Secret Scorpio

Nineteen

The way I extricated myself from the possible little embarrassment of this golden numim’s discovering all my arsenal of weaponry buckled up about me, when I was a mere wandering laborer, amused me at the time. Afterward, well, as they say, no man or woman born of Opaz knows all the secrets of Imrien. I gave an almighty yawn and covered my mouth, palm out, and said, “I crave your pardon, Koter Avandil. I am for bed. I have had a plaguey day. How did you find me here?”

If he thought I shot the last question out a little sharply, he gave no sign.

“I heard the commotion and ran up, hoping for a little exercise. It seems I was in time, once again.”

“And much am I beholden to you, Koter Avandil. What are you going to do with the Fristles?”

“The landlord will take care of them. Come with me. You cannot stay here now.”

This was an eventuality I did not relish. I reached up and touched the bowstave. He nodded, half smiling, his whiskers fierce.

“Yes. I see you have bought yourself a bow with the money you acquired, to go along with your zorca. You should be careful how you spend your cash. Buying things you cannot use is a dangerous pastime.”

“Yes,” I said with a fine free meekness, adding, “koter.”

He laughed again, that great booming numim laugh. “I warrant the fellow whose throat you slit for the money wishes he was here to spend it instead of rotting in a ditch.”

“If you think that, why bother your head over me?”

“You ask questions, Nath the Gnat, more than is seemly.”

“I crave your pardon. But the landlord will throw these cramphs out and I can sleep.” I kept forgetting, the more he pestered me, to add the required koter into the conversation. He saw I meant it when I again refused his invitation, so at last he left. I pondered. One more day, would that make so much difference? I could go up and see Natyzha Famphreon later, after sleep. Yes, that would be the answer. I somehow or other did not relish the thought of slipping out the window and finding Rafik Avandil smiling and waiting below for me.

Had I not sent my comrades away they would have created a diversion. Those Opaz-forsaken Fristles. But for them I’d have been halfway to Natyzha Famphreon’s villa by now. So, cussing away in my stupid fashion, I stripped off the gear and slept.

The sleep was needed and I awoke refreshed before dawn with that old sailor’s knack of setting alarm bells ringing in my skull, echoes of Beng Kishi’s Bells. I ordered up a huge breakfast which I demolished in short order.

The fate of empires hangs on tiny threads.

But for the Fristles I would have been long gone to the racters; but for the state of the haggard old crone who served the breakfast I would have left at once. Now there is disease on Kregen, as seems to be inseparable from man and his nature and the state of the universe in which we live. The ordinary ailments are treated matter-of-factly, and the needleman of Kregen are skilled at relieving pain, even during surgery, with their cunning twirling needles. I have not so far mentioned the disease which strikes horror into the heart of a Kregan. It is seldom mentioned in polite conversation, just as once on this Earth cancer was not a subject for decent conversation. Kregans can confidently look forward to two hundred years or so of life. Right up until their very last years they do not change much, do not appear to alter. This disease — I will tell you its name just the once — this chivrel prematurely ages its victims. Oh, the men and women stricken down live on. They tend to die around their two hundredth year or before, rather than living that extra golden autumn, but their appearance and their strengths are those of ancients of days. This, as you will readily perceive, explains the appearance of old crones and decrepit men in my narrative of life on Kregen.

The serving woman was old, suffering from that disgusting disease. How it was caught, how transmitted, no one knew. No cure was known. Whenever I think back to my days on Kregen as I fought for what I believed was worth fighting for and recall the conversations and the oaths spoken, always I change that particular curse into a different English equivalent — leprous is an example. People were not afraid to live with the sufferers. Body contact, breathing the same air, none of these things caused the disease. So instead of flinging my cloak around me and rushing out, I stayed and helped her stack the tray and lifted it so that she might open the door. I was in the act of closing the door after her, ready to don my equipment, when the ghostly form of Khe-Hi-Bjanching materialized across the chamber. He stared at me, peering, as though his trance state of lupu was not perfect. Then his misty body solidified. It seemed the wizard stood in the chamber with me.

Never had I seen the lupal projection of Phu-si-Yantong spying on me as clearly as I saw Khe-Hi. He held out a paper. Like an onker I stretched out my hand to take it. My fingers passed through the yellow paper. I cursed. Khe-Hi pointed. So, a fambly to the end, I looked down and read what he had written. Famphreon’s villa is under observation by the emperor’s spies. As I finished reading, the lupal projection of my Wizard of Loh thinned and wisped and vanished. I stepped back. By Krun! Was I to be foiled by a pack of miserable imperial spies?

I debated.

A hot gratitude to my friends for their work made me realize that they, having discovered the information and sending it as fast as they could via wizardly sorcery, would feel poorly rewarded if I simply barged up there anyway. Mind you, they’d half expect that kind of oafish barbarian behavior from Dray Prescot. But intrigue breeds intrigue, plot conjures forth counterplot.

No, by the Black Chunkrah! I said to myself. I’d play this one very coolly indeed, like a warrior prince rather than a naked, hairy, howling barbarian.

And then the door opened and I swirled about ready to use whatever weapons might be necessary. Rafik Avandil started back.

“Nath! You look-”

“Koter,” I said, and I let the barbaric instincts leach from my muscles. Zair knows what he thought then. A civilized man can display the quickest of reactions when, here on this Earth, he is aware, with his civilized sense, of an automobile hurtling down on him on swishing rubber tires. Then he will jump. With my Clansmen on the Great Plains of Segesthes and venturing among the southern forests I had learned to jump when a leem attacked. Rafik Avandil slid his half-drawn clanxer back into its sheath. He had not touched his rapier. He carried both swords in a fine raffish way, slung low on his left hip. He said he had come to see if I was all right.

I said, “You show great concern for a common laboring man.”

“I am at a loose end. You appear to bring me opportunities for a little light exercise. Let us go out and find an open-air tavern and sit and drink sazz and watch the girls.”

I, Dray Prescot, replied, “With a will, koter.”

Mind you, at the first opportunity, crossing a wide avenue where the zorca chariots rolled glittering in the dawn lights and the people were already about their hurrying scurry of another day, I lost him. I skidded down a narrow alley on the far side and watched him go running along the avenue, in a right paddy. Numims, as I knew from my friend Rees, have generous hearts. Well, some of them. So I spent the day prodding and prying. It became clear that, dressed as I was in an old brown blanket cloak, I could penetrate places closed to anyone not of the laboring classes. In Vallia the social structures were organized differently from the way they operated in Hamal with the guls and clums there. So, all in the fullness of time, I picked up the black feather and rolled it in my fingers, looked at the fat apim with the sweaty jowls and small vosk-like eyes and said, “Tonight, dom. I shall be there, to the greater glory of the Great Chyyan.”

That had been in a dopa den. I gulped the fresh air as I went outside, for all it was blowing from the fish wharf nearby. The search had not taken me overlong. I pondered.

If I chanced my arm and visited Natyzha Famphreon and the emperor’s spies took me up, that would place the old devil in a pickle. Would he take my head off this time? Or would he think of his daughter?

The racters with their schemes would have to wait. The Black Feathers posed the greater threat. The impression of the great city as a gigantic wen about to suppurate and burst and release all the evil oppressed me. Black feathers were to be seen, worn in the fashion of the colored favors of Vallia. My ugly old face drew down into grim lines. Intemperate and headlong as I am, I forced myself to ignore this tawdry panoply of evil and wait until the night’s meeting.

I thought of Delia. In all honor I had rejected the notion of having Khe-Hi go into lupu and seek her out. That would negate the understanding between us, if not question her self-sufficiency as a woman. The chief Lady of the SoR had said Delia was safe. I believed that, and suffered and hungered for her, and so compensated my own evil by my intentions to deal harshly with the priests of the Great Chyyan. The chanting of “Oolie Opaz” heralded yet another procession, flower-bedecked, carrying the golden images, wending along a boulevard. People moved respectfully out of the way. According to the season the words of the hypnotic chant are slightly varied, and among all the Oolie Opazes are to be heard the Oolie Ravox and the Oolie Ra-drak. Oolie, Oolie, they sing, gyrating, swaying, flower-bedecked, letting their inmost spirits lift and rise and soar and conjoin with the spirit of Opaz. Well, I walked discreetly along in the rear, gripping the bamboo staff, and ready for — aye, more than ready, longing for! — a dastardly attack from the fanatical adherents of the Black Feathers. Then a few skulls would be tapped and the claret flow.

A crowd of people in ordinary rough clothes burst from a side avenue. They belched out onto the boulevard. The black feathers flew. I started forward and out of that screaming mob a single face jumped. The face of a man leading them on, waving his arms, berserk with rage, screaming, urging his followers to smash and destroy.

Himet the Mak!

“Right, you cramph!” I shouted. “I’ll get you!”

Foolish, stupid me, Dray Prescot, Krozair of Zy, Lord of Strombor, shouting across a street brawl, promising a villain what I would do to him! How low I had sunk!

Before I could bash my way through the struggling, frenzied mob the guards arrived, the mobiles on their lunging clumsy totrixes, laying about them with the long official staves. I ducked a blow. Himet was running. I saw him cast a vicious glance of baffled rage at the guards. He dived into an alley between a tavern and a private house of some wealthy koter. I followed. Men and women ran with me. The black feathers pinned to their clothes incensed me as they riffled as the people ran. One priest of the Great Chyyan would be a prize worth taking.

The fleeing mass broke across an adjoining square. Fragments of the main body ran into side turnings. I stuck with a gang of men who intrigued me. Although dressed as ordinary laborers they carried themselves with the air of soldiers. They kept together. Some tavern or inn at which they stayed would offer a place to spy on them. These must be masichieri, common mercenaries of low character, employed by the priests of the Great Chyyan. All the masichieri encountered in Autonne had been accounted for and it was highly unlikely any of these would recognize me. A coin does not often bear a true likeness and they would not have been court portraits. Himet was the man to recognize me, and as we passed through barred suns-light and shadow, I kept a wary eye on him.

This was a chance and I would seize it. Soon the outlines of a half-ruined tower appeared ahead, standing alone in an abandoned plot of ground between two canals. Little as I knew of Vondium, I knew of the ruined temple of a minor religion devoted to the worship of Hjemur-Gebir. So the Chyyanists were up to their old game of taking over small or discredited religious shrines. The masichieri passed in a bunch across a wooden bridge over the canal and headed for the tower. Gray stone showed the livid blotches of algae, and vines and creepers hung down, patterned with blazing Kregan flowers. All pursuit had vanished. As an orderly group we entered the fane. No one challenged me. There were many bands of masichieri here, and many were strangers.

A huge stone caked with detritus and bat droppings lifted as powerful muscles hauled the iron-linked chains. Two by two we dropped down into the black hole thus revealed and crept carefully down the slimed steps. Luminescent fungus grew. Water dripped dolorously. Down and down we went, spiraling around a gigantic well in the solid earth. Echoes bounced eerily. The flare of torches lit in ruddy hues the sheen of water below and the slimed path. Along the path we passed, two by two, and no man spoke. However poor quality these mercenaries might be, they were well drilled. No one spoke a word until we all passed through an ancient doorway with rotting posts decorated by lichens and bulging fungi. A new world opened beyond, for in the deepest recesses of the crypts of this deserted fane had been built a soldier’s barracks. The bunks, the arms racks, the cooking and toilet facilities were all of the best. The instant everyone was in, and there were about sixty or seventy men, bedlam broke loose. Everyone was talking and shouting at once, laughing at what they had done, knocking a poor old woman over, kicking a young worshiper of Opaz in the guts when he was down. They complained bitterly of the untimely arrival of the guard. They had not expected that.

Himet the Mak stood up and they quieted down. He regarded them from the far end of the chamber from a dais of stained stone.

“Rest and eat, my bonny masichieri. Then we will sally forth again and break a few more heads of these Opaz-loving cramphs!”

“Aye!” they roared it back at him. I kept my head down.

Four or five other priests, evidently of the same importance as Himet, harangued the masichieri. Then we all sat down to tables loaded with ample if coarse fare. So I ate. Very few Kregans turn down the offer of a square meal, particularly if it is free.

Among the bunks and along the walls between the arms racks, stands held uniforms, black leather and bronze harness, with black leather helmets, all adorned with the black feathers. There were also shields here, as well as parrying-sticks, oval shields with the black representation of a chyyan painted against the thin bronze coverings to the linden boards.

As I ate, my head down and spooning the food up like a wild beast, I kept one hand against my brow. My eyes seldom left the figure of Himet the Mak, dressed now in flowing black robes embroidered with the golden chyyans. He laughed a great deal and was most lively. Yes, I said to myself, by Vox, you cramph, you may laugh now!

The chances were I would have to grab him by the scruff of the neck and drag him out. I’d given no thought to means of egress. So much for the cool calculations of a warrior prince! In this I had acted in my natural barbaric manner, red and wrathful, recking nothing of consequences. After the food the masichieri spent the time in the usual ways of swods waiting for duty. They drank sparingly, although more than I would have allowed my men in like circumstances. They played Jikalla and gambled with knucklebones and dice and some pulled out Jikaida boards with games in progress. This proved they had been here some time. Presently I was able to lounge off, with a few coarse remarks, and follow where the priests led down a narrow corridor, smoking with cheap mineral oil lamps, to a moldering door at the far end. Here guards waited, men in uniform. I waited also, until an appropriate moment, and then the guards went to sleep standing up. I propped them against the architrave and eased the door open, went through like a leem and shut it silently. Beyond the door the corridor continued, ominous, quiet, with the flat tang of oil lamps burning from brass hung bowls.

Creeping along, I listened at the closed doors lining the passage. Not a sound disturbed the silence. The corridor opened out into a vast shadowy area, lit by vagrant shafts of light falling from a ceiling hazy and distant, festooned with creepers and hanging vines. Lamps and torches shone about the walls. A circle of mighty stone columns upheld the cavern roof. Above that roof the people of Vondium went about their business all unknowing of the chasm beneath their feet, or of the squat and hideous idol crouching on its black obsidian plinth at the center. The image was of a toad-thing, enormous, crouched, malignant. But its eye sockets gaped emptily, the jewels they had once held long since gouged away. The stone was cracked and flaked away and one of the front clawed arms was snapped off and lying in a scatter of detritus. This, then, was the pseudo-god Hjemur. No wonder honest folk had abandoned his worship!

There was no sign of the priests. If this was to be the place of the temple — and I doubted that — a labyrinth of warrens would stretch out ahead. I went forward cautiously, moving from shadow to shadow.

Spiderwebbed niches along the ebon walls held crumbled statues, tentacles and tusks and obscene conjurations cracked and broken and tumbled away. The blight of powerful superstition had gripped an enslaved people and here lay all that remained of that once-mighty devilry. I passed the profane rotting idols and my fists gripped the bamboo and I prowled, I think, as a leem prowls seeking prey among the chunkrah herds.

Shadows ahead, dark forms, moving in the dim lighting from guttering torch and wavering lamp, halted me, motionless, scarcely breathing, ripe for abrupt massacre.

A small party of masichieri in black armor, led by a deldar, passed uneasily. They gripped their weapons and their eyes roved. They spoke in low whispers, oppressed by the evil of this ancient and profane shrine.

“Come the Black Day, dom, and I’ll never go down a cellar again!”

“Come the Black Day and I’ll be drunk for a sennight.”

“Come the Black Day and I’ll take my pay and be off to Menaham before Armipand can jump!”

Yes, they were uneasy here, these rough tough sadistic mercenaries. They talked of guard duty, of dopa and women and were gone, walking carefully through the torch-lit shadows. I let them go. They were masichieri, mercenaries for hire; I needed to get the scrawny throat of their paymaster between my fists.

A sudden outcry ahead made me halt again. The sound of scuffles, blows, the grunted cursing of men in action, left me unmoved. Then a woman’s scream rang shockingly through that cavern of abominations. I could hold back no longer. Fool that I was, I ran and hurled myself through the crimson and ocher shadows, whipped out the sword from the bamboo and raced on, and found nothing. No sign of men or women struggling met my gaze as I searched. Had I heard some phantasmal echo of infinite evil from ancient times? Did the foul deeds perpetrated here linger on?

The torchlights near the toad-thing had revealed dark streaks running down the obsidian slab. The marks of dark blood looked recent; there might be a thousand seasons between now and the time the sacrifice screamed and shrieked until the jagged glass knife slashed his or her throat. Prowling on around this vast cavern I saw hideous things, abominations, things that were never meant to exist in the sweet sunshine of Zim and Genodras. A strange sliding clicking drew my instant attention to a jagged wall where the naked rock gleamed with the green of lichen. Shadows flittered like bats. Pressed close against a slimy pillar forming one of a rectangle enclosing a small side chapel — and the very word “chapel” brings a blasphemy upon the evil of that place — I saw a rope ladder swinging down from the darkness above. At its foot a man stood, grasping the end, shaking it. The wooden rungs clicked against protrusions in the stone.

He turned slightly and I saw him.

His powerful numim frame was clad in brilliant armor, gilded iron corselet and greaves. His helmet glistened. He held his clanxer in his right hand as his left hand released the ladder. He swung about, big and burly and fighting grim. I felt only the smallest surprise.

About to step forward and say, “And what brings you here, Rafik Avandil?” I saw the slinking shadows at his back, stealing up from the dimness between torches. I saw the black and silver and the quick glitter of weapons, and so I cried, “Your back, Rafik! Beware!”

He swung about like the great lion-man he was, and the first leaping shadow slashed and clanged a great gong note from Rafik’s helmet. A gigantic buffet sent the man sprawling back. His comrades recoiled. They gathered themselves. Without thought, I flung myself forward to stand back to back with Rafik Avandil. A noose clung about my leg and I tripped headlong.

A figure bent over me. Hands gripped my throat. A harsh, husky voice said, “Not another word, dom!”

I could not speak. I levered up and other hands bore down on me. I was lifted like a log of lumber. A crazy vision of Rafik running fleetly along past blasphemous statues — he vanished with a wink of bright armor quenched by the shadows — the sound of men breathing hoarsely by me, a sudden exclamation. The keen edge of a knife hovered under my chin. I could just see it. It was a thick, heavy long-knife, and it would slice through my windpipe as a butcher cuts up chops.

“Hold!” The men carrying me upended me and slammed me on my feet so my neck snapped my head forward and stars flew. I dragged the right-hand man around and smashed him into the left-hand one and a very hard, very sharp point came from nowhere and rested against my throat.

“Stand still, Prince! By Vox! You’ll have us all killed!”

I stared owlishly.

In the erratic illumination I saw Naghan Vanki standing before me looking charged with rage, emotion almost making his features unrecognizable. Always before he had been smooth and bland and unremarkable.

“The cramph got away, jen,” said one of his men, coming up. They all wore the black and silver, hard and supple leather, with steel bands and bracers. Vanki kept the point of his rapier at my throat. His men hung onto my arms.

“Keep silence, Prince. May I tell you something? You are a dead man unless-”

“I thought you served the racters, Vanki. Don’t you know they are leagued with me now?” It was a ploy.

He started and then his face assumed that blank, indifferent look. This was the man I suspected had drugged me and thrown me into a thorny-ivy bush to perish miserably in the hostile territories. I had the desire to know, if I was to die now.

I asked him.

“You may be a prince now, the Prince Majister; then you were a savage clansman with ideas beyond his station. No one wanted you to marry the Princess Majestrix.”

“In that you lie, Vanki. The Princess Majestrix wished it with all her heart.”

“Aye! That is why when the other wanted to slit your throat there and then I counseled moderation. You owe your life to me, Prince.”

“Alone, in the hostile territories, on foot, with the Klackadrin to cross?”

“You are here, alive, now.”

“And for how much longer? How much is the cramph Makfaril paying you.” I stopped suddenly. Then I gasped more than I liked as I spoke: “You, Naghan Vanki, are Makfaril!”

Without any change of expression, he said, “You are a prince, yet you are a clansman still, aye, and an onker!”

“Someone comes!” said one of his men, hissing from the shadows. In a bunch we melted into the darkness beyond the pillared chapel. Black and silver clothes, black and white for the racters, black feathers for the Chyyanists. I felt then that if Naghan Vanki, who on his own admission had connived at my death, was not Makfaril, then he was very high in the hierarchy and in all probability knew who the leader of the Chyyanists was.

It was pointless for me to call out. The masichieri would be less merciful than Naghan Vanki. They’d have slit my throat and gleed in the doing of it, back there in the hostile territories. Without binding me in iron chains or stout lesten-hide ropes a man can only hold me for so long. There will come a time when he may be taken. I gave no thought to the silent ferocity of these hired men of Vanki’s. They kept a perfect stillness. Perhaps Rafik Avandil had brought men with him down the rope ladder. So, taking my chance, I slipped the rapier point and dealt each of the wights holding my arms a most gruesome mischief with my knees, then ran fleetly into the darkness of the Cavern of Abominations. In the maze of tumbled stonework and fallen rock, the pillared chapels and the half-ruined warren of rooms beyond, there was little chance Naghan Vanki and his men or the masichieri would find me. But, equally and frustratingly, I had as little chance of finding Himet the Mak or one of the other priests of the Black Feathers.

A sensible idea would be to get out of the place and rouse a strong body of loyal soldiers, from Natyzha, from the emperor, from my own Valkans, and return here with fire and sword. That would be the sensible course.

In matters of this nature I am woefully lacking in sense. I no longer had the faithful old bamboo sword-stick. The rasts had not taken my sailor knife, and I drew this now and held it ready as I padded through the semidarkness. The shafting light from above probably came from a higher cavern whose floor was fitted with fireglass crystal. How far above that lay the surface I did not know, for we had descended that slimy spiral stairway to a considerable depth. However, far into the bowels of Kregen we were, I had no mind to return to the surface without a priest of the Great Chyyan to prod along before me.

The grotesquely carved pillar around which I edged screened off what lay beyond. Tumbled walls and toppled arcades, all built within the cavern, surrounded me. I rounded the corner. . The masichieri were surprised and sprang out under the flaring torches. There was only one thing I could do: I charged headlong for them. I bellowed “Hai!” and raced in with the knife held point up and thrusting for them.

I saw the slinger. I saw him unwind. I skidded on a fallen rock and tried to duck and then. . The stone must have struck me fair and square between the eyes. I dropped headfirst into the deep dark cloak of Notor Zan.