Warrior of Scorpio (16 page)

“Then,” said Hwang with youthful force, “we will go to see the corths that rascal Nath is trying to sell me.”

I perked up at once; then reality supervened. Nath is a common name on Kregen — already in my life at this time there had been Nath the Thief from Zenicce, and my old oar comrade Nath of Sanurkazz, and I was to meet more.

This Nath was a fat but jolly man with a stub-nose and liquid eyes and a kind of loosely-rolled turban that slanted down over one ear in which a whole pagoda-like construct swung dwarfing any normal earring. His robes were new, embroidered in the Lohvian way with serpentine risslaca and orchids twining with the moon-blooms, and his slippers — to my intense disappointment — were mere plain squat-ended herring-boxes. He should have worn slippers flaunting extraordinarily long and up-curled points.

“Lahal, Dray Prescot,” he said, when what passed for pappattu had been made — I did not have to fight him or give him obi as was customary on other portions, equally civilized, of Kregen — and he rolled his girth around and resumed his seat on a pile of trappings, cushions, gear, and flying silks. Hwang was already inspecting the corths, all securely chained up by wing and leg to their perches, beneath the arched roof of the corthdrome.

“A couple are to my liking, Nath,” he said, without any attempt at bargaining. They began to talk prices, and I wandered across to take a closer look at the representatives of the flying monsters who had menaced our flight through The Stratemsk.

The corth is a truer bird than the impiter, although not as large or fierce — I believe that only two other flying animals of Kregen better the impiter — and in general will carry no more than two passengers. These birds possessed the large round eyes, the sleek feathered heads, the deep chests and wide wings of faithful fliers, their legs short and sturdy and varying as to the amount of feather-covering in different species. Now they shifted from side to side and cocked their heads to stare at me first down one side of their beaks and then the other. In color they ranged through the spectrum, with patterns of variegated feathers lending a powerful beauty to their forms. Compared to the fanged and whip-tailed impiters with their coal-black plumage, the corths were indeed beautiful.

On a question from me, Nath laughed so that his array of chins and stomachs shook. “Oh dear me, no! We would not allow our beautiful corths to perch on a bar outside our windows! Why — the barbarians would simply dive on them and kill them and then they would have the perch on which to land freely provided for them. We make it difficult for fliers to land in Hiclantung.”

“I had noticed.”

The corthdrome had been built at the summit of a high building on one of the hills of the city, on the southern declivity of which our villa lay. I thought of Seg, slowly recovering, of Thelda, keeping as she thought a vigilant night-time watch over my sick bed. They were good comrades. When we quitted the place, to Nath the Corthman’s wheezy: “Remberee, Dray Prescot!” and the chinkling of the fresh golden coin in his wallet, I was ready to turn in.

Hwang held me back. His face tautened. Looking down the long flight of stairs that led to the street, each section of twenty treads with a separate side wall looped for arrow-slits, I saw a body of armed men climbing the white stone that glimmered duskily pink and purple in the moons-light, for the twins were now wheeling across the sky after the maiden with many smiles.

Hwang suddenly laughed softly and I was aware of the rapid putting away of the longbows in the hands of his bodyguard.

The two parties met

“You are abroad late, Hwang.”

“Yes, Majestrix.” Hwang inclined. They inclined in Zenicce, and I had never liked the custom, so, as before, I merely bowed. Queen Lilah of Hiclantung looked upon me, there in the fuzzy pink moonslight.

“It seems I have pierced two impiters with a single shaft. I came to haggle for corths from that fat corthman Nath, and now I find the pleasure of meeting you, Dray Prescot. I had planned a more formal meeting, for I fear I have not thanked you enough for saving the miserable skin of my foolish nephew.”

Against that kind of polite nonsense, a plain sea officer and a fighting-man is usually out of his depth. I merely bowed again and said: “The pleasure is mine, I assure you.”

How long the inanities would have gone I do not know. This Queen Lilah stood very tall, her dark eyes on a level with my own brown ones, and her red hair had been coiffed into a high pile resplendent with gems and strings of pearls. Her dark blue gown, thickly embroidered and stiff with bullion and gold and silver threads, gave no hint of her figure; but her face was very white, unlined, her eyes picked out with kohl and her mouth painted into a cupid’s bow of allure. She gazed at me most intently as we spoke, and I gathered something of her power and her majesty, the immediate response she could always elicit, for that pallid face tinged with the pink radiance from the moons of Kregen and those darkly glittering eyes held a kind of hypnotic power, emphasized by the shadowing beneath her cheeks and the upslanted eyebrows, the widow’s peak of red hair over her forehead.

A man with her, elegant in dark green robes — dark green! — and with a powerful bearded face and eloquent hands adorned with many rings on the carefully tended fingers, was speaking of the lack of news of the scouts sent out to track the destination of the flying tribe who had so sorely bested the Hiclantung army and carried off Delia.

“But in a day or two they will return,” said this man, one Orpus, a councilor high in the Queen’s confidence. “Then we will know what to do.”

“I doubt not but they were employed by those rasts of Chersonang. Soon, now, our plans will be ready and then—” The Queen did not finish her words, and the inanities might have turned into some conversation more welcome to my ears, for Chersonang was a city-state of great power whose borders marched with those of Hiclantung and with whom, as was to be expected, there was constant friction, had it not been for the sudden and wholly unexpected slaughter caused by a shower of arrows that whistled down about our ears.

At the same instant a body of men in dark garments rushed upon us. The next second I was fighting for my life.

“Stand firm!” roared a Hikdar and went down screeching with a cloth-yard shaft in his breast. An arrow hissed by me and buried itself in the back of a bodyguard who had swung around to face the oncoming assassins. Hwang was yelling and tugging at the Queen’s sleeve. I saw her face, pale and pinkly-illuminated in that streaming radiance, and she looked firm and powerful, and yet haggard and ill, all at the same time. And, too, I saw the harsh lines curving about that painted mouth and understood more of the burdens she carried and the absolute intolerance with which she carried out what she conceived of as her duty.

Then, to what must have appeared as the seal of our doom to those attacking us, a cloud of impiter-mounted men swooped from the sky and gusting in over the walled stairway fell upon us with all the impetuosity of a chunkrah charge.

If we were to come out of this alive not a moment could be lost. Hwang had still not budged the Queen, who stood, tall and straight in those heavy brocaded garments. Her bodyguard fell about her, and now it was clearly apparent that these night raiders had planned this assault to carry off the Queen.

“The Queen!” someone shouted.

“To the death!” screeched the defiant answers from the bodyguard.

Hwang’s little sword flickered in and out very expertly. My own great long sword, suddenly clumsy in this civilized company, swept away three of the attackers, lopped heads and arms; but they pressed me back and soon Hwang and I were left isolated with the Queen at our backs, pressed against the stairway wall.

I felt cramped in, hemmed and penned. I had not used a rapier and main-gauche as a pair in a long time, the Jiktar and the Hikdar, and all the advantages of a long sword were being lost to me.

“We must break through and reach the corthdrome,” I shouted at Hwang. If only Seg were here! I felled a man who lunged at me, skipping aside from his glittering point with accustomed unthinking skill. “You must force the Queen—”

‘They will never take me alive.”

Queen Lilah of Hiclantung held a dagger, jeweled and ornate, but needle-sharp for all that. I knew that dagger would plunge into her breast when the end came. Somehow, in my agony for my Delia I found a strange sense of outrage that another beautiful woman should die.

I leaped forward, whirling my sword in tremendous overhand circles, rather in the fashion of the Clansmen of Viktrik with the Danish ax, and cleared a space in which the ghastly slashed trunks and sliced heads of my opponents sank down bloodily. Moving now very rapidly, even for me, I scooped up Queen Lilah, hoisted her under my left arm, and with a great yell to Hwang to follow, bounded up the stairway.

Two, three, four of the dark-clad assassins I slew as I raced up the steps. I forced my breathing to fall into that old familiar regular rhythm. The only thing that would stop me now would be an arrow through the spine. Even then, such was my wrath, that I believe I would have reached the lofty doors of the corthdrome with a quiver-full of arrows feathering in my back.

Just as we reached those arched doorways a figure scuttled out and the doors began to close. In seconds they would slam in our faces. From below us on the wide stairway the beast yells lifted and the rapid patter of feet and the clink of steel eloquently told of what fate lay in store for us there.

I let rip with a furious, atavistic, enraged yell and bounded up the last flight, shoved my shoulder against those closing valves, and thrust vigorously.

A frightened squeak answered from within, and then we were through and Nath the Corthman and three or four of his stable slaves were pushing frantically at the doors again. Hwang pitched in to help them.

“Put me down, you great oaf!”

I had forgotten the Queen, bundled up under my arm. As I set her on her feet, she called out in her most imperial way: “The bar, you fools! Put the bar across! By Hlo-Hli — hurry!”

Nath the Corthman was dancing around and wringing his hands and sobbing. “My beautiful corths! These barbarian beasts will take them all, or slay them, my flying wonders of the sky!”

“Cease your babbling, cramph, or I will nick your ears!”

Nath bobbed and bowed before the Queen as we struggled to close the doors, our feet slipping on the tessellated paving, our muscles bulging, our breaths clogging in our throats.

Flint-headed spears thrust through the slit opening between the two valves. Arrows flew through. We could hear the yelling outside, the whip-like crack of orders, and hear the bestial grunting of the assassins as they sought to thrust the doors wide and rush in upon us.

Behind us the corths, whose unease manifested itself in a great whistling chirruping, had now begun to emit their strange feathery-dusty odor. I glanced up. Long before we could unchain a corth and open the ceiling valves, which drew back in segments, the assassins would have completed their work.

As we surged against the doors Queen Lilah stood back from us, tall and regal, her embroidered robes falling in sheer lines to her feet, her face as waxy white as a votive candle, the dagger in her hand catching the light from torches in their wall brackets and splintering strange and disturbing colors over the scene.

“The defense wires had been removed from this stairway,” she said. Her voice cracked as flat and hard as a falchion blade. “There were men waiting in hiding. Oh, Orpus, unhappy man! If you have survived it were better had you not!”

If the high councilor had been a party to the plot then he wouldn’t hang around Hiclantung; if he had not been then he would be lying on the stairway weltering in his own blood.

The doors groaned as weights thrust unequally against them. Their bronze hinges squealed. Slowly, the stable slaves and Hwang and I were being thrust back. It was a mere matter of moments before the murderers broke in.

All my natural instincts urged me to fling wide the doors and with my sword in my fist to hurl myself upon these beast-men.

Such a course — which is deplorable in itself — often seems to me the most natural one in two worlds in circumstances like those when I fought the assassins in the corthdrome of Hiclantung. I can wait for an attacker to expose himself and then counter-strike. I can charge headlong and carry the fight to him. But now — such a course would mean the inevitable deaths of Hwang and Queen Lilah. I glanced back at the torchlit interior of the corthdrome.

Beyond the ranked perches where the corths whistled and shrilled and ruffled their feathers beneath the arched roof a narrow stair ran winding around the interior wall. At its summit a narrow door of lenk wood gave ingress to the windlass room, where were situated the necessary drums and levers and apparatus for opening the roof. I shouted at Hwang.

“Hwang! Do not argue! Take the Queen up there — at once!”

Before Hwang could reply she had stamped her foot and rejected the suggestion in an icy manner of high hauteur.

“If you do not go, Lilah,” I said, “I shall put you under my arm again, and this time I shall beat you.”

“You would not dare!” Her eyes flamed at me. “I am the Queen!”

“Aye — and you’ll be a dead Queen, by Zim-Zair, if you don’t do as I say! Now —
go!”

She looked at my face in the vivid light of the torches and I must have been wearing that old ugly look of demoniac power that transfigures my features into a devil’s mask, for she shuddered and turned away.

“Go!”

With what I took to be either a curse or a sob she lifted the heavy brocaded hem of her robe and I saw her slippered feet twinkling as she ran across the floor between the perches and started on the lung-bursting climb.

“After her, Hwang!”

“But you!”

“If I am to die, then this is as well a way to go as any other.” I shooed him away and the doors squealed as they opened further. To the stable slaves in their gray slave breechclouts I said: “When I give you leave — run! Hide! These evil men do not desire to kill you!”