Even today, I cannot say if I would have done that deed or not.
The leader stood by a great fire, half turned from me, talking to a group of the nobles of the third party caught up in his schemes. With them stood the Chuktar of the Undurkers. At the leader’s side stood a younger man, laughing and full of merriment. This was the third party’s candidate for the hand of the Princess Majestrix, through whose marriage the leader would seek to legitimize his claim to the throne. Larghos led me forward.
“Here is Berran, Vadvar of Rifuji,” said Larghos. “And here also is Drak, Strom of Valka.”
We went forward into the firelight.
The leader turned, a goblet of wine in his hand.
I saw him.
It was Naghan Furtway, Kov of Falinur.
At his side, laughing and jesting, stood his nephew, Jenbar.
I froze, for a stupid moment held in a stasis of self-contempt. These were the two I had rescued from the Mountains of the North at the instance of the Star Lords. I had saved their lives so that they might destroy mine and the girl’s I loved.
Jenbar stopped laughing.
“Who?” he said. He peered closer.
“Berran, Vadvar—” began Larghos.
“No. The other.”
“Drak, Strom of Valka.”
“No, by Vox!” said Jenbar. His laughter returned, bright and evil in the firelight. His uncle looked at me. Kov Furtway stared at me — and I knew his thoughts, as those of his nephew’s, went back with mine to those icy slopes and snowy mountains. They had known and had planned all this, then, and how they must have mocked their secret knowledge of me, then!
Furtway said, “We were surprised and disappointed when you disappeared from Therminsax. We would have taken you to Vondium, as you wished.”
“Aye, by Vox!” said Jenbar, chuckling. “And the Emperor would have been mightily pleased to receive you.”
“As, indeed, he did receive you.” Furtway’s smile altered in character. “Although how in the name of the Invisible Twins you escaped him I do not know.”
“What?” said Trylon Larghos. “What are you saying, Kov?”
“Why, Nath Largos, do you not know who this man is, the man you call Drak, Strom of Valka?”
Larghos saw the evil undercurrents running here, and he stammered, and was silent. His fear of this leader, who was Kov Furtway of Falinur, was very great.
I poised. Flight! I, Dray Prescot, the Lord of Strombar, Krozair of Zy, must run from my foemen! Well, I had done that before, not often, and would do so again; now I must live to reach my Delia, stand by her side, and defy the might of Vallia arrayed against us.
“Chuktar Uncar,” said Furtway. “Feather me this fool with arrows! Pull him down as the trags pull down a leem!”
The Undurker unshipped his bow. Larghos was babbling. Jenbar was laughing.
“That man, you fools,” shouted Furtway, “is Dray Prescot! That wild clansman, the Lord of Strombor! Slay him!”
I swung about and ran from the firelight and into the avenue of dinosaur bones. And as I ran the whispering rain of arrows whistled about me and clanged from those millennia-old bones in a sleeting shower of death.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“. . . fit to be called Prince Majister of Vallia.”
The very tangle and interlacing tapestry of bones over and under which I leaped and dived saved me. One arrow only nicked me, a slicing shear through the leather over my left shoulder; a scratch, nothing. I dodged and ducked as best I could. These ancient bones, fossilized over the millennia and then cast adrift once again on the desiccated surface of the secret crater where these great beasts had trekked to die, surrounded me and in a weird and ghoulish way afforded me protection.
The arrows sleeted about the iron-hard bones. I heard their chiming, like the bells of the damned, and I ran and leaped. One chance alone was left me now. A roaring bellow of rage pursued me. Kov Furtway had let loose his mercenaries, and the Undurkers, their proud supercilious noses high, were after me.
I remember as I ran, hurdling risslaca vertebrae and all the scattered skeletons of giants of the past, that I had a most uncharitable thought about these halflings from Undurkor. Their long noses meant they could not turn their heads when loosing, otherwise the strings would have given them bloody stripes down those snouts. They used a short compound bow, and they must draw it as far as they might, to the chest, the lip, the nose. It is from the long throw of the great longbow that all its awful power is obtained, that long energy-storing thrust that gives range and penetration, when the shorter flatter staccato of the small bow slaps out jerkily.
Mind you — if an Undurker arrow skewered me now it would be just as painful as a cloth-yard shaft.
The moons of Kregen floated past above and the shadows shifted strangely among that fossilized forest of bones. The hard clatter of booted feet pursued me. I ran. I dodged. There was no time for that old Krozair trick I so joyed in employing, of turning about and swatting the arrows away with my sword, something after the style of a flick-flick gobbling up flies on the wing.
“I’ll marmelize you!” a voice screeched at my back.
I ignored that kind of drivel.
I kept my bowstave horizontal so as not to foul the arching rib cages. Had my bow been strung — for like any frugal bowman I kept the stave unstrung when possible — I’d have risked a turn and a shot. But I kept on. Inky shadows barring the path succeeded by patches of pink moonlight passed, and I raced on. The avenue twisted and turned where bones too large and heavy to lift from the way imposed a turning. These serpentine windings saved me. I roared out into a cleared area. In a great circle the bones enclosed this area like a fence of fossils. In the center rose the tumbled pile of ruins. I made out three corners of a tower, shafting up like a rotten tooth. Masses of rock lay strewn haphazardly. A few lights glimmered. I had to cross this open space somehow.
Head down I started off at a tremendous pace, my Earthly muscles gaining full effect from Kregen’s gravity, knowing I had at best but a few murs before the first of my pursuers appeared at the mouth of the tunnel-like avenue through the bones.
As I went I shouted. I used up breath to bellow a warning of my approach.
“Friend!” I roared. “I’m Strom Drak! Let me in!”
A long arrow skeeted past my head. I let out a blistering Makki-Grodno oath and lifted my voice, as on this Earth I had hailed the foretop in a gale, and told them what I thought of a Vox-spawned Opaz-forgotten cramph of a bowman who tried to spit a comrade.
With all the hullabaloo I very nearly miscalculated and left my first dodging weaving too late. I slanted my run and then zigzagged back, and six arrows clumped against the rock, to carom ahead. Three of them snapped across, whereat I took note and would have smiled, were I given to that kind of facial contortion in interesting moments like this.
“Undurkers!” I screeched. “Feather a few rasts for me!”
I was almost there, now, in the shadow cast by one moon. Over my head rustled the near-silent covey of long arrows. I dodged again and then dived into the sprawled mass of ruins with the shrieks of skewered halflings in my ears.
I rolled over and jumped up. “By Vox! That sounds better for a fighting-man to hear!”
Seg said, “You took a chance, dom. I only just managed to knock Hakli’s bow up in time.”
“I knew you must have done so, Seg. Since when does a Bowman of Loh miss a running target coming straight for him!”
The dark crimson shape at Seg’s side chuckled. “Aye, Seg Segutorio. This Drak of whom you spoke is indeed a man.”
In the moonshot darkness a line of bowmen sank down into their places in the shelter of rocks and tumbled slabs of masonry. Hakli, his fire-red hair a weird color under the moons, chuckled again, and took up his station. “The cramphs have crept back among the bones, where they belong.”
“They’ll be out again, Hakli,” I said. “They have archers of Undurkor with them now.”
“Children with toddlers’ bows, by Hlo-Hli! Flint fodder!”
I turned to Seg. “The Princess Majestrix, Seg. Where is she?”
Seg looked at me. I saw the lines on his face in the streaming pink moonshine.
“Delia? She is not with us.”
Once again that frightful sensation of the solid ground beneath my feet turning and plummeting sickeningly seized me. I gripped Seg’s arm. We moved away, into the shadows.
“What do you mean, she is not with you? She left in an airboat when these kleeshes attacked Delta Dwa. She must be here!”
“No, Dray. She did not come with us. I was aboard the flier in which the Emperor fled. She did not land here.”
There had been confusion when the Emperor, warned by Vomanus, had fled for safety to these ruins in The Dragon’s Bones. Vomanus liked to come here to study the old remains; it was a hobby. There had been worse confusion when the courtiers, retainers, and guards had landed here, a chaos made worse by the great storm that had swept up the airboats like idle leaves upon a river and swept them into shattered destruction against the massive array of bones. Seg could have been mistaken.
“We’re short on food and water, Dray. There have been a few attacks, not many, and we held them off without trouble. But the men may not fight if they are not fed.”
“They have Undurkers with them out there now, Seg. If the crimson Bowmen of Loh do not fight, the Emperor is a dead man.” I looked into the ruins. “I will seek him out now. Delia must be here. If she is not — he may know where she is.”
Seg, looking at my face in the shadows, coughed, and said: “Remember, my old sea-leem. He is the Emperor. He is surrounded still by his men.”
“I know, Seg. But I have come here to find Delia—” I told him, then, that I had sent Inch to what might be his death.
Seg said, “From what you tell me of Inch, Dray, he will fight his way out of anything.”
I warmed at that. Seg’s tour of sentry duty being finished he accompanied me as I went to find the Emperor. On all sides among the ruins the mercenaries were camped, and they appeared to be a sullen, dispirited lot. I could imagine the frightful problems they were revolving in their minds. A mercenary fights for pay and will remain loyal, but if you do not pay him, if you do not feed him and give him wine . . .
“Welcome, Strom Drak!” The Emperor held out his hand and we gripped in the Vallian way. He looked exhausted, with the betraying dark smudges beneath his eyes, his cheeks sunken. But there remained about him the same indomitable iron determination that kept his place as Emperor; this man would never give in until they shoveled earth down onto him. Perhaps that was where we differed, for I would not give in until I had clawed my way up and thrown down those hurling the dirt on me. “You are right welcome, Strom Drak. It is good to find loyal men still in Vallia.”
The silly old fool! He thought I had fought my way here to rescue him, or to help him in his defense! Idiot! Onker! Calsany!
“Where is the Princess Majestrix, Majister?”
“I do not know.” He made a flat, dismissive gesture. “At least, she is not trapped here with us. But, soon, my loyal subjects will arrive, as you have, Strom Drak, and will destroy utterly those treacherous rasts led by the Trylon Larghos, may Vox tear his guts out with white-hot pincers.”
“But, Majister,” I said. “The Princess Delia — she must—” I swallowed. I shook and couldn’t stop myself. The Emperor looked coldly at me, for no stranger, no man not of the family, unless given permission, may call the Princess Majestrix anything other than that. Her name, like her person, is sacred. “She was in an airboat — the storm — those mad leem out there . . .”
Pallan Rodway, the minister in charge of the Treasury, took my arm and tried to wheel me away from the Emperor. I would not be maneuvered. I glared at them, at this Emperor and the few loyal nobles and Pallans remaining to him as we stood in that shattered tower surrounded by ruins.
“Where is she!” I yelled it; it was a demand. “The Princess Majestrix!”
The Emperor returned my glare with all the apoplectic fury of complete authority. I saw that malignant glitter in his eyes and I know my eyes returned the same ugly, evil, hateful, utterly damn-you-to-hell look. What might have happened then I do not know — and didn’t care, by Zim-Zair, then! — but the moment was broken by two almost simultaneous events.
A voice spoke, a voice I knew: “Well met, Drak! Come and drink wine with me, for there is much to tell.”
I said, “Your words to me, Vomanus, were: ‘I will do as you ask.’ Do you remember?”
He came forward into the torchlight. “I remember.” He looked just the same, handsome, careless, above the petty run of party politics, and yet. . .
And then a Chulik mercenary let out a tremendous bellow.
“The cramphs! They attack! The Undurkers! They come!”
I unslung the great Lohvian longbow and with the smooth practiced forward jerk, strung it. I looked at Seg and at Vomanus. Here one was a mere private Koter in the Emperor’s bodyguard, the other a lord of a province; to me they were comrades both. We went to the perimeter of the ruins and we vied one bowman with another, in our picking off of the supercilious Undurkers as they strove to outshoot us. Nothing on Kregen, as I understood it then, outshoots the Lohvian longbow. The warriors of Kov Furtway, attacking, were feathered into heaps and piles as they sought to rush from the ruins under the cover of their own arrow shower. Oh, we took casualties. But we held that attack and hurled it back; at only one point did it come to handblows, and then our Chuliks with their chilling ferocity smashed the first wave, and the second recoiled and ran.
The metal-adorned backs of the mercenaries vanished into the fossilized forest of bones. Our wounded were cared for. The fourth moon, She of the Veils, cast down her pinkish light and picked out in a roseate glow the glimmer of weapons, the gleam from an eye-socket, the black sheen of blood, and the harsh rock and dust, the ring of bones, the ruins, the desolation.
Vomanus cornered me where a dead Rapa still clutched his sword, his bird-beak embedded in the dust, the Undurker arrow protruding through his neck.
“Dray! I never thought to see you alive again!”
We talked. Much of our conversation dealt with what I have already related to you. I found my surmise was true. He had allowed himself to become the candidate so as to discover the secret intentions of the Emperor’s enemies. His warning had been almost too late. “And now we are done for, anyway, I think, Dray. We have had bonny times, but they are over.”
From the corner of my eye I was aware of the dark crimson shape, hovering. I said, “Vomanus, tell me true — you have no desires to marry Delia? You continue to support me?”
“Of course! Need you ask? I have spoken with Delia, and no woman loved a man as she loves you.” He chuckled, an incongruous sound in those surroundings. “Although why so ugly a looking devil as you should manage it when all the chivalry of Vallia have been spurned — Vox take it! But you are the man, Dray Prescot!”
I heard Seg gasp.
“Come here, Seg!”
These two, Vomanus of Vindelka and Seg Segutorio, stared at each other, and I recognized the amusement in me at their instinctive sizing up, their flash of temperament. I told them both a little of the fuller story, and finished: “So we three are dedicated to the service of Delia of Delphond. Very good. Very fine. But where, by the Black Chunkrah, is she?”
All that was certain was — she was not trapped with her father in the tumbled ruins at the center of The Dragon’s Bones.
Naturally, I immediately took stock of the situation with the single obsessive desire to get out. I could make a run for it, and once inside the tangle of bones, no man or beast-man would catch me. Covering that open space would be the tricky part, for I would be shot at by Undurkers in front and by Lohvian Bowmen from the rear. Of the two I gave the Lohvians the best bet on feathering me.
“Sink me!” I burst out, and the other two looked at me st
rangely. I knew I must appear a black-hearted devil to them, a harsh, intolerant — and intolerable — man who demanded instant obedience. But other thoughts occurred to me. This man we defended was Delia’s father. That he was the Emperor meant nothing in my book. But if I left now, and Furtway succeeded in murdering Delia’s father in cold blood — what would she think? What would she think of me? I would be the man who had run away and left her father to die a miserable death.
Hell’s bells and buckets of blood!
I was in a cleft stick and it was damned uncomfortable.
Furtway flung his men in again, and this time they surged up to our parapet of stones. We had a few brisk moments when the swords rang and slithered, and men screeched with steel skewering their bellies. Then the third party mercenaries broke and we spitted them all the way back to the bone ramparts.
Seg said, “I’m down to a dozen shafts.”
“Here, take these quivers.” I handed them out, sharing among the crimson Bowmen. They had lost all their Jiktars, their Chuktar was Opaz knew where, only three Deldars remained, and one badly wounded and dying Hikdar. Of the intermediate ranks, as you know, a man is called simply by the last and identifying portion of his full rank. Various organizations place varying numbers of degrees in each rank. The highest ranking of the three Deldars was a So-Deldar — that is, the third degree of Deldar — and he had seven more to go before he became a Hikdar. They were good men. But, as is my custom, I had been active in the fighting, shouting intemperate and callous orders in my brutal and domineering way, and they had listened to me, instinctively understanding that, for all my sins and ugly face, I was a leader, and they obeyed.
The Emperor came up and said abruptly, “Strom Drak. I have noticed how you fight, and I am pleased. Of the other matter we will talk by and by—”
I interrupted him. If you cannot imagine the full depth of my agony for Delia, the feelings of screaming madness possessing me, I can understand that. It has been given only to few men to grasp what I suffered then, and I would not wish that pain on anyone. So it was I interrupted the Emperor, and walked away, saying over my shoulder: “I will fight for you, Majister — aye, and slay those rasts for you! — but afterward we will talk, you and I.”
Prince of Scorpio Page 19
