Masks of Scorpio (12 page)

Pompino had secured enough directions from Jespar to take us through to Murgon’s quarters. We didn’t then discover just what were the passing acquaintanceships the tump had with this fortress; but Jespar was perfectly confident in his directions. Soundlessly we leaped over the bulwarks of the flier and raced into the shadows.

We reached the first shadowed doorway unobserved and I paused and looked back at the airboat.

If a satisfied grimace cracked my battered old features into a gargoyle smile, I was not only allowed that

— and deserved it, by Vox — I joyed in it!

From the bulwarks, Dayra stared after us. She saw me stop and look back, and she shook her fist at me.

She had said, very hot, very intemperate: “Why should
you
go and
I
stay?”

“Because you can fly the voller—”

“I believe you have some small skill in flying, Jak the Onker!”

“That is beside the point—”

“Or is it that you think me not a ferocious enough fighter to go?”

“If ferocity were all, then you would outdo all of us—”

“Then it is my skill and prowess at arms that disqualifies me in your sight?”

“Not at all, your skill—”

“Well, then, what?”

Pompino and Murkizon and Quendur and the rest looked on and took their own enjoyment from the scene and my predicament. I couldn’t burst out: “Because you are my daughter, Dayra, that’s why! And I’m not having you uselessly killed like Velia!”

I did say in my churlish way: “By the disgusting diseased liver and lights of Makki Grodno, girl! You’ll stay with the guard and fly the voller out if you’re attacked, and you can hang about and fly down to pick us up when we get out!”

She opened her mouth — and I looked at her, and Dayra or no damned Ros the Claw, she shut up.

I admit to no proud feelings in this, on the contrary, to my discomfiture; but I knew what was what and Dayra was the pilot among us to stay in the voller.

Queyd-arn-tung!

There is no more to be said!

As we took breath in the shadowed doorway a second figure appeared beside that of Dayra at the bulwarks.

A fierce raspy voice said in my ear: “I give you thanks, Jak, that you made Ros Delphor see sense, for Lisa the Empoin was constrained to obey me — for a change.”

I said, “They’ll be up to mischief, don’t fear, Quendur.”

“I know. I do not wish to contemplate that—”

“In here and stop lollygagging!” rapped Pompino.

Dutifully, we all went into the first of the chambers and looked about, our weapons ready, our senses alert.

Jespar mumbled: “I should have stayed, too. You know the way—”

“Think of your ear,” said Pompino, “and lead on!”

Korfseyrie was large enough to require a sizable garrison and it was highly unlikely that the twenty or thirty with Murgon would spread out. When we bumped into one, we’d find most of them, or so we reasoned. The place smelled of damp and decay and bore an abandoned feeling, for Pando seldom ever came here and the place, designed to guard the mines worked by the tumps as well as the forests below, had been bypassed in the late wars. Murgon had shown craftiness in selecting it as his temporary headquarters.

We passed a tall window from which the glass had long since fallen. The stars glittered through the opening and a zephyr stole in and rippled the tapestries on the wall opposite.

Instantly, the movement at his side registering in the corner of his eye, Rondas struck.

The tapestry split. Dust puffed out chokingly. The whole tapestry simply ripped and fell into pieces, whole soft swaths of it disintegrating and collapsing across the corridor.

Nobody passed a comment.

A mail-armored and axe-armed man could have been waiting behind the arras, ready to leap out and decapitate one of us as his comrades roared into the fray.

Those decrepit tapestries were symbolic of the whole fortress. Decrepit, dusty, disintegrating. Just how old it was we didn’t care to guess; it was old...

However unwilling and complaining he might be, Jespar led us in what I considered to be a reasonably straight line through the corridors and chambers. For all Pompino’s tough manner, and the paktuns’

casual menace when they suggested agio, we all felt affection for the little tump and the fearful threats made were merely that, threats and not to be acted upon. At least, I trusted that was so...

Cautiously we descended from that high courtyard going down broad staircases and narrow spiral staircases, prowling along corridors darkened by shredded tapestries and drapes. No statuesque harnesses of armor, no stands of weapons arranged in decorative patterns, adorned the walls. They had all long since been taken away to be used in the red tumult of battle. Weapons and armor must serve many seasons when the wars are on.

Now the castle-builders of Kregen do not usually construct their fortresses so that any raggle-taggle-bobtail crew may calmly stroll in as though out for a Sunday promenade. They set traps.

They confuse by winding stairways and corridors. They trick the unwary in a myriad of cunning, ingenious and lethal stratagems.

If you are unable to garrison the whole of your fortress, then you seal off those parts undefended and set the traps. We had the great advantage that we descended from the upper levels instead of fighting our way in over the ramparts as any sensible Pandaheem besieger would have to do. Jespar was aware of many of the places where we would have been slain for sure, and our own expertise took care of most of the rest.

Most of the rest...

“There are murdering holes in that ceiling,” pointed out Rondas the Bold, “and arrow slits in the walls.”

“Aye,” agreed Pompino. “Where is the trigger?”

Jespar professed himself at a loss.

“This must have been set up after Kov Pando left.”

“Well,” I said, venturing an opinion, “if no one has been here much since, this could be Murgon’s work, therefore we look for places where the dust does not lie as thickly — as there!”

The plate in the floor was suspiciously free of the dust that clung stubbornly everywhere. We could mark our route in the dust of the floors.

“You could be right.”

“We shall see,” said Rondas, and he took off his heavy helmet, swung it by the straps, and hurled it full onto the plate. The metal rang gonglike.

Instantly, the nearest murdering holes disgorged a fuming liquid that stank in the confines of the corridor, and the nearest arrow slits ejected barbed darts that flew to smash rendingly against the opposite walls.

Bold as ever, Rondas laughed, and stepped forward to retrieve his helmet, no doubt concerned lest the feathers were damaged.

“Wait!” screeched Pompino.

Rondas took two steps more and bent, and the whiz of the dart passed just over his head. From the murdering holes more fuming liquid poured, stifling us in the stench. Rondas let out a yell, and leaped back, half-straightening as he jumped. The second dart took him full in the back. It punched through his carelessly flung cape, and as he reeled under the blow I leaped, grabbed him, hauled him in like a fisherman reeling in his catch. Rondas fell all of a heap.

We staggered back.

Rondas said, “May all the devils of Gundarlo take it — my back, horters, my back!”

We turned him onto his front so that his great beak jutted to the side and lifted the cape away. The barb had dinted into his armor, breaking a way through. Dark blood welled.

Pompino pursed up his lips.

“It is deep; but not so deep as to be fatal, as I judge. You have been lucky, my Bold friend.”

“Lucky! My back feels like it has been broken in two!”

“Well, the dart must be got out, and that is a job for a needleman, of whom we have none. So—”

“I can make it back to the flying boat,” gasped Rondas. “Even if I crawl. Do you go on.”

I said, “I am not prepared to see Rondas die for lack of attention—”

“What do you suggest, then, Jak? Abandon our rescue?”

“If necessary. The Vadni Dafni can always be rescued another time — this whole venture is—”

“I know! It is foolhardy, harebrained and stupid! But we are in for it now, mostly thanks to you. So I shall go on, by Horato the Potent!”

“Very well.”

He glared at me, very huffy, very arrogant, brushing up those reddish whiskers into a bristling stiffness.

“If that is your desire, Jak the — Jak the—”

“Call me Jak the Onker, and it would fit. We cannot go on through that corridor, I judge—”

“That is right, master!” broke in Jespar, babbling in his eagerness. “The traps are fresh and strewn thickly.”

“So you will have to find another way through, Pompino the Iarvin.”

Cap’n Murkizon, who appeared somewhat at a loss because of the absence of Larghos the Flatch on guard by the voller, banged his axe about, mentioning his Divine Lady, and suggesting we stop blathering and get on with it. I believe he had missed a deal of the byplay, the words not spoken, between Pompino and me.

Now Pompino cast about and spotted a secondary corridor. He pointed that way, nose in the air, filled with a quivering fury.

“Let us go, then, by Horato the Potent!”

The way led for a time back the way we had come and if Pompino noticed this he did not comment thereon. I supported Rondas, fairly hauling him along, concerned at the state he was in. Arrow and dart wounds are the very devil if they are not treated correctly. I judged that the barb although not overly deep was deep enough to present problems. It could not be pushed all the way through, as a slender arrow might with a smart blow, mainly because it was aimed directly into the vitals of the Rapa. It would have to be cut out. This I could do, and had done aforetimes; it was not something I was overly fond of having to do. Also, to weigh the balances in our favor, Rondas was a tough bullyboy of a fellow, able to stand the shock of my rude ministrations. He would not keel over like others might have done who had previously caused Seg and me some headaches.

The Fristle guard commander, Naghan the Pellendur, told off one of his men to assist me, and between us we carried Rondas along more comfortably.

As we went along, I decided that I didn’t care what Pompino might do. He was my comrade and we both worked for the Star Lords. If he wished to continue the rescue attempt then he would do so and I would not seek to prevent him. I did know that I was taking Rondas back to the voller where I’d put out my utmost exertions to see that he did not die from his wound.

The others pressed on and Naghan half-turned.

“Maybe it would be safer if a couple of us went with you, horter Jak.”

“My thanks, Naghan; but with Nath the Gristle here to help, we should manage.”

The Fristle guard assisting me made no comment.

The Pellendur nodded, satisfied, and swung off after the main party. We’d reached a bend in the corridor where the Twins shafted their light, still eerily tinged with a ghostly silver glow, across the walls covered in faded paintings, from an arched opening above.

Dust motes spun in the still air. The men ahead seemed phantoms, specter figures moving in moonbeams and magic. The whole wall at our side collapsed and fell away on hidden hinges. A pit gaped beside us.

The Fristle guard, Nath the Gristle, and Rondas would have fallen, tottering off balance. I managed to give them both a fierce twisting shove, a gasped effort like the release of a spring. They toppled away from the pit.

Then, in the same instant, I was falling, spinning head over heels through thin air.

A frenzied hullabaloo started above, a chorus of shocked yells and oaths. The sounds racketed between the stone walls. I hit with an almighty thump, thwacking down flat on my back onto a heaping pile of filthy straw. Mangy bits of straw fluffed, the stink was immense, and all the stars of Kregen flashed before my eyes and the cacophony of the Bells of Beng Kishi clamored in my skull.

“You all right, Jak?”

Pompino’s shout was an echo, floating around in darkness, an alarmed yell of despair.

I couldn’t — for the moment — answer.

“
Jak!
”

I drew in a breath that nigh gagged me.

“You’ll wake up the whole damn fortress...”

“Thank Pandrite — we’ll soon have you out.”

A hiss, a particular venomous malevolent hiss, drew my shocked attention. I came quiveringly alert. I knew, at once and without a doubt, what kind of creature stalked me from the shadows.

Up above on the lip of the pit, out of jumping distance, my comrades crowded to peer down. They saw.

They saw the lean slinking form lope out into the shafts of moonlight.

That lethal shape halted when the first shaft of moonlight struck down. In that pallid radiance the eyes gleamed, gleamed — oh, how those eyes gleamed!

The wedge-shaped head sank down, low to the stone, and the mouth gaped wide revealing rows of yellow teeth and the purple-black gums, from which spittle-foam dribbled down. Slavering, those jaws opened wide.

Delicately, step by step, two feet at a time, one from each side, the eight clawed feet lifted and fell and the long lean body bore down on me. The tail flicked from side to side, sinuous, quivering, and the tip was truly tufted by a clot of black hair. The muscles stirred the furred pelt, long iron-hard muscles, moving with smooth precision under the ocher hide. Low to the ground, head out-thrust, two feet after two feet, tail flicking, death stalked me in that moonlight-drenched pit.

One of the Fristle guards hurled his spear and thankfully he missed the leem.

More usefully, Nath Kemchug shouted: “Hai!” and threw down his spear to me. It clattered on the stones and the butt end rested on the pile of stinking straw by my foot.

At the Chulik’s shout the leem paused and his wicked head with the whiskers stiff as steel spikes tilted up. I reached out a slow, steady, cautious hand for the spear.

My fingertips touched the iron-bound wooden butt; and then froze. The leem snarled at me, ignoring the people up above who were all now shouting and screaming trying to draw the beast’s attention.