Fires of Scorpio (8 page)

They laughed. Well, they would, of course.

The Rapa reached out and caught Ashti by the dress and reeled her in as a fisherman reels in a catch. He held her most familiarly, and she writhed and kicked and yelled.

I held very still.

Ashti had come to mean a great deal to me in our stroll along the shore of Pandahem in the past days.

There had been a man at the front door with a crossbow bolt aimed at the Chulik. That seemed clear. The Chulik must be servant to Pompino. He had tried to warn me off, knowing that his mistress might be murdered at any moment if he did anything foolish.

I said, “The children? The two sets of twins?”

The bearded apim guffawed.

“Tied up in bed. Now, dom, before we kill you, tell us where this rast Pompino is.”

I nodded at them. “You carry tridents and wear the brown and silver.” I put a snap into my voice. “By the Silver Wonder! Are you then all fools?”

They gaped, not grasping what was going on. If I leaped now — but Ashti squirmed and kicked and yelled, and the Rapa clouted her on the bottom. At this she let out an almighty yell and almost struggled free.

He took a fresh grip on her, and turned her so that her head lay inside the crook of his arm.

“What do you know of—?” said the apim.

“Lem must be witless to employ loons like you,” I said, and the snap in my voice lashed at them. “If you have harmed the children or the lady — or if you harm that child — you are all dead men.”

The Brokelsh looked past me. I did not turn. I’d left three dead men there, and heard no one else.

“Where are Halki, and Nath?” he said.

Things were just beginning to get out of hand. If I did not leap soon I would be too late. Yet a single slash and Pompino’s lady would be dead, and Ashti too. I looked at these four, and I held the thraxter at what must appear a negligent angle. I said, “Which question do you wish me to answer first?”

This puzzled them. While it was clear they were not over-bright, they were deadly dangerous. I moved forward a few paces, and I managed to summon a grimace that might pass for a smile. “Pompino, or Halki and Nath?”

The apim said, suddenly, high, screeching: “He is not one of us! Slay him!”

So they tried.

There were four of them. An apim, a Brokelsh, a Rapa, and the other fellow.

The big apim, all whiskers and scar, remained with the lady Scaura Pompina. The Rapa held Ashti. That left the Brokelsh and the other fellow to shriek and leap at me.

If I give the impression these lay brothers of Lem the Silver Leem were not over-bright, I do them no injustice.

Hard, they were, brutal and rapacious. Serving their masters who were the initiates of the cult of the Silver Leem, they aspired to no more than to bash a few skulls, skewer through between a few ribs, take a few purses of gold, get drunk a few times. They bristled and snarled and hurled themselves at me.

Just the two of them — the Brokelsh and the other fellow.

Descriptions of fights are not boring if you consider the circumstances. In this case, if I dealt with these two in too rapid and summary a fashion, the big apim might just slit the lady Scaura’s throat before joining the fight. And the Rapa would have no compunction over Ashti, none whatsoever...

The whole affair had to be balanced on a pivot of exceeding smallness.

So, of course, being more than a trifle warm, I hit the other fellow on the nose. I hit him hard. His nose opened up like one of those gorgeous scarlet and orange and blue flowers of Balintol. He tried to blubber through his mouth, which was of a large, squarish, full character, highly purple in color — even before I hit him. His eyes were most prominent and affixed somewhat high on his face, so that his cranium partook of a very shallow dish. I left that alone. I didn’t want to risk my knuckles on bone of that evident sharpness. The frills stuck up around the top of his head like the defenses of a dinosaur, or the frilled fins of a fish. As he carried on blubbering, I ducked away from the Brokelsh’s blow.

The thraxter in my right hand clicked across. I had, of course, struck the other fellow with a left. The Brokelsh looked for me where he expected to see me, and I wasn’t there. Well, of course I wasn’t. Who wanted to hang about when swords whickered — as they say — for your guts? I gave the surprised Brokelsh a cheerful kick up his bristly Brokelsh rear and launched myself for the apim and the Rapa.

Chapter seven

The four terminations of the Lady Scaura Pompina

From somewhere the sweet smell of squishes wafted into the room. The taste twined in the warm air. For a single and scarlet moment, I recalled Mefto the Kazzur, who had featured in my life at the same time as Pompino. Mefto the Kazzur, who had bested me in sword fighting.

The headlong leap left me no time to brood on past misfortunes and mishaps. The apim’s hairy face screwed up. He dragged back on the lady Scaura Pompina’s head and his blade glittered.

The Rapa bristled. Ashti squirmed. I caught a glimpse of her face, golden, shining, furious, and then it seemed her face disappeared behind two rows of teeth. She opened her mouth and bit. The Rapa screamed.

“Good for you, Ashti,” I said and went full tilt into the apim.

My sword flicked away his blade. The hilt lifted and descended and thunked, and the man toppled and sprawled, his eyes crossed, his mouth glugging open.

Without pausing to see if the lady fell off her chair or not I whirled. Ashti was doing all right; but the feathered Rapa with his vulturine beakhead would soon master her. So I tapped him on the back of the head and snatched Ashti from him as he pitched onto his beak.

“Jak!” she said, chattering. “He hit me!”

‘And you bit him.”

“Serve him good — nasty man.”

The Brokelsh, all hair and uncouth roaring noises, recovered from the kick up the backside, charged at me. He was brave if not over-bright. When he, too, lay slumbering with his three comrades, I took stock of the situation.

There was the fellow with the crossbow at the front door who, it seemed to me, must come running in to investigate the cause of the uproar. Cautiously, I poked my head around the other door and looked along the corridor. The light glimmered from side windows, fell across the floor and across the humped shape beneath the far door. That had to be the front door. The shape did not move — but the door jerked against it, opened and pushed, and then closed, only to open and push against the shape once more.

Very carefully — just in case there were more of these bandits — I walked along the corridor. The shape on the floor was the dead body of a Stroxal, with a spear through his face. I recognized the spear. I pulled the body away and called out.

“Hai! Chulik! You got him. It is all safe now.”

You will observe I called Chenunga the Ob-eyed merely Chulik, and not by his name. Even then, after so many seasons on Kregen, I remained still bristly around Chuliks. As for Katakis, with the exception of Rukker — and he was a marginal case — I’d so far never met a halfway-decent Kataki. Which was a tragedy, for all of Kregen. And Chuliks — the door opened and he came in, looking suspiciously around. He saw the body and he saw me.

“Yes,” I said. “The others are unconscious.”

“The mistress—?”

“She is safe.”

“The children?”

“Bound in their beds, so I am told. I have not seen them.”

“I will attend them at once.”

All the deference dropped away as he asked his questions. Something of the old coldly ferocious Chulik manner broke through, an echo of the time before he lost his eye and his tusk.

The quick light patter of feet along the corridor brought the Chulik around. His hand reached for the spear.

“All right, Ashti,” I said. “The Chulik is on our side. Don’t bite him.’”

She turned her head. She looked sorry not to get the opportunity to fasten her teeth into the Chulik.

“They will wake up in there—” she said.

“Then we must tie them up.”

Chenunga the Ob-eyed went off to find the two sets of twins and Ashti and I went back into the room where we’d had the fight. We stopped on the threshold. The stink of spilled blood gusted up, raw and vile.

Ashti looked quite calmly on the scene.

The lady Scaura Pompina was just about to rise from her knees. The front of her dress was a mere red shining mass. There had been four of them, an apim, a Brokelsh, a Rapa and the other fellow.

Scaura Pompina had slit all four throats.

Ashti wandered across and picked up a discarded trident. She started to poke at the Rapa’s dead body.

“All right, Ashti. He’s on his way to the Ice Floes of Sicce now. He can’t feel you sticking him.”

“But I can feel me sticking him.”

Against logic of that kind it is difficult to argue.

The woman laughed suddenly, throwing her head back, letting her hair swirl, laughing.

“The child is right! Look at the four bullies now! Dead! May Horato the Potent thus destroy all scum like that!”

“What were they after, my lady?”

“After?” She drew herself together and took a look at me as though seeing me for the first time.

I had to be patient. Faint sounds of yells drifted in, so that meant the Chulik was releasing the twins.

“They were after Pompino,” I said. “I came here to see him, also. But what could they want with him?”

“Lem,” she said. By the way she spoke I saw she was not an adherent. “The Silver Obscenity.”

The ways of the folk along the southern shore of Pandahem varied enormously. The jungle people lived quite unaffectedly cheek by jowl with constant danger and death, the jungle their home also their mausoleum. Death was merely another stage to them. Ashti, already, held a contempt for other death that just might, I considered, just might extend to her own.

The people who lived in the towns and cities had, it seemed, settled there. They were not indigenous. The jungle folk tolerated them up to a point. A clash of cultures had not happened, which was not to say that, this being Kregen, it would not do so.

So I could harbor a vile suspicion of my comrade Pompino. Maybe he had become an adherent of Lem the Silver Leem?

It was possible. He was a kregoinye, like me, a man picked out by the Star Lords to go about the world for them and pick their hot chestnuts out of the fire. Unlike me, he believed the Everoinye to be some kind of god, and he was bursting with pride that he had been chosen. All Khibils share that feeling of conscious superiority, of course. But for Pompino, pride upheld a shrewd understanding of his own worth. He might have been dazzled by promises. Maybe the adherents of Lem had caught Pompino at a bad time. If he did not get away about business for the Star Lords from time to time he brooded and fretted. He had told me this himself. If he felt slighted, and the Leem Lovers happened by... Oh, yes, it was eminently possible.

Then the two sets of twins burst in, all a-yelling and a-screaming. They threw themselves on their mother. If they noticed the blood and the dead bodies, they were not as important as making sure their mother was unharmed.

I grabbed Ashti and went off, out of the room.

There remained a considerable quantity of clearing up to be done, and I had no desire to become involved in that. Ashti kicked — once — and then said: “I’m thirsty.”

“Good,” I said. “We will find some sazz for you.”

Chenunga the Chulik came out and started up the corridor. He was going to retrieve the little spear and begin the disposal of the dead. He saw Ashti and me.

“Master?”

“We’re off to Swod’s Revenge for a wet.”

“But — the lady Pompina will require you to dine here.”

“Undoubtedly. But I dislike the smell of blood with meals.”

His Chulik face grew more yellow. “Everything will be cleaned.”

“Then we will return later. Tell me, Chulik, where is your master?”

He spoke up openly.

“From time to time he is called away on business. He is on a trip now. I do not know when he will be back.”

“And why did these Leem Loving scum wish to see him?”

“I know that—”

“Then, Chenunga the Ob-eyed, tell me.”

His pigtail wiggled as he spoke. His one piglike eye regarded me with what appeared to be a baleful stare.

“They wished the master to join them. He refused. On the last occasion he slew three of them. This was their way of revenging themselves at the same time as they forced their wishes on him.”

“It seems to me they do not know Pompino very well.”

“No, master.”

“Well, you did your duty as you saw it. And you caught that Stroxal in the end, thank Pandrite. So we will be off. Remberee.”

We went out, and I was conscious of the construction that could be put upon my actions by those with limited vision. And to say I wanted Ashti out of that house of death, while true, was also laughable as a reason. A jungle child, she’d seen far worse already in her four years.

At the well in a secondary yard, walled in at the rear, we washed off. Ashti’s white dress was, once again, in need of laundering. Also a large rip was spreading along the hem. And, it seemed to me, the cloth was decidedly thin under the arms. Ashti, of course, being perfectly used to running about without the encumbrance of clothes, was resolutely determined not to be parted from her white dress.

Eventually, looking as spruce as we could, we set off along Lower Squish Street for the Swod’s Revenge.

The thraxter, cleaned up, snugged in the scabbard. And I’d taken a couple of tridents. If they represented ill luck or a talisman of good fortune, I did not know. But they would act as a catalyst, that seemed certain sure...

The dusty road had no appreciable affect on Ashti’s bare feet. And I’d been going barefoot when I was her age — aye, and much later, when I was a powder monkey in Nelson’s fleet and, later still, in my adventures on Kregen. The vegetation bordering the road gleamed a brilliant dark green. Each leaf appeared freshly polished. Humming from the greenery and the quick flitting darting of insects told of the myriad life forms all fighting and struggling for existence. How life mocks us all! We fight and struggle and think ourselves grand and proud and mighty because we achieve a few shining goals, and, in the scheme of things, each one of us is just the same as any one of those gauzy-winged shining insects, flitting among the leaves.