Storm over Vallia

by Alan Burt Akers

  She could see the funny side of it, though...

  As a Sister of the Rose, she knew she was a member of the very best sorority there was without having to think about it. The Sisters of the Sword, the Grand Ladies, all the other female Orders, secret, martial, mystical, charitable, it mattered not, paled beside the magnificence that was the Order of the Sisters of the Rose.

  Among the regiment commanded by Gilda were a bare handful of girls from the SOR, and none knew Silda Segutoria. She had kept away from the new arrivals, and would take enormous care investigating them, unseen, before introducing herself as Lyss the Lone.

  She was off duty in half a bur and would then keep her appointment with Lon the Knees. She would far rather be breaking and entering the rooms behind that infuriating green velvet door with its tawdry golden ornaments.

  Reaching the left-hand guardroom reserved for the Jikai Vuvushis, she was met by gusts of laughter, a quantity of horseplay, a ferocious squabble over the ownership of a pair of black tights, and a sweeter scent by far than most of the stinks in the villa. She ducked a thrown hairbrush and sidled past two girls indulging in a little arm-wrestling, and so reached the small cubicle-sized space reserved for the Jiktars.

  All this was a nonsense, of course. She didn’t mind sharing a guardroom with the girls, who equated with the men called swods in the army, the girls having a variety of colorful names. Because the villa was so small for all the people Kov Alloran crammed into the place, everyone had to share. At least, she and the other Jiktars did have a private space, and a personal locker and a peg to hang their duty uniforms.

  She shucked off the silly tabard-like garment revealing her black fighting leathers. The tabard was stiff with threaded wire — not gold wire. Kov Vodun was not so enamored of dressing up his bodyguards as to throw gold away like that. Rumor had it that all the colors would change once Alloran crowned himself king. She hung the tabard on the peg and heard the smash and crash of something glasslike and fragile breaking outside. The girls were in riotous mood tonight.

  They were a good bunch, really. If only they fought for the Prince Majister, for Drak, instead of his bitter foe!

  “Got a man for tonight, then, Lyss?” shouted Jiktar Nandi the Tempestuous, shoving her head into the cubicle.

  “No.”

  “Of course,” said Nandi, cheeks aglow, hair falling over her forehead. “I should have known better than to ask. We don’t call you Lone for nothing.”

  “You ready to take over, Nandi?”

  “I am. But what’s your hurry?”

  “No hurry. Nothing special. When you bring my girls in I want to be gone. That’s all.”

  “Been rucking ’em again, have you? You’ll be one of the first to get a shaft through your back, come a battle.”

  Nandi was only half-joking. Everyone in the regiment knew the strictness of Lyss’s control over her pastang.

  Without replying, Lyss sat on the cramped three-legged stool and took off her villa shoes, started to pull on her tall black boots.

  Nandi did not offer to help.

  Lyss was too bloody-minded to ask.

  In this she recognized that herself, the real person sitting here, Silda Segutoria, was perilously close to being sucked whole into this strict and harsh woman, Lyss the Lone. She thought of herself as Lyss for obvious security reasons. To think of herself as Silda, twin to Valin her brother of whom she had not heard for season after aching season, was to court disaster.

  She looked up under her eyelashes, both hands on the straps of her left boot.

  “When Sosie the Slop trundles in, she is down for four burs’ extra duty in the washroom. I’ll tell her Deldar on my way out.”

  “Washroom? Just as well. If she caught punishment duty in the kitchen she’d crottle[7] everything she touched.”

  A thin flicker of a smile touched Lyss’s lips. Silda would have laughed out loud in delight.

  Nandi took herself off, and Lyss, after a last quick look in the tiny oval mirror and a pat at her hair, followed.

  She stamped down to wriggle her boots on comfortably, and gave her weapons belts that familiar hitch that settled them comfortably about the swell of her hips. Never one to let herself be untidy or in discomfort, Silda, in the shape of Lyss the Lone, followed that maxim to the best of her ability.

  She headed directly for the nearest exit of the villa. Many of the massive and ornate statues had been removed merely to provide that amount of extra space. The marble floor looked paler and more polished in squares and star-shapes where the statues had stood for so long. Lyss moved with a sure easy pace, not swinging about too much, keeping in a straight line. People passed, going about their business. She felt a pang at the sight of slaves in their gray breechclouts and kept her face set in that stony mask.

  Raised voices, as of a group of people all talking at random, reached her from the hall leading to the exit. She walked on and saw the group entering the building, a gaggle of the new arrivals being led to take up whatever duties they had been assigned. If many more bodies were crammed in here the walls would burst.

  She stopped abruptly. She did not swear out loud; but the soft curve of her lips tightened.

  To herself, she said: “Oh, damn! Just my luck!”

  In the approaching group and laughing up at a tall Bowman of Loh, walked Mandi Volanta. Mandi had been through Lancival at the same time as Silda Segutoria, and it was sure that she would recognize her. Lancival, where the Sisters of the Rose trained their girls in many arts and educated them for life on Kregen, bred a very special kind of person. Silda was immediately aware of the stab of sorrow and then of anger that Mandi Volanta had turned against the majority of her school friends and against the emperor.

  There was nothing else to do but swing about and go marching off back the way she had come and by a circuitous route reach the next exit along, which lay past the Corridor of Bones.

  She looked neither right nor left and, with her nose stuck arrogantly in the air, strode on past the detail of Chuliks on guard. For all her attitude of haughty superiority, she was aware of the Chuliks’ yellow skin, of their green-dyed pigtails, their round black eyes, and most particularly of the upthrust tusks set in the corners of their mouths. They wore good quality armor and bright uniforms, and their weapons were clean and sharp. Born to be mercenaries, Chuliks, and highly prized.

  When she reached the outside air the suns were nearly gone.

  Crowds meandered about the streets waiting to gawp at the illuminations to be provided by the kov in this night’s contribution to the festivities of his coronation, and no doubt hoping that free wine would flow in torrents.

  A musky odor hung on the air, compounded of sweat and dust and the exhalations of many people. The streets echoed to the surf roar of the crowds, and the occasional shrill yells of laughter piercing through did not sound incongruous. Lyss hated it all.

  All these people should be shouting for Drak and the emperor. Still, she could hardly find it in her heart to blame them too harshly. Those ferocious Chuliks back there and all the other warriors under Kov Vodun’s command would quickly smash them back to their new obedience.

  Already there were drunks lurching disgustingly about the streets.

  Taverns were doing, in the liquid jargon of the profession, a Roaring Trade. Dedicated drinkers were not hanging about waiting for job lots of free wine from the kov that might or might not materialize. The worshipers of the circle around Beng Dikkane, patron saint of all ale drinkers in Paz, were not going to soil their lips with wine, free or not. So the liquid refreshment flowed and, inevitably with people of small brain capacity and inferior character, the drunks staggered about.

  With the last upflung rays of red and green scoring the darkening sky the twin suns sank, Zim and Genodras settling down for the night. And, to relieve them on their eternal vigil over the face of Kregen, the fourth moon floated into the evening sky, resplendent with light. She of the Veils shone down in fuzzy pinks and golds, ligh
ting the whole world in her own special and mysterious way.

  Silda — off duty she was firmly going to be Silda and not Lyss — always felt comforted when She of the Veils drifted serenely in the night sky. She knew that many of her special friends felt that way, too.

  Now the four hulking lads, two sets of twins, whose names were Ob, Dwa, So and Ley Dohirti, must have been imbibing very freely very early. Otherwise not a one of them in his right mind would have offered to insult a Jikai Vuvushi. They each carried a heavy wooden cudgel, as was the right of any free man of Vallia.

  With the four clumsy farm lads, and undoubtedly the cause of the trouble, Nath the Sly urged them on. He was short, slightly built, squinted, carried a knife and was a very devil in determining to have his own back on the whole world for not providing him with a powerful fighting man’s body that would attract the girls. He was a stylor at the farm, and ink smudges stained behind his ears and along his fingers. He squinted up at Silda, leering.

  “A prime one this, lads! Ready for the plucking.”

  Nath the Sly had heard those words used in a mummer’s play only three days ago, the actors prancing in a canvas booth, and he considered them apt to the situation and himself as an educated man for quoting poetry.

  “A real right beauty,” said Ob Dohirti, and hiccoughed.

  His twin, Dwa, spluttered out: “I’ll fight you for the first—”

  “Plenty there for us all,” cut in Nath the Sly, anxious to avoid internecine warfare. “Grab her now!”

  Silda did not know if these louts had chosen their spot with cunning skill or if the fortune of Coggog the Unmentionable had blessed them. She did know that as she swiveled to face one pair of twins, her hand going for her rapier hilt, the other pair rushed in from the back.

  Used to snaring recalcitrant animals on the farm, the Dohirti twins used a twisted rope with great skill. Silda felt the strands lap about her, tangling her arm.

  “Keep her quiet!” yelped Nath the Sly.

  The spot in question, either chosen by these five cramphs or by the chance of Coggog’s favor, gave the opportunity for the twins to drag Silda into the black mouth of an alley penned between sheer brick walls. Burn marks, like distorted clouds, showed in the moon’s light on the brickwork. Windows were boarded up. Silda knew the place all right, for it was a structure selected by Alloran to be demolished to make way for his building extension program.

  She kicked and got a black boot into a gut, and then thrashed aside with the other, and missed a vital spot, and then she thought it was time to start screaming.

  Nath the Sly took out his knife, held it by the blade, and clouted Silda over the head.

  At once she slumped, her body went slack, and she fell all asprawl with the rope into the blackness of the alley.

  Chapter five

  Of Lon’s Fine Feathers

  Silda toppled forward into blackness and slid herself forward over worn cobbles. A single tap from a knife hilt wielded by a scrawny runt like this specimen wasn’t going to knock her out. Her head donged a trifle, as though the famous bells of Beng Kishi tolled muffled.

  Her onward movement stripped the tangling rope away from her arm.

  This situation was very familiar indeed from her years of training at Lancival. There they taught their girls how to take care of themselves.

  The men were already arguing fiercely among themselves.

  “Grab her, you great hulu!”

  “Git outta the way!”

  “Can’t see a thing—”

  “That’s my foot!”

  A rough hand raked along the cobbles after Silda’s boot.

  Obligingly, she rolled over onto her back, peering back to see the silhouettes of the men against the vague luminosity of the moon-drenched street. She felt regret, as she lifted her boot, that as a zorca-rider she did not wear spurs. Still, the boots were solid. The heel crunched down with a nice juicy smack.

  One of the louts yelled blue bloody murder.

  In the next instant Silda was on her feet and the sound of the rapier as it whipped from the scabbard jolted half an ounce of sense back into the drunken heads.

  “She ain’t—”

  “She’s got her sword!”

  Nath the Sly felt cheated.

  “Get on her, you fools!”

  One of the men surged forward, a black batlike shape.

  Silda had no wish to slay them. Oh, yes, there were plenty of girls who would joy in sticking a length of tempered steel into their bellies, one after the other. But Silda’s emotions were held in check. She was a cool fighting machine, and as such not about to spill blood that could be avoided. Her cover remained more important than simple vengeance.

  Delicately, she pinked that outstretched arm.

  The fellow yelped as though branded and stumbled back.

  “Onkers! Idiots!” Silda poised ready for anything.

  “Get her!” screeched Nath. He did not lunge forward, preferring to leave the heavy stuff to his half-drunken companions.

  Standing in the darkness she was practically invisible to them, while they stood out as black silhouettes.

  “Run off, you unhanged cramphs, or I’ll spit you through, one after the other! Bratch!”

  They did not bratch there and then, although they hung back. Nath whispered ferociously and Silda just glimpsed in time the upraised arm and the flung cudgel.

  The common folk of Vallia are adept and swift at throwing cudgels and knives.

  She ducked. The wood clipped her across the forehead, bounced, clattered against the cobbles. She felt a wave of dizziness sweep over her, and ground her teeth together and fought the ugly wave of weakness that dragged at her knees. She remained upright, warily watching, and she used her training to push away the pain.

  “Right, you rasts. You’re done for now. By Vox!” she got out, half-gasping. “I’ll have your ears!”

  Her head felt light, like a feather, and as she moved forward that silly head seemed to want to go ahead on its own, her body stumbling after. She flicked the rapier into line. The little ’un. He was the bastard to go for...

  One of the men husked out: “I’m off. Come on — she’s probably got no gold, anyway.”

  Silda lined up, poised, and lunged.

  With a cry of pure horror Nath the Sly leaped like a salmon, just avoided the blade that would have skewered his right arm. He took the point in his elbow and for a breathless heartbeat Silda fancied the rapier would hang up entangled in his bones. She whipped it free and immediately slashed it hard down the arm of the next fellow.

  That settled it.

  Their clumsy farm shoes clattered on cobbles.

  This unpleasant incident, Silda was aware, was one of the ugly results of drink.

  Except — except that little ’un, the one the others called Nath, had clearly been intent on dark business.

  Well, there were thousands of Naths on Kregen, named for the fabled hero of many an epic legend. Nath was just about the most common and most favored name in Kregen. The precious metal Nathium was reputed to hold magical qualities in its silky texture. She put her left hand to her forehead, and felt stickiness.

  She had not drawn her main gauche. The whole stupid incident hardly seemed to merit great concern. She took her hand away from her forehead and lightly touched the brown leather and canvas bag slung at her side.

  Poor hulus! If she’d... Well, they’d have either run screaming, or tried to scream without faces...

  It was absolutely imperative then for her to lean against the greasy wall and to suck in draughts of the evening air. She did not so much shudder as let the shakes cleanse the feeling of dirt from her.

  After wiping her forehead, she cleaned the rapier on the oiled rag all prudent warriors carried against this kind of eventuality, and sauntered out onto the street.

  There was, of course, no sign of the four drunks and their evil genius, Nath. What his sobriquet might be, Silda did not know. Probably it was the Cunning, or
the Clever, or the Fixer.

  Plenty of the girls she knew would piously hope that the little runt’s elbow would seize up and would never work properly again.

  And, being apim, Homo sapiens, he had only two arms.

  The various races of Kregen blessed with four arms, or a tail hand, were, she had often thought, extremely lucky. To have four arms in a fight! Or to have a tail with a dagger strapped to the tip, or, like the Pachaks, a hand with which to grasp a blade... How perfectly splendid that would be!

  Walking along, she kept herself more on the qui vive than she would have done before the fracas. Lon the Knees had said that he did not think The Leather Bottle would be the nicest place for a lady to meet him, and had suggested an inn, The Silver Lotus, which he considered suitable. In the ordinary course of his life, Lon would never dream of entering so expensive and so — to him — high class an establishment. But he’d mumbled something to her about a deal he could arrange, and she’d gathered he was going to do something particular to find the silver stivers necessary for admittance.

  People like Lon, and those louts back there, habitually worked in copper or bronze coins. Silver was hailed with joy. Gold — wha’ that?

  Just about the only way they’d get their Diproo-fingers on gold was the way they’d tried in the alley. And, to be sure, during the Times of Troubles many lawless men had snatched more gold than they, their fathers and grandfathers, and sons and grandsons, would ordinarily see in their combined lifetimes.

  Lon the Knees, face aflame, nose a purple beacon, eyes brimming, looked splendiferous. He glowed. He waited under the dismounting porch so that he might enter the inn with the lady, and glory in the feeling that all eyes would be fixed upon his companion.

  “Lahal, Lon.”

  “Lahal, my lady.”

  Silda composed her face. Then she contrived a dazzling smile. She really wanted to bust a gut laughing.

  Lon! Lon the Knees! His famous bandy legs were encased in riding breeches that almost fitted, and their color owed more to judiciously applied brown chalk than to natural cloth. He’d borrowed those, that was for sure. Yet they were not too far removed from the usual Vallian buff breeches the gentlefolk wore.