Fires of Scorpio (2 page)

Eventually I thanked Skort and sat myself down and closed my eyes and Skort put a hand neatly on my shoulder and I woke up and it was full daylight. I had slept.

In the mingled streaming radiance of the Suns of Scorpio slanting into the clearing and lighting up the world for us, the dark events of the night passed away as though mere dreamstuff. I stretched and sniffed and Skort made that hideous grimace, all rotting teeth and glaring eyes, that is a Clawsang smile.

“Yes, you smell correctly. Breakfast.”

As we ate, I sensed some reservation on Skort’s part. He clearly wished to say something, and nerved himself to utter the words, and then withdrew and said some inconsequential observation of our present situation.

So, guessing what he wished to say, I said: “I wish my duty was concluded, as is yours.”

The green-slime around the exposed roots of the rotting teeth glimmered. Skort nodded. He was well-pleased.

“Yes. I must return to report the queen dead. It is a sad duty.”

I swallowed the last of the food and took a last mouthful of tea. I stood up. All I owned was — one, a scarlet breechclout, and, two, a Krozair longsword.

Skort stood up. His people looked on. They were travel-stained with ripped and torn clothing; but at least they had escaped from the mountain intact. What my friends would be like — well, that I had to find out.

“Remberee,” said Skort.

“Remberee,” I said, and struck off along the trail leading from the clearing toward the mountain.

The face of the mountain, caught at this early morning sun angle, bewildered by its vastness and variety of carvings. Vines looped and trailed across the rock; but the very profuseness of decoration could not be concealed. The lake opened out to my left with the usual activity on the brown sandspit. One proceeds with caution under these circumstances. I did not leave the concealment of the trees at once, and with daylight and the twin suns I could see the damned vines that sought to loop my neck and throttle me. I could see the nasties and the creepy crawlies, and that, by Vox! is a great help.

My skills as a hunter and stalker are not inconsiderable. Well, to stay alive on Kregen in some of the more robust spots such skills are de rigueur. But I have known men and women who can move through any terrain like ghosts, unheard, unseen, unsuspected until they strike. I do not profess skills of that high order; but, crouched unmoving in the cover of leaves that did not seek to choke or chew me, I was at a considerable advantage. So in the long level streaks of suns light as Zim and Genodras, the great red and the smaller green sun of Kregen, rose over the treetops, I blinked my eyes with shock.

A figure appeared soundlessly beside the track. It was concealed from all observation except from where I crouched, I judged, and that due to a casual alleyway between the leaves. I most certainly had not arranged that slot of vision. The figure did not move, made no sound, and had made no sound in reaching its present vantage point.

Often my comrades joyed in stalking one another, seeking to leap out with a joyous shout of surprise. Seg Segutorio was our master and our mentor. Inch and Turko and Balass — Balass the Hawk! — and Korero were very good indeed, and Oby had learned much. When we could we played pranks, one on the other, and led a riotous life. But that very life had sent us off about business in the world, and our days of laughter in mutual comradeship were circumscribed by duties reserved to nobles and lords of the land.

So now I watched that alert figure beside the trail. The man carried a bow. The bow was a Lohvian longbow. It was held in a certain way. I own it, although the superhuman Star Lords had shown me a picture of Seg and the others escaping safely from that deadly maze within the mountain, I had barely dared to believe. Now I believed.

I pursed up my lips and fashioned a bird call. That bird would never be found in this jungle, here on the island of Pandahem, maybe; the call fluted across the space and the man beside the trail did not move, made no sign — but the return call whistled out, true and golden on the morning air.

Presently, after a long space of waiting, unmoving, silent, watchful, we judged that no one spied on us. We met in the shadows of an aromatic bush whose small blue and white flowers brought back the memories.

“What in a Herrelldrin Hell happened to you?”

“And you! I found a tunnel which led to the jungle—”

“As did we,” said Seg. He stared at me accusingly. “You were going back in there—”

“It seems to me you were in front of me going back—”

“Well, my old dom, I thought you were still in there somewhere.”

Seg’s dark hair brustled up, it seemed aggressively, and his fey blue eyes looked wild. Tough, competent, kind-hearted, the best archer in all Kregen, as I devoutly believe, Seg Segutorio was not about to become maudlin over me. Rather, he’d take a deuced mocking line, and cut me down to size in no time.

“So you were going back into that ghastly place to look for me.” I shook my head. “We’re all maniacs, Seg, all of us, and I verily believe you are the biggest maniac of all.”

“Well, Dray — it seemed like a good idea at—”

“Aye,” I said, dryly. “I don’t doubt it.”

“The others are waiting farther along. I simply said I’d scout a little—”

“The Lady Milsi?”

“Fine. Still very quiet, of course, over the death of the queen. I think you saw how—”

“Yes.” I knew that Seg and the Lady Milsi had, as they say on Kregen, been shafted by the same lightning bolt. I told him what Skort the Clawsang had told me. Seg looked thoughtful.

“There is a power vacuum now, in this kingdom.”

“Well, Seg, I’ve told you. If you wish to become Emperor of Pandahem — now’s your chance.”

“Cretin!”

“Yes. I agree.”

“Which hole did you discover? I saw only the one, and we came through that one. You could not have done.”

I looked at Seg. We were blade comrades. Why should I not confide in him? I said: “There are things that I wish to tell you, Seg, and that you will not believe at first. When you get home to Vallia, ask Delia. She will confirm what I have to say.”

At once he was almost serious, and made only a few mocking remarks about the chuckle-heads. I told him that I was never born on Kregen, that I came from a planet called Earth and, moreover, a world that possessed only one little yellow sun and only one silver moon and only apims,
Homo sapiens
, without any of the splendid array of diffs that make of Kregen so wondrous a world.

He shut his eyes and leaned back when I finished speaking.

“I believe you, my old dom. You’ve always been more than a trifle apt to go flying mysteriously off somewhere. Next time you disappear, I refuse to worry my head about you. If you prefer one little yellow sun and one silver moon—”

“No!”

“—and only looking at people with faces like our own, then the best of Eos-Bakchi to you!”

“The Star Lords constrain me, that is all.”

“That is all!”

“No, Seg.” I made up my mind. As so often happens when confidences begin, others spurt out like a flood. “When I was up in Falinur of which at the time you were lord—”

“Yes, I was the Kov of Falinur. I am glad I gave it up and let Turko take it on.”

“When you returned to us from your adventures, I met a man called Lol Polisto.”

“Oh, old Lol,” said Seg. “I knew him — only a little. Something to do with wanting to be a farmer and having nothing to do with politics or fighting. I marked him as a good likely man.”

I looked straight at Seg.

“He is now married to Thelda. They have a fine child. His Thelda is—”

Seg stared back. His expression stopped me.

Then he said, “You are hard on a man, Dray. When I had that great wound in my back, then, was it?”

“Aye.”

“Funny thing. I sensed there was more to your concern for my back than I could fathom—”

“Look, Seg. If you’d gone rushing off up there — you’d have killed yourself—”

“I wonder now — and this shocks me — I wonder if I would have gone rushing off. I thought Thelda must be dead. She was cut off in Evir; I had searched for her there.” He stopped speaking, and shook his head. Then, quickly, like a reptile striking: “She was happy with Lol Polisto?”

“Very. She thought you dead. She would never have married Lol if her first husband was alive. You know that.”

“I loved Thelda, in a funny way. Then she was dead. And I stopped loving a corpse, a ghost, and merely cherished a memory. Now there is the Lady Milsi. And, as you know, she is the first...”

“I know.” Then, to soften the stupid arrogance of presuming to know all of Seg’s life, I added: “That you have told me of or that I have seen.” And then, in case Seg began to feel something of what I’d expected him to feel in this, and therefore to give him a chance to slang me, I said: “Anyway, a lot of folk predicted that you and Jilian would—”

“Jilian? Jilian Sweet-tooth?”

“That’s right.”

“She’s a bonny lass, what with her Whip and her Claw. But — not for me.” We sat more comfortably now under the leaves and we watched the trail both ways as we talked, and no one beyond three or four paces would have heard our voices. “And, I tell you, my old dom, I knocked out a fellow’s teeth who linked your name with that of Jilian’s—”

“One expects that kind of foul-minded slander from the meaner sorts of intellect. You’ve probably heard many filthy rumors of Delia—”

“So far,” said my blade comrade Seg Segutorio in a flat and neutral voice. “So far I have only had to kill four people who mentioned Delia in that connection.”

I was surprised. I stared at Seg.

“Killed four!”

“They were well rid of.”

Massive emotional overtones are not for Seg and me. But I knew. I swallowed. Good old Seg!

But, all the same, four deaths for mere words...!

If that is Kregen, as it is, it is, then, perhaps...?

“If it was my wound,” said Seg, in a ruminative way. “But, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I guessed you’d say that.”

“Well, why?” He wanted to know why I had not told him that his wife Thelda was not dead but was married to another man and, apart from her mourning for Seg, was very happy with her new child. “Why?”

“I could say I don’t know why. That was true, once, after your wound had healed. But I’ll tell you the truth.”

“Yes?”

“I was frightened—”

“Frightened? You, Dray Prescot,
frightened
!”

“Too right, my old dom, too bloody right. I was frightened. Scared right through to the soles of my feet.”

He shook his head in amazement, a small gesture that would not be observed should hostile eyes be watching.

Now Seg is a man of parts. No one with normal human emotions is going to remain unaffected under the impact of news such as had just hit Seg. He had suffered a shock. He had loved Thelda, and she had, he thought, died, and he had gotten over that, and now had found the Lady Milsi. Life was going to be exceedingly unpleasant for Seg in the next week or so, or for however long it took him to adjust. That his marriage to Thelda was now over admitted of no question. That Thelda was happy with Lol Polisto was important. That Seg might find happiness with Milsi was also important.

I knew Seg would also consider as vitally important the happiness of the Lady Milsi. She, he would say, must not suffer on account of Seg’s past thrusting itself awkwardly into the present.

Eventually he heaved up a sigh and said, “When I tell the Lady Milsi, I believe she will understand. I’ve already spoken to her of Thelda, and she has told me that her husband is dead. Opaz rest his ib.”

The mention of Opaz made him go on: “And this story of yours of a world with only one sun and one moon — that is blasphemy in the eyes of the religious. What of Opaz? What of the Invisible Twins made manifest in Opaz, in the glorious light of Zim and Genodras?” He squinted up. The red sun and the green sun shone refulgently, and the streaming opaz radiance poured down splendidly.

I said, “Gods are not suns.”

“Agreed. But, all the same—”

“All the same, we’ll have to get back to the main party before they start after us and raise devils better left sleeping.”

Quickly, slurring details, I told him of the black sorcery within the mountain. “So we’d best be off. Nothing remains to detain us here.”

“And when you vanish in a puff of smoke, you’ll be gallivanting about somewhere else on Kregen?”

“Or Earth.”

“Aye.”

A lightness of spirits affected me now that I had told Seg. Two items of news had been dovetailed into a seeming one; and that economy pleased me in its use of emotional resources to the best advantage. Seg had killed to protect the honor of Delia, had filled a fellow’s mouth with blood and broken teeth in defense of mine. Deplore the violence though I might, in hard times on a hard world, honor — that tawdry bauble — sometimes has to be upheld to the utmost.

I’d do the same for Seg. That went without saying.

We went along the backtrail like a couple of savage hunting beasts — no. No, as I have said before, we were not
like
a pair of savage hunting beasts. We were.

Yet the chill conviction remained that against the dark sorcery within the tunnels of that gargoyle of a mountain, all our warrior skills would not prevail. We’d escaped, and had achieved a kind of victory. Now we had to make good our escape.

Seg’s reference to my disappearance in a puff of smoke was uncomfortably close to the truth. When the Star Lords sent their gigantic blue Scorpion to fetch me away from wherever I happened to be and plonked me down somewhere else it must in all seeming appear to any onlookers that I did vanish in a puff of blue smoke.

The problems we faced immediately were simple. We had to get out of this pestiferous jungle and back to civilization. Seg had to see the Lady Milsi safely home. I wanted to return to Vallia and Delia. The Star Lords had shown me that she was safe and handling her problems — handling them! She’s smashed the opposition that had enslaved her, and had taken command with all the imperial majesty and grace that makes her the supreme Empress of Vallia.