Talons of Scorpio (21 page)

The place reeked of unwholesomeness. Incense stank. Candelabra burned, and I eyed these with a view to incendiary activity. No one took any notice of me as I joined the congregation.

The girl in her white dress in the iron cage sucked on her sweets and played with a scrap of satin ribbon. Next to her the slab waited, flanked by ranked instruments. The statue of Lem in a silver glitter hovered above.

Three turns of his pocket glass, Pompino had agreed, would give me time to infiltrate and position myself ready. My own sense of timing told me the three glasses must be almost spent. I eased a little forward. The stage remained empty of all save the girl sacrifice, and I was minded to feel disappointed on this score for I’d marked any of the vile crew who tried to stop me for instant destruction.

The high priests and their acolytes and sycophants did not appear just yet, and the congregation waited, talking, excited, keyed-up.

The crash of splintering wood and shattering tiles jerked everyone’s astonished gaze upward.

From the balconies to either hand men leaped down, their weapons flashing in the lights.

These startling newcomers wore armor, and helmets tufted with yellow feathers. But their faces! Each warrior’s face was covered by a mask — but not by any ordinary assassin’s mask — oh no. As the fighting men leaped down and ripped into the shrieking congregation, their faces snarled with the savage and frightening golden semblances of untamed zhantils.

Chapter seventeen

A Rose between two thorns

Without hesitation I roared up onto the stage, leaping a screaming woman and kicking her companion in the face — quite accidentally — as I whipped up onto the boards. The girl in the cage held the scrap of blue satin ribbon before her face, her eyes wide, staring, not quite ready to start crying at all the hubbub.

Just about then the first firepots sailed in.

This place would burn like dry shavings.

The cage of the sacrifice, which, as I knew, sometimes held leems, was bolted. The bolt clicked back with a snick audible in the hullabaloo. I reached in.

“I have some more sweets for you,” I said in what I tried to make a modulated and reasonable voice. “We’re going to a special Banje shop—”

“You won’t take me back?”

She drew away, the ribbon held like a shield.

I knew what she meant. These Leem Lovers knew where to go to buy their sacrifices.

“No. I promise you. To a Banje shop, that’s where.”

“There’s a fire.”

She spoke in her light treble, interested in what was going on, allured by the thought of candies, ready to cry or laugh as the occasion warranted. I flung a quick look back.

Pompino’s lads were hard at it. Fire raced up the drapes and smoke roiled from two of the side openings flanking the main doorway. In the auditorium the zhantil-masked warriors were cutting down men and women indifferently and some, who appeared to be in authority, superintended the rounding up of those worshippers who threw down their arms and surrendered. It was frighteningly obvious that whoever the men in zhantil masks were, they were not over-bothered if the Leem Lovers fought or surrendered.

I snatched up the girl and leaped for the drapes at the rear of the stage.

If I cut to the side through any convenient doorway I ought to get back to the clear way out. Thank Zair there were no more girl children imprisoned there.

Others besides me had the same idea. They knew the layout and a bunch of them followed me along the dusty corridor. There was no point in fighting them at this stage, for however much the itch might have trembled my sword arm, fires burst up at our backs, and if we didn’t get out we’d all be roasted — the girl sacrifice and me along with the rest.

People who attempted to escape through other exits would be met by walls of fire. Up ahead the corridor stretched empty both of flame and smoke. Pompino’s folk would wait until I was out — and they wouldn’t wait overlong, by Krun — and then this place would fire up, too. If, that was, the temple hadn’t burned down already.

Empty of smoke and flame this exit might have been — it was not empty of golden-masked zhantil men.

As we broke out of the last doorway and made for the double doors leading outside, a line of fighting men in the zhantil masks fronted us, weapons glittering.

Now anyone who resisted Lem the Silver Leem was an ally of mine. Also, I had an idea I knew who had sent these men here, who employed them, who would use the zhantil mask as an emblem in defiance of the leem mask.

It was no part of my plan to fight allies.

To the side lay the other corridor, and there might be a way past there, so that I could circle... Clutching the girl child, who was now, most understandably, crying at all the din and confusion and the roar of the flames, the stink of the smoke, I turned sharply to break a way through. The zhantil-masked fighters crowded up to the rear. The Leem Lovers, yelling, pressed back. Smoke choked down, obscuring much of what was going on, and the evil crackle of the flames beat against the din of combat.

A hand clutched my elbow.

A leem mask glinted as a slender fellow in a short brown cape with little silver adorning its folds tugged at me.

“This way, Jak! Hurry!”

At his side a woman, more bulky than he, urged me on.

At once I realized these two must be Tipp the Kaktu and Monsi the Bosom, Naghan Raerdu’s spies.

They guided me through the smoke away from the main mass of struggling people; three or four of the Lem worshippers spotted our movement and followed. Seven or eight of us crowded along, stumbling, coughing as the smoke retched into our mouths. Tipp the Kaktu threw up a trapdoor in the floor, Monsi the Bosom held out her arms to take the girl sacrifice.

“Quick, Jak — we must be quick!”

There was nothing else for it.

Monsi took the girl and bundled through the opening in the floor, I followed, dropping onto a straw-scattered floor with only the dim glow of the fire angling down to provide illumination. A body dropped after me and Tipp’s reedy voice husked: “Go on! Go on!”

He smashed into me, and he cursed as more bodies dropped down after. The quick-witted among the Leem-Lovers desperate to escape the zhantil-masked killers had not missed this chance. In a bunch we ran along the murky corridor.

Naghan must have given strict instructions to his two agents. They would have had me under observation all the time, discreetly shadowing my movements. Just how far into the cult were they? They knew their way about what had been the Playhouse of the Singing Lotus. The cellars wound about confusingly and we had to backtrack at one point where the roof had fallen in, a mass of blazing timber. In the lurid orange light I saw the Leem-Lovers with us. Two men and a girl, quick and active figures, swinging around at once and retreating and then waiting for Tipp and Monsi to take up the lead. These were survivors, that was clear.

Gobbets of flaming wood tumbled about our ears as the floor above burned through.

One of the Leem-Lovers gave Monsi a savage thrust, shrieking: “Get on, you cramph, if you know the way out! Hurry!”

This behavior was normal for the Lemmites. Monsi stumbled and the girl cried out in terror. I caught Monsi about her waist — surprisingly slender for so large a woman — and took the Leem-Lover by the arm. I bent a trifle to him.

“Ill-treat this woman again and you go headfirst into the flames.”

His silver mask ran with ruddy highlights. He tried to hit me and I threw him away, one-handed, and then hustled on with Monsi. “Shall I carry the girl?”

“I can manage, I thank you.”

We did not use names.

As I say, the sequence confused. One moment we were hurrying along the cellar passageway, the next the whole roof collapsed. Monsi sprawled forward and the girl, her legs flailing, rolled over and over. Tipp screamed and jumped.

The woman Leem-Lover fell on top of me. The others were mere contorted shadows, writhing in the smoke and turmoil. I struggled to rise, pushing a burning bulk of timber away. I hauled the female Lemmite up and she sprang to her feet, lithe and lissom, swinging instantly to the help of her male companion. The way ahead was blocked. The three of us were cut off, walled in by flames.

“Which way?” shrieked the man.

“Any way so long as it is up,” said the girl.

Again the sequence confuses. We tried more than one of the cellar passageways and boltholes, and we passed gagging through the space where, behind bars of solid iron, the leems were caged. No one thought of releasing them, poor dumb brutes though they were, in the common parlance, for the whole section of roof and wall collapsed into the thunder of an inferno as we shielded ourselves and ran on.

The girl had to drag the man past a tongue of flame that scorched across a narrow alleyway. I jumped through when it was my turn, and the Furnace Fires of Inshurfraz were no doubt hotter, but not by much, by Krun!

Beyond that point the girl sniffed out a way where fresh air was drawn in. We bundled along, colliding with the old worn projections of walls, barely seeing where we were going, finding steps with their treads hollowed into half moons, panting up, pushing desperately at the wooden trapdoor above.

The two halves of the trap flapped back. There was an impression of the night sky speckled with stars, a cool night breeze. Blocky silhouettes moved against the stars. A hoarse voice shouted: “Here are more!”

And the answer, begun: “Hit them gently for—” and a blurred shadow in the corner of my eye and the black cloak of Notor Zan swooped down and engulfed me.

As I must repeat, the sequence blurs.

Looking back at that frightful period I think I must have made an attempt to fight, so they hit me again, perhaps they hit me many times. My memory, which in the normal course of events, because of the immersion in the sacred Pool of Baptism, is well-nigh perfect, fails me in this. When exactly the dark cloak of Notor Zan enfolded me is open to conjecture. I recall nothing with clarity after that brief glimpse of the stars of Kregen, for I remember nothing of any internal stars in my old vosk-skull of a head. A pain in my wrists kept pricking at me, and I couldn’t move my feet, and I felt awful, and my head hung down.

They’d hung us up in a row on hooks against the wall.

A hoarse voice croaked out: “By Lem! They’ll pay for this.”

The girl’s voice, next to me and from the same direction, on my right: “Who will make them pay?”

Ungluing my eyes may not have been as painful as the uproar clanging away in my head; it was agony enough. I could see my feet, bound together, and the rough stone of the floor below, with an air gap between. I could see my legs, and the scarlet breechclout which I had, when I’d dressed myself up for the evening’s entertainment, donned without a thought that this might be the outcome. Scarlet. Well, I’d chosen the brave old color out of sentiment, and because we struck a blow which might aid Vallia. So they’d stripped us of clothes. Yet they’d left the silver leem masks on, and the reason for this was made at once clear by another voice, harshly dominating, that broke across the girl’s pointed question.

“Aye, you rast. The girl is right. It is you who will pay when our master arrives. Your masks are the badges of your shame and I spit on them and you!”

I swiveled my eyeballs and squinted at the fellow who spoke. That I shared his sentiments would not be believed. He wore bulky armor, and the yellow tuft of feathers in his helmet, and his zhantil mask glittered golden in the light of the becketed torches.

Just so we were kept alive until this fellow’s master arrived... I was so sure that master had to be Pando I had already fathomed out his whole scheme, and approved, and wished I’d thought of it, and determined to put it to the best use of which I was capable as soon as I could.

There were four or five of the zhantil-masked guards and they began an argument among themselves whether or not the leem masks should stay on or come off the captives. I managed to get my eyeballs to swivel to my right and saw the girl hanging as I was hanging, her arms spread out and hooked to the wall by leather thongs. Her body, stripped to a breechclout, as was mine, arched in an instinctive and futile struggle to free herself. She, like me, wore a red breechclout and this — I confess — amused me. It seemed odd. As for the fellow beyond, the glimpse I could catch of him showed a wiry body and a green breechclout. In other circumstances if it came to a fight, my natural ally would be the red and my natural foe would be the green; here they were both Leem Lovers, Lemmites, as the word was, and they could both go hang.

As, by Vox, would I!

Eventually the zhantilman who wanted to keep the leem masks on was overruled. One of his companions, a potbellied individual, said: “I’ll jump up and down on ’em!”

Another one — and, in the nature of these things he was thin and quick — said swiftly: “Aye, dom, you do that. And when you’re finished I’ll melt ’em down. They’ll fetch a fair price down the Boulevard of Silversmiths.”

Thick fingers reached out to unlatch the leem masks, the thin quick fellow merely slashed my latchings away so that the mask fell into his clawed hand. He laughed, a hollow rattle behind his own mask.

I blinked.

With the skills taught me by Deb-Lu I managed to fashion a gyp-face; but it stung like the devil, and I guessed the repeated knocks on the head had done me no good at all. I’d recover fully, thanks to the Sacred Pool of Baptism in far Aphrasöe, but right now I was still muzzy, not quite in command of myself, and feeling as though I’d been in a fight with a leem...

My head hanging, I watched dully as the guards, chuckling over their booty, left the cell. The door clanged.

There seemed little chance that this dungeon cell was in the Zhantil Palace. Probably Pando had set up his headquarters for his zhantil masks in a safe house in Port Marsilus. The quicker he got here the better, for I surmised his delay had been caused by the arrangements for this sort of exercise. The problem from his point of view was that the Vadni Dafni, whom he had been trying to rescue, was already rescued.