Thoughts of Numim girls brought up certain memories. I now felt confident Numim girls were as tough as was said; and I fancied Numim men were also as tough and would keep a promise.
“Straight on, Saffi,” I croaked out. “Keep going.” I managed to sprawl forward and stick my head up enough to see where we were going. Saffi looked back.
“They keep close, Hamun. We should dive into the jungle and hide."
“No! Keep straight on."
She pouted at me, and her golden eyes regarded me with calculation.
“I am not delirious, Saffi. I will get over this rast-given wound directly.” It was an effort to think and speak. “Keep on. Look for a clearing; caves, huts—and villas."
I closed my eyes. If I had gambled wrong, then it was all over. Going down to hide in the jungle was a meaningless gesture, when the Manhounds of Antares sniffed at our trail...
The airboat sliced through the air, warm at our low altitude, and once in a while Saffi turned and looked back. Then she would stare ahead again, and the creases on her forehead indented deeper, so I knew our pursuers stayed doggedly with us.
We had chosen a fast voller, but we had not picked the fastest in Smerdislad.
Saffi said, “Two vollers gain on us, Hamun."
“They have purer minerals in their silver boxes,” I said, mumbling. Then I realized what I was saying. But I could do nothing about that. Saffi took no notice, and I believe she thought I was delirious. Well, I was rambling in my speech, and must not talk again until the time came.
As Zair is my witness, I have at all times attempted to tell the truth in these tapes as I saw it. I own to many failings, and I am a great rogue when necessity presses, and yet I believe I have not willingly deceived you. So I must now confess that I do not recall what happened from the time Saffi reported the two pursuing vollers were lunging for our airboat to the time when I awoke festooned with acupuncture needles—and many of them moxybustion examples, aromatically smoldering—to stare up into the concerned face of Doctor Larghos the Needle. What I tell is what Saffi told me. It was a most hairy time, she said, her golden face alight with the passions of the fight still strong upon her.
Saffi swerved the voller about, avoiding the lancing hail of bolts fleeting from our pursuers. The voller was stocked with many of the familiar weapons of aerial fighting. Although I had thrown away the quiver of bolts, there was another to hand. Somehow, with one hand and the crossbow thrust against a rib of the voller's frame, I succeeded in loading. Saffi shouted, and I loosed and the pilot of the leading pursuer hurled backward, his hands clawing skyward, a crossbow quarrel through his throat.
But their vehement onslaught could not be halted by slowly placed, single shots. The first voller surged up on our larboard and Saffi jinked away to the starboard and dropping, and the second let her come and rode with her, and the cruel iron grappling hooks sailed toward us.
My thraxter bit ineffectually at the wire-wound ropes. I ripped out two of the grapnels and with them chunks of the voller's skin, and the air rushed through the gaps. But the airboats grappled us. Saffi set the controls and we plunged on and down toward the jungle. The two vollers plummeted with us. They were packed with armed men. I fought. I do not remember, but I fought. Sometimes, in the small hours of the night when my brain releases my mind to wander freely over the lurid paths of memory I think I recall scarlet fractions of that fight.
There are painful memories of a glorious golden form at my side, with a bloodied sword. There are hazy recollections of pain that was beyond pain gouging all along my left side. Saffi and I fight well as a team, and we fought well on that long-gone day. A crossbow quarrel sprouted from my left shoulder, and I am told I yelled: “Waste your shots, you kleeshes!” For there was little they could do to that left arm of mine now save chop it off entire.
“Your back, Hamun!"
Whirling, I ducked clumsily and the thraxter, with a life of its own sought and took the life of the Rapa chopping at my head. Thraxters clanged and hammered, lunged and withdrew. How many men died I do not know. Saffi was wounded, the blood drenching down her golden skin. I must have fought as a berserker. But we were surely done for. The airboats were down low now, our voller penned between the other two. The green jungle tops fleeted past below. When an uprearing tree lashed our keel and scraped and tore away below, the whole flier shuddered.
“Fight to the end, Hamun!” yelled Saffi. Her golden hair waved wildly in the wind of our passage.
“We will fight, Saffi!” I shouted back. “But it is not the end! Look!"
I had not misjudged the quality of the Numims.
A clearing appeared below, past the last of the jungle trees. To one side reared a rock-face honeycombed with the black openings of caves. Huts burned. Villas burned. Down there the corpses of many manhounds lay sprawled, feathered with crossbow bolts. And up into the sky rose the vollers bearing the golden colors of the Trylon of the Golden Wind.
Jiktar Horan, Rees's guard commander, had kept his word.
There is little left to tell, for Saffi, her glorious golden eyes wide with the wonder of it all, finished by saying:
“And dear Horan and our men simply took those foul vollermen of Faol apart, Amak Hamun!"
I managed to say, from where I lay flat on my back with the needles smoldering and Doctor Larghos fussing, “You called me Hamun when we fought together, Saffi."
She smiled. “If you wish it, Hamun."
“It is you who do me the honor, Saffi. And your wound?"
At this Larghos the Needle piped up with: “The Lady Saffi must rest, Amak! But she would hear nothing but how you were and if you were likely to die! I told her—"
“And I ask her, Larghos the Needle.” I smiled at Saffi. The smile did not pain. “You have proved everything true, Saffi. Now for the sake of your father, the Trylon Rees, you must rest."
“If you say so, Hamun."
There could be no rest for me.
Doctor Larghos strapped up my arm. I knew but did not tell him that a few burs of rest and recuperation would see the wound healed. But he persisted in his fussing, and my tiredness made me tolerate his mollycoddling.
There was one thing more left to do before I could fly for home.
I did not tell Saffi or Horan or Larghos the Needle what I intended, for they would not have understood. It was taken for granted by all of them that I would be going with them back to Ruathytu.
Jiktar Horan, a true professional, and his lion-men had followed my directions and had found this place and had worked it over. There were no Manhounds of Faol left alive. The slaves, those who had not run off, would be taken away, some to a slavery more kind than the horrors to be found in Faol, others to freedom. The faithless guides either had been killed or had escaped. Their work was done. The lion-men had cleansed this place of horror in their search for their Trylon's daughter. So my vow had come to be honored, in a strange fashion, truly: for the time being the foul practices of the Kov of Faol and his manhounds had been stamped out here.
I knew there were other places in Havilfar where the Manhounds of Antares would still be used for horrific sport.
Encar Capela, the Kov of Faol, still lived.
The final consummation of this cleansing process remained.
That would have to wait. The Savanti had placed in my hands information I dared not waste. Before I could return to Hamal and seek to know the truth of the Nine Faceless Ones, and through them the secrets of the silver boxes, I must return home. I craved to see my Delia once again, and my twins, Drak and Lela. But, also, I had to know how far the wise men of Vallia had progressed in their unraveling of the information I had already sent them.
When the last streaming light of Zim and Genodras had faded from the sky and the Maiden with the Many Smiles hung barely above the horizon, I cast off in the battered voller and set a course back to Smerdislad. The Numims did not see me go. I have some facility at stealing airboats, as you know.
Three
ulms from the gate of Smerdislad, along the road of the tombs, Melow the Supple had said.
An ulm is about 1,500 yards, so I would have to fly very low indeed and touch down within easy sight of watchful guards upon the ramparts.
The Maiden with the Many Smiles did not smile down on me, for which I was most grateful, thanking Zair. The fuzzy pink and golden orb shone fitfully through a high drift of cloud. Shadows lay inky dark, but I picked out the impressive marble argenter, the ship with all sails spread, above the tomb of Imbis Frolhan the Ship Merchant. I touched down in shadows and prepared to spring out.
Fatigue had been beaten back a little by my enforced rest after that unremembered fight with Saffi aboard the voller, but pressed back only a little. I needed rest.
A hoarse hissing voice reached me from the shadows of the tomb.
“I have waited, Dray Prescot of Strombor. You come hard upon my time."
I knew.
If I do not recount in full what then happened it is because again I have but hazy and fragmentary memories. I know I tore off the bandages so carefully placed upon my arm by Doctor Larghos the Needle. I needed two hands for this work. Melow the Supple lay quietly as I carried her to the voller. I sent the airboat up and set the course northward. Then I turned to the jikla.
The birth was easy by a human reckoning, but hard in the nature of things, and I sweated by the fuzzy pink moonlight, easing the two baby jiklos into the world of Kregen. Melow the Supple bore twins, a boy and a girl manhound. When it was done and everything was cleaned up and tidied away and a fold of cloth enclosed the two tiny forms, one on each side of her, I slumped back, exhausted.
Melow lay looking at her twins, and I swear that motherhood made of her face that was normally of so ferocious an aspect a kindly and concerned benediction as she gazed at her babies.
She looked up at me.
“I did not think you would return. Truly, Dray Prescot, you are not as other men."
“So I have been told, Melow. And usually in anger."
“I do not bear you anger, Dray Prescot.” She fussed with the cloth about the girl jikla. “And where do we fly now?"
We were out over the sea, heading north with just a touch of east in our course, so that we would pass safely far east of the Koroles, the islands off the east coast of Pandahem.
“We fly to Valka."
“Valka? Do I know it?” The hazy golden moonlight struck twin shadows as She of the Veils rose from the sea rim. “No matter. For in all Kregen I have nowhere to go now, Dray Prescot, save by your side."
How strange, by Vox, were the fates that sought to link me with a deadly and vicious Manhound of Antares!
“You will always be a welcome comrade, Melow the Supple."
After all my adventures I had achieved much in Havilfar; and if war was to come with Hamal, then my home of Vallia would not fight defenseless in the air. Much remained to be done, but I would deal with that when the time came. I, Dray Prescot, smiled at the jikla, Melow the Supple, and at her baby twins.
“We fly for Valka, Melow, and for home."
How marvelous it was to be flying back to Delia! Often and often in my life on Kregen I have flown, sailed, ridden, or walked on my own two feet back home to Delia. I own it to be the more perfect experience of travel in all of Kregen or of Earth.
Many a time I had returned to Delia, and if Zair and all the other gods of Kregen grant the boon to me, then always will I return many and many a time yet to come.
Home! Back to Valka and my Delia, my Delia of Delphond, my Delia of the Blue Mountains!
That can never tire. That, for me, is always the perfect ending to every adventure.
I would have it no other way.
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About the author
Alan Burt Akers is a pen name of the prolific British author Kenneth Bulmer. Bulmer has published over 160 novels and countless short stories, predominantly science fiction.
More details about the author, and current links to other sources of information, can be found at www.mushroom-ebooks.com
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The Dray Prescot Series
The Delian Cycle:
Transit to Scorpio
The Suns of Scorpio
Warrior of Scorpio
Swordships of Scorpio
Prince of Scorpio
Havilfar Cycle:
Manhounds of Antares
Arena of Antares
Fliers of Antares
Bladesman of Antares
Avenger of Antares
Armada of Antares
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Visit www.mushroom-ebooks.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.
Avenger of Antares [Dray Prescot #10] Page 20
