Secret Scorpio

Fourteen

The fuzzy pink light from the Maiden with the Many Smiles and the golden glitter from a distant torch bracketed to a wall ran gleaming up my blade as I sheathed the rapier. We rode through the nighted streets of Vondium, this parcel of avowed racters and I. They were all apim. There are many so-called menagerie-men on Kregen, as you know, and you also know that they are men even if they are not carrying their spirits and souls in bodies exactly like those of Homo sapiens. To call them menagerie-men is to demean your own sense of your pride in matters of true value. So we rode and if you think I trusted this Strom Luthien then you misread my nature.

Vondium is a large and sprawling city, not occupied by as many inhabitants as the enclave city of Zenicce, perhaps, but large and prosperous and filled with great wealth and luxury. Up the paved roadway of one of the Hills we rode, the Hill known as the Ban’alar, past dark masses of vegetation and long walls concealing the villas of the rich. The Ban’alar holds a number of the richest houses in Vondium. We halted by a fortified gateway outside a stone wall with bronze spikes where four samphron-oil lamps cast their pleasant mellow gleam upon the guards and the gates and the shimmer weapons. The simple fact of four samphron-oil lamps conveys adequately the wealth of this house. We were passed through and rode silently along a winding pathway bordered by missals and flowering shrubs. The sweet scent of night-blooming flowers reached me, most soothing. But I kept my senses alert as we dismounted and slaves ran to attend the zorcas. We passed through ornate halls and lushly furnished corridors and so out a glass door into a crystal-walled conservatory. Heat smote me. The walls and ceiling were fashioned of fireglass and the crystal which resists great heat showed the steady beat of furnaces beyond.

The place was crammed with exotic plants, many from the jungles of Chem, and others from Zair knew where upon the face of Kregen.

In a wicker chair stuffed with cushions the Dowager Kovneva Natyzha Famphreon awaited me. I let her have a half-bow, a small mark to show irony, rather than any mark of respect.

“So you come to see me, Prince Majister.”

“The invitation was pressing.”

“Strom Luthien had his orders. You would not have been harmed.”

I looked at her. She had been carried in her palanquin this morning, joining in the rush to greet the emperor. Now she let go one of her famous barking laughs. Yes, I knew her, this famous old biddy, this Dowager Kovneva of Falkerdrin. She must now be almost a hundred and seventy. Her face contained that nut-brown, cracker-barrel experienced look of iron authority. Her mouth curved down at each corner and deep grooves extended the arc of her rattrap mouth so that all her habitual callous command lay revealed in that dominating face. Her lower lip was upthrust in a perpetual sneer. And as I could see by the way she was dressed all in gauzy silks, that carefully pampered body of hers remained as lushly alluring as ever. She kept her priorities in order, did Natyzha Famphreon. Standing with his hand on the back of her chair, her son the kov looked at me uncertainly. He was a weak-chinned, spineless nonentity, his every thought and deed ordered by his mother. That was not his fault, but rather the fault of his breeding. He was still the Pallan of the Armory, and through him his mother wielded enormous powers.

Many of the pallans, the high officials, the ministers or secretaries of state, had changed since my absence. But. Natyzha Famphreon held onto her power with iron claws.

“You say I would not be harmed. If you wish to talk I will listen for a mur or two.”

She didn’t like my tone.

“Will you remove your hat, your cloak?”

They could all see the bow stave thrusting up. The hilt of the longsword was hidden by the upstanding jut of the cloak’s collar.

It was warm. I said, “I am comfortable. Speak.”

“Let us drink a little wine first. I await others who wish to speak with you.”

As to drinking wine with these racters, that was another matter. That I had been called in for conversation meant they had a zhantil to saddle, and I fancied the purpose of my presence, alive and without a slit throat, was to make an attempt to seek my alliance. After all, however they had found out about my banishment from Vondium, they knew and therefore counted on that to make me amenable to their proposals. Those proposals must be obvious. So I refused the wine and waited for a space, removed my hat and looked about this luxurious conservatory.

What a wonderful world this planet of Kregen is! What a profusion of life seethes and ferments there!

So much there is to know of Kregen, so very much, and so pitifully little have I been able to speak into this microphone. But if you who listen to these tapes have some small inkling of the wonders of Kregen, the marvels, the beauties and the horrors, then you will grasp at the wider reality and the sheer vastness of it all. And I never forget that sheer size, although counting for a considerable amount, is by no means that most important criterion of value. Most assuredly so. So the racters, to bring back the thoughts which crowded my mind to the scene I awaited, so these racters might be the largest political party of Vallia with most of the big guns; they were not, in my view, by any means the best. Not by a chalk. Presently in came Nath Ulverswan, Kov of the Singing Forests, just the same, tall and lean and with his scarred face vivid in the fireglow. He wore a lounging robe all of deep dark purple, and the black and white favor was pinned to his shoulder. For all the informality of his attire, the rings and the jewels about him, he carried a rapier and main gauche belted up around his narrow waist. I said, “We have had no real addition to our parties to talk, kovneva.”

The old biddy cackled at this, sticking up her lower lip. Nath Ulverswan was notorious for saying so little as to be practically mute. He gave us a surly “Lahal” and sat down and the slave girls brought wine. The third attendee — one tended to discount the Kovneva’s son in these affairs, rather cavalierly, true

— turned out to be Nalgre Sultant, Vad of Kavinstok. I was hardly overjoyed to see him, for we had pointedly ignored each other during the times when official business threw us together. He did not forget my harsh treatment of him when the galleon Ovvend Barynth had been attacked by shanks. He was not only a dedicated racter; he hated my guts.

Now he stalked in, and I saw the way he postured, using those thin lips and arrogant eyes to put me in my place as a loutish clansman who had had the temerity to burst into civilized Vallia and marry the emperor’s daughter. He gave me a nasty look and sat down on the other side of the Kovneva with a mumbled “Lahal.”

I cocked an eye at Natyzha Famphreon. “Any more?”

“One only, for this night’s work.”

The trouble with these Opaz-forsaken racters was that they were evil in ways they could not understand themselves to be evil. They were not committing any consciously criminal acts. If I died, they would joy, but they would not send stikitches after me to assassinate me in a dark alley — at least I did not think so. My death would have to come as a result of an open quarrel, the legality of my demise beyond dispute. They made their money through the possession of land and all the wealth that brought. They also operated the Companies of Friends, the trading ventures of Vallia. A great deal of their wealth came from slaving and investment in slaving. With the ruthlessness of those in possession, they ensured the continuation of their wealth and with it all their fancy titles and the very real powers they had taken into their hands.

Under torture, each one, I have no doubt, would swear she or he did what they did for the ultimate good of Vallia. They believed this. This kind of conviction made it hard for anyone with differing views to make any kind of coherent sense in their eyes.

Each of these people with me now, discounting the young kov, was a personality: Natyzha Famphreon, Nath Ulverswan, Nalgre Sultant. Each was a strong personality, a real live person with passions and desires and secret hungers and fears they overcame. Of their family lives I knew little. But to them I was a mere wild clansman from the wide Plains of Segesthes, the Lord of Strombor, a man from outside who had dared to wed the Princess Majestrix and to make himself the Prince Majister. That I had won the title before the wedding would no doubt conveniently slip their memories. The last racter who wished to speak with me arrived. By the tardiness of arrival and by the sweat stains on Trylon Ered Imlien’s buff riding clothes I judged my apprehension had come with speed, and these conspirators had been summoned with great urgency. This Ered Imlien, Trylon of Thengelsax, I had seen from time to time and, knowing him to be a racter, had treated him with my usual courtesy tempered with viciousness. I supposed he detested me like all the rest, and I returned the detestation with what I hoped was greater measure.

A short, squat man with a square red face and deeply set eyes of Vallian brown, he moved with a rolling gait and boomed every word and liked to use a riding crop on his slaves just to tone ’em up, as he would say, bellowing. “So he’s here, is he!” he bawled, bashing his riding crop against his booted leg. “Well, put it to him, kovneva. Tell the rast what we want.”

This vastly amused me.

It did not amuse Natyzha Famphreon, and her lower lip thrust upward like a swifter’s beak rising over the apostis of a beamed foe. “We waited for you, Ered. Have the courtesy to bear with us.” Cutting irony was lost on Ered Imlien.

“Why wait? Time presses. The bitch queen is gloating this very minute.”

“Just so. Now, Prince Majister.” And Natyzha Famphreon gestured so that we listened and marked her words. Indeed, she was an old biddy, but she had power and was accustomed to its use. “We know you have been banished from Vondium. How does not matter.”

“Oh,” says I, very easy, interrupting. “Spies only cost gold.”

“Just so.” That was a fact of life to her, if not to me, as you know. “The emperor is no longer fit to rule. We run the empire. There is no shilly-shallying about that.”

I wanted to argue the point, but reality forbade. The emperor had the final say in many things, and he balanced party against party, but the power of the Racter party so often bent dividends and results in the directions they desired.

So I said, “I may have my disagreements with the old devil; he is sometimes impossible to live with. He hates me.” This was not exactly true. “But he does rule the empire. He keeps you racters toeing the line, for one.”

They didn’t like this. Again, it was only a half-truth.

“He hates you,” spat out Nalgre Sultant. “He is not alone in that.”

I ignored the man.

“There is no profit in supporting the emperor any longer,” said the kovneva.

“He is doomed!” bellowed out Ered Imlien, red of face, grasping his wineglass as though to splinter the delicate globe.

Movement and shadows beyond a glass screen attracted my attention. This place would be like most of the villas and palaces of Kregen, a rabbit warren of secret ways. But I fancied I could find my way out. Now I saw past the end of the glass screen the unmistakable outline of a Chulik’s head. Chuliks, powerful warriors trained from birth to the use of weapons, have oily yellow skins and shave their heads to leave a long pigtail. But the characteristic that betrayed this Chulik to me was the upthrusting tusk at the corner of his mouth. I saw this plainly. Chuliks generally command higher hiring fees than other races, Pachaks apart, and are finicky in their choice of employer. Their delicateness does not come, as it does with Pachaks, from honor or sentiment; their choice of employer rests solely on his or her ability to pay. Now this Chulik lifted his head, talking to a comrade, and the profile showed me the hard tusk lifting from his curled lip.

Two savage tusks, a Chulik has, and he uses them when he fights, as I can testify. If I had to fight an army of Chuliks here — well, wasn’t that half my reason for going with Strom Luthien in the first place?

So I dissembled a trifle and made the conversation more general, and hinted obliquely that, well, perhaps the time had come for me to give up my allegiance to the emperor. I did say at one point, rather sharply,

“But if the emperor dies, his daughter and her husband will take the throne and the crown. You have thought of that?”

“If the emperor dies you are out of it, Prescot. If he dies before things are settled the land will run red with blood, for it will mean civil war, without doubt.”

“And you would run that risk?”

“It would be no risk for us,” said the kovneva, and she chuckled in her crone-like way, her gorgeous body incongruous in the soft swathes of silk. “For we will win whatever the intervening chaos may be.”

They believe that, these high and mighty of the world.

Of course, by Makki-Grodno’s disgusting diseased left kidney, it is often true.

“Do you expect me to connive at the murder of my father-in-law?”

“If you were a man with blood of Vallia in him, if you had the breeding, then it would be nothing to you.”

I did not say, “If that is breeding a fellow is better off without it.” But it was a near thing. The swathing buff cloak could be ripped off in a twinkling. Depending on the danger, it would be the longbow or the longsword. Either would suit me in my frame of mind. Eventually they offered a deal in which I would have no part of the death of the emperor and in which I would keep all the lands and titles I now held in Vallia with the exception of Prince Majister. They could not know how little I valued that. In return I was not to oppose them, and was to make sure my people did not interfere during the coup. I asked about this, but they were too cagey to give me any details. Without attempting to imply any false modesty, it seemed to me they were anxious to get me out of the coming conflict because they feared my influence. They must have some apprehension of what I could do. Otherwise the terms would not have been so generous. Whether or not they’d keep their side of the bargain would be in the laps of the gods.

Had I been acting only for myself, for the old impetuous Dray Prescot who thumped before he thought, I’d have roared out some obscene suggestion at them and then gone swinging into action. I felt a keen regret that I could not do this. I needed the exercise. But more than mere gratification of my injured ego hung on this. The fate of Vallia depended to a very great deal on what was decided here in this conservatory. It was in my interest to appear to go along with them, giving them rope, so that I might more surely bring them down into ruin.

So I said, “Let me think about this. There is the Princess Majestrix to be considered.”

Ered Imlien burst out with: “Do not worry your head over her, you onker. The Princess Dayra occupies her mind.”

Furious, Natyzha Famphreon rose from her wicker chair. “Speak not of things of which you know nothing, you fambly!” She would have gone on. But I took a few steps toward this Ered Imlien and clutched up his buff tunic in my fist and shook his head a little and I glared into his eyes.

“But you had best speak to me, rast! And quickly!”