Avenger of Antares (25 page)

At the little half-hidden door leading out Saffi turned to me. In the lamplight splashing in, she looked furious clean through.

“Father said you were a strange one, Amak Hamun! By Krun! He was right! Do you want to spend forever in here?”

“What those men had to say interested me, Saffi.”

“A fine time you pick to eavesdrop!”

Well, that was true. I reflected, not without joy, that if I had not decided to try to rescue this glorious lion-maid, if I had selfishly gone about the much more important business of Vallia in Hamal, I would never have heard of this wizard, Phu-si-Yantong, would never have come here, to this hidden fortress, never have squeezed down a slot of blackness and so overheard evil plans concerning Vallia. The chances that seemed miraculous were no chances. I had chosen to try to rescue Saffi, and the Savanti had used that to their own ends. I felt convinced this must be the work of the Savanti, those mortal but superhuman men of the Swinging City, Aphrasöe, the more I thought on the question. They had the welfare of men at heart on Kregen, that I knew. Just what the Star Lords’ plans might be, I, a mortal, had no way of knowing.

We could no longer mingle freely with the guards and slaves within the inner fortress. The alarm had been given. A lion-maid, as had been proven so conclusively, is a rare and precious object in vile dens where beautiful girls are hunted; Saffi needed a hooded cloak. The slave from whom we obtained the gray slave garment was probably very pleased indeed to be afforded the opportunity of a quiet sleep. Together, Saffi in her cloak, I as a forest-green-clad guardsman, we prowled on.

Presently she said: “You go up, Hamun!”

“Aye.”

She sniffed and pulled the hood closer about her golden hair.

Up we went, through passageways and caverns. We had to dodge away out of sight two or three times as bodies of guards marched past; among slaves we pressed on boldly.

All feeling had left my shoulder now. I tucked my arm into the side of the tunic and it hung like a lump of meat on a butcher’s hook. I kept the crossbow. Saffi might take the one shot; I discarded the quiver. At last we saw doors ahead that, I trusted to Zair, must take us out to a landing platform on the roof. Only three guards stood their posts here, and all were Rapas. Saffi shot one. I spitted the second, and Saffi, not without a splendid example of swordplay, dispatched the third. We pushed through the open doors onto a flat roof and saw vollers lined up, quietly waiting for us.

It was not quite as easy as that.

To our right reared the tall glitteringly white column of the central tower. Up there no doubt the Kov of Faol had his own amusements. Certainly, he had guards. They began to shoot down as we ran for the nearest suitable voller, a four-place craft with rakish lines indicating speed. Other guards sprang to bar our path. We had a right merry set-to then, but in all honesty I recall little of it. I do remember Saffi, most glorious, blazing golden, striking shrewd blows, and myself shouting the Jikai to her, saying, “A true daughter of a noble father,” and other silly words besides. Then Saffi was pushing me into the voller. I flopped down. Saffi straddled above me. I recalled that I was supposed to be rescuing her, and levered myself up past her. I was able to smash the thraxter down on a couple of Rapas and an apim who would have dragged us out. The voller moved, lurched, sprang into the air.

We soared away over the jungle.

Zair must have been with us for it was some time before the pursuing airboats took off. The preparations for the hunt had begun early; the day was barely half gone. We could expect no grateful concealment as the twin suns, Zim and Genodras, sank below the horizon.

Saffi set a course due south. Well, that would do for now. We must outrun our pursuers, or fox them in some way, and then we might begin the long flight back to Ruathytu. Saffi must have thought along the same lines, for she looked back, and her long golden hair blew out splendidly past her face. She laughed with an exultation that is reserved for the battle-mad or the gloriously adventurous of two worlds. I could not feel my shoulder; all I could feel was a damned gray wave roaring over my thick skull, blotting out reasonable thought.

“We will outfly them, Hamun, and then hide in the jungle. They will never find us once we find a safe place!”

“The — manhounds—” I croaked.

“With a weapon in my fist, I do not think I would fear even a manhound, with you at my side!”

Well, Numim girls are notorious for their ardor. I shivered. I was a damned sick apim, that was certain. After the dip in the sacred Pool of Baptism that had ensured me a full thousand years of life, I was also strongly able to recover from wounds and sickness. But it would take time; that fellow’s dagger had bitten deeply, more deeply than I realized. I was running a temperature, and I felt as bad as ever I had, apart from certain more scarlet moments of my life — as when I crossed the path of the Phokaym along the Klackadrin.

Thoughts of Numim girls brought up certain memories. I now felt confident Numim girls were as tough as was said; and I fancied Numim men were also as tough and would keep a promise.

“Straight on, Saffi,” I croaked out. “Keep going.” I managed to sprawl forward and stick my head up enough to see where we were going. Saffi looked back.

“They keep close, Hamun. We should dive into the jungle and hide.”

“No! Keep straight on.”

She pouted at me, and her golden eyes regarded me with calculation.

“I am not delirious, Saffi. I will get over this rast-given wound directly.” It was an effort to think and speak. “Keep on. Look for a clearing; caves, huts — and villas.”

I closed my eyes. If I had gambled wrong, then it was all over. Going down to hide in the jungle was a meaningless gesture, when the Manhounds of Antares sniffed at our trail . . .

The airboat sliced through the air, warm at our low altitude, and once in a while Saffi turned and looked back. Then she would stare ahead again, and the creases on her forehead indented deeper, so I knew our pursuers stayed doggedly with us.

We had chosen a fast voller, but we had not picked the fastest in Smerdislad.

Saffi said, “Two vollers gain on us, Hamun.”

“They have purer minerals in their silver boxes,” I said, mumbling. Then I realized what I was saying. But I could do nothing about that. Saffi took no notice, and I believe she thought I was delirious. Well, I was rambling in my speech, and must not talk again until the time came.

As Zair is my witness, I have at all times attempted to tell the truth in these tapes as I saw it. I own to many failings, and I am a great rogue when necessity presses, and yet I believe I have not willingly deceived you. So I must now confess that I do not recall what happened from the time Saffi reported the two pursuing vollers were lunging for our airboat to the time when I awoke festooned with acupuncture needles — and many of them moxybustion examples, aromatically smoldering — to stare up into the concerned face of Doctor Larghos the Needle. What I tell is what Saffi told me. It was a most hairy time, she said, her golden face alight with the passions of the fight still strong upon her.

Saffi swerved the voller about, avoiding the lancing hail of bolts fleeting from our pursuers. The voller was stocked with many of the familiar weapons of aerial fighting. Although I had thrown away the quiver of bolts, there was another to hand. Somehow, with one hand and the crossbow thrust against a rib of the voller’s frame, I succeeded in loading. Saffi shouted, and I loosed and the pilot of the leading pursuer hurled backward, his hands clawing skyward, a crossbow quarrel through his throat.

But their vehement onslaught could not be halted by slowly placed, single shots. The first voller surged up on our larboard and Saffi jinked away to the starboard and dropping, and the second let her come and rode with her, and the cruel iron grappling hooks sailed toward us.

My thraxter bit ineffectually at the wire-wound ropes. I ripped out two of the grapnels and with them chunks of the voller’s skin, and the air rushed through the gaps. But the airboats grappled us. Saffi set the controls and we plunged on and down toward the jungle. The two vollers plummeted with us. They were packed with armed men. I fought. I do not remember, but I fought. Sometimes, in the small hours of the night when my brain releases my mind to wander freely over the lurid paths of memory I think I recall scarlet fractions of that fight.

There are painful memories of a glorious golden form at my side, with a bloodied sword. There are hazy recollections of pain that was beyond pain gouging all along my left side. Saffi and I fight well as a team, and we fought well on that long-gone day. A crossbow quarrel sprouted from my left shoulder, and I am told I yelled: “Waste your shots, you kleeshes!” For there was little they could do to that left arm of mine now save chop it off entire.

“Your back, Hamun!”

Whirling, I ducked clumsily and the thraxter, with a life of its own sought and took the life of the Rapa chopping at my head. Thraxters clanged and hammered, lunged and withdrew. How many men died I do not know. Saffi was wounded, the blood drenching down her golden skin. I must have fought as a berserker. But we were surely done for. The airboats were down low now, our voller penned between the other two. The green jungle tops fleeted past below. When an uprearing tree lashed our keel and scraped and tore away below, the whole flier shuddered.

“Fight to the end, Hamun!” yelled Saffi. Her golden hair waved wildly in the wind of our passage.

“We will fight, Saffi!” I shouted back. “But it is not the end!
Look!”

I had not misjudged the quality of the Numims.

A clearing appeared below, past the last of the jungle trees. To one side reared a rock-face honeycombed with the black openings of caves. Huts burned. Villas burned. Down there the corpses of many manhounds lay sprawled, feathered with crossbow bolts. And up into the sky rose the vollers bearing the golden colors of the Trylon of the Golden Wind.

Jiktar Horan, Rees’s guard commander, had kept his word.

There is little left to tell, for Saffi, her glorious golden eyes wide with the wonder of it all, finished by saying:

“And dear Horan and our men simply took those foul vollermen of Faol apart, Amak Hamun!”

I managed to say, from where I lay flat on my back with the needles smoldering and Doctor Larghos fussing, “You called me Hamun when we fought together, Saffi.”

She smiled. “If you wish it, Hamun.”

“It is you who do me the honor, Saffi. And your wound?”

At this Larghos the Needle piped up with: “The Lady Saffi must rest, Amak! But she would hear nothing but how you were and if you were likely to die! I told her—”

“And I ask her, Larghos the Needle.” I smiled at Saffi. The smile did not pain. “You have proved everything true, Saffi. Now for the sake of your father, the Trylon Rees, you must rest.”

“If you say so, Hamun.”

There could be no rest for me.

Doctor Larghos strapped up my arm. I knew but did not tell him that a few burs of rest and recuperation would see the wound healed. But he persisted in his fussing, and my tiredness made me tolerate his mollycoddling.

There was one thing more left to do before I could fly for home.

I did not tell Saffi or Horan or Larghos the Needle what I intended, for they would not have understood. It was taken for granted by all of them that I would be going with them back to Ruathytu.

Jiktar Horan, a true professional, and his lion-men had followed my directions and had found this place and had worked it over. There were no Manhounds of Faol left alive. The slaves, those who had not run off, would be taken away, some to a slavery more kind than the horrors to be found in Faol, others to freedom. The faithless guides either had been killed or had escaped. Their work was done. The lion-men had cleansed this place of horror in their search for their Trylon’s daughter. So my vow had come to be honored, in a strange fashion, truly: for the time being the foul practices of the Kov of Faol and his manhounds had been stamped out here.

I knew there were other places in Havilfar where the Manhounds of Antares would still be used for horrific sport.

Encar Capela, the Kov of Faol, still lived.

The final consummation of this cleansing process remained.

That would have to wait. The Savanti had placed in my hands information I dared not waste. Before I could return to Hamal and seek to know the truth of the Nine Faceless Ones, and through them the secrets of the silver boxes, I must return home. I craved to see my Delia once again, and my twins, Drak and Lela. But, also, I had to know how far the wise men of Vallia had progressed in their unraveling of the information I had already sent them.

When the last streaming light of Zim and Genodras had faded from the sky and the Maiden with the Many Smiles hung barely above the horizon, I cast off in the battered voller and set a course back to Smerdislad. The Numims did not see me go. I have some facility at stealing airboats, as you know.

Three ulms from the gate of Smerdislad, along the road of the tombs, Melow the Supple had said.

An ulm is about 1,500 yards, so I would have to fly very low indeed and touch down within easy sight of watchful guards upon the ramparts.

The Maiden with the Many Smiles did not smile down on me, for which I was most grateful, thanking Zair. The fuzzy pink and golden orb shone fitfully through a high drift of cloud. Shadows lay inky dark, but I picked out the impressive marble argenter, the ship with all sails spread, above the tomb of Imbis Frolhan the Ship Merchant. I touched down in shadows and prepared to spring out.

Fatigue had been beaten back a little by my enforced rest after that unremembered fight with Saffi aboard the voller, but pressed back only a little. I needed rest.

A hoarse hissing voice reached me from the shadows of the tomb.

“I have waited, Dray Prescot of Strombor. You come hard upon my time.”

I knew.

If I do not recount in full what then happened it is because again I have but hazy and fragmentary memories. I know I tore off the bandages so carefully placed upon my arm by Doctor Larghos the Needle. I needed two hands for this work. Melow the Supple lay quietly as I carried her to the voller. I sent the airboat up and set the course northward. Then I turned to the jikla.