Manhounds of Antares dp-6

by Alan Burt Akers

  Prevailed on to remain as a guest with Dorval Aymlo, and then specifically invited to the coming nuptials, I agreed to wait twelve days, two Kregen weeks. Then — Vallia!

  Halfway through the first week, dressed up in a fine dark red tunic, with white trousers, and a turban of white silk upon my head — very fashionable gear in Ordsmot, then, the turban — I wandered about the town. One could walk quite freely in any of the eight precincts, only taking a little care not to be too far from the area of one’s own race by nightfall — and then only if none of the greater moons were in the sky — for skirmishes and clashes between the races were relatively rare. There was no Chulik sector, and I saw none of those fierce yellow-skinned tusked halflings in Ordsmot at that time. Coming in one evening I was halted by Aymlo, who was in a high old state of excitement. He was dressed up in the most profuse and lavish clothes, with jewels smothering his turban, and a golden belt, and curled slippers of foofray satin. The house blazed with many lights and the expenditure of samphron oil must have been prodigious.

  “Dray!” he said, clutching me by the arm, his yellow fur glowing. “Dray — the Vad of Tungar visits me!”

  I congratulated him.

  Tungar, I knew, was a large and prosperous province of the country whose boundaries ran ward and ward with those of Ordsmot. Ordsmot, of course, was a free city, with her own elected council and Kodifex, chosen by rote, a term at a time, from each of the eight precincts.

  “He has large ideas, Dray! He owns much land, dwabur after dwabur, and wishes to develop. If my old business head will aid me now, he and I will strike a pretty bargain or two!”

  “May Opaz shine on you, Dorval, my friend.”

  “And but for you, Dray Prescot, I should be bait for the Manhounds of Antares!”

  “Don’t think of such things, Dorval. They are of the past.”

  A commotion began outside, with the sound of zorca hooves, the tinkle of bells, and the soft silver sound of trumpets. These were not the famous silver trumpets of Loh, but they made a brave welcoming sound. Aymlo darted outside to greet his guest by the light of flaring torches. I strolled after.

  The conviction grew on me that I should not push myself forward here. This was business — and, Zair knew, I had done enough of business during my time as Strom of Valka, and later as Prince Majister of Vallia, when I had worked hard with the Companies of Friends — and my instincts were that Aymlo would want to prosecute his plans to his own fashioning. So I wandered out to stand in the shadows of the entranceway as the Vad of Tungar alighted from his zorca.

  He made an impressive sight.

  Clad all in crimson silk, with a lavish display of gold and jewels about his person, the straight sword of Havilfar they call a thraxter swinging at his side on a silken baldric heavily embellished with jewels and gold thread, he ran up the steps, hand outstretched, calling: “Lahal, Dorval! Lahal! Your happy return brings joy to my heart.”

  It was Aymlo’s business, but this man was a Vad, a rank below that of a Kov, though a high rank, nonetheless. I felt an itch of apprehension, and then every other thought was banished from my head as I saw Tulema move forward into the torchlight. Tom Dorand moved, a vague shadow, at her back. Tulema looked radiant. She wore a sheer gown all of white silk, with crimson embroidery at throat and hem, cunningly slit so that her long legs showed in a gleam of warm flesh. The baths of nine and much scented oils and costly perfumes had transformed Tulema, the one-time dancing girl from a dopa den. Now she was the great lady.

  I saw her face. She stared at the Vad of Tungar as risslaca stare at a loloo’s egg. And — he halted in his impetuous greeting of Aymlo, and stared up at Tulema there in the torchlight, and his business was done for him.

  So they stared at each other, and I looked at them, and a hateful croaking voice sounded in my ears, coming from no earthbound denizen of Kregen.

  “Truly, Dray Prescot, you are a prince of onkers!”

  And the blue radiance took me, and swirled me up, and twisted me, and so departed. . I felt stinking rock beneath my naked body and the stench of slaves in my nostrils and I knew I had been thrust brutally back once again into the barred slave pens of the Manhunters of Faol.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Concerning the purposes of the Star Lords

  I didn’t believe it.

  I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it.

  How could I, again, have brought out the wrong person from under the slavering fangs of the Manhounds of Antares?

  It was all a cruel jest of the Star Lords, to punish me for being a prince of onkers. Surely, after taking Tulema safely out, and spending so much time in her company, after she was safe, in Ordsmot, she had to be the right one! I lay there in the stink and gloom of the barred caves and I confess I came as near as I ever allow myself to despair.

  Then I roused myself.

  There had to be an explanation, and I was too stupid to see what must so clearly be dangling in front of my nose.

  Princess Lilah. The Pallan Golan. Latimer the voller magnate. And Tulema the dancing girl. Well, none of these four was the one I had been sent here to seek.

  Then an awful thought struck me.

  Tulema had said, distinctly, that she was the last of those who had been with me in the cave when I arrived.

  There was no one left for me to rescue — apart, that was, from a milling mass of a hundred or more filthy, unwashed, clamoring slaves.

  So that must be the answer. I was to release them all.

  I pondered on this carefully, for as I have indicated, the rash freeing of slaves, no matter how desirable that may be, is not wisely undertaken without much forethought. If these miserable creatures were released they would rush screaming into the jungle, and the Manhounds of Antares would lope after them, red tongues lolling in human imitation of hunting dogs, and devour them all. They would perish in the jungle. They would die on the plains. How many, if any at all, would reach safety?

  I had vowed with my Delia to end the abomination of slavery on Kregen, thinking that a part of what the Savanti wished. But how would that vow help me now?

  “By Hito the Hunter!” said a voice in my ear, a startled voice. “I thought you were dead for sure!”

  I looked up from the floor and there was Nath the Guide, bending over me, wearing a mightily puzzled frown. Of course he could recognize me, for I had gone through the baths of the nine, and had my hair and beard trimmed, and so looked something like the Dray Prescot who had first arrived here. And, also, something else I should have observed much earlier then struck me. These so-called guides who claimed to guide people out to safety would hardly swear by the name of a mighty hunter. No, I should have seen that earlier.

  “And I thought you dead, also, Nath.”

  I refrained from immediately leaping up and dealing with him as he had left us to be dealt with by the great Jikai. It was through no help of his that Princess Lilah and I had escaped. “You disappeared, and we feared a leem had taken you.”

  He cobbled a story together swiftly, and, truth to tell, he was more concerned with his lies than he was to find fault with my story of running and walking until strange beast-men had taken me and so, eventually, sold me back here.

  Nath talked on, very volubly, about his concern for the slaves and how he sorrowed that he had been snatched away by wild beasts, and fought them, and so won free. In truth, there in the barred caves cut into the rocks, we had a high old time swapping lies, and this brought me back to something of a better humor.

  “I would like to go out again, Nath, and this time escape clear away.”

  “Of course! A party is due tomorrow. You must be with us.” Then, meaningfully, he added: “There are three Khamorros among us, and they are very fierce men.”

  “So be it.”

  There was no doubt in my mind why I needed to go out with a hunted party of fugitives. I would take their treacherous flier from them, as I had done before. I had to take care not to betray any knowled
ge of what had transpired here after my Jikai with Nath, and nothing of the disappearance of Inachos the Guide passed my lips. But I guessed Nath and his fellows, and Nalgre, may Makki-Grodno rot his liver, were mightily perplexed.

  If I make keeping my fingers off Nath the Guide’s throat sound easy — believe me, it was not. Wild plans scurried through my head, and I slept fitfully, awaking with the others to rush at the stentors’

  call to the feeding cave. In the morning we would be taken out and prepared in the slave barracks. Fantastic and unworkable schemes flitted into and out of my imagination, as a flick-flick shoots its tendrils out to gobble flies.

  Many of the slaves had been beaten into submission and could not respond to the meal call, and the usual Kregan custom of six or even eight square meals a day did not always impel them to answer the stentors’ summons. I noticed a little Och with a chin fuzz and skinny arms and legs who, so Nath told me, was due to go out with us in the morning. Then this Och, a man named Glypta, pulled back as an ancient, yelling female Och rushed into the chamber beating her broom wildly behind her. Screeching like one of those devil-bats from the hell-caves of Karsk, the old Miglish crone rattled into the chamber, thwacking her broom at the Och woman, raising a great dust and commotion, catching the Och woman cunningly around the head, then switching to trip her legs and so tumble her sprawling into our filth.

  “Keep off! Keep off, Mog!”

  “I’ll see Migshaanu the Ever-Vengeful tears out your liver and your tripes and strips your skin off!” The Migla was stuttering in fury, thwacking with her broom, a very witch in truth, from her mass of tangled hair to her bare and filthy feet. “You don’t trick Mog and regret the day you dropped into this world!”

  And thwack! went the broom and the little Och shrieked and tried to spring up and run, and thwack!

  down came Mog’s broom again in a gigantic rustling and swishing of twigs. Bedlam broke out with scuffling and dust flying. Then the Och managed to scuttle out. Mog leaned on her broom and the liquid sheen of her eyes as she leered after the Och sent a shiver up my spine, as I remembered Tulema’s avowed declaration that this Miglish crone was in very truth a witch.

  “She’ll think on!” said this Mog the Migla, in a shrill cackling tone of satisfaction. “Ar!”

  There was no Tulema to pull me away.

  I stared at Mog.

  And the thought dawned. The thought I felt a deep reluctance to face. The thought that must be a true thought. “Now, may Zair take my ib for a harpstring!” I said, but to myself. And so I continued to stare at this old harpy, this filthy harridan with the rat-tail hair, crooked nose, and nutcracker jaws, and I thought that I had taken four people out of here and all of them wrong and this — this monstrosity of a halfling witch — had to be the right one.

  She had been here when I arrived. Tulema had said so. And she was still here. Mog the Witch!

  Incredible!

  What could the Star Lords be about, to want this object restored to the outside world of Havilfar?

  However much I did not wish to believe what I had so belatedly discovered, I had to believe. And if I freed all the slaves and did not set Mog at liberty, I had the nastiest of suspicions that I would be hurled back here yet once more.

  I set myself to talk with the witch, and she beat at me with her broom, and spat, drawing her filthy old blanket up around her shoulders as though I assaulted her, and bade me clear off or, by Migshaanu the Mighty-Slayer, I’d be sorry!

  “But, Mog,” I said, “I can get you out of here.”

  She cackled at that.

  “Get me out!” she mocked. “Onker! Nulsh! And you’d take me out for the manhounds to gnaw on!”

  “Not so, Mog.”

  “Yes, yes, you great ninny!”

  “But, Mog-” I said, breathing hard and gripping both my fists together lest they do harm I would feel sorry for after. “The guides!” I repeated what the deluded slaves believed. “The guides will take us through to safety.”

  She leered at me, mocking, spitting, drool running down that promontory of a chin, the black hairs in her nose quivering. “Onker! Idiot! Nulsh! The guides are-” She swung a bright beady eye to where Nath was deep in conversation with a fair-haired girl, and she cackled like any loloo laying a square egg, and drew a corner of her gray blanket up over her face. “May Migshaanu the All-Glorious turn your belly to porridge and your back to paste!” And she scuttled from the chamber. I lost her in the gloom of the maze of passageways.

  There was only one way to settle her hash for her.

  I tried to get some sleep and vowed that if there was a bigger fool than me on Kregen he belonged to the Star Lords.

  I had been blowharding a lot just recently. Mind you, I felt fully justified, but it was enough unlike me to make me take stock. Old Mog called me a nulsh and I knew that was as foul a term of abuse as most on Kregen. The rast, which is a six-legged rodent infesting dunghills, is often contemptuously referred to as a disgusting creature, and the term of abuse is likewise powerfully disgusted; but a rast is only one of the creatures set down on Kregen like us all and must act out its duties in its own nature. This old Migla crone was only acting as her nature impelled her. Surely, the circumstances in which she found herself were enough to make anyone scream, and the fact she had become a tame slave to sweep and cook meant only that she had a slightly less precarious grip on life than the rest. Anyway, she was coming out with me the next morning and that was all there was to that. I awoke to Nath’s ungentle toe in my ribs and I yawned and sat up with much play of knuckling my eyes and stretching. Although the air was foul, I came alert and ready for action the instant I awoke, the result of long years at sea being called in the dark of the middle watch to face crises of all imaginable horrors.

  but I had the idea of putting Nath off guard.

  All went as before. Again, and to my distaste, the Notor leading the brave band of hunters was this Trelth. His doughy face gleamed under the morning suns.

  The band of runners lined up for Nalgre’s inspection. As was customary we all cringed back — even I, for I had no wish to start something that, in finishing, might end up disadvantageously for the Star Lords

  — and, as you may guess, I was not thinking of them when I wished no foul-ups to occur. The thin old Och, Glypta, did not cringe.

  He simply stood, upright, a distant lost look on his face, and I knew I watched a man who had already given himself up for lost and who put no stock by Nath the Guide’s encouraging words.

  “Why do you not bow to me, Och?” demanded Nalgre. He was interested. He was accustomed to the instant servility of slaves. His whip twitched in his thick fingers.

  “I have reached the bottom, the end. There is nothing more you can do to me. I have no more fear, for I am finished.”

  Nalgre laughed.

  “Aye! I have heard political prisoners speak like that, Och. They imagine — oh, they imagine many things, the degradation, the hollowness, the utter irrationality of imprisonment. They believe that in negation they overcome.” He laughed, and the sound chilled the blood. “I tell you, Och, you have no conception of the hell that can be yours if I wish.” He flicked his whip and the female manhound gamboled out. “I have no need, even, to cause you suffering from my man-hounds you do not as yet comprehend. The whip, ol’ snake, will quickly teach you that you have not reached the end of suffering. I can make you fear again, Och — as many political prisoners have found before.”

  I knew he spoke the sober truth.

  I was thankful to see that Glypta, too, through the miasma of his suffering, had been jerked back from that self-congratulatory abyss of suffering so many politicals, believing themselves beyond fear, indulge in. He cringed and Nalgre laughed.

  What the slave-master might have done next for his amusement remained thankfully unknown, for Notor Trelth with a thick impatient rasp to his voice said: “Have done with the rast, Nalgre. If a slave will not bow the neck, have his head cut off and thus make hi
m bow for good and all.”

  A woman with Trelth, with pearls in her hair and a plump and well-fed figure she had somehow crammed into tight hunting leathers, so that she bulged, tinkled a laugh. “Let him run for our sport, Ranal!

  I shall joy to tickle him!” And the fat fool had the effrontery to finger the thraxter at her side. Ranal Trelth chuckled. “He shall be all yours, Lavia, yours for yourself, my precious.”

  I did not miss the tip of her scarlet tongue as it licked her rich lips, shining in the radiance of the twin Suns of Scorpio.

  As we trudged off to the slave barracks, I heard the slavemaster Nalgre have the last word.

  “Ah, but, Notor Trelth, if you take off the head of an impudent slave, he does not suffer!”

  There would be no chance whatsoever of convincing my fellow slaves that Nath the Guide, the one man to whom they looked for deliverance, was a traitor. I did not stand in the same danger vis-a-vis him as I had done with Inachos, for I had told Nath nothing, as I had blabbed to Inachos. I had to wait my time, and then strike, and trust in my own skill and strength to bring me through. Of one thing I was absolutely, irrevocably sure. I could expect no help from the Star Lords beyond an insulting jibe from their spy and messenger.

  Up in the first floor above the hard-packed earth of the slave barracks we found two other parties waiting to go out, and a third joined us later on, when Nalgre had attended to them. There were sixteen in our party, of whom nine were halflings. The three Khamorros did not appear to me, at first glance, to be friendly to one another, and there were two human girls, the fair-haired one and one with very short dark hair, who by that token had been slave for a very short time. The girls were frightened of the Khamorros, and everyone else was, too. Nath himself trod warily, and I remembered the brave futile fight of Lart on that very dirt below us.