Mazes of Scorpio [Dray Prescot #27]

by Alan Burt Akers

  I took a breath. The spell was broken. I said, “You seem to call me by a name you know. How is that?"

  “Fool!"

  “Well,” I said, equably, “that is true, and I do not deny it. You say you have formed an attachment for me. That is your misfortune, woman, for you should know better—"

  “Beware—"

  “Oh, I'll beware all right. You are not Pancresta, that is sure. But you know of Spikatur Hunting Sword?"

  Anglar laughed. Even the Chulik, polishing up his tusk, grimaced—and Chuliks and a sense of humor are light-years apart.

  “I know of the creeping worms! Spikatur! We took them over, and made them do our will—our will! And you, you ruined it all, you and your wizards! I know! Why I do not condemn you to a life of torment I cannot say—” She put a hand to her forehead, a white naked arm snaking from the black and green robe. She looked suddenly bewildered.

  I looked for my ally, the scorpion, but he had vanished.

  The curtains of the bed parted as Anglar and Nath the Kaktu assisted this woman to step away from the bed and out to her chair. This throne-like chair was pushed into a cleared space. I crawled off the end of the bed and thought to take up the Krozair longsword from where I'd shed it as I'd gone slinking forward under the spell of this woman. For, spell it truly was.

  And then! By Zair, I tell you, my heart turned over and all the blood rushed to my head and I was almost sick, sick as any poor beaten cur dog...

  A tinkling tintinnabulation of golden bells...

  The woman closed her eyes, sitting erect in the throne-like chair. Her eyelids were covered in gold leaf, and not unusually in the way of that kind of cosmetic fad, the leaf split along the lines of creases. In that moment all the beauty of her face dissipated, so that the pallor of her skin and the golden eyelids resembled a corpse face, painted for the last death journey to the Ice Floes of Sicce.

  The multitude of tiny bells tinkled and tingled, and I felt the blood rush from my heart.

  Stiffly, I turned about. A procession entered the crystal chandelier-lit chamber. A familiar, a horribly familiar, a blasphemous procession...

  “You fool,” whispered the woman, naked in her green and black robe. “What you have thrown away..."

  Instead of sixteen Womoxes, bulking in their black tabards girt with green lizard skin, horns all gilded, there were but twelve. They bore a palanquin smothered in decoration and with its golden cloth of gold and embroidered curtains half-drawn. Against the red-gold sliding gleam of silks within a small shape showed, in shadow. The massed golden bells, tiny, spine-chilling, tinkled into the enveloping silence.

  There were Katakis in the procession, savage, evil, predatory men, slavemasters with their low-drawn brows and snaggly teeth. Their whiptails curled boldly above their black-haired heads, and each tail was strapped with bladed steel. There were Chail Sheom, beautiful half-naked girls, chained and decorated, painted, whimpering. There were all manner of strange and obscene creatures, fashioned from nightmare, not of the Kregen I knew. There were, in this procession, things I had not seen before, and there were things missing.

  The voice I had heard in that room of the blue doors, that had, all but one, turned red, whispered now.

  “Mother,” said that fragile voice. “Why do you tarry? What ails you?"

  The woman opened her eyes. They were now of a deep pellucid green. I looked from her to the procession, and the palanquin, and tried to discern the creature within.

  I remembered the warning, burned into the portal of the Coup Blag. But he was dead! He had been blown away in the Quern of Gramarye. He had to be—he was dead, dead, dead!

  “You—” I choked out. “You are dead!"

  “Silence, Dray Prescot.” The woman spoke on a hiss, my name long-drawn with evil, and yet, and yet—she looked at me with those green depthless eyes, and I shuddered.

  “Mother—we have won—why do you wait?"

  So, then, I saw it, or thought I did, and trembled anew for the fresh evil loosed upon the glorious and forbidding world of Kregen.

  Again I tried to peer past the cloth of gold curtains into the interior of the palanquin. Man or woman, boy or girl? How tell, in that eerie whispering voice?

  Then, among the retinue of people following the palanquin I saw Pancresta, walking not proudly, but in a resigned, shoulder-drooping way. And I saw that we had been deceived. Spikatur Hunting Sword, we had been told, had been taken over by some new leader, some person with fresh ideas for evil and murder. And I thought I knew who that person, that devil, was; and yet I knew I did not know.

  For Phu-Si-Yantong was dead.

  He was not in that palanquin, so like the one I had seen him ride in before. He was a mighty Wizard of Loh; I did not think he could come back from the grave.

  The woman must have read a deal of the appalled thoughts on my face. Truth to tell, by Zair, I am not sure what I thought, what I imagined, in that moment of horror.

  “Yes, Dray Prescot. Yes. You are trapped. My child rides in the palanquin that was my own and only wizard's. You and your vile sorcerous friends slew my wizard. I tried to aid him and could not. You have much to answer for, and yet, and yet..."

  “Mother!” The weird whispering voice, so like its father's voice, sharpened. Still I could not tell if the creature borne within the palanquin was wizard or witch. “Mother! The time is now. We have played the game well, and we have joyed in it. But, mother—now!"

  Yes, they'd played their games with me. The woman had given me no Llahal when we met, and not inquired my name, had not, in her impersonation of the queen that I had fostered, inquired for news of the king. She had known. She had known all there was to know about this place from the beginning, for she and her wizard, Phu-Si-Yantong, had constructed it themselves.

  No wonder the power of this place was wielded with such consummate ease!

  I had to hold onto the fact that I was not dealing with Yantong. The child in the palanquin was aping her—or his—father. The woman was speaking again.

  “My name, Dray Prescot, is Csitra. Mark it well. I owed you a score such as any woman would hunger to avenge. Yet I would have spared you, as you know. I would have raised you up, against the wishes of my child, the child of Phu-Si-Yantong. Know, now, that I, Csitra, am a Witch of Loh, and you are doomed!"

  * * *

  Chapter twenty

  A Voice Speaks

  I found a voice. If it was my voice, or another's, if it spoke from the grave, or from my love for Delia, if it was fostered by some lingering aftereffect of the counter-spells worked on me by my comrade Wizards of Loh, I did not know. If it came from the Star Lords I did not know. That, even then, seemed to me so unlikely as to be a foolish wisp of a whim.

  That voice issuing from my throat spoke up bravely.

  “Now wait a minute!” said the voice. “Now, just hold on—hold on a moment! You say you would have spared me, would have raised me up—and this after what you say was done to your wizard. Well, and what have I—here and now—said or done that offends you? Tell me, Csitra the Witch, tell me—if you can!"

  “What—” She put a hand, again, to her head.

  The long golden hair she had worn as part of her disguise, when I had forced on her, by my assumption, the identity of Queen Mab, lay abandoned. Her own shining black hair, peaked over her forehead, sweeping tightly past her ears, suited her better. Her beauty remained; but now in a strange and, indeed, frightening way, the artificiality had vanished. She was herself, Csitra, and the depth of terror was—she looked and was the better favored for that.

  “What do you mean?"

  “Mother! Waste no more time. The tormentors await and I must slake my just vengeance first!"

  Her head rolled from side to side. Her voice faltered. “Phunik! Wait, wait—there is more here—"

  “The man is mortal, he is Dray Prescot, and he is doomed! Queyd-arn-tung!"

  That means no more need be said, but more did need to be said, and said damne
d quick.

  I found that voice speaking again. “Since when does a mother, even a witch, sit still under insults from her own child? I have not insulted you. I treated you with courtesy—"

  “You slew my wizard!"

  “That,” said the voice, “was before I met you."

  “Do you know, Dray Prescot, what you are saying?"

  A shrewd question. I did not. But I was in no condition to argue. I went on with that voice issuing from my mouth: “I have known very few Witches of Loh. I detest braggarts, pushy people, the vainglorious of the world. Perhaps had I known you were a Witch of Loh, and not a mere queen, I would have understood. Do you, Csitra the Witch, understand that?"

  I, myself, was under no delusions. I was fighting for my life. Instead of cold steel, I used a voice and a tongue that welled up from some unsuspected source of deceit deep within me. And, anyway, of what use a warrior's sword against a witch's spell?

  “Mother!"

  Her green gaze left me and centered on the palanquin.

  “Wait, my uhu, wait."

  So, now, I understood what the creature in the palanquin was. Uhu—a hermaphrodite, half man, half woman, a person cursed or blessed with androgynous characteristics that could make its, hers or his life a heaven or a hell—uhu.

  “Why, mother, why?"

  “Because I say so!"

  And the green eyes blazed with an awful occult power.

  Asinine, my remark—rather, the remark of the voice issuing from my mouth. “Young, the uhu?"

  “Yes, Dray Prescot. Young and unformed, a coy among wizardly witches. But able to destroy you—if I please."

  “But why—now—should that please you? You see I do not prevaricate. I am what I am, what the gods fashioned me. I mistook you. That was a mistake, but an understandable one. What is past is past. Even a witch cannot alter that."

  “You think so?"

  I refused to rise to that bait.

  I felt the cold in me. I was shivering. If talk could keep me alive, I'd talk the four hind legs off a vove.

  She looked at me as though I were a frog's leg, to be dissected. “How can I trust you?"

  I breathed a shaky breath. Those words told me I had won a small space, a tiny moment of time in which to operate.

  The uhu from the palanquin spat out vicious, tumbling words, adding up to a demand that I be handed over—instantly.

  “Phunik,” said Csitra the Witch. “A flyer remains unsaddled.” Which is to say that there is unfinished business. “Leave me. Go and play with your creatures. I will call when I have decided—"

  “Mother!"

  “Go, my uhu, go."

  She turned her shoulder to the palanquin and the retinue of grotesque and ghastly retainers mingled with the chained slave girls and the warrior guards.

  The moment hung charged with tensions that I, a mere mortal man, would never comprehend. It seemed to me the crystal chandeliers twined together and rushed upon me. The sweetly scented air cloyed and tried to suffocate me. The very floor rolled like a leaky seventy-four after four years’ blockade off Brest. I saw the people staring at the palanquin, at the witch, and at me. I thought I would fall from the clamor in my head.

  After three or four centuries of black emptiness, the tiny golden bells began to tinkle, and the procession turned around, and the Womoxes lifted the palanquin. Sheened in red-gold, glittering, and yet black with an indrawn power, the palanquin bearing the uhu, Phunik, the child of Phu-Si-Yantong and the Witch of Loh, Csitra, moved away out of my sight. I saw it go. I did not believe it had gone, not really; but the witch and I were left alone with her own people.

  “Now, Dray Prescot, I think you must prove to me in deeds what you say in words."

  Overcoming the first spell of allurement she had placed on me had been accomplished only through my Delia, and the scorpion, and my own wits. Could I hope to defeat a second and far stronger spell?

  The chamber with its dangling chandeliers spun about me. I felt the nausea rising. I fell down. I, Dray Prescot, Lord of Strombor and Krozair of Zy, fell down in a faint. Well, to be honest, I performed the fainting act well; but that act needed little assistance, by Krun! Like any poor unfortunate girl cramped into too-tight clothes and paying the penalty for fashion, I fainted away.

  As I toppled to the ground, I remember thinking that the girls who fainted to order were rather cleverer than stupid...

  Cold logic—now—makes me sweat in retrospect. She could so easily have thrown a spell of true cognizance upon me and so suspected that I but shammed. Her slaves lifted me up and bore me off, and she cooed and aahed over me, with my poor lamb this and my poor dove that as to make the nausea rise almost uncontrollably in my guts. But I held fast, and was carted off.

  In my struggle against Phu-Si-Yantong I had always imagined and hoped that there was in the wizard a streak of goodness. I had found it difficult to believe that any man, Wizard of Loh or not, could be entirely evil. So, now, I fancied that in this witch-woman, Csitra, some tenderness for others than herself or the objects of her desire must exist.

  I profoundly hoped so.

  All the same, until I had been revived I was of no use to her. She called for someone named Pamantisho the Beauty, and heard an answering shout of joy and the quick patter of feet. That would be the pretty boy who had passed me with so sullen an expression. Csitra the Witch would be occupied for a bur or two, then...

  No doubt the length of time I had to plan and execute my escape depended on pretty boy Pamantisho's staying power.

  Having had no orders either to bind me or knock me about a bit, the guards just dumped my lax body onto a pile of cushions in a corner. They talked among themselves, and I gathered they were not happy here, and those few from Loh wanted to get back there very quickly. They said they were going for some booze—their words were highly colorful—and then they might hunt up some fun elsewhere. Guards in a witch's retinue ought to be superfluous. What their fun would be I did not care to guess.

  I cracked an eyelid open.

  It goes without saying that when a warrior falls down in a faint he will grip tenaciously onto what he is holding. The guards had passed a few uncomplimentary remarks about the longsword; but it was still there, and someone had tucked it down into the scabbard. I did not think this merited any comment on the quality of guards Csitra employed; they did their job and no doubt were paid, and they had seen the witch's powers, and the way she and I had, at the end, got on.

  Now I was about to test the witch's powers again...

  The guards began some of the usual warrior nonsense down at the wine tables, and others shouted at them to shut up, Shastum! and then someone shied an empty goblet at a chandelier.

  This appeared a typical scene. For me, it represented just about the only chance I'd get.

  So, now, I had to stand up, get out of here—and run.

  By Krun!

  I wanted to lie there. Just to lie there and rest. My body felt as though a sixteen-ton weight had rolled back and forth along the length of my spine. My eyes were red raw. My mouth was like—well like some disgusting part of some disgusting creature's anatomy. I just wanted to lie there and go to sleep.

  Metaphorically, the snowflakes whirled about me and the deep snow formed my couch and pillow, and I could close my eyes and drift off, peacefully and gently and wonderfully.

  No. Not good enough, not for a craggy old Krozair of Zy who had comrades to think of, and a world to save, and Delia at the end ... My joints sounded like frozen twigs going bang bang bang under the iron hooves of horses. I stood up. I nearly fell down. And then, somehow, I was in at the back of a hanging arras, and breathing dust and cobwebs, and feeling my way along the rough stone wall.

  By this time there was just me, a scarlet breechclout and a Krozair longsword. All the rest of my gaudy trappings had vanished.

  With a scarlet breechclout and a Krozair brand a fellow is as well dressed and equipped as he needs to be, save at the poles, on that marvel
ous and terrifying world of Kregen.

  Along corridors and passageways, avoiding traps, stumbling across rooms where specters gibbered, climbing stairs where the decomposing corpses of unfortunates told of sprung traps, hauling myself along by willpower, I dragged a painful way. Do not ask me if I would have escaped. I try not to boast, for, as I had told Csitra, I do detest the braggarts and pushy people of two worlds. Perhaps I would have been caught and moldered away in a fiendish trap, or been melted down in an acid bath, or been chewed up in the fangs of a monstrous beast from nightmare.

  But, somehow or other, there is in my thick old vosk-skull of a head the fixed idea that I would have escaped.

  I think that being a Krozair of Zy played a major part in that thinking. Poor old Phu-Si-Yantong—he'd come unstuck before against a Krozair Brother. It was quite clear that no Brother of any Order of Krozairs had been through this maze before.

  But the people of Spikatur Hunting Sword had.

  Down low on the corner of a doorway the sign, cut into the stone, showed the heart pierced by a line. That line not only showed direction, it was the sword, the sword piercing the heart that was the sign of Spikatur Hunting Sword.

  Staggering, making a sketchy attempt to prod the floor with my own sword, and glaring up with bloodshot eyes at the roof and around the walls, I tottered on. I followed the sign, the sign of Spikatur, and I followed it back the way we had come.

  How long would it be before the uhu, Phunik, tired of playing with his creatures? How long before Csitra wearied of her amorous sport? Then they could go into lupu and descry objects at a distance. They could use the signomants they must have located in the corridors and tunnels. Then they would see me. Their vengeance would be swift.

  Stumbling, I staggered on through rooms I recognized.

  The carved doorway through which we had entered could not now be far off.

  With great caution I entered a circular chamber. There were twelve doors, paneled and colored. Halfway around the chamber lay the mummified corpses of two werstings and two strigicaws with slit throats. Opposite them, near a splay of bones and skulls, the body of a Chulik sat propped against the wall. Of the hellhounds and the Pachak there was no sign.