Witches of Kregen

by Alan Burt Akers

  “Perhaps.”

  Well, it was a madness, in all truth. But Nath was being allowed out of the Barange Fairshum. He would dress in his pomp and finery and ride out to the parade ground outside the city walls. This had to be our chance, surely?

  “We need two stratagems,” I said. I spoke firmly. But the plan was as shaky as a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old’s legs. “One: we must block the Avenue of Grace. Two: we must enlist a gang of rascally cutthroats.”

  “And then?”

  “Oh, it’ll be a desperate affray. No doubt of that.”

  Nalgre the Point unlatched his tunic and then paused, the points between his fingers. “I’ll undertake to block the Avenue of Grace. I can see that the escort with Nath will then have to pass through the Souk of Weavers to reach the palace by the quickest route.”

  “Exactly so.”

  “You may enlist your cutthroats. I have noticed that in Vallia you apims do not take altogether kindly to folk who are not apims. I think of the people of the world as divided up between olumai and diffs. It makes no difference to me. But in Vallia, apims and diffs are regarded in vastly different lights.”

  Useless for me to protest. What Nalgre said was depressingly true. This, as well as slavery, was a blot that would have to be removed.

  “Done.”

  Then we refined the plan until we felt we had it as well-oiled as we could make it. On the morrow we would each do what was necessary, and in the afternoon see if the ramshackle plan would work.

  Natyzha Famphreon’s carbon-steel grip on the country had put down the bandits and so opened up the communications; the paradoxical effect had been to drive the drikingers into the cities where they festered. To recruit a gang of cutthroats was not easy; it was not difficult, either. These were men accustomed to robbery and murder as a way of life. Every day they ran the risk of apprehension. My plan struck some as too bold.

  In one ill-favored tavern a black-bearded rascal with a gold ring in his only ear spat out: “We’re with you! And you, Ortyg! Catch that stinking Lart before he runs out!”

  The fellow Lart, whose effluvium did pervade the atmosphere, was hauled back by a dangling strap and sat on.

  “He’d have warned the watch, as sure as my name’s Mangarl the Mangler!” This Mangarl twisted the ring in his ear. “Don’t you worry, Koter Nath, we’ll see to him.” They knew Nath wasn’t my name; but they accepted it readily enough.

  Their weapons were mostly cudgels, or stout sticks, some had short swords, and all had knives. There were also five slingers, whose stones I fancied would materially assist in the plan.

  I let them see the rapier and left-hand dagger, and, as well as knowing my name was not Koter Nath, they knew I’d use the rapier and spit them if they started anything untoward. I left them with:

  “Three glasses after the hour of mid. As they go through the Souk of Weavers.”

  “Aye,” said Mangarl the Mangler. “I’ve a score or three to settle with the soldiers! They’ll pay for what they did to my sister’s sons.”

  These drikingers did not seem dismayed that with their cudgels they planned to go up against soldiers armed with spears and swords. If I read the picture right, they’d do all their fighting from hiding places. This was exactly what I wanted. It would take only a handful of the braver or more vicious among them to jump into the affray for the scheme to work as planned.

  Nalgre the Point reported he had arranged a most beautiful furor concerning four quoffa carts. Once a quoffa — huge, shaggy, lumbering, patient — sits down, a great deal of encouragement is required to get him up again. When Nalgre added that he’d put in a string of calsanys also, I smiled.

  “I shall give them a wide berth if they become upset, by Vox!”

  Almost all the gold I’d brought from Vondium in the waist belt was now exhausted. Despite the unholy character of the ruffians the gold had brought into our employment, the money was spent in a good cause. And I’d stressed that I wanted no wanton killing, we were just out to make the biggest disturbance we could.

  This, again, suited these desperadoes, for they also wished not to disturb overmuch or enrage the soldiers who administered the law in Falkerium.

  Saddle animals, whether of the air or ground, are scarce and valuable in wartime. I had to pay out just about all the balance of the gold to secure a zorca. He was a lop-eared animal, whose horn was rather too thin and rather too long and not quite spirally coiled enough. But he was a zorca, and he’d run as best he could until he could run no longer. The zorca handler from whom I bought him in a disreputable market assured me his name was Greatheart; but Greatheart seemed never to have heard of his own name.

  A patch of hide on his rump bore a nasty scar.

  I asked no questions. I just hoped his real owner would not spot him before my use for him finished.

  So, then, see me astride Snagglejaws and with Greatheart — or whatever his name was — following along on a leading rein, riding out to the parade ground beyond the walls of Falkerium. The day bloomed with color and scents and noise. Many folk had come to see a new regiment on parade. Out of professional curiosity I gave them a keen appraisement.

  They were from Frant, a middle-sized island in the northwest, between the larger island of Ava to their northeast and the narrow strip of island of Yuhkvor to their southwest. Odd folk up there, of course — well, all folk are odd from one village to the next. They stood in their ranks well enough, wearing bronze helmets and leather jacks. Their spears slanted at more or less the same angle. They did not carry shields. Each one had a flamboyant favor of ribbons and bows pinned to his left shoulder, all black and white. Black and white were the Racter colors.

  The mobs set up a caterwauling when the nobles rode onto the parade ground. They glittered in the lights of the Suns and looked splendid and important and they went through the inspection with sufficient enthusiasm as to fool one into believing they enjoyed it. All except Nath. He looked as I remembered him, for people age incredibly slowly upon Kregen over their better than two hundred years life spans. I looked closer. On each side of the slim, upright figure of Kov Nath rode two men I recognized.

  One was short and squat in the saddle, beet-red of square face with deeply set eyes of Vallian brown. He wore a fancy uniform and armor, yet he still carried his riding crop, with which he belabored any and sundry impartially. Trylon Ered Imlien. Yes, I remembered his abrupt ways and consciousness of personal power and of the way he had spoken of Dayra. So the rast was in the conspiracy! At the heart of it, too, if you asked me.

  The other man, the Trylon Vektor Ulanor, of Frant, was to be expected to be here when his Second regiment of Foot Spears marched on parade. Crimson-cheeked, pouchy eyed, impatient and intolerant of all — yes, he was a fit companion to Imlien, a pair of high-flown Racter nobles indeed. I’d met Vektor Ulanor far away when he was the ambassador to Xuntal. I’d treated him with a high hand myself, at the time. But, then, I’d just returned from a twenty-one-year exile on Earth, had been lost at sea in Kregen, and was in no mood for a petty official to stand in my way.[iii]

  The band played, the people shouted, the dust puffed up, the swods marched and, at last, the parade was over and the two Racters, one each side of Kov Nath, led off to return to the city.

  Unhurrying, I nudged Snagglejaws along to follow among the crowds.

  I overheard a chance conversation between two upright citizens — stout, solid Vallian merchants.

  “The people shout for them now, Markman. But I wonder if they will shout when the emperor arrives?”

  “The Racters have always had my allegiance, Naghan; but now—” A tiny resigned grimace. “All this war isbad for business. The nobles grow too puffed up. The dowager kovneva should return and take command.”

  “By Beng Llamin! I grow weary of this continual struggle for power between the nobles—”

  “Caution, my friend.”A frightened glance from slanting eyes. “There are ears everywhere these evil days.”

>   I rode on, taking no notice.

  If only my plan encompassing the lever and fulcrum worked! Then these two solid merchants, Markman and Naghan, should have cause to rejoice.

  The soldiers of the Second Frant of Foot spears marched off to their barracks, the procession of the nobles and their escorts trotted along through the city gate and began their ride to the palace. I spared a single glance for the graveyard away across the parade ground. In the natural course of life and death on Kregen, no less than on this Earth, burial customs varied from place to place. Here the dead were reverently placed to rest in graveyards outside the city walls. The markers showed gaunt limbs against the dusty ground, or marble slabs, or fabrications of branches bright with flowers and ribbons, or gray and hollow shells of gourds, gonging sonorously through the night.

  With these unwelcome reflections on man’s mortality, and woman’s too, for although they may outlive men they too, in the end, must die, as witness Natyzha Famphreon, I chick-chicked Snagglejaws and with Greatheart following trotted after the procession of the nobles.

  A cluttered side road paralleling the Avenue of Grace led me into the Souk of Weavers at a right angle some distance down from its junction with the avenue. If the plan was working, Nalgre was up there now organizing his catastrophe.

  Here the weavers not only sold their products; they wove them. The Souk, originally a broad thoroughfare with shops and booths along the sides, had over the seasons been encroached upon, so that most of the space was covered by little awnings and shelters, crammed with people, and the noise battered away aloft. There was no communal roof as in many of the Souks of other parts. Congestion and turmoil, constant comings and goings as people forced their way along, marked the market. Flies upon a honey pot... Well, humans have to earn a living somehow.

  In the surf roar the added noise of the confusion at the mouth of the Souk passed practically unnoticed. The numbers in the crowds watching the soldiers parade made no appreciable difference in the numbers continuing their daily work here. Whatever mischief Nalgre had accomplished with his four quoffa carts and the added complication and undeniable panic the calsanys would cause when they did what calsanys always do when they are upset proved enough. No doubt Ered Imlien, bluffly impatient as ever, had bellowed angrily and turned his zorca and Nath’s away from the muddle, seeing the mouth of the Souk so conveniently to hand. They’d just ride down there, knocking people out of their way in the comely fashion of that kind of noble, and make the journey back to the palace by a slightly more roundabout route.

  As I expected, Trylon Ered Imlien came into sight first, striking out with his riding crop. His face was a black mask of anger, and while I couldn’t hear what he was bellowing over the hubbub, it did not take a clever guess to sense that, by Vox!

  His left hand dragged along Nath’s zorca. Vektor Ulanor urged his mount along on the other side. The cadade of their guard followed on in the rear, and the soldiers of the escort followed him. People staggered out of the way of this proud group, and those laggards not quick enough to jump were clouted for their tardiness.

  In any contest between nobles, as had been spoken of so bitterly by the merchants out on the parade ground, the ascendancy here of Imlien over Ulanor was undeniable.

  A ferocious whiskery face peered down from a wickerbasket-hung balcony opposite. A stout pole protruded at an angle supporting an awning, and its mate supported the other end some ten paces along. Those poles were whole cedar trunks. The awning, I recall, was green and yellow. A second rascally face showed perched alongside the second awning support.

  Mangarl the Mangler timed it perfectly.

  This part of the scheme was mainly his in inspiration, and I guessed they’d done this kind of thing before. They detested the soldiers. They had no fear of being caught here in the seething squalor of their home ground. Also, these bandits knew that if they didn’t kill a soldier the hunt for them would be entirely superficial. This, I had learned, was just another result of the absence of the kovneva.

  The drikingers were doing this as much to revenge themselves on the soldiers as for my red gold. They’d bash a few heads, steal everything they could, and vanish.

  The first cedar trunk fell just abaft Ulanor. He incontinently fell off his zorca. The second trunk and the swathing mass of the awning fell slap bang over the escort, swaddling them in green and yellow stripes. Bulges rose and sloughed away under the canvas. With fiendish whoops the rascals dropped from their vantage points, bludgeons raised.

  My concern was with Kov Nath.

  Now this might be the home of the weavers, and plentiful evidence of their handiwork everywhere decorated the Souk, but the folk of Kregen like their food and drink and were not stupid enough to fail to provide these necessary requisites conveniently to hand. Many little stalls selling food and drink were scattered among the other booths.

  I kicked over the charcoal, all glowing red and splendid with fire, of the roasting nuts stall. The gold I’d given its owner cleaned me out. The flames sizzled under the hooves of the zorcas.

  Absolute utter and glorious pandemonium!

  Without a second’s delay I urged Snagglejaws forward. Imlien’s riding crop sliced down over the butter-golden skull of a Gon, who shrieked and tumbled over. Other people were running away and running in. I reached Nath’s zorca. A fellow twisted under the hooves. The fire was taking hold of a booth filled with straw bundles, and the owners were screaming and carrying off their stock in trade.

  In all this hullabaloo I reached for Nath.

  My arm around his waist simply hauled him from the saddle. Imlien let his riding crop dangle by its loop. He snatched out his rapier. He still held Nath’s zorca and he dragged the reins in cruelly. He saw Nath in my clutch as I turned.

  “You rast! You are a dead man!”

  “Come easily, Nath,” I said, hard and even.

  Then that inconsiderate, ungrateful, selfish beast called Greatheart simply broke away, kicked over a fat man with a red nose, and bolted away down the alley. I was left with Nath dangling in my clutch and beginning to try to hit me.

  Imlien gave a huge cry of triumph and urged his mount close. Nath caught me a glancing blow on the forehead. Ered Imlien poised his rapier, aimed for my ribs, and thrust.

  Chapter seventeen

  Nath Famphreon, Kov of Falkerdrin

  With a frantic heave to swing Kov Nath out of line, I twitched desperately sideways on the saddle. The rapier ripped through my buff tunic and the damned skewer scored a bloody weal all along my ribs. This upset me.

  Useless to hang so stupidly onto the leading rein so disgracefully chewed through by Greatheart. I dropped it. That left me one free hand, for being an apim I do not have the luxury and convenience of three or four arms like some of the folk of Kregen. I used that free arm to jab a rocky fist into Imlien’s face as he bent forward with the ferocity of his thrust.

  “Let me go! Let me go!” Nath was babbling away.

  “Shut up,” I told him, with a growl.

  He quieted a little. Imlien sprayed blood everywhere from a squashed nose. Some of the people who a moment or two before had been desperate to escape from the noble’s riding crop had stopped and were turning back and taking an interest in what went forward.

  For the second and last time I put out that arm and fist, and, this time, Ered Imlien fell off his zorca.

  With that other half of my ration of arms I laid Nath flat on his stomach before me. Zorcas are extremely close-coupled so that riding two-up is uncomfortable. Nath flopped along belly down, face over one side, legs over the other, yelling blue bloody murder.

  “Oh, do shut up, Nath,” I said, again, bending a little to bellow in his ear.

  Snagglejaws was only too anxious to get away from all this riot. He moved smoothly enough along under the double weight and, with only one poor fellow shouldered out of the way — he’d been gawping so hard he appeared stapled to the spot like a poor damned levy — we started off along the paralle
l alley.

  I heard Nath spraying words like: “You’ll be sorry!” and: “I am the kov, you poor fambly!” and: “Take me back at once!”

  Back there the soldiers might be sprawled insensible under the green and yellow awning, their portable possessions just about to pass from their ownership. Ulanor was probably also among the list of those rendered hors de combat. As for Ered Imlien — I cast a quick look back.

  He was not following.

  He was, in all probability, tenderly rubbing his nose.

  I reflected that there would probably have been time to have snaffled one of the zorcas. The plan had envisaged what had happened, that Imlien would be holding Nath’s zorca reins. Still, perhaps I ought to have attempted to grab a zorca in those fleeting moments. That was smoke blown with the wind, now...

  The most important item on the agenda now was to quiet down the squirming, kicking, yelling Kov Nath.

  I said in a harsh voice: “If you do not keep quiet I shall have to strike you. I do not wish to do this, Nath, but, by Vox, I shall if you don’t shut up.”

  We were almost through the parallel alley — I believe they called it Splitter’s Alley — and the open parade ground lay beyond the gate. I’d have to risk that small end section of the Avenue of Grace.

  Nath spat up at me: “Strike, you rast! I shall cry out the more strongly, for my people will recognize me and rescue me — Help! Help!”

  I hit him.

  This grieved me.

  Oh, yes, indeed, in a sinful work in a sinful world, Dray Prescot is right up there among the chief sinners.

  The flap of a cloak about his dangling body, a rearrangement of myself in poor old Snagglejaws’ saddle so that we rode more easily, and I struck out across the last few paces of the avenue.

  The guards lounging in the gate counted but two — the rest had gone hurrying officiously off to sort out the confusion wrought by Nalgre the Point. I put a semi-imbecilic look on my face, and wobbled a trifle, and let go with a bellowing croak of “The Maid with the Single Veil” which I finished on an enormous hiccough.