Secret Scorpio [Dray Prescot #15]

by Alan Burt Akers

  He flicked blood drops from his sword.

  “Think nothing of it, my man! A wayfarer is entitled to the protection of a koter of Vallia."

  He used the word koter in its meaning of gentleman, rather than of mister.

  He reached out and grasped the reins of a zorca from which a dead Rapa hung tangled in the stirrups.

  “Llahal and Lahal,” I said in one of the prescribed forms for making pappattu, the first Llahal with that strong Welsh double-L sound, used in greeting strangers, the second with the softer single L, used for greeting friends. “I am Nath the Gnat.” I said this promptly, almost without thought. My cover as a poor old wandering laborer seemed valuable enough to maintain for the moment.

  “Llahal and Lahal. I am Koter Rafik Avandil.” He appended no further information, but I did not mistake his deliberate use of the title. For a poor laborer koter was a gentlemanly rank that should impress.

  Moving slowly yet with sureness I dismounted from Whitefoot. The hirvel had served as well as he was able, not unlike a nightmare version of a llama, with that tall round neck and shaggy body. I took up the reins of the only other zorca left by the Rapas. Koter Rafik looked on. If he wished to claim both animals as his own he would have a fight on his hands. But he offered no comment.

  Numims are loud and boisterous, with their golden fur and golden manes and fierce bristly mustaches. Lion-folk are numims, and the lion-maidens are glorious under the rays of the suns. They are also extraordinarily seductive under the moons, or so I am told.

  I mounted up with a sack and my bamboo stick. I took up the reins. “I am for Arkadon, Koter Avandil. I am in a hurry. I give you my thanks again for your assistance.” He was not to know that I'd been in no real danger. If the Rapa masichieri had turned nasty and attempted to use the edges of their swords I'd have been forced to unlimber the bamboo stick and settle their business. But he had come charging in like a knight errant and so deserved his due of praise and thanks. “I ride fast, Koter, so will bid you Remberee. May Opaz the All-Glorious have you in his keeping."

  “Eh?” he said, a little put out. Then, with a real numim bellow, “Oh, yes! By Vox! I don't hold with religion! A man's right arm and his sword, they are the gods of Vallia."

  He wore a rapier and a dagger, I noticed, but the clanxer, the cutlass-like weapon of Vallia that is so often derided, had proved a good choice against the thraxters of the Rapas.

  I set spurs to the zorca and took off. He followed, keeping pace, but made no attempt to engage in conversation which was, in any event, not too easy as we galloped along the dusty road.

  There was an odd, eerie sensation about that wild nighttime ride across Vallia under the moons of Kregen. Only the sounds of the zorcas’ hooves and the wind in our ears and the thumping feel of our onward passage kept us in touch with reality. With some thankfulness I saw the sharp-cut outlines of the fortress of Arkadon rising up against the star glitter, and soon made out the circuit of the walls and a few scattered lights from tower and window within.

  We made enough hullabaloo at the arched gate to arouse the sleepy sentry. My Delia's Delphond is a quiet, lazy place, but any town near the coast must needs stand a watch. This is one of the ways of Kregen that can never be forgotten, if you wish to keep your head on your shoulders or your wrists and ankles free of chains. The slavers and the aragorn prowl many lands and seek to snatch away slaves where they can. Even here, in civilized Vallia, in sweet Delphond, the slavers sought to carry on their foul trade.

  The response was quick enough to surprise me.

  A yell and a curse from the ramparts, and then: “What's all the noise! Quiet down, you great villains, you'll wake the town!"

  We managed to convince the sentry and the ob-deldar guard-commander he called that we were not slavers or bandits, those drikingers of the wild places unknown in Delphond. The ob-deldar was surprisingly suspicious. My few experiences of Delphond had led me to believe the easygoing people would have welcomed a pack of rascally kataki slavers with a proffered flask of ale.

  Rafik Avandil bellowed out in his numim way, quite out of patience.

  “Open the gates, you onker! Jump to it! Bratch! Or I'll have your deldar rank torn off and burned!"

  Bratch is not as ugly a word as the terrible Grak! shouted at slaves to make them work until they drop, but it is still a powerful word of command, implying move, jump or you know what will happen! The ob-deldar jumped.

  The gates swung open, well-oiled and uncreaking, admitting us to the cobbled street.

  “I need a bath and a meal and a bed,” bellowed Rafik. “I'll stand the same for you, old man, and you will."

  This was munificence.

  “I thank you, Koter Avandil. But I think it best for me to finish what I must do. Perhaps—"

  “Aye! That will serve admirably.” He waved a violent hand at the guards sulkily trailing their spears back to the guardroom under the archway. “These southerners are a puny lot! By Vox! I'd smarten ‘em up!” These sentiments appeared to put him in a better humor, for he finished in a roar: “We'll meet on the morrow at an inn that has some pretence to fashion. I'll see you at Larghos's Running Sleeth."

  “Until tomorrow, Koter Avandil, at the Running Sleeth."

  He cantered off and he began to sing, one of those rollicking numim songs that always bring back memories of Rees and Chido and wild days rioting as a Bladesman in Ruathytu. I took myself off to rout out men and mounts and weapons for the rest of my night's work.

  I had to reveal my identity to the town governor before I got any sense out of him, sleepy-eyed in his night attire, tousled of hair, roused from bed. He held the title of Rango and was your usual plump, easygoing, smiling, lazy Delphondian. But I impressed on him, this Rango Insur na Arkadon, the importance and the urgency of the night's business, and soon thereafter I rode out on a fresh zorca at the head of all the zorcamen he could spare, a miserable thirty of them, all sleepy-eyed and cursing away and rolling about in their saddles trying to ride off the fumes of the evening's wine.

  She of the Veils vanished beyond the horizon and the Maiden with the Many Smiles would follow and then the suns would rise and a new day would dawn over Kregen. By that time we reached the Temple of Delia. Harshly I ordered the party to dismount and giving them no time to rest their aching backsides gave instructions in a cutting voice to their hikdar and the deldars to spread out and surround the central roofed area, which gleamed in the first chinks of morning light, ominously silent.

  Birds were chirping merrily away in the trees, and the dew sparkled everywhere, fresh and sweet. The air tasted like the best Jholaix. But, I, Dray Prescot, took no comfort from all that beauty.

  We crept in, and I held a rapier borrowed from Rango Insur, and we stole between the pillars ready to leap upon the congregation engaged in their blasphemous rites to the Black Feathers of the Great Chyyan.

  I knew, I supposed, when I heard the birds singing.

  We burst in, and the place was empty. We scoured all the tumbled ruins, peering and prying, prodding with our swords. Nothing. Not a single thing gave any evidence of a soul having been there for a thousand years.

  “It seems, Prince, we have had a wasted ride."

  The hikdar spoke a little sourly. His head was still ringing, I judged, from the party of the previous evening.

  “The birds have flown, hikdar. I'll grant you that. But as to a wasted ride, I think you'll eat a better breakfast this morning than you would otherwise have done."

  He made a face, but bellowed out, “Too right, Prince!"

  It was so, of course.

  There, was nothing here. I had failed in this night's business. Then I walked quietly around to that crumbled corner of masonry and bent among the dew-bright ferns. The hikdar stared at me curiously, hands on the hilts of his weapons, his booted feet thrust wide. I straightened up. In my hand I held the scrap of rusty black feather.

  “Not altogether wasted for me, hikdar, either."

  Then we m
ounted up and I shook the reins and turned my zorca's head for Arkadon and the Running Sleeth and this Rafik.

  * * *

  Eight

  A disrobing at the Running Sleeth

  Sleep would have to take its turn. I'd been up all night haring about Delphond. If I bothered to ask myself why I should care tuppence about this Koter Rafik Avandil, I suppose, then, I would have answered that the fellow had conceived he was saving my life. And a lone koter against a rascally gang of Rapa masichieri demanded a high brand of courage. So I banished the idea of sleep and rode up to the inn run by Larghos, the inn with the revolting name of the Running Sleeth.

  One positive thought I had. I would question Rafik about the airboat that had taken off just before the Rapas attacked. It seemed perfectly clear to me that Phu-si-Yantong had observed me in his trancelike state of lupu and had then whistled up his gang of bully boys to take me. The airboat had dropped them to lie in wait. Rafik might have seen something useful.

  All the same, although I kept my usual careful lookout as I rode, I remained firmly convinced that the wizard's orders that I was not to be killed remained in force. His ludicrous desire to rule, physically and in person, vast expanses of Kregen and to set up puppets to carry out his orders told most eloquently that he must be mad. Mad in that special sense, of course, a kind of madness which afflicts people in certain ways. He was clever, brilliantly clever, and fiendishly ruthless, as I knew. He was an opponent to reckon with. Apart from anything else, his sorcerous skills gave him an advantage almost impossible to conceive of on this Earth. I must look to my own defenses within the mystic realms, that was for sure, and get Khe-Hi-Bjanching to earn his keep, although that was hardly fair. Khe-Hi had done wonders. His own powers had grown over the years. He would, if he lived, prove a most potent ally to me and adversary to Phu-si-Yantong.

  Thus thinking, I dismounted from the zorca and tied him to the hitching rail. Pulling my tattered brown cloak around my shoulders and with a touch of the fingertips to the bamboo stick, I went into the Running Sleeth.

  The brightly painted wooden sign over the lintel had been carved in the round and showed a sleeth running, the reptile's powerful back legs fully extended, its silly front claws curled, its dinosaur-head thrust out, the forked tongue—a strip formed of brass wires—twitching out most realistically. The craze among the young bloods of Hyrklana and Hamal for owning and racing sleeths had not yet extended to Vallia, I had thought. In this I was clearly wrong. The reptilian sleeth can run reasonably fast, not as fast as a zorca, but it is a damned uncomfortable ride, waddling along on those two massive hind legs, with its tail stuck out aft to balance itself.

  So the name told me the kind of inn this would be.

  The place had been tarted up. Smoky old beams had been painted over. Garish pictures filled every corner. Instead of quaffing ale from jacks or flagons, the customers were drinking parclear or sazz from thin glass goblets. The smells of cooking told me that the over-refined food served here would be all fashionable rubbish, not fit to last half a bur in a man's stomach. Still, it takes all kinds to make a world.

  Small round tables on spindly legs, elegant chairs with needlepoint covers, flowers in pots of chunky ceramic—well, flowers are a boon to tired eyes—all gave the impression that this Larghos who owned the place must be a man of taste, well able to satisfy his provincial clientele that they were being entertained in the best fashion of the capital.

  Mind you, there is nothing wrong with sazz or parclear or elegant chairs and furnishings. It is when these appurtenances to gracious living are pushed blatantly forward as an end in themselves, catering for empty-headed gadflies, that the ordinary man must recoil. I say must. Some do not see things in this light, and as I went in and sat down in a chair with my back to a wall facing the door—an instinctive action, this, done without thought—I was prepared to let any man enjoy whatsoever he wished within reason. So I scanned the people there and then prepared to ignore them. Farmers, stockholders, breeders, they were unlikely to be found here. Here in the Running Sleeth would be found those men's sons, eating up the family wealth. One or two soldiers of the garrison who fancied themselves men of culture, an artist and poet or two, if they had little talent but large incomes, light ladies and fashionable damsels, the would-be cultured layer of provincial life would come here to ape the ways they imagined to go on in Vondium.

  And then, well, I admit it fully and freely, I could not find it in my heart to blame Larghos, the owner and landlord. After all, into this place of conscious refinement and culture stumbles an unshaven common fellow, a wandering laborer, with a raggedy old brown blanket cast over his shoulders and a mop of untamed hair, and puts his odiferous sack on the beautiful embroidered tablecloth and sticks his naked feet out over the charming rugs woven in imitation of Walfarg Weave. Well!

  Larghos, slender, oily, charming, with wavy hair, trotted over and his face showed such outraged fury that I almost laughed. I couldn't see what was setting him going.

  “Out, fellow! What do you think you're at! Schtump!"

  “I only wanted—” I began, beginning to understand.

  “You'll have a broomstick over your head! Schtump!"

  I made a solemn promise to myself. I would not allow myself to become angry. No. No, this Larghos was right. I had no business bringing my old blanket cloak and my sack into this temple to culture and gracious living.

  I sighed. “Is Koter Rafik Avandil here? I am supposed to meet him."

  “He is gone out! Paid his bill and gone. Now you go!” Then he lifted his voice and shouted squeakily, “Nath! Cochu! Come running and throw this fellow out, and his verminous sack with him!"

  I stood up.

  “Thank you for your hospitality, dom, I'm going."

  I hefted the sack and put out my hand for the bamboo stick which I'd placed on the table.

  Now there are some men who cannot let well alone. Larghos stepped back, his face red, breathing heavily, scandalized at my intrusion into his establishment that had such a good name, but prepared to let me go without further ado. Not so the idler at the adjoining table who had watched all with a bright, birdlike gaze.

  He was young, full-fleshed, bright of eye and erect of carriage, and yet about him there were plain to see the old familiar hateful signs of corrupt authority.

  “Let Nath and Cochu give him a beating before you let him go, Larghos. The rast deserves a lesson, forcing his filthy self in here among decent people."

  Before I could stop myself, I'd said, “I'm not filthy, dom."

  He levered himself up from the chair. He wore foppish clothes, not of decent Vallian buff, but of a mixture of bright colors among which the black and white predominated. His rapier was overlong and the hilt was ornately set with jewels. Whoever he was, he was not a citizen of Arkadon.

  Larghos began to wring his hands.

  “Please, jen, my men will throw him out without fuss—"

  “Silence, cramph!” This young lord—for Larghos called him jen, which is the Vallian form of addressing a lord—pushed himself up from the table. I saw by the glasses and bottles on the table that he had been drinking wine this early in the morning. So he had that problem as well.

  His full-fleshed face flushed with blood. A vein beat in his forehead. His two companions at the table with him rocked back in their elegant chairs, thrusting out their boots, and egged him on with comments that suggested a little workout would do him good and a thrashing would do me good.

  Larghos was wringing his hands. I could guess in his mind's eye he saw spindly-legged chairs and tables smashing into costly ruin all over his inn.

  There would be no profit in my telling this young bully that I was the Prince Majister of Vallia, for he was a racter and would joy in having the excuse to get his rapier between my ribs, claiming afterward that this filthy tramp could not possibly have been the Prince Majister. How was a loyal jen supposed to know that?

  Nath and Cochu appeared, beefy apims in blue-
striped aprons, bare-armed. Larghos started to say something and the young lord waved him down. “I shall deal with the cramph myself. I do not care for his manners. You, rast!” he shouted at me. “I shall teach you manners!"

  With that, confident in his own limber strength against this bent-over fellow in his brown blanket cloak, he took a couple of dancing steps forward and struck out, with more power than skill. I slid the blow and stepped away from the table calmly. The bamboo stick was in my right hand, held by the end, the thick, ridged end.

  The young coxcomb went mad with fury. He shook with rage. “Do you see that!” he yelled. “The calsany! He threatens me with his stick! A filthy tapo daring to lift a stick against me, against the Trylon of Tremi! I'll prick a little blood from his mangy hide!” With that he ripped out his rapier and flung himself into a fighting crouch.

  I sighed again, this time with real regret.

  He lunged for me. I used the old bamboo stick to parry him off. I judged him to be reasonably skilled with the rapier, well able to take care of himself in an inn fracas, swishing and swashing; as to his caliber against real opposition, I was still unsure.

  When he couldn't quite get his rapier to cut me up, as he expected to do just as he expected the twin suns to rise each day, he grew even more angry. His face was blotched. His eyes glared. His lips twisted with rage and frustration.

  His cronies at the table, laughing and hawking, did not help him with their crude advice and mocking injunctions to spit the old fellow and have done.

  Here in my Delia's Delphond, I knew, a murder would merit the strictest investigation. Delphond was civilized.

  He blundered toward me and caught his foot in one of the elegant chairs and sprawled forward. His left hand raked up instinctively. He caught the bamboo stick. His face went mean.

  “I've got you now, you cramph!"

  He tried to wrench the stick aside and so slice me down the face, as a nice preliminary to what he intended to do to my carcass.

  He twisted the bamboo, hauling back.