A Victory for Kregen

by Alan Burt Akers

  He was not the bearded servitor’s young lord, and I guessed he was a lord in his own right, gone adventuring on his own account. The expedition of which we nine were the last to escape from Moderdrin had contained nine separate expeditions within our ranks. The armor came off easily, for it had been well cared for. I hoisted it on my back and took his weapons and then trailed off after the others who were hurrying back to the rocks.

  I saw Prince Tyfar looking at me.

  He said nothing.

  I said, “When you have been adventuring out in the wild and hostile world, Tyfar—” And then I stopped myself.

  He would not understand. He might learn — if he lived long enough. But I knew enough to know that his ideas of honor could not comprehend my motives.

  “Just, Tyfar, one thing.”

  “Yes, Jak?”

  “Do not think the less of me. I hazard a guess that you have never starved, never been flogged, never really wanted in all your life. These things give a man a different view of the values in life and, yes, I know I am being insufferable and almost preaching, but I value your comradeship and would not see it spoiled over so small a matter.”

  And, even then, that was the wrong note. The matter was not small when it touched the honor of a prince of Hamal.

  Then he surprised me.

  “I have a deal to learn — everything is not contained in books or the instructions of axemasters. I shall don this poor young lord’s armor, which Nath and Barkindrar carry back for me — when it is necessary.”

  I felt, I admit, suitably chastened.

  When he reached the outcrop, the others had finished up their work and had secured the surviving fluttrells. The big birds were chained down by their wing chains, and had found it suddenly restful in the shade.

  I nodded. “Well done.”

  “And, what do we do with the swarths?”

  “Cut them loose,” said Tyfar. “They will fend for themselves and, eventually, find their way to fresh employment.”

  “Agreed.”

  The night would soon be upon us and although we could fly quite easily by the light of the moons, we judged it better to give the fluttrells a time to recuperate. Hunch busied himself brewing up tea, that superb Kregan tea, for a supply was discovered in the saddlebags we had taken from the dead animals.

  Also, we found something that told us who at least some of these folk had been.

  Modo brought the package across and we opened it and read the warrant in the last of the light.

  “Rolan Hamarker, Vad of Thangal — most odd.” Tyfar looked up from the paper. “That is a good Hamalese name. Yet I do not know of anyone called that. Thangal has no Vad. It is a Trylonate.”

  “Due northwest of Ruthmayern,” I said.

  “Yes. This is, indeed, a curiosity.”

  “And this came from the effects of the young man?”

  “Yes, Jak,” said Modo.

  “Well, there was nothing with the other lord to identify him. And that, to me, is stranger still.”

  “You are right, by Krun!” said Tyfar.

  “Perhaps,” said Quienyin in his mellow voice. “They did not wish to give their true names when they ventured into Moderdrin.”

  “Of course.” Tyfar beamed on the Wizard of Loh. “You have the right of it.”

  “Probably,” I said.

  We now had a plethora of weapons and armor and equipment. So we could take our pick. Any good Kregan will take as many weapons along with him as the situation warrants, or the situation that might arise the day after tomorrow will warrant.

  As I picked up the dead lord’s sword, I looked across at Tyfar and said, “But that warrant, made out for Rolan Hamarker, gives him authority to arrest anyone he sees fit to question. It is exceedingly wide.

  And, of course, you observe the signature and the seal?”

  “I do. It is the seal of King Doghamrei. Although the scrawl is so bad it could have been signed by any damned slave who had stolen the seal cylinder.”

  “King Doghamrei,” I said, and I fell silent, my mind choked with memories: of Ob-Eye, his one optic quite mad, trussing me up and stuffing me into a metal cage, of the cage being swung over the bulwarks of the massive Hamalian skyship Hirrume Warrior, of Ob-Eye thrusting the torch into the mass of combustibles piled around my bound form, of the cage being readied to drop onto the decks of the Vallian galleon Ovvend Barynth on the sea below. They’d set my pants alight, all right. Somehow, because I was a Krozair of Zy, as I truly think, and because I did not wish to be parted from Delia, I had gotten out of that scrape. But — all those vile things had been done to me not on the orders of the Empress Thyllis — Queen Thyllis as she was then — but of King Doghamrei. Oh, yes, I recalled him with some clarity.

  And so, because of all those old memories ghosting up, I said, “By Krun! I’ve half a mind to feel sorry he’s still alive.”

  Then I looked at Tyfar.

  He smiled.

  “Then in that you do not stand alone, Jak. He never did succeed in his plot to marry the empress — her poor doting husband still mopes away in some fusty tower or other — and King Doghamrei is still only a servile king in fee to the empress.”

  “Well, I was incautious in my sentiments. Perhaps, one day, you will understand my feelings.”

  “My father once fought a duel with Doghamrei—”

  “Ha! Then I’ll wager Prince Nedfar acted as a true horter and let the rast off — more’s the pity.”

  “He did and it is. But that is smoke blown with the wind.”

  “Your father, Tyfar, is a prince for whom I cherish the most lively affection and respect. Now, why couldn’t he be a king — or even an emperor?”

  Tyfar drew his cheeks in. He looked suddenly grave, all the banter fled.

  “You run on leem’s tracks hastily, Jak.”

  “I will say no more. I have said too much.”

  “Yes. But, I think — I know — your sentiments are not yours alone.”

  “Ah!”

  Now, of course, all this sentiment was sweet in the ears of a Vallian. Anything to discomfit Hamal until that empire was willing to talk decently to her neighbors must be to the advantage of Vallia. All the same, what I had said about Tyfar’s father, Prince Nedfar, was true.

  What a plot it would be to depose Thyllis and set up Nedfar as emperor of Hamal! I fancied I could talk to him, get him to see reason, see that all the countries of Paz had to unite to face the menace of the shanks, who raided and spoiled from over the curve of the world. For I felt sure their depredations, raids at the moment, would develop into a mass migration, a gigantic attempt to invade our lands. And that, we of Paz could not in honor allow. The fish heads would not be satisfied until every one of us, diff and apim, man, woman, and child, was exterminated.

  We made our selections of weapons and armor and equipment and stuffed ourselves with the food in the saddlebags. Then we decided to let our meal go down and set off astride the fluttrells in exactly two burs.

  Sitting with my back propped up against a folded cloak on a rock, I popped palines into my mouth, chewing the luscious berries contentedly. Quienyin sat down by my side and I offered him the yellow berries, extending the dish.

  He chewed. Tyfar walked across and we passed the dish around. We felt relaxed, comfortable, perfectly confident that now that we had flying steeds we would be out of Moderdrin in no time. Quienyin coughed.

  “Prince Tyfar. This war between you and your neighbors, which has extended into Vallia—”

  “Yes. Vallia is recalcitrant. The Hyr Notor has the command there. But the news is — odd, to say the least. We have had to recall a number of regiments.”

  “So I believe. They have a new emperor up in Vallia now, do they not? Tell me, Tyfar, what are your views on this new and fearsome emperor of Vallia, this Dray Prescot?”

  Chapter five

  “Dray Prescot, Vile Emperor of a Vile Empire!”

  One of the tethered fluttrells let out a
squawk, and Hunch gentled him with quick, sympathetic skill. A small branch broke and fell from the fire. Nath and Barkindrar suddenly laughed, and I caught a coarse reference to Vajikry. The light of the moons shone exceedingly brightly upon the dusty land.

  “The Emperor of Vallia?” said Tyfar, Prince of Hamal. “Well, now. A hyr-lif might be written about that great devil.”

  “Tyfar,” I said, “did you see this great devil Dray Prescot paraded through the streets of Ruathytu lashed to the tail of a calsany? In the Empress Thyllis’s coronation procession?”

  “Aye, Jak, I did.”

  “And, Tyfar,” said Quienyin, and he looked at me as he spoke to the Prince, “your thoughts on that occasion?”

  Tyfar poked at the fire with a stripped branch.

  “This Emperor Dray — it was just, that he should be brought down and humbled, but the way of the doing of it...”

  Quienyin took his penetrating gaze from my leem’s-head of a face and stared questioningly at Tyfar.

  “Yes?”

  “By Krun! The rast deserved what he got, did he not?”

  “He deserves all he gets,” I said.

  “But, all the same...” And, again, Prince Tyfar did not complete his sentence. I wondered if he was unwilling to face the consequences of his own thoughts, or unwilling to reveal them to us.

  He pulled his shoulders back and threw the branch on the fire.

  “Anyway, Quienyin. Why do you question me, now, about the great devil Dray Prescot?”

  The nasty suspicion gathered in my mind that I knew the answer to that. But, then, why was it nasty? If Deb-Lu-Quienyin had discovered the truth about Phu-Si-Yantong, then surely he would understand the horrendous problems confronting Paz? Yantong’s insane dream was to encompass all of Paz, to take over and control and dominate all of the grouping of continents and islands on our side of the world of Kregen. He had made a start with Pandahem and other places, was destroying Vallia even now, even though we Vallians fought back, and had, under the alias of the Hyr Notor, achieved much with Hamal.

  If Quienyin knew all this, as I now suspected he did, then of a certainty he must see the justice of the fight being waged by those opposed to Phu-Si-Yantong.

  One of the chiefs of that opposition to the maniacal Wizard of Loh was Dray Prescot, Emperor of Vallia. This, I believed, was what Quienyin was leading up to, what he was telling me in this way. And, cunning old leem-hunter that he was, he had his reasons.

  “Well, Quienyin? I fly to join my people. We have been through much together, surely you can find a more enjoyable subject of conversation?” Tyfar stood up and stretched his legs. “By Krun! When Princess Thefi hears what has been going on—”

  “Will you join the army of Hamal, or the Air Service, and fight in Vallia, Tyfar?”

  Quienyin’s question drew a down-drawn and hesitating look from Tyfar.

  “We are comrades, Quienyin, and therefore — for anyone else to question me thus would touch—”

  “Your honor?”

  And then, characteristically, Tyfar laughed. “I do not know! My whole view of the world has changed.

  What is honor? It can get you killed, that is sure, certain sure.”

  I said, “But that knowledge would not stop you from acting in honor, Tyfar? You would not let those vakkas be hounded to death by the flutsmen without an effort to help them.”

  “That is true. It was foolish. But Jak, and you know it, I would do it again.”

  “Then,” said Quienyin, “as your comrade — and thus taking full advantage of being rude or overweening to you — I would counsel you most seriously not to go to Vallia to fight.” He shook his head and his turban did not so much as quiver. “No, Tyfar. I am a Wizard of Loh — and I say to you with all the force at my disposal, do not go to fight the Vallians.”

  “Why?”

  That was your Prince Tyfar for you. Straight out, direct, to the point. It was a damned good question and a damned hard one for Quienyin to answer.

  I studied their faces by the lights of the moons and the erratic flickers of ruddy light from the fire.

  Quienyin and I were wrapped up in what underlay our words; Tyfar was in the middle and slowly becoming aware of what was not being openly spoken of. He could become exceedingly angry, a prince being treated like a child. But he was Tyfar. He spoke evenly.

  “You have no answer for me, Quienyin? I think you are being mysterious on purpose — but what is your purpose?”

  “It is simple. It is to save you much grief.”

  Tyfar sucked in his cheeks. Then: “So it is true. You Wizards of Loh can see into the future?”

  “Perhaps.”

  At that I smirked. No Wizard of Loh was going to reveal any of his secrets, and the worse that was thought of them the more their power and the dread they invoked in the hearts of ordinary folk.

  “You spoke of Dray Prescot, the vile emperor of a vile empire. Why should I not go up there and chastise him for the evil he has wrought?”

  “Do you know of this evil? Can you show it to me?”

  Tyfar spread his arms. “Well — all men know—”

  “All men hear tales. Dray Prescot has the yrium, he has that special power, that charisma that marks him out among men and—”

  “The yrium!” Tyfar was incensed. “Rather he has the yrrum, the evil charismatic presence, the vile leading the vile, rotten clean through, decadent—” He was panting.

  I said, and I spoke gently, “I think the Empress Thyllis would joy to hear you speak thus, Tyfar.”

  That sobered him.

  He stared toward Quienyin and then toward me. I say toward. I don’t think he saw us, not then, for he was looking with his inward eye at past events and conversations and trying to grapple with the problems he now saw more clearly than, probably, he had ever seen in his life before.

  At last he said, and his words were still breathless, “So you tell me Dray Prescot has the yrium and not the yrrum, that he is not evil clean through, that he has not brought shame and misery to Hamal, that—”

  “I tell you, Tyfar,” interrupted Quienyin, “only to search your own ib for the truths in these things.”

  “And I,” I said, “tell us all it is time we departed.”

  Whatever was going through Quienyin’s mind would have to wait. He was Up To Something, as he would have said in his Capital Letter Days. But I banished all that from my own mind as we rose into the air.

  Ah! To fly free on the back of a great bird, soar through the sweet air of Kregen, with the blaze of the stars and the fat, serene moons shining down! She of the Veils and the Maiden with the Many Smiles shone refulgently, pink and gold, shining down on the fleeting surface of Kregen passing swiftly below.

  The windrush in my face, blowing through my hair... The feel of the rhythmic rise and fall as the fluttrell bore me on with wide pinions beating... The whole sublime sense of flight and motion and headlong movement... Yes, flying over the face of Kregen beneath the moons, there is very little in two worlds to equal that, by Zair!

  And, as for the fluttrells themselves, they were the big birds with the silly head vanes that were always in the way, it seems. Well, there is a simpleminded saying among the simple folk of Kregen that sums up the magic in simple terms. Of the birds’ flight through the air, they say: “They can do it because they think they can do it.” A pathetic little bit of philosophy, perhaps. But it rings, all the same, it rings...

  Our flying mounts skeined through the air and we drove on through the moons-washed night. When by the feel of the birds’ motion and the little draggling skip to the wings we knew they had had enough, we descended in a grove of tuffa trees, for we had flown past the end of the Humped Land and left that desolate landscape astern. The fluttrells had been hard-driven by their former owners. It is the habit of flutsmen to use their mounts to the utmost. We had a distance to travel and wished to husband the fluttrells’ strength.

  All of us, I feel, had been touched by that night
flight.

  We spoke softly, doing what had to be done in the way of caring for the birds and of brewing up. Then the wine was passed around. We spoke quietly, not just because we were somewhere in Havilfar none of us knew and therefore must expect the eruption of danger at any moment. As I say, we had been impressed by that flight under the moons.

  Prince Tyfar did not raise our previous subject of conversation. I, for one, by Vox, was happy to let it lie.

  Nodgen, as a bristly Brokelsh, was content to dunk his head in the stream and splash water vigorously all over himself. Hunch, being a Tryfant — and you know how foppish they can be on occasion — had to go the whole hog and give himself the full treatment. Mind you, although I say I have no feelings one way or the other for Tryfants, I had seen enough of Hunch by now to have summed him up better, I fancy, then he guessed or knew himself. And Nodgen shared my opinion. Hunch was a Tryfant, sure enough, not above four foot six in height and full of quivers and quavers and always with an eye open for the nearest bolt hole — but he had gone with us through the horrors of the Moder.

  “Jak,” said Quienyin as I turned away from the stream, shaking myself like a collie.

  “Aye,” I said, blowing water. “Aye, Quienyin. What you have to say is overdue.”

  “Come a little way apart. Much Is To Be Said.”

  Those capital Capital Letters, as it were, alerted me. I followed the Wizard of Loh into the shadows of the tufa trees and we settled down, facing each other so that we might keep an eye open on each other’s back.

  I said, bluntly, “You have sussed Phu-Si-Yantong and you do not care for what you have found.”

  He rubbed his fingers through that reddish hair, shoving the turban aside, uncaring if it fell to the ground.

  “We Wizards of Loh set store by certain standards. We have power and we try not to abuse it.

  Certainly we lust after gold and gems and suchlike baubles — or some of us — but it is the pursuit of knowledge and its manipulation that is our goal and that sustains us. We do not seek petty princely dominion.”

  “But...”