A few canals have been cut through the Blue Mountains, and one, the Quanscott Cut, is carried through the longest tunnel in Vallia, driven through the heart of the Blue Mountains to the coastal strip on the west where stands Quanscott, the major port on that stretch of coast. But the Emperor would be riding up to High Zorcady astride a zorca, unless he chose to ride like old women, monks, or children, and saddle a preysany.
I knew that here, all around me in the rolling wild country leading up to the Blue Mountains, roamed thousands, possibly millions, of zorcas. This was zorca country. The frowning citadel and the town that had grown up on the granite crags around it in sight and sound of rushing waterfalls was aptly named High Zorcady. On most days clouds drift around the highest towers. From the ramparts on a clear day you can look out and see so vast an expanse of country that the very coil of the world seems to lie beneath your feet.
We had some way to go yet before we reached that high and inaccessible place, full of crags and water-thunder, drifting with clouds and the wide-winged crested-korf. That night we camped in a hollow by a stream and I was able to appease my hunger with hot vosk and taylyne soup. I noticed that double guards were set. Stovang was jumpy. He had been carrying this treasure of wedding gifts all around Vallia, it seemed, in futile chase of Delia, on the run from her father’s marriage plans, but I knew that he was not apprehensive on account of the gifts.
The Blue Mountains, it seemed, were notorious.
According to Hikdar Stovang, bandits and robbers and assassins lived in every cave and crevice of the rocks.
I could see I was welcome as an extra sword. Fifty zorca riders had not been considered too many guards. Among the zorca riders in the service of Vektor and wearing his colors and insignia — a butterfly on gold and black — were halfling mercenaries, Rapas, Fristles, a couple of Chuliks. They appeared a reasonably disciplined and efficient bunch, but I slept with a hand on my rapier hilt, and with a lifetime’s experience I slept ready to leap up in an instant. This knack of sleeping soundly and yet with the ability to react to the noise that threatens usually serves me well, for it has been learned in the harsh life of seafaring, or adventuring on Kregen; it is not a gift of cloistered universities.
Among the zorca riders were two Womoxes. Although outwardly as composed and drilled as their companions, they exhibited to me clear signs of a much greater degree of agitation. I had fought Viridia’s Womoxes, and found them formidable opponents, their stumpy horns mounted on their foreheads able to jab at an enemy’s eyes with terrifying power. Now they made no pretense at sleep. They stayed on guard all night, alert, their weapons drawn, waiting.
The next day as we jogged northwestward Hikdar Stovang, who had taken to me as a new companion able to enliven the journey with new stories, enlightened me, although without realizing he did so. The island of the Womoxes lay directly westward of Vallia, with the inevitable cluttering of smaller islands and islets between, and the port serving the Blue Mountains, Quanscott, lay on the same parallel of latitude as the chief easternmost port of Womox. Before Vallia had achieved hegemony and then consolidation of all the different peoples that now formed part of the empire, clearly there had been long and bitter racial enmity between the Womoxes and the people of the Blue Mountains. They were all of one nation now, under one emperor, but the old antipathies persisted here, at least.
We rode on. Vektor’s men lived well, and they did not grudge me my share of food. We were made welcome at a couple of towns, where there was an influx of people foreign to these parts; then, as we penetrated higher and higher into the Blue Mountains and by following narrow tracks winding beside gorges where streams splashed and roared a thousand feet below, we knew we had left not only the plains and foothills behind but the attitudes of mind to be found there. We stayed a night at a small mountain village where the atmosphere of hostility could be cut with a terchick. We pushed on. Here local politics, local grudges, and local vendettas were carried to extremes.
“We’re all one people under the Emperor, aren’t we? complained Stovang. “If this is the family my master the Kov is marrying into, Opaz help him, by Vox!”
I was puzzled. The antagonism of the inhabitants of the Blue Mountains was a tangible onslaught on a man’s feelings; we were interlopers, unwanted, detested. Clannish feelings ran high here. Were the Blue Mountain people, as Stovang insisted, just a rabble gang of thieves and cutthroats?
What a contrast to Delphond!
Very often now, during the day, as we progressed laboriously along a narrow ledge, or negotiated a track perched between heaven and hell, we heard a long ululating call, echoing and rebounding from crag to crag. The high notes pealed in the clean chill air. The mountains rang with the gong-notes.
“We’re under observation, Opaz rot ’em,” grunted Stovang. We edged our zorcas along with care, and the animals put their dainty hooves down with a precision that showed they fully understood the situation. Highly intelligent, are zorcas.
This difficult path wended higher and higher, traversing a rampart wall of mountains. The peaks soared to either hand, their lower slopes falling away into gorge and crevasse, and so down and along and out to the foothills. Trees of all the mountain varieties grew here, and flowers of fragile beauty, and we saw mountain ponshos leaping like impiters from crag to crag. The peaks carried mantles of ice and snow. The snow-line lay high above us still, and the weather held none of that frigid bite of the Mountains of the North where I had met and rescued Furtway and his nephew Jenbar. I was grateful for that.
Once we had penetrated the rampart barrier, which curved in a gigantic oval, we could descend the other side and so ride out onto the great central plateau within the Blue Mountains. But, as Stovang said with as much pleasure as he could derive from the situation, we were not traveling that far. High Zorcady had been built on its serried peaks where the pass reached its highest point. Cupped by mountains, shielded by clouds, walled by crags, High Zorcady frowned down from the mist.
It was at that point, as we paused in a narrow defile to glare up at High Zorcady, eerie, pointed, and leering above us, that the Blue Mountain Boys jumped us.
All was instant confusion. The mercenaries drew their rapiers, some hurled javelins, their zorcas wheeling and colliding. I saw stones hurtling to smash against close-fitting helmets or thump against gold and black chests. I saw men in shaggy ponsho skins leaping from the rocks to lay their cudgels against skulls. I saw the frantic pandemonium of the fight, then I was down, and a man lifted a rock high over his head, straddled above me, laughing.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I meet the Blue Mountain Boys and the shorgortz
I reached up and took the rock away from his brown fingers and he had to let it go or his fingers would have snapped. I threw the rock away. I took his wrists in my left hand, his throat in my right, and I squeezed — a little, not much, just enough to let him know who was master here.
“I could kill you now, dom. But I will not. I am not one of Kov Vektor’s men. You should have seen that from my clothes.”
He glared at me, his eyes bulging out, a bright and brilliant blue. That was interesting; nearly all Vallians have bright brown eyes, and brown hair, and some of them have the luck to have that outrageous blend of chestnut that so glorifies the hair of Delia of the Blue Mountains.
I released my grip a little and he choked and coughed.
A quick glance around confirmed that all the zorcamen were down. I saw one Womox with a broken horn and blood oozing from a smashed skull. The other I could not see, nor did I ever again see that particular Womox. A Chulik was backed against a rock, his rapier slashing desperately at the cudgels of the ring of Blue Mountain Boys. I looked for Stovang, but could not pick him out. The defile looked a mess, with calsanys and preysanys milling, zorcas standing with drooping reins, the bodies of unconscious men sprawled everywhere.
“Listen, dom. You have a leader. Tell me his name — quick!”
No thought of treachery occurred
to him; he told me what, in other circumstances, could not have been dragged from him by torture.
“Korf Aighos!”
I nodded, satisfied. The man was named for the powerful iridescent blue bird of the mountains, a nickname, as one might say “Eagle Jack.” The man tried to work his throat, and gulped. And I was satisfied he was cowed — how little I knew of the Blue Mountain Boys, how proud of them I am!
“Get up, dom. Shout for Korf Aighos. I would like to have words with him.”
The man rose, dragging his ponsho skin about him. He wore decent leathers beneath and his body was of the whipcord toughness required of a mountaineer. His face, brown and lined, glanced back at me with a return of his natural arrogance.
“Shout, dom,” I said.
He shouted.
There was a stir in the Blue Mountain Boys, and a man strode toward me. At first glance I knew I could do business with this man. He walked with a swinging alert gait, half arrogant, half cautious, that marks a man ready for what the world may bring him. He carried a sword, short and heavy, more of a large knife than a shortsword, and its tip shone clean and unbloodied. He was not overlarge, but his chest was massive and his arms roped with muscle. His eyes, too, were blue.
“What is this—” he began.
I chopped his words off brutally.
“Aighos! If you look you will see I am not Vektor’s man!”
“By Vox! You speak out of turn, cramph! You must be a rast of Vektor’s, or else why are you here?”
A little rascally fellow with snaggly teeth and shaggy ponsho fleeces flapping about his narrow shanks trotted up. He carried a cudgel almost as long as himself. He had but one eye.
“Stick him, Korf Aighos!” he cackled, waving the bludgeon. “Stick him and take the treasure—”
“Still your tongue, Ob-eye!” Aighos glared. “I will say who is to be stuck and who not. As for the treasure, throw it into the river for all I care.”
One or two of the ruffians, forming a watchful circle about me, started at this. Ob-eye yelped as though hurt.
“But the treasure! Stick him, I say!”
“I will stick you, by Vox, you ob-eyed rast! You know the orders of my Lady of Strombor! No killing!”
I really felt those solid mountains lurch under me. My Lady of Strombor! I, Dray Prescot, was the Lord of Strombor! There were only two ladies of Strombor in all Kregen — and one, Great-Aunt Shusha, was still there, as far as I knew, still in Strombor in Zenicce. So — so Aighos could only be speaking of my Lady of Strombor, my Delia!
No real recollection remains of how I covered the intervening space, but I was gripping Korf Aighos by the scruff of the neck, and twisting him up to me, and glaring down into his face. He glared back — and that dark, betraying shadow passed over his eyes.
“What is this of my Lady of Strombor! Speak, and quickly, or I’ll snap your neck like a rotten pitcher!”
He struggled, and a hand was laid on my shoulder preparatory to my being whirled about and struck. I back-heeled and a man screeched. I lifted Aighos, beating away his fists, for he had dropped his long knife, and I swung him about and I shouted at these Blue Mountain Boys.
“Listen to me, you creeping mountain cramphs! I mean you no harm. I visit your country and am set upon! If this rast is your leader then let him speak, or by Zim-Zair, he’s a dead man!”
I saw Korf Aighos’ eyes flick toward me, and, suddenly, he went limp in my fist.
“I will speak. But first, tell me who you are — and, for the sake of Opaz himself, put me down!”
I set him on his feet.
“I am Drak ti Valkanium,” I said — and then wondered if that had been the best thing to say. But habit had become ingrained.
He glanced at me, sidelong. He shook his head. “Now, by the Invisible Twins, I wonder!”
“Tell me of my Lady of Strombor!”
At this, as though abruptly recollecting himself and where he was, his face took on an expression of alarm immediately succeeded by grim determination.
He glanced around. He said, in a whisper, “If I tell you that, Tyr Drak, the Opaz-forsaken guards of Vektor will hear. Then we shall have to kill them all. My Lady of Strombor has expressly forbidden killing, although—” Here he spread his hands and glanced around, not, I fancy, with any too-guilty a feeling. He finished: “Sometimes the knife or the rock are the only solution.”
A pragmatist, Korf Aighos. We withdrew into a cleft in the rocks, and he eyed me so narrowly that I tensed up ready to beat him in whatever scheme he was brewing. Instead, and again the rocks of the solid mountains lurched, he said: “You called yourself Drak ti Valkanium. I gave you the honorable title of Tyr because you are clearly so. But I think if I called you another name you would answer.”
I looked at him. I know that old devil’s look flashed evilly from my face, for he swallowed, and hurried on.
“Pur Dray, Dray Prescot, the Lord of Strombor, Zorcander of the Clan of Felschraung — I know I am not wrong!”
“Yes,” I said, shattered.
“The Princess said you would come. Long and long has she waited. By stratagem after stratagem has she fended them off. Her father, the Emperor, may Opaz have him in his keeping, and that perfumed idiot Vektor — and there are others. Welcome and thrice welcome, my Lord of Strombor, to the Blue Mountains!”
“Well, sink me!” I exclaimed.
Korf Aighos rattled on, his face eager, his whole bearing animated and intense. “The Princess uses her name as the Lady of Strombor as a disguise. She trusts me.” He spoke that proudly, and I could not condemn him for that. “This idea was hers. If there are no wedding presents, there can be no wedding. She it was, the dear daring Princess, who discovered the real treasure was coming in this caravan the hard and little-used way, and the great parade of servants and slaves and guards along the Quanscott Cut was the fake treasure!”
“That sounds like Delia’s style.”
“Every man of the Blue Mountains would die for her! And of them all, the Blue Mountain Boys are her most devoted and loyal subjects.”
I had to rise to this occasion. Implicitly, in all Aighos said, there was the fact that if he agreed with Delia that she would not marry Vektor, then he must agree to her marrying me. I had to show some fire, some spirit, act a part as the great man.
“I would thank you, Korf Aighos, for your love and loyalty. I agree that we should not kill Vektor’s guards. But, my friend, I do not think you should hurl the loot into the river.”
“No?” He sounded doubtful, at which I took heart.
“Carefully spread out and spent, it would bring in much for the people of the Blue Mountains.”
“Loot!”
Had I gone too far? Was he an honest man in the sense that he wouldn’t accept loot when it came his way? Was this stealing in the accepted sense of the word? I was sailing near the wind, even by Kregan standards which are notoriously laxer than Earth’s. Perhaps—
I said quickly, “But as we are all honest men, then the treasure must be gathered together and returned to Vektor when the Princess Majestrix and I are married.”
“Amen to that, my lord.” Then he screwed up his blue eyes, and said, with a chuckle: “And I will take counsel on the question of the treasure. We are great bandits in the Blue Mountains!”
They are great ruffians, the Blue Mountain Boys.
The missing Womox had leaped voluntarily to his death, rushing back down the track out of the defile and so over a precipice. The other, the one with the broken tusk, sat crouched in mortal terror of the Blue Mountain men. I had seen the Womoxes in action, aboard Viridia the Render’s swordship; now I saw how a member of that savage and sullen race was terrified in his turn.
And yet — my Delia was the princess of this cutthroat bunch!
Aighos bustled about superintending the tying of the guards’ wrists. They would be set stumbling up the track the remainder of the distance to High Zorcady in the mist. The calsanys loaded with the treas
ure were prodded away down the track. I looked up and saw a line of airboats appear over a nearby crag. They followed in line astern formation as neat as a rulered line on a score, sailing through the upper levels. They did not see us, down among the rocks, and so serenely flew on. I could guess why the treasure had not been brought in by flier; no one was going to trust an airboat with all this treasure among these hostile crags. The thought drew from me a gesture of respect for the men of the Vallian Air Service.
Hikdar Stovang stumbled up, blood on his face, his helmet gone, his bright gold and black butterfly insignia ripped and stained.
“Traitor!” he yelled at me as I stood with Aighos. “I trusted you, you Opaz-forsaken cramph! Drak ti Valkanium! I shall remember that!”
Ob-eye swung his cudgel and slanted his one eye at Aighos, but the korf of the mountains laughed and said: “Let the braggart go!”
His men respected Aighos, that was very plain, and even Ob-eye, inclined to rumbustiousness, stayed in line, and with them all accepted me as Drak, a friend of Aighos. The korf considered it best for the time being to conceal my identity from everyone, with the exception of himself. I saw, with an amusement tinged with a wry affection for this korf of the mountains, this bandit, that he relished this knowledge, this secret he shared with a princess and a lord.
From the zorcas Aighos selected the finest specimen, that ridden by Hikdar Stovang. I remounted my own animal. The other Blue Mountain Boys selected zorcas and preysanys, and in a straggly procession we wended down away from High Zorcady.
I looked back. High Zorcady! There was a ring about that, a fineness, a sense of high yearning. The grim rearing pile spearing up into the clouds, its towers ringed with mist, the crested-korfs wheeling past its battlemented walls, all made a reality out of a fantasy of imagination. I knew I was sorry not to have visited High Zorcady.
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