Masks of Scorpio (13 page)

Two more spears flew.

“Belay that!” I yelled, risking an immediate attack. “You might hit him!”

No more spears hurled down.

Two clawed feet at a time, eight feet lifting and putting down, the leem moved from the shadows into the light of the Twins. His two shadows lay close together, so for a bewildering moment it seemed there were three leems stalking me in the pit...

My fingers wrapped around the iron-shod butt. Nath Kemchug was proud of his spear. It was stout and sturdy, with plenty of steel weighted in the head. He could polish up his tusks a treat with it.

The saliva glimmering on the teeth of the leem dripped down from those purple-bruised gums. His tail flicked from side to side — was he one of the sort who straightened his tail into a bar in the instant he charged? Or was he of that diabolical sort who waggled his damned tail even when he leaped? I did not know. My fingers eased up the smooth wooden haft of the spear, and I was at full stretch, and knew that if I moved too much too quickly the bolt of ocher-furred lightning would strike...

Sensations fined down. I could feel the polished wood as rough as sandpaper. The stink wafted away and became as nothing, the dung-heap stench vanishing, and instead my nostrils filled with the smell of leem. I could see the way his whiskers indented, each in its own little black pit. I could see the sparkle of each drop of spittle. I could see the angry-red tongue, lolling behind those fangs. His ears lay close to his head, swiveled to catch the first sound of an enemy elsewhere than where he knew he had his prey firmly fixed. And his eyes! Partially veiled by a downdroop of brow, semicircles of hate, the eyeballs turned up so that the eye looked a blot of mirror darkness cupped in a rind of yellow-white, those eyes fastened on me with such merciless determination I knew that I’d have one heartbeat and one only to save myself.

As that thought shot through my head I realized I was glad Dayra was not up there, crowding to the lip of the pit with the others.

I do not know how long the interval was between my falling into the pit and the instant the leem charged.

It could not have been very long. Leems are sudden beasts in their ferocity; to me that time passed in an agony of slowness. It seemed a long time to me, a damned long time.

Then I had the spear in my fists, had thrust the butt into the crack of stone just beyond the pile of straw and the leem was in midair above me, his paws widely extended, his mouth a single vast cavern...

One way and one way only to go—

Headlong I dived under him, between the rows of taloned paws. His belly shot past above and the steel spear point penetrated his breast and went on and on and he went on also. Had I stayed another heartbeat, he would have landed full on me. The spear passed completely through him, jutting up a reeking and gory splinter above his back.

His screeching scream shattered against the walls of the pit and echoed crazily in my head.

I was on hands and knees, was turning, seeing his tufted tail quivering before my face. He thrashed and screamed and pawed at the spear, and blood sprayed.

He wasn’t dead. Not by a long long way do you kill a leem by merely passing a spear through his body.

Even if you hit one of his hearts, the other will pump fresh anger and power into his muscles.

If my comrades were yelling, I could not say. If the world had blown up, I didn’t know. The noise in my head, compounded of the leem and my own blood, drowned out sanity. My thraxter was in my fist. What a weapon to fight a leem! I leaped to the side, skidding, and he turned and tried to leap again and this time I was poised and ready. The thraxter went in neatly and I swear the last foot of the blow was in midair, for I was already turning and leaping away and snatching up one of the Fristles’ flung spears.

Give a leem no chance — he never gives anyone or anything a single chance in all of Kregen — give him no rest... The first spear, muscled by desperation, flew to embed itself in his flank and bit, as he swiveled to leap again. He did not move as fast as he had... His blood choked upon the floor and fouled among the foulness of the straw...

Flashing the second spear before his face, shooting a jagged reflection of moons shine into his eyes, checked him for a tiny moment. He was a fine specimen — powerful, savage, a killing machine. I believe the spear in his flank must have nicked his secondary heart; for as he swiveled and prepared to leap again he was slow. I poised the spear. I drew a breath, realizing that that simple act meant I was back in control of myself and was a fighting intelligence rather than a mere primordial warrior-savage. His tufted tail lashed. His eyes fastened on me like leeches. His scarlet cavern of a mouth gaped and the yellow fangs glittered with saliva. Blood pumped from his side.

In the next instant he would leap...

So, mastering myself, remembering I was Dray Prescot, Lord of Strombor and Krozair of Zy, I bellowed out: “Hai!” and charged in full tilt.

Savage against savage, beast against beast...

The cruel steel spearhead drove deeply into the ocher beast’s breast as the apim beast that was myself forced on the shaft with bursting muscles.

Almost, he had me then.

A paw swiped from nowhere and even as I ducked a claw razored down my cheek. Had he connected full that blow would have split my head as an axe splits kindling, a child squashes a rotten fruit.

Hanging onto the spear I twisted, grinding it in, shouting, redness and haziness everywhere.

Someone shouted: “Hai!”

Pompino was there, before me, a spear in his fists driving down.

I said, “Thank you, Pompino—”

He said, “It was fast, too fast — my help was not necessary.”

Staggering back, feeling the wetness of my own blood on my face, I gulped air. The stench was prodigious. The leem lay on his side, eyes rolled up, a last long shaky quiver trembling his lean flank. The dark tufted tail gave a last twitch.

“Hai!” bellowed down Murkizon.

The others set up a yelling. I sat down, plump, on the blood-soaked straw.

Probably the perfectly natural reaction of a fellow after a fight overwhelmed me then. Normally I can contrive to carry on with some at least of the old functions still operative after combat. But, for some reason, on that occasion, with the dead leem and the blood and the stink — and the very real horror coiled in me at thought of what might have occurred had Dayra been with us when I fell into the pit — I babbled like a green young coy after his first brush with the foe.

“A leem!” Quendur said, leaping down and giving the dead carcass a kick. “That is a jikai — a lone man—”

So, loose-tongued, chattering, I said: “A leem? But I had a sword, and spears, so I had all the advantages. I’ve fought leems before. Once, I recall, I fought a leem with a kutcherer, that silly butcher knife with the spike at the back. That was a bad one. He chewed me up; but I got him in the end.

Leems? No, doms, I do not like leems and have fought them many times, and each time I swear will be the last.”

“You speak strangely, Jak.” Pompino turned his head to stare at me instead of the leem. The furred, feline and vicious fighting cat lay there in his own blood, and he looked pathetic now, as so many dead creatures do...

“Strangely?”

“Aye. A lone man against a leem no matter what his weapons and skill is a jikai not lightly to be undertaken. Even professional leem-hunters, who are all mad anyway, do not operate alone. You were a leem-hunter?”

“Not a professional — I only fight leems when I have to...” And, as you know, that was not strictly true...

“A jikai,” boomed Murkizon. “That is what I call this deed and that is what it is, a jikai. Hai, Jak Leemsjid!”

Jak Leemsjid...

They all took up the cry.

So, I had acquired a sobriquet, at last, after my simple name of Jak.

Leemsjid, leemsbane...

I said, “If that is so, we must prove myself equal to the name. The Leem Lovers—”

“Aye!”

I stood up. I retrieved the thraxter. I cut off that dark tuft at the tip of the leem’s tail. This I tucked down into my harness. Then we were hauled out of the pit and so set off again, and now Rondas the Bold was assisted along by a rascally savage fellow rejoicing under the new name of Jak Leemsjid.

The way before us was blocked solidly by a mass of masonry extending from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling.

“The devil take it!” exclaimed Pompino.

He twisted up Jespar’s ear.

“Well, tump!”

“I do not know, master! Maybe, maybe the noise — we were heard — maybe Murgon has triggered more traps—”

“That cross-passage fifty paces back may lead us in the direction we wish to go,” suggested Naghan the Pellendur. He glanced at the slumped figure of Rondas the Bold. “We must hurry—”

“Aye,” said Nath Kemchug, busy with rags and oil.

I took great heart from this small exchange. I have said many times that most of the folk of Kregen did not get on with Rapas. But one became accustomed to their smell after a time. Not all were evil. No more than any other of the races of Kregen — excepting Katakis and some others, who were damned of the devil and doomed in all men’s eyes.

Now a Chulik and a Fristle were concerned for the life of a Rapa.

As I say, that heartened me.

We retraced our steps in the dust to the cross-passage and ventured along it in semi-darkness.

Pompino said to me: “I suppose that damned great gash in your face will heal up with uncanny speed, as always?”

I grunted something. Pompino was not aware that I’d bathed in the Sacred Pool of Baptism in far Aphrasöe and this gave me seemingly miraculous healing abilities. There was so much Pompino did not know of me, and I was his comrade, a fellow kregoinye. Well, the dark glass holds the future, as they say. Now, as we shuffled on through the dusty corridors, I felt the weight of Kregen pressing down on me.

The walls and ceiling floated echoes down oddly from up ahead. Pompino and Jespar were yammering away, and although they spoke in fierce staccato whispers, the sounds bounced off the stone and reached us at the tail. They might, also, reach other ears, set each side of heads filled with plots for our destruction. There was no doubt we had made a lot of noise. Now ordinary noise in a castle can fade and attenuate from one ward to another, muffled by thick walls and lost. A fight can bring the guards arunning, as all of us here knew. That damned leem... He must have been a precious part of the Leem Lover’s paraphernalia, for the slinking lean forms of leems are not easily come by — alive in good condition.

So, we expected company at any moment.

Nath Kemchug’s ministrations on his spear were almost finished. He carried oil flask and rags like any warrior to keep his armory clean, and again like any warrior wasn’t too choosy whose wall he knocked over to get some brick dust. Of spittle we usually had a plentiful supply, except when our mouths dried in the fear and clangor of combat, and then we were not particularly thinking about cleaning blood off our weapons — quite the reverse.

But with Pompino’s mercenary Chulik the cleaning of spear took precedence over all of his other weaponry. There was obsession in this. Chuliks, trained from birth to handle any weapons, continue to perplex and baffle me, and while they could handle — and clean — any weapon, Nath Kemchug remained obsessed with his spear. As we were making so much noise, I did not hesitate to call across to him over Rondas’s drooping shoulder.

“I give you thanks, Nath Kemchug, for the use of your spear. The weapon served well.”

He was down at the butt end, meticulously picking away at the junction of wood and iron, removing all traces of the leem’s blood. He did not look up as he spoke in his apparently surly Chulik way.

“You fought well. In the name of Father Chalkush of the Iron Brand, I give you the jikai for that, Jak Leemsjid.”

Rondas, sagging in my grip, let out a gurgling groan of a laugh at that. Surly, Chuliks appear to the world; I was beginning to believe that my original estimate of them, founded as it was upon ignorance and prejudice, might be more in need of rethinking than I supposed. And, the same estimate applied to Rapas, and to Fristles. Truly, the more I spent my life on Kregen and learned of the ways of that ferocious and mysterious world, the more I understood how little I really knew!

Men are men and women are women, and that is the beginning and end of the mystery.

Pompino’s voice floated up. He sounded absolutely revolted at what he had just heard. He sounded disgusted.

“What, tump! Down
there
!”

“Aye, master. It seems to be the only way through.”

Another of those uncannily appearing blocks of masonry walled off the passageway ahead. If we went back we’d only run into the other block, or be forced to try the passage where Rondas took his wound.

At the side of the block the dark round opening of a hole promised fearful terrors. The smell was bad enough; there was no leem stink mixed with it as far as we could sniff.

“By Horato the Potent! This expedition is not turning out as I expected!”

“Strom Murgon is a very clever man, master—”

Pompino turned to look down, and he turned and looked very slowly and with great meaning. Now by this time we’d all taken off our zhantil masks — if I’d been wearing mine when I fought the leem I wondered how little protection it would have afforded my face against those horrific claws — so that Pompino’s haughty Khibil face could fully express the depth of his feelings. He stared at the little tump.

“And are you then suggesting that I am not?”

Jespar quaked.

“No, master! Of course not—”

For a reason not at all obscure I said: “Jespar is too wise in the ways of this world to make elementary mistakes, apart from being made slave and then of going with us. I think he should be listened to—”

“But, Jak, down there!”

Cap’n Murkizon boomed out: “Show us another way, horter Pompino, and we will gladly follow it.”