Rebel of Antares [Dray Prescot #24]

by Alan Burt Akers

  Jaezila drew her brows down. “Many girls say that the sylvies make them feel less than feminine."

  “I do not think your Kaldu will—” began Tyfar.

  “No. Nor your Nath or Barkindrar. But who could blame them?"

  They were laughing together over at the other bar. A file of slaves carrying amphorae wended past, and a totrix clip-clopped six-legged along, his rider slumped in the saddle with his broad-brimmed straw hat pulled over his nose. The day seemed perfectly ordinary.

  Tyfar squinted sideways up at the suns. By the position of the red and green suns Kregans can tell the time with wonderful accuracy. “In a few murs he will be here, if he keeps his appointment punctually."

  Even as Tyfar spoke, a bent figure in a brown tunic and straw hat walked slowly toward the bar at which we stood. He carried a staff with which he assisted his movements. He looked completely inoffensive. So, naturally, we all became alert.

  The sylvie laughed and danced a few steps away, and then walked in that undulating way they have around the corner. The bent figure halted at the bar. “Is the sazz here good?"

  “As good as the parclear,” said Tyfar.

  That, then, was the secret exchange.

  “Follow me, horters, hortera. It is not far."

  We finished the drinks and walked slowly after the man in the brown tunic. I own I let my hand brush across the hilt of my sword.

  There was no doubt that Hamal kept up a secret network of spies in Hyrklana. That was mere common sense. If there were plots against Queen Fahia the Hamalese would demand to know what the plots were and how best they might profit from them. Tyfar, now, might decide to help bring down Fahia, or he might decide it was better for his country for the fat queen to remain in power. Despite my feelings of intense affection for Tyfar and Jaezila, despite that they were blade comrades with whom I had gone through the fire, in these intrigues I would put Vallia first, always providing no harm befell Jaezila or Tyfar.

  The opposite side of the small square was occupied by an arcade of shops nearly all selling religious trinkets and votive offerings. The fourth side was dominated by the bulk of a temple to Malab the Kazzin. Part of the side wall had fallen in and workmen had been killed in a second fall during repairs. Blocks of stone and bricks in ungainly heaps filled the side street. No work went forward until the queen's inspectors had surveyed the fabric. Malab is a relatively respectable religious figure. He is often called Malab the Wounded, or Malab the Fount, his believers seeking mercy and wisdom, luck and health in the blood that pours from his wounded head. He is not, of course, Malab the Kazzur, for that means bloody, and Kazzin means bloody, although the two meanings are very different. Our guide led us past the tangles of broken scaffolding and piles of brick. Dust tanged on the tongue. We went in through a low-arched doorway. The interior struck gloomily after the brilliance of the suns.

  “Loosen your swords,” said Tyfar in a low voice.

  He went first, as was his right as a prince, Jaezila followed, and I tagged along at the rear. At that, I kept screwing my head around to inspect the way we had come for hidden assassins.

  We climbed wooden stairs that creaked. The dust lay thickly. I could see only one set of footprints in the dust ahead of us, going up. Broken windows allowed light to sift in.

  We came out onto a landing and a corridor with doors leading no doubt to the cells of devotees, or the quarters of the acolytes. The whole place lay silent and deserted apart from us intruders and whoever waited for us.

  At the far end of the corridor the guide pushed open a door covered in red baize and studded with brass buttons. The door creaked in protest. Light washed out in a fan.

  The guide passed through the opening, followed by Tyfar and Jaezila. Both gripped their sword hilts although they had not yet drawn. I paused. A sound wafted ghostlike up from the corridor. I looked back. A glimpse of a fierce Brokelsh face, of intent staring eyes, told me Barkindrar the Bullet led on our comrades to afford us protection. And, I own it, I felt the comfort of that. I went past the red-baize door. I left it open.

  A vaulted space lay before us, long and high. The slates had fallen from the roof some twenty paces ahead so that the blaze of suns light fell like a curtain across the chamber. The myriad dancing dust motes within the wall of light, the brightness of that radiance itself, contained in a narrow slot, prevented any clear impression of what lay beyond. The proportions of the room suggested the slates had fallen near the middle and there was at least as much space again beyond. The door slammed at my back.

  Whirling around was, as usual in these circumstances, entirely useless. This side of the door was solid iron.

  The guide half-turned and beckoned us on.

  At once I knew. Jaezila and Tyfar, also, at once saw what that indifference to the closing of the door must mean. The guide, in his turn, realized he had betrayed himself. With a cry he leaped headlong, vanished like a plunging swimmer into the curtain of light. Tyfar ripped out his blade and ran after him with Jaezila at his heels. I followed and my brand was in my fist.

  The light dazzled only momentarily, for I had half-closed my eyes against the glare. The space beyond duplicated the first and boxes and bales lay scattered about, with a two-wheeled handcart upended at one side. Tyfar stood peering about, looking this way and that, his sword snouting. Jaezila was nowhere to be seen. A hole in the floor between Tyfar and me puffed a little dust turning and floating and sinking.

  “Jaezila!” I yelled.

  Tyfar looked at the hole. I saw his face. The shock, the despair and then the anger flooded into that face of his. His rapier shook.

  “I heard nothing, Jak! Nothing! She must have—"

  “Yes."

  I ran to the hole, carefully, for the floorboards might be rotten, and looked down. Only darkness down there. Not a speck of light. Our blade comrade Jaezila had fallen down through a devilish trapdoor in the floor.

  Tyfar edged closer. He gathered himself. He was going to throw himself down, without hesitation, gathering himself as a professional diver gathers himself before launching off a high cliff into a narrow slot of rock-infested water.

  Before Tyfar took that plunge a figure rose from the cover of an upturned bale at his back. A blade glimmered. The figure screeched wildly and hurtled forward, the sword aimed directly for Tyfar's back.

  The trap had been sprung.

  I cannot say if I shouted first or jumped first. Everything happened at once.

  “Your back, Tyfar!” I leaped.

  I leaped. “Your back, Tyfar!"

  Whatever the order, Tyfar heard me and rolled away and I landed awkwardly on the edge of the trap and got my rapier up in time to parry that cowardly thrust.

  The man was a superb swordsman, that was apparent in the first passage, and he pressed in again hard, silently, swirling his brown cloak with his left hand to dazzle me. I fended him off, feeling for a secure foothold at the trap edge.

  “Jak!” Tyfar raged forward.

  “Jaezila,” I shouted, “go on, go on!"

  Tyfar hesitated no longer. Instead of leaping in to fight with me, as he had automatically begun to do, being a blade comrade, he jumped bodily down through the trap. I did not envy him the decision he had had to make, but he had made the right one. When there are three blade comrades and you have to choose which one to stand alongside in a fight to the death, all the gods must needs smile for you to choose right.

  A second figure joined in against me, and this was the guide, bent over no longer, but young and lithe and, his staff cast away, boring in with a skillful flourish of a rapier fighter.

  Circling, I cleared that dangerous trapdoor. I foined and then a thrust intended to skewer the guts of the first fighter scored all along his arm as he riffled the cloak. He let out a yell and staggered back; in that moment I stepped in and, most unbladesmanlike, hit the guide alongside the jaw with my left fist. He fell down.

  “So that is how you damned Hamalese fight!” said a light voice
at my side.

  I didn't hang around. I leaped away, ducking, and a blow from some solid gleaming object whistled past, missing me by the thickness of a copper ob.

  “Gouge the rast's eyes out, Valona!” yelped the man with the gashed arm. He started to come in again, the cloak now wrapped clumsily around wrist and arm to stanch the blood.

  The girl who, after her first blow had missed, had sprung back to clear a space between us, lifted her rapier in her right fist. Her left arm was held down behind her back. For a moment we stood, fronting one another.

  “I can take care of this Hamalese cramph, Erndor. Get after that corrupt prince! Stick him! He is the man we want."

  “Quidang!” said this Erndor. He ran and jumped down through the hole.

  I said, “I admire your self-confidence, Valona. You Hyrklese hate Hamalese very deeply—or some of you.” I wanted to annoy her. I studied her as she stared in open anger and contempt upon me. She wore a loose blue tunic and her legs were bare. Her legs were very long and lovely. Her brown hair was fastened by a fillet. Her face was regular and beautiful, with widely spaced brown eyes, and the redness of her lips in the radiance from the roof glistened with full passion. Some peculiarity in her face, some characteristic, struck me with a chord of memory. I did not know her, but I felt I ought to know her, although we had never met before now.

  “The Hyrklese hate the Hamalese, some of them, as you say, rast. But I am not of Hyrklana."

  And she sprang.

  As she leaped so she foined with the rapier and then—and then!

  Her left arm whipped up. Her left hand reached for my face.

  Razored steel flashed before my eyes. Her left hand was sheathed in talons, steel tiger-claws that could shred and rip and blind. And I knew she was exceedingly cunning in the use of this metal claw.

  Without hesitation I leaped away, jangling the rapiers, and moving off and away from her. I did not wish to kill her. I could not, seeing she was of Vallia, and a sister of the Sisters of the Rose.

  “I am not of Hamal,” I said. I know I spoke breathily, caught up in the wonder of a girl of the SoR being here, here in the capital of Hyrklana.

  “A cowardly lie to save yourself. You are Hamalese and therefore you will die."

  “You are wrong on both counts."

  I moved away, circling, the rapier up. I was ready for her next spring, rapier and claw working together sweetly, to lunge and to rip.

  “Your armies have laid waste to my land and you, at least, will pay the price, here and now. Die, Hamalese!"

  The rapier moved with precision, the feint lunge coming in exactly so, and the claw striking across with a glitter of steel. I made no attempt to parry but leaped away.

  Again, we fronted each other.

  “You are a man. Why do you not stand and fight? Do you fear my claw so much?"

  “I am a Vallian—"

  “You lie, rast! You lie!"

  “I know you are of the Sisters of the Rose—"

  “That is easy enough to discern. It is common knowledge, who I must be. Even you cramphs in Hamal have heard of the SoR—to your sorrow!"

  This was becoming farcical. Here was this splendid girl trying to send me down to the Ice Floes of Sicce, and her deadly companions were off chasing Tyfar and Jaezila, and who knew how many more of them there were waiting below? I had to settle this, and settle it fast.

  “Look, Valona the Claw—"

  “That is not my name.” But she hesitated.

  “Valona, then. Listen, girl. Forget your preconceptions. Yes, the two who came here with me are Hamalese. But I play them, as I must. There is much at stake—you are here, far from Vallia. You must understand that ... Perhaps you know of Naghan Vanki?"

  “I know the name.” Now her rapier lowered.

  Naghan Vanki was the chief spymaster of Vallia. I wasn't going to say that, just in case she did not know. If she did not know I did not want her to have that information, and should she know, then Vanki was probably her employer. I knew he had spies in every country of importance to us. And if she was one of Vanki's people, she would understand what I was talking about.

  She swung the razored claw about. “My father has a friend called Naghan Vanki. Not that my father knows much about what I do. But I do not think I believe you. I think you are a damned Hamalese spy who knows more than he should. It is the Ice Floes of Sicce for you, Jak the Hamalese rast!"

  She was going to spring in the next instant.

  I said, “There is no time to waste any longer on you, young lady. I know that you have been through Lancival...” Lancival was the place where the Sisters of the Rose were trained up to use the claw, those that did so, for not all the girls of the SoR wore the claw. No one would tell me where the place was, would not even tell the Emperor of Vallia. But the name itself, alone, might cause this Valona, who was not Valona the Claw, to stop and think.

  The hammering on the door that was subdued red baize with brass studding on one side and solid iron on the other increased. The door shook. It had been designed to keep out thieves from this store chamber, but Barkindrar and Nath and Kaldu would break it down in only heartbeats.

  “I have met young ladies who have been trained up at Lancival before. I am honored they count me as a friend. Now do you—"

  She had stopped dead when I used the name of Lancival. Now she broke in, roughly, flourishing her claw. “What do you know of Lancival? How could you know...?"

  “Because I am what I told you I am! It is in my mind I know your father, for you bring someone to my mind. But there is no time for that now. I give you my most solemn oath, as the Invisible Twins made manifest in the light of Opaz are my judge! I am Vallian and dedicated to the Empress Delia."

  “The Empress Delia! You dare use her name—"

  “Stand aside from the men who are breaking the door in. For all your claw—and you have no whip? I see not. For all your razor-talons they will eat you up and spit out the pips. Now I am going down to try to stop honest Vallians from murdering those two poor damned Hamalese down there.” I couldn't say that I was in agony for the fate of my blade comrades, my friends, Tyfar and Jaezila.

  “I cannot believe you! You must give me more proof!"

  “No time, no time."

  I had worked us around during this conversation so that the open trapdoor lay at my back. I lifted the rapier in salute. She anticipated an attack and came on guard instantly.” Then she saw what I purported—too late. She tried to get at me before I retired from the scene. Her exertions during the pseudo-fight had broken the latches of her tunic and as it gaped I caught the sheen of black leather beneath. A real she-cat, tiger-girl, this Valona!

  I could not refrain from calling, “You fight well, by Vox. Take your friend the guide and go, for those men breaking the door down will deal harshly with you. Remberee!"

  Then I leaped into the open trapdoor and fell headlong into blackness.

  * * *

  Chapter six

  Froshak the Shine

  The thump of landing was not overly painful. The place was little more than a closet, dark and dank. I kicked out and a wooden panel nearly broke my toe. The square of light over my head remained clear: I half expected Valona to jump down after me. I kicked again at the next wall, more cautiously. A distant crash from above was followed by voices raised intemperately.

  “Where are they?"

  “There goes someone—after them!"

  “Get on, get on! The prince is in danger!"

  I leaned more gently against the third wall and fell all sprawling out into a lighted corridor. I did not want Kaldu and Nath the Shaft and Barkindrar the Bullet with me now. I did not want those three blade comrades, Hamalese, assisting me to slay Vallians.

  The panel revolved and shut. I looked up and down and saw a dead man slumped against the wall. He sat with his head on his chest and his arms lax at his sides. He wore inconspicuous clothes. I did not know him. I hoped he was not a Vallian and guessed he was p
robably the Hamalese spy Tyfar had come here to see. Valona and her merry men had gotten wind of the meeting, had slain the spy and sent their man as a guide to bring us to the trap. Well, the trap had not yet failed. I ran full speed in the direction pointed by the dead man.

  I wondered how Erndor, whom Valona had sent off after Tyfar, would fare against that puissant prince of Hamal. The guide must have been shaken into sense by Valona and the pair of them run off to a prepared bolt hole as our three comrades burst in. Now, Erndor is a Valkan name, and I am the Lord of Valka. But, equally, as the Strom of Valka I cannot know the face of every Valkan, as everyone of that superlative island cannot know the face of his strom. The likenesses on coins are not reliable guides to recognition. If Erndor and Tyfar clashed, rapier against axe, it would make a pretty fight, a fight that would chill me to the core. I had to prevent that confrontation if I could.

  The corridor ended at a door and I simply bashed it open and roared through. Torches in bracketed sconces lit up an area that curved in a subtle way like a crown rink, so that I guessed I was over the side porch of the great hall of Malab's Temple. Dust choked everywhere. I saw no more bodies, for which I was profoundly grateful.

  A distant noise, like a clink of metal against stone, floating from the opposite side made me hare over the shallow dome, kicking dust. By the time I reached the opposite door, passing the ranked cubbyholes stuffed with skulls and skeletons, there was sign of no one. The torches were all burned low, some guttering. No doubt they afforded light to the watchkeepers of the dead. The believers in the power of Malab's Blood wished to remain in his temple when they were dead and not to be buried in the ranked mausoleums of the Forest of the Departed. As for Malab, your ordinary uncouth fellow like myself will quaff a good measure of Malab's Blood, and comment on the quality of the wine. Such is one belief to an unbeliever. As for Malab's Blood itself, as a wine I drink it when there is nothing finer to be had.