Masks of Scorpio (17 page)

Now, it seemed, we had a fresh task set to our hands.

“Jak—” began Pompino.

I turned to look at my comrade. I turned slowly.

I’d taken the name of Jak for perfectly obvious reasons — reasons I have explained and that are easily understood. But, sometimes, it irked me, this answering to another name. My name is plain Dray Prescot.

I may be the Lord of Strombor and a Krozair of Zy, which privileges and responsibilities I take seriously.

I was also Emperor of Vallia, King of Djanduin, Strom of Valka, a whole pretty kite-tail of titles and folderols. But, all the same...

“Yes?”

“Once again the Gdoinye did not call you Jak. He would know that you are now Jak Leemsjid.”

“Of course he’d know, the cunning, onkerish—”

“Jak!”

Instinctively, Pompino glanced up. No doubt he expected lightning to blast down for my impiety.

Pompino dealt with the Star Lords on the basis that they were supernal gods, demanding and worthy of obedience. He was privileged to serve them. And they’d rewarded him. Their machinations had brought the gold into his fists, gold with which he’d bought his fancy fleet of ships.

As far as I knew, they’d not put a single copper ob my way.

“Jak — why does the Gdoinye call you by the name of the Emperor of Vallia, a name which you adopted as a ruse long ago, when he knows the truth?”

I did not pluck my lower lip; I did not scratch my head. I did not narrow my eyes on my comrade. Had I done all those things they would have been perfectly proper.

“Well, Pompino...” I began. Then, as Seg Segutorio would have said in his fine free way, I also said:

“...My old dom. It’s like this.”

And then I stopped.

No. No, I wouldn’t shatter our relationship. As I had surmised earlier, if I told Pompino the truth, he’d never regard me in the same comradely way again. How could he? If I was an emperor, then he’d have to start treating me like an emperor, like one of the lordly beings of Kregen, and I detested that. I valued Pompino. Perhaps, when the situation was clearer, he might know, and then we would work out a modus vivendi. For now — no. No, I couldn’t tell him the truth.

“Well, Jak Leemsjid?”

Now we had talked together of our experiences beforetime with the Star Lords. I’d been circumspect with Pompino, anticipating he had not penetrated to the Star Lords’ hugely vaulted chamber of scarlet, seen the world spread out below, ridden in one of their hissing chairs, understood just a trifle of their plans. So he knew somewhat of my history regarding the Everoinye.

I said: “Must be because that was the first name they knew me by. They don’t have the sense to get up to date.”

“They know everything!”

“So they must forget a lot, mustn’t they?”

“That, I cannot believe.”

It sounded lame, even to me.

I tried again.

“The Everoinye were once people as we are. I am sure they still possess a sense of humor. It may be vestigial. I think they amuse themselves by thus dubbing a poor wight like me with the name of the emperor of Vallia—”

“A most puissant and terrible man!”

“Oh, aye.”

“He was dreadfully severe on the slavers in Vallia. His name is not one lightly to be conjured with. If ever you venture up into Vallia, Jak, you had best beware.”

I said, and I blurted it out before my stupid babbling tongue could be halted: “One day, Pompino, I look forward to the time when you and I go in friendship to Vallia.”

His bushy, foxy eyebrows rose.

“Oh?”

I blustered it out.

“Surely. There must be fine pickings there.”

And I laughed, forcing myself, as a free-roving reiver and paktun would laugh at the thought of loot.

Pompino, severely, said, “If you try any tricks in Vallia these days, the emperor will put you down, cut off your head, dangle you over the walls of his stupendous deren in Vondium — Jak, Jak! Think on!”

“Well, there’s a damned army forming in Port Marsilus, paid by gold from somewhere — gold that was once in our possession. When that army sails for Vallia, the story might be different.”

“You would join that army against Vallia?”

“Join it?” I pretended to ponder. Then: “Aye, Pompino! I’d join it. Then I would sabotage it and destroy it and scatter it to the winds. Why, then, man, I’d go up to this high and mighty Dray Prescot, Emperor of Vallia, and stare him in the face, and demand a fitting recompense for saving his empire for him!”

And Pompino guffawed at the conceit.

He sobered. “If we are to be snatched up by the Scorpion of the Everoinye then I must warn Cap’n Murkizon and the others. They will have to make their way back to the ship.”

“Aye.”

Pompino nodded and walked off, moving briskly, going among the trees toward the camp.

I stood for a moment, all my thoughts of Dayra making me feel the miserable stupid fool I really was, that fool, that onker, that I was dubbed by the Gdoinye.

As I stood there, the blue radiance grew about me.

The coldness of an arctic wind cut through every fiber of my body, the silence of a rushing wind drowned thought. The world fell away. I saw above me, towering and enormous, the gigantic blue outlines of the Scorpion, immense, awful, and then I toppled away into the blue radiance of the Star Lords’ commands.

Sometimes the Star Lords procrastinated unbearably in their casual dumping of me down into action.

Often and often I’d find myself in some desperate situation, quite without a clue, unable instantly to decide exactly what the Everoinye were demanding of me. They acted like this, I was more than half convinced, not out of malice but out of sheer indifference.

This time there was no misunderstanding.

Normally the Star Lords catapulted me into danger naked, unarmed, and half-bedazzled from the effects of the blue radiance, the baleful form of the gigantic Scorpion and the stomach-unsettling topsy-turvy fall through nothingness.

This time I felt limber, alert, ready for what might befall.

I needed to be.

By Zair, I needed to be!

I was, as usual, naked and unarmed.

Still the Everoinye must have sensed the lessening of regard for them that would have been engendered had they provided me with a spear, a helmet, a shield. They summoned, I went and did.

But — this time — there was something new.

In the rough canvas bag dangling on its cord over my shoulder snugged a hard, metallic object.

Without thinking twice — in all the uproar that surrounded me — I drew out the golden zhantil mask and snapped the straps about my head. I glared out through the eyeholes.

The scene was cut straight from nightmare.

The cavern lofted into purple shadows, bruised and swollen. Torchlights fluttered against that encompassing presence. The leering silver image of the Leem lowered over all, high against the far wall, silver glints striking and sparking from its body.

The iron cage stood empty. The door opened onto a stone ledge. On this ledge two acolytes of Lem the Silver Leem drew on the eager form of a little girl clad in a white dress.

Candy juice smeared her chin.

She was laughing.

Below, to the side, the altar crouched. Dark, misshapen, stained, it humped a blot of blackness against the torchlights.

The worshipers, all wearing their silver masks, swayed and gyrated, caught up in the expectations of the moment. The butcher-priests stood beside the altar. Their assistants held the implements of their trade upon cushions. The air stifled.

And the stink was diabolical.

I was one man, alone, naked and unarmed.

The worshipers mustered upward of a hundred. The priests and their assistants and acolytes another thirty or so.

Even as I started forward I was saying to myself but so that the damned Star Lords — wherever they were! — might hear: “Right, Star Lords. You’ve dropped me into a real beauty this time! By Vox! What a mess!”

A knee in the back of a fellow who was clutching at the woman next to him, ready for the bloodletting to follow, sent him toppling. Before he fell the thraxter in the scabbard at his waist was gripped in my fist.

I hit the next fellow a nasty slash along the neck and swiveled immediately to hack down his companion.

Run — run! Straight for the altar and the cage and the girl sacrifice! Run as I’d never run before — get into them, as Cap’n Murkizon would roar: “Hit ’em, knock ’em down, tromple all over ’em!”

The pandemonium began as I legged it, spreading from my hurtling body as the ripples spread from the thrusting prow of a swifter of the Eye of the World.

People tried to stop me.

They were cut down as the reaper cuts corn.

They saw the blazing gold of the zhantil mask.

Shocked cries burst out.

“The Golden Zhantil masks! Kill him! Kill!”

At least the Star Lords had had the sense to dump me down at the back of this unholy crew. They’d not seen me arrive, or don the mask. Now they saw a fleeting naked figure roaring along, cutting left and right, lopping heads, disemboweling, amputating limbs, the glinting glory of the zhantil mask ferocious upon them.

They crushed in to prevent my onward movement and to slay me.

Swords whipped up. Men and women screamed and gesticulated and tried to get at me.

I did not hang about.

The thraxter snapped off clean.

I hit a corpulent bastard over the head with the hilt and took his sword and degutted his crony at his side.

The next two went down, the next reeled away with his face reflecting the effects of a foot in the guts, and I roared on.

It was all a blur, of course, a blur of action and movement, of the silver twinkle of swords and the quick spurt of dark red blood. Even then I don’t believe I thought that I would never surface from this dank spot. There was no time for coherent thought. As each fresh opponent or pairs or threes or fours of opponents presented themselves they had to be taken on their merits. What the floor looked like in the wake of that intemperate bloody bashing onslaught I hesitate to contemplate.

I do recall that one thought hit me with scarlet intensity.

Where the hell was Pompino in all this frantic bedlam?

Had the Star Lords fouled up again?

Nobody of this ripe bunch possessed a bow, or, at least, no one shot at me.

One fellow hurled a stux and the javelin flew straight.

I took it out of the air with my left hand. I did not return it whence it came, a favorite trick of the Krozairs. Instead I lobbed it at the Chief Priest in his brown and silver robes and his ornate mask, the butcher knife in his hands. It sheared through his neck, half-severing it. I was disappointed his head did not fall off.

The Brown and Silver at his side jumped away, flinging up his hands in horror. But he didn’t drop his own cunning little instrument of torture.

In the next half-dozen heartbeats I was past the chained-off area separating the main hall from the preserve of the priests. Here the incense stank away, stiflingly.

There was time — just — to throw two of the torches at the brown draperies, and then I leaped for the man who was now turned away from the fallen body of his chief. The other acolytes ran. I hit the second in command over the head — not too hard — hurdled him and scooped up the girl.

Two hard and unmerciful blows disposed of her guards.

The second-in-command staggered. I put the girl down — of course she was crying now — and said: “It is all right. Stand still.”

I put an inch and a half of the thraxter into the second-in-command’s guts and said: “Where is the way out?”

The repulsive idiot must have imagined I was setting up a bargain with him, making a compact.

“Behind the drapes there,” he babbled. The sword must have been tickling him up. He wriggled like an insect on a pin. He pointed painfully. “There.”

I finished him — and he still clutched the shiny instrument he would have used to put this girl child to so much pain — snatched up the sacrifice, and hared for the drapes.

Another stux hit the wall beyond as I wrenched the panel open.

We bundled through into dimness relieved by mineral-oil lamps at intervals. The air smelled stale and musty and yet clean by comparison with the stinks in that chamber of abominations. The door snapped shut. There seemed no way of bolting or barring it, so I just ran full tilt up the corridor.

The girl sacrifice, following the usual habits of girl sacrifices rescued against their wills, was yelling her head off and banging her heels against me.

The corridor opened into a square stone-cut chamber.

The congregation would be after me like a pack of leems.

The Chulik in the chamber, clad in leather armor with brown and silver flourishes, seeing me, immediately drew his sword and dropped into the on guard. He was ready for a pleasant foining match before he dispatched me.

The point of my flung thraxter took him in the throat. The blade punched on, ripping tendons and throat and all to smash in a welter of blood.

I ran on without stopping, scooped his sword up, went racing on along the far corridor.

Howls from back down the passage echoed from the stone walls. The helter-skelter rush and hammer of feet roared after me. I fled on, carrying my cargo in her white dress as carefully as I could. Blood spattered the dress from the splashes and stains covering me. She was blubbering away now, a fist stuffed into her mouth and her nose all running and I felt for her, I felt for her. But that mob of hyenas baying after us — if hyenas bay — had to be outdistanced before we could stop. Outdistanced — for I was not sanguine of slaying them all, much though that would have cleansed the world of Kregen.

Steps hewn from the rock led up.

A few lanterns glowed to point out the broken treads and the darkly greasy patches where water seeped.

The smell of the earth, dank and rich and sweet, began to oust the charnel-house stench of the chamber of worship and sacrifice with its unholy freight of incense and blood.