The Tides of Kregen (11 page)

Unless, of course, the Star Lords still needed me for their inscrutable purposes. The veil that had been partially lifted on the Everoinye, allowing me a dim glimpse of secrets to be discovered, had shown me potentialities for conflict that staggered me, courses of disaster I did not wish to steer. Below me Valkanium vanished aft, with the peak of Esser Rarioch lofting, its pinnacles and towers ablaze with flags and banners, the wink and gleam of weapons very comforting as Hikdar Naghan ti Ovoinach and his pastang saluted my departure.

The voller whisked into the clouds and I was alone.

Once more I was set full on a fresh course for adventure and headlong action, hurtling across the surface of Kregen. The thought came to plague me that perhaps I was no longer the Dray Prescot who had first been transported here by the Savanti. Maybe I had lost my cutting edge. Well, as Zair was my witness, I would do all that I could for my Delia, and not reckon the consequences. No matter what perils I might encounter I would not surrender the fight until they shipped me out to the Ice Floes of Sicce.

Into the Eye of the World

I, Dray Prescot, Lord of Strombor and Krozair of Zy, flew for the inner sea of Kregen, the Eye of the World.

Since I had left the enclosed world of the inner sea with Delia, Seg and Thelda, much had happened to me and much time had passed. I had become all manner of fine fancy nobility, Strom of Valka, Prince Majister of Vallia, King of Djanduin and other titles in addition. I had become a father. I had been to Earth and back to Kregen. How could I, who still took real and genuine pride in belonging to the mystic Order of Krozairs of Zy, expect to recapture the sensations and excitements of my life on the inner sea?

As I flew through the clear and bracing air of Kregen I felt no doubts about what must be done. For I flew to find my Delia, my Delia of the Blue Mountains, my Delia of Delphond. For her sake I would dare anything, anyone. I do not boast. I state a plain fact. I know too that she would dare all for me, and it is at that thought that I tremble.

At an average speed of approximately ten dbs the flier would take roughly two and three-quarter days to cover the distance from Valka to Sanurkazz. Despite all the urgency I felt, and the maddening impatience that tore at me, there was nothing I could do but wait for the time to pass as the voller soared across Kregen. Vondium, the capital of Vallia, passed away over the southern horizon. The ocean that is called the Sunset Sea all the way from Vallia to Segesthes flowed beneath the petal-shape of the voller. By the time the shoreline of the continent of Turismond appeared ahead I was almost sunk in an apathy induced by frustration, fretting and concern.

My Delia had passed this way over a year before. What had happened to her? Then, as Port Tavetus, one of Vallia’s colonial cities of the eastern Turismond coast, passed astern, I found a few remnants of sanity returning. Now I was headed for the Klackadrin. The earth had moved here at some time in the past, opening up a long narrow lift from which noxious gases poured, vapors carrying with them hallucinogenic substances that ripped away a man’s sanity. I had traveled here on foot. The experience is one I seldom dwell on. The Phokaym, those coldly hostile risslaca men, riding risslaca steeds, gripped the land on the western edge of the Klackadrin in a fist of iron. The experiences through which I had been dragged there must have left deep scars, for I know I held on to the voller and prayed it would not break down over that hellish place.

The enormous rent in the earth’s surface stretched for dwabur after dwabur north and south. I could see steam and vapors lifting and I drove the voller higher. The ground stank with barrenness. Remnants of the proud roads once driven across from east to west by the imperial powers of the old Empire of Loh glittered in the dying light of the suns. Now the Klackadrin on the east and the stupendous mountain bulk of the Stratemsk on the west effectively closed off the land between, land men called the hostile territories.

Believe me when I say that however inimical the hostile territories are, I heaved a sigh of relief when I passed safely over the Klackadrin.

As for the hostile territories, somewhere down there Delia, Seg, Thelda and I had marched and sang as we fought our way on foot from the Stratemsk eastward. Looking back, I could be thankful about what happened, that my friends were spared the horrors of the Phokaym and the Klackadrin.[2]

At the time, mind you, I was a very angry man.

Down there Queen Lilah might still be lording it over Hiclantung, aping the ancient ways of the Queens of Pain of Loh. Without any feeling that the emotion was grotesque, I found myself wishing her well. She was merely what she was. At the least and for all its faults, Hiclantung was an oasis of culture in a sea of barbarism.

The changing face of the land below as it sped past gave no real indication of what was going on down there. One day, when safe means of crossing the Klackadrin had been found, the onward-pressing frontier forces of Vallia and the various nations of Pandahem would spill out into the hostile territories. The use of vollers alone would not be enough. I consigned these interesting prospects for the future to the Black Spider Caves of Gratz as before me rose the impossible bulk of the Stratemsk. I have already spoken of the Stratemsk, the ranges of mountains extending north and south, defying reason, sprawling into the sky, cloaked eternally in ice and snow, cleft by deep humid jungle valleys, demanding everything of spirit and valor to dare. They shut off the eastern portions of the lands of the inner sea. I must cross them. My Delia had done so — three times. I had crossed them only once, and then we had crashed.

This was where I had first encountered flying animals and birds on Kregen of a size large enough to carry a passenger. Out in the hostile territories I had seen a few distant dots in the air and the speed of the voller had taken me past. Now I faced gigantic birds and animals in their natural state, untamed, ferocious, vicious, forever seeking food.

I fancied they’d find Dray Prescot a tough and sinewy mouthful; still, it behooved me to keep my old carcass out of their fangs and jaws.

The voller took me through the first of the foothills. Ahead the high peaks waited. Wending a way through the passes and gradually flying higher and higher, I skirted those ice-bound precipices, sped beneath the pinnacles of glistening rock and drove hard through whatever open spaces valleys offered. The air cut to the quick. Flying silks and furs were heaped over me.

I crouched in the voller with only my eyes and nose showing and my fist gripped around the hilt of a longsword. If a flight of impiters caught me, those coal-black demons of the air would rip the voller to pieces. I could not hope to be saved once again by a gorgeous myriad of tiny pink and yellow birds. Straight on past two mountain flanks that seemed ready to topple inward and grind together, I sent the voller hurtling down over the saddle. The long valley ahead swarmed with birds swooping from the rocks. I held to the center. Mists coiled below. The farther end of the valley showed its V-notch and chill white-blue sky beyond. Due west, always due west . . .

The voller fluttered and dived.

Useless to bash the controls, to rave and curse. Down swooped the voller, down and down, plunging into the mists. I ripped open the panel which in this small craft covered the two silver boxes in their sturm-wood orbits. A single glance told me the mechanism was functioning correctly, the orbits moving one with the other on their bronze and balass gearing. So the trouble lay within the vaol box. If there was trouble with the paol box there was nothing I could do. To open that would release the cayferm and that box would never function again.

The idea that this voller’s power source had reached the end of its useful life, when the silver boxes dulled, had given me a nasty turn; now I must land and dismantle the vaol box. The mists coiled more thinly. Huge bloated tree trunks passed. I had the speed down now and felt confident of making a respectable landing. The muggy heat rose. Here in these deep valleys the air hung heavy and humid, ground heat and the greenhouse effect combining to make jungle miniatures within the mountain mass.

A confused jumble of orange-speckled yellow, of leprous growths with medusa-arms, of black and glistening trunks, swished away. The voller roared past a lichened rock outcrop, clipped yellow powder from hanging clusters of puffballs, making me sneeze, and came to a shaky stop amid tendrilous yellow ferns. All about me the spectral trees rose like a wall. Bloated, whiplike, fern-fanned, the variety of forms displayed a massive and frenzied struggle for life. Lianas draped everywhere. The smells were fetid and yet not overly unpleasant and I guessed the busy scavengers were at work breaking down every last fragment of refuse.

A bulky something moved ponderously among the trees. A glimmering white outline, immense, inhuman, something like a giant slug with orange horns, slid past between the trees. The longsword lifted, but the monster glided on, tearing at the branches.

Putting the longsword down close by, I ripped out the vaol box and carefully opened it. How often I had done this! Inside the box the minerals were clumped, packed mostly at one end with only a scattering of powder moving freely. I used a dagger to stir the powder free, to break up the clumps, to return the mix to its original loose condition. By the time the lid was back on the sweat poured from me; the humidity was murderous.

The vaol box was slicked with moisture and I knew that enough had been trapped inside to make the box unusable again before too long. It would have to get me through the Stratemsk. I reseated it within its orbit and reconnected the gearing train.

It was at that moment, straightening up, ready to hit the controls, that the xi lunged. There was barely time to scoop up the sword and parry that first vicious thrust. The xi whirred its diaphanous wings and backed off, chirring in frenzy. Its iridescent scales glimmered in the diffused light. The xi was something like a dragonfly, with four glistening wings behind a head that was a nightmare cross between a bird’s beak and a snake’s wedge. But all likeness to a dragonfly was lost when the xi whipped its sinuous snakelike body from side to side and coiled it for a stinging blow from beneath. Besides, the xi was ten feet long — a flying monster, aiming to skewer me and then devour me at leisure for lunch.

A single dominant thought obsessed me: I must dispose of this fellow before the rest of the swarm found me.

It darted in again and I ducked the lethal lunge of the tail, the longsword slashing down at his forward antennae. The keen blade sheared through the black furry feelers, surged on to gouge into the bright and staring eye on the left of that wedge-shaped head. The xi’s wings fluttered madly. It whirred away, spinning, flying clumsily. From the longsword a green ichor dropped.

The voller went up cleanly. Up and up, past the tumbling, pathetic shape of the xi, up to burst through the mist and so bring me into the chill upper air.

"By Vox!" I said explosively. "I was lucky there!" In those last few murs before the mist enfolded me I had seen the glittering swarm approaching, flying fast, a blurring mass of shining wings and iridescent scales, the lizards of the air, swarming to devour me!

There is a considerable variety of xi, and I had just met a type whose body had nearly evolved into a whiplike snake form, away from the original, bulkier lizard form. Whatever family they belong to, the xi are bad news.

And my Delia had flown this way!

Straight on I forced the voller. Like the end of a nightmare the last valley opened out and all before me stretched the downward trending slopes of the westward face of the Stratemsk. Here fresh dangers lurked. The flying furies of the mountains might all be behind me, the impiters and corths, the zizils and bisbis, the yellow eagles of Wyndhai and the iridescent-scaled xi; now I must fly over the lands of the crofermen.

Savage, untamed, cruel and suspicious, the crofermen inhabit the outer reaches of the Stratemsk. They live an arduous life filled with peril, defending their ponsho flocks against the demons of the air, continually fighting among themselves, man-beasts of lowering aspect and formidable ferocity. I, Dray Prescot, say this with all truth: I was lucky to be able to fly over them and not have to come to ground.

As you know I had been well informed that it was against policy to take an airboat into the lands of the inner sea. Delia had landed her flier some way off the eastern edge of the sea and had taken local transport when she had come searching for me before. The people of the Eye of the World had little if any knowledge that it was possible for a man to fly through the air.

Now I knew that interdiction must have come from the Empire of Hamal, which made and sold vollers, and the law had been implemented by the Presidio of Vallia because they did not wish to lose their franchise. Hamal would not sell vollers to Pandahem or Loh, and their lack had proved disastrous in the past.

I consigned Hamal and Empress Thyllis, with whom I had an outstanding debt, to the Ice Floesof Sicce as I bored on through the bright air of Kregen, angling to fetch up in Sanurkazz itself. How often I had promised myself I would return to the Eye of the World! And how often fate had destroyed my intentions, one way or another, every time. I had planned to return on a joyous holiday, to take my Delia and the family, to revisit the haunts of my existence there as a Krozair captain and see my friends once again. Now I came in urgency and haste, desperate that Delia might be in peril. My plans were very simple. I would go first to Sanurkazz, the chief city of the Zairians, and seek information. If I found nothing I would fly on to Zy, the island fortress of the Krozair Brotherhood, that order of which I was proud to account myself a member and which, I truly think, meant more to me, for all the tiny scope of its activities on Kregen, than anything else except Delia and my family. The journey had taken the best part of three days. I had flown in as straight a line by the compass as I could contrive, a great-circle route that wasted not a dwabur of distance. The distance would have taken months to travel by land and sea. It had taken me month after weary month to travel in the opposite direction. As the land opened out below and signs of cultivation appeared, I felt those irritable, apprehensive, fearful sensations attack me once more as I neared my goal. It seemed to me that Delia had come here because she had had bad news of Segnik — he who was now Zeg. I had pushed all that from my mind. But what other explanation could there be? I had discussed with Delia the education of our children many times. She knew that I intended Drak and, in his time, Segnik to go to the Krozairs of Zy. I believe the most profound education was possible with them. I had intended to take a hand to soften the teachings that emphasized the hatred for the Grodnims of the green northern shore. Oh, yes, as you know, I hated the overlords of Magdag and all the other Grodnims of the northern shore. But I felt mature enough to hold that feeling in its proper perspective. I had worn green clothes of late and I had met in friendship those to whom green and religions associated with the color were good and fine. It was the inner strength the Krozairs of Zy give, the spiritual teachings, the skill at arms, the knowledge of self, all those mystic disciplines that make a Krozair a man among men that I wanted for my sons.