Warlord of Antares (2 page)

From locations just beneath and either side of his feeding tube a pair of grasping claws were folded limply. He did not use them to rip the metal away. By their size and ruggedness I fancied he’d have no trouble doing that if he came to a section of metal not quite decayed enough for him to suck up.

There is no pleasure in killing animals. There are really only two reasons or excuses for slaying animals, one that they are dangerous pests, and two you need to eat. I was sharp-set by this time; but this metal-eating caterpillar struck me as being a not particularly tasty dish. So I turned around and went the other way.

Judging by the increasingly desperate state of my stomach, I must have marched on for a good long time. In all that journey the boxes and the alleyways did not vary. I ran across a dozen or so more armored men in the alleyway and a couple more on roofs; not a one of them spoke and none moved. Their armor was in the process of decaying, so I judged the poor devils had been a long time dead.

Also I saw a couple of dozen of the metal-eating caterpillars. I gave them all a wide berth and went on.

What I hoped to achieve by this senseless wandering escaped me. I couldn’t just stand in one spot and wait to die. Surely, if I persevered and went on long enough I must come across someone, or something other than these mindless ranks of boxes? I might, if I was not dead of hunger and thirst beforehand.

Just as I’d reached this conclusion in my miserable thoughts I heard a sharp hissing from ahead.

That hissing sounded familiar. It sounded remarkably like the hissing the magical chair of the Star Lords made as it whistled you along from chamber to chamber.

A dark object appeared from an intersection about a hundred yards ahead, flashed across from right to left, vanished.

The shape in the fleeting instant I’d glimpsed it could have been the shape of a Star Lord’s chair.

I ran up to the cross alleyway and stared down; there was no sign of the chair and the habitual silence of this place clamped down again.

After that a number of chairs hissed past and always, infuriatingly, across alleyways too far off, so that there was no way I could hail. Always assuming, that was, that anybody sat in the chairs.

The metal boxes possessed doors, as I discovered, of many different sizes. There was no way I could gain ingress. The gap between door and jamb was hairfine thin, and there were no doorknobs, handles or any other system of opening. That there must be a system to open the doors was obvious, otherwise they wouldn’t be there; I could not fathom it out.

Soon I was progressing through an area where the decay of the metal walls was far advanced and where large numbers of the caterpillars fed contentedly. I took considerable detours to avoid them.

At one corner I spotted a caterpillar who had been at full stretch, retract his body and go rhythmically off in search of fresh decay. Where he had chopped away left a jagged-edged gap.

Very cautiously I looked inside.

All was in darkness.

The silvery light spilling in from outside revealed what seemed to me to be more ranks of boxes, one after the other, receding into the dimness. There appeared no point in going in there to find a lot of small boxes when I had a lot of big boxes out here to play with.

Yes, I was growing more and more hungry and more and more annoyed.

What I imagined to be the final annoyance, although in that I was wrong, hissed past close at hand. A chair shot out of the alleyway opposite and pelted on and vanished past me. It went by close. And the damned thing was empty.

So, I lifted up my head and voice and I roared out: “Star Lords! What in blazes is going on! Are you all asleep, or are you all senile?”

Echoes rolled around eerily.

“Sink me!” I burst out. “I wish those doddering old fools would get both oars in the water.”

Nothing responded so there was nothing I could do but march on in hope.

I didn’t go near any of the dead men in their decaying armor. They hadn’t been struck down in a fight, so it was a good guess that they’d died of disease. I did not wish to have anything to do with that.

Only one of them was not wearing full harness. He was a numim, and his ferocious lionman’s face lay lax and crumpled in death. He carried a water bottle at his belt. I licked my lips. But that water could be the death of me. The numim’s chest was crushed in, a most unappetizing sight, and a curved sword lay on the metal near his right hand.

I went on.

Now I really was hungry, and no doubt about it.

Pretty soon I’d join the caterpillars and rip off a chunk of decaying metal and find out what their diet tasted like. They looked big and chunky and well fed. Perhaps the corroded metal was really tasty. I pushed aside vivid mental pictures of pies and puddings, of steaks and gammons, of fruit and vegetables and endless cups of tea, and stalked on. And more and more my gaze was drawn to that rotten and tempting decaying metal.

“By the Black Chunkrah!” Head up, feeling a fool as though I was under observation, I marched over to the nearest wall and ripped off a handful of scrunchy metal.

It felt like biscuits just holding together; crumbs fell away. I molded the handful in my palm. I looked at it. I sniffed it. No smell. Cautiously I tasted a tiny portion with the tip of my tongue. The hardness at once melted into paste. And the taste — deuced odd. Like vinegar, and yet not sharp and unpleasant, with a touch of gherkin in there, and spice, and a generous portion of piccalilli and tomatoes, and, under all this bizarre mixture, the feeling that, yes, by Krun, this was metal I was eating.

I ate some more. After a couple of handfuls it became more than palatable. I could guess that a fellow could get addicted to this stuff. This, therefore, would not do. I did not know of any metal-eating caterpillars on Kregen.

Munching the paste, well, teeth were unnecessary for, as the caterpillars did, I could simply slurp it down once it had been moistened, I trotted on. I confess I felt in a more reasonable frame of mind. That state of mind was still bloody in the extreme, mind, and I stored up the fruitiest epithets in my skull for use against the Everoinye — when and if they ever put in an appearance.

Now I know about the Mysterious Universe and all that, and of the mystifying nature of humankind’s choice, of destiny and all that, and of the inevitability of death; but I hadn’t chosen to come here, I was not at this moment concerned with the mystery of the universe, and I most certainly did not intend to die here.

I was interested in the mystery of this place, for understanding that might hoick me out of it.

There appeared to me in all sober reality little chance that I
could
understand this crazy gaggle of metal boxes.

The miserable nagging doubt began to creep in that I had chosen the wrong way, that I should have gone right instead of left.

I can tell you, the bonhomie brought on by an unexpectedly good meal in a place not at once apparent for gastronomic delights, wore off sharpish, very sharpish, by Vox.

In this churlish frame of mind the fact that the metal was not corroded on the boxes I was passing took time to sink in. What made me realize this were the antics of a caterpillar I’d automatically switched alleyways to avoid.

He was lifting his head and aiming that feeding proboscis and shooting a jet of liquid in neat patterned swipes over the wall. The liquid glistered with the sheen of the rainbow before vanishing.

“So that’s it,” I said. “These hairy horrors squirt some gunk on the metal, that starts to rot away, then they trundle along and slurp it up.”

That made no difference to my taste for the stuff. I’ve eaten far worse than that on Kregen.

Farther on, with pristine boxes all about me, I ran across an object that — at last! — signaled a change.

A slender, near-gossamer tower rose up into that indeterminate silvery sky. The lacework of the weblike struts and girders, delicate and fairy-like, formed a contrast of overwhelming power.

Approaching that enchanted spire with great caution I stared up its height. I couldn’t see the top against that all-encompassing whiteness; but it was remote and far distant, for the latticework blended and formed a line no thicker than a hair before it was lost to my vision.

Now why I did what I did might have remained a mystery to me, had not a memory of Zena Iztar occurred to me. When, as Madam Ivanovna, she had visited me on Earth, she had said: “When the need to strike arises, you must strike with a gong-note of power.”

What the blazes she’d meant then I’d no idea.

But the memory recurred to me now, and as Zena Iztar might move in mysterious ways but always to a purpose, I whipped up the great Krozair longsword and struck the flat against the latticework of that fairy tower.

The structure gonged pure and mellow.

In the next instant I was upside down, buffeted by a mad whirlpool of blackness, hurtling head over heels out of the blackness and into a refulgent blueness. I gasped as I landed with a thump.

Noise burst about my head, men shouting and arguing, women laughing and screaming, and in my nostrils stank the stenches of a tavern, of rancid fat, of burned meat, of wetted sawdust, the smells of spilled wine and ale and the cheap scents of women.

Chapter two

Of Emperors in a Thieves Tavern

Apart from the too-obvious fact I was in a tavern, I had absolutely no idea where on Kregen I was. Well, that was the usual engaging way of the Star Lords. The Everoinye would drag me off from whatever I happened to be doing and chuck me down somewhere to do their dirty work for them. It was beginning to look as though they were genuinely incapable of doing that work themselves.

Instead of their habitual practice of tossing me in at the deep end to face horrendous perils stark naked, this time I still possessed the scarlet breechclout and the longsword, the belted loincloth and the sailor knife.

Everyone in the tavern must have thought I’d fallen from the balcony along this side of the taproom.

I regained my balance and, rather naturally, the longsword remained in my fist. The blade snouted up and the samphron oil lamps caught and runneled in a golden silver glitter.

An absolute — a deathly — hush fell over the tavern.

No one spoke. No one moved. All that raucous laughter, the screaming of insults, the savage words that must inevitably lead to a fight, all the hullabaloo died as though a giant door had slammed.

They were a rough old lot. Most of them would cross the road to avoid the Watch. There was probably more stolen property about their persons, and no doubt in the landlord’s cellars, than would comfortably fit into a six-krahnik wain. Their faces showed the marks of hard experience, of cunning and skullduggery, of thievery and mayhem. Also, they were not too clean and many were scarred and more than a few one-eyed.

In this company the sudden arrival of a stranger was like to see that foolhardy wight with a second mouth to laugh with, a mouth stretching across his throat.

The immediate action into which I had dropped was pitifully obvious. A young lad was being bullied by a hulking brute and in the next few moments would have had his head knocked in and the purse removed from his belt. If this was the state to which the Star Lords had reduced me, then I was very deep down indeed.

Then I contumed myself for a proud idiot. Any injustice must be fought, and if the injustice close to hand appears pitifully insignificant, it is not, and must be fought as hard as the greatest of injustices. For of the small the great are fashioned.

And still that cutthroat crew stood silent and still, glaring on me as though I was a ghost, an ib broken from the flesh and blood body.

Suddenly, as though flung from a catapult, the lad pushed himself up from where the bully had bent him back over the table. He leaped up and instantly dropped down and went into the full incline, nose in the filthy sawdust and brown breechclouted rump high in the air.

A yellow-haired woman, very blowsy, whose bodice strings were unlatched in a slatternly way, screeched in a shriek that pierced eardrums.

“It is! It is the emperor! It is Dray Prescot!”

Then — and I swear it as Zair is my witness! — that whole ruffianly crew from bully to pot boy, thumped down onto their knees, stuck their noses into the sawdust and elevated their bottoms in a sea of rotundity.

In a voice that cracked out more like a whip than a roar, I shouted: “If you know who I am, then you know I do not like the full incline. It is not seemly in a man or woman. By Vox! Stand up!”

The rustlings and surgings and gaspings as they struggled up really were funny; I could see the humorous side of this; but I was all at sea here and in too much of a hurry to laugh. Which is always a mistake.

There was no surprise to be felt when the lad and the bully and the yellow-haired woman all started in shouting at one another and at me, accusing, counter-accusing. The row was over the woman’s affections, a perfectly ordinary squabble. Harm might have come to the lad. So the Emperor of Vallia had dropped in to sort out the problem and see justice was done.

They were not surprised, once they’d overcome the initial shock. Everyone in Vallia had read the books, read or heard the poems, seen the plays and puppet shows, telling of the deeds of Dray Prescot. No one bothered to wonder how the emperor could be in so many places at one and the same time. He was Dray Prescot, and so he could be expected to turn up in times of trouble.

An old buffer with lank hair, three front teeth and a look of a dyspeptic owl sitting on a stool to the side, and saying nothing, ought to be the one.

I said: “Dom, tell me the rights of this.”

He led off at once, cacklingly, relating how young Larghos thought he was beloved of Buxom Trodi, who was enamored of Nath the Biceps.

“They but gulled the lad, majister, and no harm done. But young Larghos pulled a knife—”

I glared at the youngster.

“Did you draw steel in this quarrel?”

He flushed scarlet and stammered. “Yes, majister.”

Probably he had intended to scare Nath the Biceps off before his head was bashed in. I suggested that.