The crimson beat a steady pulse of glowing ruby light through all the other clash of color.
All the time I stood upon the battlements of Esser Rarioch, in my capital city of Valkanium, in my island Stromnate of Valka—and yet I might as well have been on Earth, or Esser Rarioch have been flung to the farthest depths of space.
And although I say I understood, I understood that I had grasped at a tiny fragment of what was going on. Amid all this frightening display of supernal power I gleed at the thought that Zena Iztar did, indeed, possess some vestiges of influence. However, she may wish to influence the course of events, Zena Iztar, I felt with a dim sense of prying perhaps beyond the evidence, must perforce direct the current, seek to steer events rather than to originate them. The yellow glow faded.
I tried to scream out for Zena Iztar to remain, to succor me; but I was falling, falling, feeling the chill biting into me, and I heard, faint and far-away, like the echo of a lost child in the darkling woods: “Dray! Dray! Where are you?"
The cords in my throat stood out as I tried to bellow back. “Delia! Delia—” But no sound forced its way from my ashen lips.
Once again I was being hurtled head-over-heels into fresh adventure, being flung halfway across Kregen to succor someone whom the Star Lords wished to remain alive for the sake of their future plans.
Where before I had insanely contumed the Star Lords and sought to fly back at once to Delia, and been banished to Earth for my pains, this time I would do what the Everoinye commanded, do it fast and quick and ruthlessly. Then I would return to Valka. Better, return to Strombor, for I knew Farris would make sure that Delia was taken with the children to refuge in my enclave of Strombor in Zenicce.
The blueness roared in my head like a rashoon of the Eye of the World.
The Scorpion, writhing in blue fire sharded with the crimson glints of Antares, had me in its grip. Wherever on Kregen I was thumped down to get on with the commands of the Star Lords would not be too far for me to claw my way back.
As always I was thumped down stark naked. A ferocious screaming and bellowing lacerated the hot air. Joe Muggins, Dray Prescot, yanked from all he wanted on Kregen and sent to sort out a problem for the Star Lords. Well, this time I'd do it so damned fast even the Everoinye wouldn't have time to blink.
There was no hesitation in my mind over what I was supposed to do.
I had been hurled down into a small wooden cabin which had been ripped and wrecked and thrown into confusion, with odd bits of clothing and kitchen utensils scattered everywhere. A man lay sprawled on the floor, his right hand trapped under his body. He was dead, his head cloven in. I leaped to my feet, feeling a dragging weight pulling at my limbs, launched myself at the man who was trying to strangle the half-naked woman. She clutched a baby to her and screamed and screamed.
As I say, there was no doubt in my mind what I was supposed to do.
The people were all apims, like me, and the fellow whose neck I took into my fists, twisting a trifle, for I wanted to ask him some questions, wore a hide loincloth and a quantity of beadwork. His head was shaved somewhat after the fashion of a Gon or a Chulik. He tried to slash me with his little steel-headed axe and I ground down harder so that he slumped.
I threw him down and heard the betraying shush of a shoe across the floor. The cabin was lit by a cheap glass oil lamp. The light beamed out mellowly. It was a wonder the lamp had not been upset in the struggle before I arrived.
The turn I made and the immediate sideways step were all done without thought, heritage of the Disciplines of the Krozairs of Zy. The fellow who was in the act of leaping at me, his axe upraised, was dressed as his companion. A tangle of ridiculous feathers tufted about the haft of the axe. It was only a small axe; but I knew that kind of weapon and I knew the fellow wielding it would be exceedingly ferocious and swift, no matter what part of Kregen I might be in.
The axe-head sliced down, glittering. I slid the blow and stepped in and he tried to seize me with his free hand. His face looked a flat-nosed shriek of absolute resolve. He was a savage, no doubt of it, in his fighting techniques. But so was I. I gave him no time to grapple or to bring the axe back.
A knee into his vitals, a chopping blow to his neck, and a slashing smash of my forearm as he went down, finishing with a kick to whatever came handiest as he rolled. He flopped. I gave them both a reassuring tap with the little axe-head, not to slay them but to keep them in cold storage for a space.
The woman was still shrieking. She glared at me with wide-eyed horror and she could not speak. The baby was yelling.
I stepped across to a pile of clothes all tangled up and then my head snapped up. My hand fastened on a pair of trousers made from some hard blue material. But, outside, shouts lifted, the sound of men yelling, muffled words and the trample of feet. Hastily pulling on the trousers, which had to be doubled up around my waist and yanked tight with the belt, I snatched up the axe and started for the door.
Men were yelling out there. I heard a sudden shriek which, if I knew anything, was the sound of a friend of these two sleeping beauties in the act of charging. The first one in the door wouldn't be put to sleep—he'd be flattened.
The door burst open. A man towered, on the threshold, the lamp glinting from his sweat-soaked coppery skin. His axe looked identical to the one I grasped, save that I'd taken time to rip away the silly tangling feathers. He saw me and he gave a single incoherent shriek and charged.
His lank black hair was bound by a fillet and he wore a few feathers there. I sidestepped, hit him over the head, smashed him down and so whirled as another appeared. This one tried to be clever, whipping a broad-bladed knife in with his left hand as he struck with the axe. But I'd fought for many and many a year with a sword and a left-hand dagger, the Jiktar and the Hikdar. I foined briefly, desperately anxious to get these idiots off my back and hightail it back to Valka or Strombor. I pitched him down to lie with his comrades, although, as I had bleakly surmised, he did not sleep. I had to slash half his face off before he'd consent to lie down.
The screaming from the woman and the baby went on and on and there was no time to shout at them as a fifth man leaped into the doorway. He took a single look at the scene within, the shrieking woman and the baby, his four comrades sprawled and bloody on the floor, and me, a right tearaway with an axe fronting him, and he half turned.
He stood in the doorway, the light gleaming from his powerful body.
I was perfectly prepared to let him go. I had no idea where I was, but I had no wish to slaughter more than was inescapable if I was to do what I had been commanded to do. If he attacked the woman and the child, he would probably die. If he ran away I might run a greater risk; but that was an equation that honor demanded.
I shook the axe at him, to help him make up his mind.
From outside the approaching beat of hooves heralded the arrival of a hard-riding group of men. The staccato hammer held much of the rhythm of a zorcatroop; certainly they were not totrixes with their awkward six-legged gait or nikvoves with their battering array of eight hooves. The man in the doorway threw me a look of so powerful a hatred I was minded to charge forward and settle his hash there and then. In the linen and beadwork band about his dark hair he wore more feathers than the others. He moved smoothly, like a chavonth, the lamplight running in gleaming shadow-filled highlights across his muscles.
A succession of strange noises broke from outside—noises I did not at once identify. The first impression was of some maniac hammering a dull but noisy drum, or repeatedly slamming a heavy door. The coughing bangs erupted with the violence of a summer storm, bursting thunder about our ears.
Ready to leap forward and make sure the woman and child were safeguarded from this fifth fellow who had tried to kill them, I stopped stock still.
The man jerked. He stiffened. He dropped his axe. He half-turned, shaking with some invisible force. He staggered and then, limply, collapsed.
From his back a gush of blood dropped
down.
I stared.
I looked down on him.
And I trembled.
The banging sounds continued. But I knew what they were.
With a roar of rage and agony I hurled forward, reached the door, looked out.
The shack stood near the end of an untidy row of similar shacks, and a raised boardwalk connected them above the road. Other men clad in loincloths and wielding axes and knives, some with bow and arrows, ran this way and that, and many fell. Up the center of the street rode a party of men, wearing clothes I recognized.
And, over all, the silvery flood of light from a single moon lit the scene in hard metallic pewter brilliance.
Again and again the Winchesters and the Colts and the Remingtons flamed.
I felt sick.
Somehow I was back in the cabin, looking at the woman who stared in horror at me, her sobs shaking her, her cheeks wet. She cradled the baby to her. Slowly, I picked up a shirt, a red and white checked shirt, whereat I felt a fresh pang, and put it on. Boots stood nearby. The woman's husband would not require boots for his last journey to Boot Hill.
“You are safe now,” I said, and my voice made her flinch back.
I turned to the door and men crowded in. They were apims, like me—well, they would be, wouldn't they? There were no Fristles and Rapas and Chuliks and all the other wonderful assemblage of diffs within four hundred light years.
“You all right, pardner?” The man who spoke wore Levis, a hickory shirt, a tin badge and a wide-awake hat. He held his Army Remington easily one-handed, and the muzzle centered on my midriff. I own he was wise to show caution. Despite my pants and boots and shirt, I must have looked far more like the Red Indians he had been shooting at than any of the White-eyes with him.
“I'm all right. This lady needs help—"
One of the others turned the bodies over with his toe.
“These two ain't dead, Hank."
The leader, the one with the silver star, said: “See to Mrs. Story, Jess.” He eyed me meanly. “Reckon I don't know you, mister."
Carefully, I placed the axe down. The men stared into the room, seeing the lax forms of the Indians, the mess, the sobbing woman—and seeing me, scowling, black-browed, looking more mean and savage than any painted Indian busted loose they'd ever run across.
“I'm Dray Prescot,” I said, and although I tried to make my harsh voice easy, I knew my words spat out like the slugs from their guns. “This lady appeared in need of help."
“You did fer them injuns?” The men looked perplexed. The woman, Mrs. Story, was assisted to her feet. The men talked about ‘gitting her to the doc’ and so I felt she was now safe. If the Star Lords had commanded me to rescue her and her baby, then I had done that. But there was no easy way now of my returning to Valka or Strombor. I was once more marooned on Earth, stranded and desolate on the planet of my birth.
My appearance was easily enough explained—I'd been raked out of bed by the fighting and had run to Mrs. Story's assistance. But the posse eyed me askance for a space, until the easy open-handed way of the West, and question and counter-question, plus the convincing results of my handiwork plain to be seen sprawled on the floor, assured them of my bona fides. I managed to keep track of the situation and not betray an almost impossible to explain away ignorance of local conditions. The Indians had broken out, as they were wont to do, for down here the main fighting had been finished up a few years back.
Down around South Fork things erupted only now and then, and the main action had transferred north, where great disasters had shaken the nation. The local people were still jumpy. All the talk was of the frightful events of the 25th June last. The newspapers carried a leaked confidential report severely critical of Custer and his handling of the tactical situation at the Little Big Horn. I remembered the braves who had tried to do for me and was forced to wonder if not only the tactical but the strategical handling was amiss. They were men, like me, even if their skin was a coppery color. They were not Fristles or Rapas or Chuliks, and they also are men, if not like me.
Around that time a considerable amount of English money was being invested in the West. Having to face the catastrophic fact that the Star Lords had not pitched me into another part of Kregen but had dispatched me back to Earth, the world of my birth, I was still in no frame of mind to settle down. I had the opportunity of going partners more than once in a fine ranch; but I turned them all down. I took a swing through the Staked Plains and checked out Charles Goodnight's JA Ranch, a spread he ran with John Adair's money. They were just beginning their fabulous build up. Then I drifted west through El Paso and had me a rip-roaring time in Tombstone.
This was a couple of years before Wyatt Earp showed up with his kinfolk and Doc Holliday. Rather to my surprise I discovered that men would shoot whole magazines of Winchester ammunition away, or the full six shots from their Colts, and still not hit anything. I could draw reasonably fast; but did not make a habit of it. As to accuracy, given a gun I knew, I could hit what I aimed at. So I stayed out of trouble and drifted north. The 2nd August had witnessed the shooting of Hickok, in Carl Mann's Saloon in Deadwood. Already, men wouldn't play a hand of cards consisting of aces and eights.
So I drifted around the frontier, not doing much of anything. As I have said before, it is not my purpose to tell you of my life here on this Earth. Certainly I got myself into a few scrapes and tight corners during this period, and found out enough to know that a great deal of guff was written then about the West, guff that has been continued to the present day.
My bankers in the City of London sent funds promptly as requested, and I had more or less reached the conclusion of going east, at least across the Mississippi and south, and then of repeating my previous swing around the country ending up in New York. From there England tempted me.
The continuing improvement in repeating firearms interested me greatly. The Spencer I had known in Civil War days was now quite outclassed, although remaining a fine weapon, by the new Winchesters. The model ‘73 with its stronger receiver than the model ‘66 proved a reliable weapon, although lacking the range and penetration of military firearms. As for the revolvers, a plethora of different patterns and styles vied for attention. I studied everything I could, and this time I had very much in mind that the wise men of Kregen might be brought to a consideration of a repeating varter. The gros varters of Vallia, the best of their kind in my opinion, might work wonders on the Leem Lovers if some kind of repeating mechanism could be provided.
Of one thing I felt reasonably although not one hundred percent certain. It would destroy a great and intangible asset if gunpowder were to be introduced to Kregen.
By the time I'd reached Saint Louis the thought of spending time in England appealed overwhelmingly to me—until I ran across Amos Brown who had a hankering to go to California. Well, he talked me into it. We outfitted ourselves in great style, and Amos, who'd been a mule-skinner up around Laramie and ways west for a number of years, expressed himself as plumb pleased at our rigs. He was a short, spare, wispy-haired little guy with a mean shot-gun trigger finger. Well, we set off full of high spirits to cross Missouri just as fast as we could and then across Kansas. The place was already being domesticated, and Amos couldn't stand the smell of ironing and scrubbing and stoop-sweeping.
Dodge City was just about played out, too—or so it was given out. We got into only one good fight, and from then on to Santa Fe the rest of the folks with us more or less kept us on our best behavior. But I never got to Santa Fe—leastways not on that swing.
The blue radiance descended on me as I rode drag to the remuda—for we had a few wealthy folk with us—and the dust biting into my throat and the shushing of the hooves for a split-second prevented the reality of what was happening from penetrating.
Then I understood and I let fly with a holler and a whoop and felt the pony slipping away from between my knees. I gave a convulsive snatch at the Sharps scabbarded under the saddle—it was a model ‘77 ch
ambered for the three and a quarter inch, 45-120-550 load, not too hefty, with a beautiful full octagonal barrel of 34 inches, a real Creedmoor beauty with tang sight—and felt that vaporize under my fingers. No good going for the Winchester on its California saddle horn loop or the Improved Army Remington .44 at my waist—that revolver cost me eighteen dollars, plus a premium to get it—or, indeed, the Bowie knife. The Star Lords were calling me and all the gunpowder in the whole of the West wouldn't stop them.
Whirling up, seeing the radiance enfolding me and watching with a choked fascination the enormous shape of the Scorpion glowing against the sky, I had time for what was a remarkably lurid reflection on the reactions of Amos and the rest of the bunch to my disappearance. When my pony trotted in with everything in place and without me—they'd spend a heck of a time rooting around trying to find me or my body.
Maybe, I said, maybe one day I'll mosey back along the trail and find out what happened.
And then all reflection ended as I felt the ground come up and thump me, felt once again the blessed warmth of Zim and Genodras pour heat into every fiber, drew deep breaths of that glorious tangy air—and knew I was once again back on Kregen, where I belonged.
* * *
Four
Jak the Drang Encounters the Iron Riders
To be perfectly honest, as I leaped up I felt my nakedness, felt it terribly. My hand went to my waist. My little arsenal had become a part of my daily round, the Sharps to hit ‘em as far off as I could, the Winchester to cut ‘em down as they charged, the Remington to finish those that wouldn't go down and the Bowie to take out the last, obstinate idiot who insisted on closing to close quarters.
All this was a long way away from the Sea Service pistol of my youth, the cutlass or boarding pike, and a very long way away from the rapier or thraxter, the spear or the longsword I needed on Kregen—and needed right now, by Zair!
Golden Scorpio [Dray Prescot #18] Page 5
