Warlord of Antares (4 page)

Little more than nothing would still be nothing.

“Yes,” sighed that nasal voice. “There is your task, Dray Prescot, and yet—”

“Hold it, hold it,” I interrupted, not recking of the damned power of the Star Lords. “I know all about that lot. Why didn’t you warn me of them? You said the Shanks were over in Mehzta. Yet they are here off the coast of Pandahem and likely to—”

Instead of cutting me off peremptorily with cutting sarcasm, as they would probably have done in the old days, they interrupted with: “The Shanks are in Mehzta. The fight sways back and forth. These are Shtarkins, along with Shkanes. Their use of vollers is recent.”

“That doesn’t alter the fact you should have told me.”

A spark of their old arrogance spurted.

“We are not answerable to you, Dray Prescot. You answer to us!”

“Yes and no,” I said, and heard myself speaking, and I was in a fair old state, I can tell you. This was quite unlike normal dealings with the Star Lords, unknown arbiters of life and death. I realized I was holding the glass of light yellow with a grip that would fracture the globe if I didn’t manage to control myself.

The Star Lords went on to apprise me of the details of the vollers run by the Shanks, details that I shall pass along when they become relevant, and something of what they said calmed me down. All the same, I felt that the bargain I fancied we had patched up between us had been seriously endangered, and I had been betrayed.

“Not so, onker. You have had time to deal with your problems, there is time yet to go. We shall tell you when that time comes, never fear.”

I did not slang them. I wanted to know why what had happened to me since being snatched up from the collapsing palace, leaving Seg, and arriving here, had occurred. The details seemed to me so bizarre as to warrant an explanation that, in all probability, I would not understand.

The voice gained an edge as it answered.

“You need not know why. We have many responsibilities and in Kregen we—” and here when I interrupted, not understanding, the voice snapped: “The easiest concept for you to grasp is melting pot. Yes. We are almost sure your brains can understand that.”

I wasn’t sure: I didn’t say so.

“A dead numim, did you say?”

“As a doornail, poor devil.”

This was followed by a long silence.

After a space I said: “I did see, earlier, the green presence of Ahrinye—”

“Silence, onker!”

Well, if the young and arrogantly energetic Ahrinye was trying a scheme on against the other Star Lords, he might well be successful if their powers really were fading. And young? Maybe he was a million or so years less in age.

Presently the voice — and I thought it was by a shade different from the first — said: “Our responsibilities sometimes demand assistance.”

Almost, almost I blurted out: “Call on me, any time.” But I managed to keep the black bile down.

The Star Lord went on: “If we so will it, you will be called on to serve in the bacra area—”

“Bacra area?”

“Where you were, fambly.”

That did not mean anything to me.

“But we deem you to be more useful following the course we have set out—”

“A course I initiated before you suggested it, Star Lords! I don’t forget that.”

A silence.

Typical of the Everoinye, they loftily ignored that point. It was, in truth, a petty point, and indicating my own stupid self-esteem. They indicated they were unhappy at the way I risked my neck for purposes other than theirs. They’d twice now hoicked me up out of it when I’d tried to pull first Seg and young Ortyg, then Loriman, out of danger. But, and I felt a sudden coolness down my spine at this, they told me a thing I should have realized.

“We understand you to be reckless and a daredevil and an onker of onkers, Dray Prescot. We suppose you to continue thus. Maybe, one day, we shall not require you, and your usefulness to us will be at an end.”

“Come the day!” I bellowed up. “Come the day!”

“You forget—”

“I don’t forget! Those two times are the only times you’ve lifted a finger to help me. You’ve never worried yourselves over my skin. I’d have been dead a thousand times by now for all you care.”

The silence this time seemed to be charged with that insufferable pressure that clamps down just before a thunderstorm.

“We are sending you back now, Dray Prescot, to rejoin your comrades.”

“I see. Tell me. All this trudging about mazes and underground corridors. Can you give me something to help me see a trifle better in the dark? Is that beyond your powers?”

“Not at all. A trifle.”

“Well?”

“You were ever ungracious in your ways.”

“I’m gracious to those who are polite to me.”

Let them suck on that one, the high and mighty bunch of onkers!

From the white rectangle hanging blankly on the wall a shaft of pure white light hit me in the face so that I blinked, and cursed, and flung up a hand. If this was their idea of a joke it hurt.

This might not be a joke. This might be a new form of punishment for insubordination.

“Remember your tasks, Dray Prescot. You have reunited Vallia. Now your task is to unite Paz—”

“That’s easier said than done, despite all our grand talk. The task is greater than I imagined.”

“Of course.”

I fumed away and saw I’d get no farther. At least, I’d given the Star Lords a piece of my mind, not that they needed much in the way of extra brains. Maybe their powers were fading; they were still so immeasurably stronger than any other force I knew of on Kregen, they remained superhuman and all-powerful.

The transition rustled in on wings of blueness and I was up and away again, like a scarecrow blown headlong in a gale. Just as I went I reflected bitterly that they’d not given me a magic torch or something to light up the darkness, the stingy taskmasters.

Whirling around I went thump down on my feet. Rock scraped underfoot and the orange flare of torches burned into my eyes. The passage was rough hewn and the light shone in brilliantly from the corner. A man stepped around the edge of stone into view.

“Hai, my old dom. I knew you’d be around here somewhere.”

Chapter four

Horrors in the Coup Blag

Our greetings were necessarily brief, for, as Seg said: “There’s an unfriendly monster fellow with a horrendous set of gnashers chasing us. I’ve shafted two of his eyes; but we need to find a little space to tackle him properly.”

Nath the Impenitent, bulking hugely in the passage, roared on half-dragging the suddenly unimposing form of Kov Loriman the Hunter.

The Hunting Kov was a husk of his former self. Gone were the bluster and arrogance. Gone was his imperious look. He appeared shrunken. Since his lady had been slain and swallowed up in the earth, he had scarcely moved under his own volition.

“Hai, Jak,” rasped out Nath the Impenitent, fiery-faced, spiky with contained anger. “We must get on. The beast is snapping at my heels.”

There was no time or need for me to argue.

If these two said run, then I’d run. If Seg, who is the finest bowman in two worlds, had shafted the beast twice, and the thing still lived, then running was clearly and eminently the most sensible course of action.

Nath held up a torch in his left hand. His right dragged on Loriman. Seg held a torch in his left hand, and his right grasped his bow with the arrow nocked in that old and cunning bowman’s fashion.

I wondered why Seg was doing it cack-handed; there was no time to ask now as we ran on along the corridor. The floor caught at our feet, rough-hewn as it was. The light glanced weirdly from the jagged walls and roof. The place held a musty stink as of last week’s socks left and forgotten in the laundry basket.

Before we’d reached the next corner the beast rounded his corner and rumbled along the corridor after us.

I cast a look back.

Nasty. No doubt of that. And the loss of two of his four eyes made his temper even worse. He looked to be all spine and scale, with grasping forelimbs, claws and, as Seg had said, a jawful of gnashers. Nasty, right enough. We ran on.

The chamber into which we pelted around the next bend lofted high and vasty into purple mistiness where the flare of our torches merely touched the edges of mystery with orange. There appeared little comfort for wandering adventurers here.

“This’ll do,” said Seg, full of confidence.

Most unkindly, I said: “P’raps a flat-trajectory compound reflex might—”

“Oho!” burst out Seg. “You’re a backstabber too, are you?”

He thrust the torch at me, transferred the great Lohvian longbow into his left fist and took up the nocked arrow into those supremely capable archer’s fingers of his. We could hear the beast roar from the tunnel. Our torches threw a little light and I blinked, for their radiance held an odd glow to me now, as I paused in the chamber. The light glinted on scale and spine and on two fiery eyes.

Seg loosed.

A watcher would say he blurred into action; the loosing of the two shafts was so swift, the second following the first so rapidly, that the whole transaction was over in a twinkling, the two arrows flying almost before Seg moved.

“Well,” said Nath the Impenitent. “I shan’t have to run dragging this damned lord about, now. I thank you for that, Seg the Horkandur.”

Seg smiled and then looked at me.

“Little flat bows,” he said. Then he shoved that superb Lohvian longbow up on his shoulder and whipped out his knife.

As I went over with him to help dig out his four arrows, Seg said over his shoulder: “Not until we meet the next horror, Nath.”

The first two arrows had merely destroyed the eyes. The second pair had penetrated deeply into the brain. I left those two to Seg.

Truth to tell, as I believe I have struggled to explain, the death of wild animals, even monsters intent on devouring me, is always a saddening and chastening experience.

Nath the Impenitent let rip with his grunting snort of a laugh when we rejoined him.

“The next horror is likely to be seriously conulted by you mad pair.”

Conulted, as I may have mentioned, means to receive a nasty shock, a body blow, and I found its usage, and particularly by a rough tough customer like Nath, in these surroundings, decidedly charming.

Also, and this pleased me immensely, Nath with his ingrown hatred and contempt for lords and nobles, had quite grown to accept Seg and me as companions.

“Oh, aye,” said Seg in his raffish offhand way. “We’ll conult a few more of the confounded creepy crawlies down here yet. But with half the maze vanished away I fancy it won’t be long before we’re out of it altogether.”

The way Seg easily accepted the heights — or depths — of sorcery involved here did not amaze me. His own fey nature told him things that more lumpen mortals could never understand. With the death of the Witch of Loh’s hermaphrodite child, the uhu Phunik, its ethereal constructions had vanished. Opulent underground chambers, palaces of wonder, had not simply whiffed away with Phunik’s death. Oh, no. There had been a gargantuan upheaval as the fabric of the normal universe resumed its shape and the distortions of magical art withdrew.

In other words, the whole lot fell down in a hell of a smother.

Most of the people in the party who had ventured down into the maze of the Coup Blag had got away, scrambling up the slippery slope of detritus to emerge into the lights of the Suns of Scorpio.

Kov Loriman, shattered by the death of his lady Hebe, existing now like a man drugged or in a trance, had been the cause of Seg’s, Nath’s and my enforced further entrapment in the maze of the Coup Blag.

By this time, as was clearly apparent, old Nath the Impenitent recognized he was lumbered with Kov Loriman. Nath was conscious of his insular Vallian blood, and of the fact that the lords of the land cared nothing for him, and this famous Hunting Kov was not even Vallian, he was from Yumapan in the west of the island of Pandahem. Well, Nath would be saying to himself, they might be stumbling about in a damned hole in the ground in Pandahem, he’d drag this haughty noble out of it by the scruff of the neck and then pitch him over onto his nose. This, I fancied, would also be the reading Seg would give to the situation.

The rocky corridor turned twice upon itself and then led into a room where some light seeped in from a webwork of cracks in the ceiling.

“If that lot’s due to fall down—” began Nath, ominously.

“—we’ll depart with the utmost urgency,” finished Seg, cheerfully.

Loriman slumped to the stone floor with a thump. His head hung down so that his armored shoulders peaked. He’d lost his helmet. Looking at this once blustery, damn-you-to-hell fellow, I experienced a sudden, quick, quite surprising stab of pity.

Mind you, if Delia was — well, never mind that.

“Two exits,” sang out Seg. “D’you have a fancy?”

“They both look the same,” observed Nath.

“Toss a blade,” I said.

Now the meaning of a couple of odd looks Nath had given me when he’d met up with me again revealed themselves.

“Need to stand from under if you toss up that great bar of iron, Jak.”

He’d seen me use the Krozair longsword in action; now I realized he’d seen me step out with the old scarlet breechclout and with the longsword cocked up and, of course, all the legends and tales of Dray Prescot would have come into his mind. That was how Dray Prescot, the Emperor of Vallia, whirled about the world, righting wrongs, rescuing both princesses and tavern girls from danger, slaying dire monsters and putting Vallia back together again and recreating the empire as a place where folk could live happily in safety.

There would be absolutely no connection in his head. I was Jak the Bogandur, admittedly a lesser noble of some kind; but a decent enough fellow for a lord, as was our comrade Seg the Horkandur. The Emperor of Vallia was altogether another fellow, a rogue and cramph Nath detested wholeheartedly.

He’d already said he disbelieved the tales about Dray Prescot. Well, that made two of us.

Once we were out of this maze I’d have to make the attempt to put the record straight. Nath had been court-martialed, and I had promised myself that I’d have that lot sorted, too. The main priorities now were getting out of the Coup Blag, of finding our Vallian aerial fleet, and of going and bashing the fliers of those Opaz-forsaken Shanks.