A voice whispered in, like a dagger.
“You swore, Dray Prescot, there was a compact between us.”
By three things I knew this was not the voice of Ahrinye. First: The blueness tinged with a deep crimson, and there was no sign of the acid green associated with Ahrinye. Second: The voice was not his, although superhuman and remote, not drilling in my head like a white-hot auger. And, third: I had no compact with him, and had at best a ramshackle kind of agreement with the Everoinye themselves.
So I said, “I hear you, Star Lords. Have I not done your bidding well and faithfully? And I know you have no thought or care for humankind, so that anything I might say will not move you.”
Into the rushing wind swirling about me seeped that macabre silence and stillness found in the eye of a storm. The blueness of the Scorpion faded as the pulsating crimson brightened. I looked in vain for the first glimmerings of friendly yellow. The voice husked now, as though speaking in my ear, and yet I knew I sat on a bed in a dusty apple-smelling room in Orlan Mahmud’s villa. All around me the crimson stretched, and gradually it coalesced beneath me and broadened and lifted above into a hollow vault.
“You have obeyed, Dray Prescot, although we know your resentment of us.”
I marveled. These beings, although once human, were no longer a part of the human race. How could they be? I did not know. I was confused.
“What do you want of me now? I have work to do—”
“We released you for your work in Vallia. Now you will work for us in Hyrklana, as you did once before, just the other day. And your work here is goodly in our eyes.”
I just didn’t believe this.
“Goodly — my work? You mock me, Star Lords!”
“Mockery is for fools. No doubt that is why you mock others so much.”
I clenched my fists. I was no longer sitting on the bed, I was standing on a hard crimson floor and the vault above blazed with white stars through the crimson curve. I stared, sick.
“What—”
“Listen! You will be sent to where you wish to go. In this thing our wishes coincide. Also, a bundle will go with you, for it grows heavy in the transubstantiated state. It seems to us, Dray Prescot, that you are not as other men. You are reckless, foolish, headstrong and cunning. Also, you have striven to resist us. As a Kregoinye, one who serves us on Kregen, you have done well despite yourself. Continue to do well.”
I held myself in check. If I angered the Everoinye I could be back on Earth instantly, stranded on the world of my birth.
Yet I could not hold back: “I do not admit to being a Kregoinye—”
“Yet you are.”
The hardness of the crimson floor seemed to me to be no illusion. A soft wind blew. I thought I could see distant shapes, insubstantial, gossamer, floating at the extremity of vision. I appeared to be standing on the floor of an impossible vast hall, vaulted with star-pierced crimson. Somewhere there was music. I breathed deeply. Was that a face, a face of enormous size, peering down at me? Were those eyes, as large as suns, shooting forth crimson light within the crimson immensity? I shut my own eyes, dazzled.
I felt the coldness of a damp wind on my naked skin and the earthly sough of tree branches stirred by wind. I opened my eyes and I was standing at the edge of a wood, dark in the light of two of Kregen’s lesser moons hurtling past low above. I looked about. The breeze blew damp and chill. The grass was wet. The trees sighed, black masses flogging in the coming gale, and I sucked in a breath of air vastly different from the last lungful I had breathed in that supernal chamber.
My foot kicked a solid bundle, and I looked down. Wrapped in an old gray blanket, the bundle looked — odd. I bent and undid the rope knots and threw the blanket back. I stared.
That gray blanket reeked with a repellent odor of fish.
Inside, a short scarlet cape showed the typical thin and elegant gold embroidery of Valka. I lifted it aside to reveal a rapier and main gauche of fine Vallian manufacture. There was a first-class thraxter that had been taken at the Battle of Jholaix. I touched the old scarlet breechclout and fingered the broad lesten-hide belt with the dulled silver buckle. The breast and back gleamed with the luster of oiled armor, their chasings and embossings superb examples of the armorer-decorator’s art. The helmet was really a plain steel cap with a rim of trimmed ling fur and a flaunting tuft of scarlet feathers I remembered I’d not cared for but had worn to show my position to my men in battle.
No surprise at all that the very first item I picked up, holding in my fists, and staring deeply, was that special sword Naghan the Gnat and I had designed and forged and built in the armory of Esser Rarioch, in Valka. That sword was as good a copy as we could contrive of the superlative Krozair longsword.
Well!
Yes, I knew this bundle of clothing and weapons. I’d last seen these swords, this armor, when I’d defied the Star Lords and been thrown back to Earth for twenty-one years. They had tried to bribe me then by hurling me down into action for them with my gear still intact. Usually — always — I was naked and unarmed. Slowly, I picked up the gear, looking at it, feeling it, expecting it to evaporate into moonshine as the pseudo-weapons from the Moder had done. But the metal felt hard and ridged under my fingers, the scarlet breechclout snugged neatly and the plain lesten-hide belt cinched tightly with the silver buckle.
I tore out half the flaunting scarlet feather from the steel cap and I hoped, as I donned the armor, that it would be taken as a favor of the ruby drang. For I was still in Hyrklana, and those lights beyond the curve of the wood must be the Castle of Afferatu.
With the rain-laden wind blustering about my ears, head down, I started off to rescue a princess from a guarded tower.
At the Castle of Afferatu
I should really have said to rescue a princess from a dragon-guarded tower. For her jailers had four captive risslacas, dinosaurs of ferocious aspect, chained up at the inner and outer gates. The walls towered. The arrow slits were narrow and deep. The moat was brimming and the drawbridge was up.
“No hope,” said Dogon the Lansetter as we stood under a tree that dripped water on our heads and shoulders and down our necks.
The local rebels were very disheartened, dispirited, seeing nothing but failure ahead after their last failure. They’d been easy enough to find and identify from the information Orlan Mahmud had given me. We skulked in the woods and spied on the castle and we might as well have been on the first of Kregen’s seven moons, the Maiden with the Many Smiles. There were perhaps twenty-five of us — I say perhaps, for I wouldn’t care to try half of them in action. Men and women, boys and girls, both diff and apim, they looked up apathetically as Dogon the Lansetter and I trailed into the camp. Everything was sodden. There were no tents. And the waterproofs were wet inside and out. As for a fire — ha!
“There has to be a way to get in, to rescue the princess, and get out with all of us alive.” I spoke commandingly.
A gap-toothed rascal looked across and unwedged his jaws from a cold ponsho chop. His gappy teeth showed as he spoke.
“We don’t know you. You quote names at us — I say you are a damned spy come to trap us all without trouble.”
“Aye!” shouted an apim with carroty hair and a spotty face.
The four Fristle fifis huddled under a blanket looked out wide-eyed. Pretty, they surely were. But now, they were wet...
“Which one of you organized Frandu the Franch?” At this there were squeals and giggling; then there were certain searching questions for me to answer. One of the fifis admitted to detaining Frandu, but: “Was no good. He didn’t part with his keys.”
“And we lost Naghan the Finger, and Ortyg the Lame and Hernon the Kramdu, all of them killed dead,” said Dogon. He was a bulky fellow whose belt circumscribed bulges, but he was useful with an axe. He wore an iron cap. Most of the others had some kind of body armor, mostly leather, and an assortment of weapons. I refused to let my hope sink or to allow myself to become disheartened. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d ventured into dark and dragon-infested towers to rescue princesses, now would it? But I would prefer company on this occasion.
“By Harg! If only this rain would stop!” growled gap-tooth. He was not Gap-tooth Jimstye, for which I was grateful, but his mistrust of me, while perfectly natural, could have been awkward.
“We wait until tomorrow night,” said Dogon.
I was fed up with waiting. I said so.
“Tomorrow we expect more men.”
Gap-tooth cackled. “You could have more than a hundred men and you’d never bust in there. The castle’s impregnated.”
A girl with long fair hair started laughing. One or two others joined in. Gap-tooth glared about, not comprehending.
Then a blasted squall drove stinging rain onto us all and drenched us all over again. As I say, not a happy camp and not an auspicious start for a venture that should topple thrones.
The root words for impregnable and impregnated are not the same in Kregish either, but the minuscule jest remained, as if it were hovering in the rain-sodden air. I was still mentally dizzy from the encounter with the Everoinye. Superhuman beings of awesome power living God-alone knew where — yes, I feel I was entitled to be a little punch-drunk. There was no time for self-pity.
Circumspection marked Orlan Mahmud’s dealings with people of this stamp, and I’d introduced myself to them as coming from him in his cover name of Klanak the Tresh. Tresh means flag, and Klanak is the name of a mythical hero of Hyrklana, so that Orlan was in effect saying, rise up and follow the flag of your greater past.
No, I could not wait around for this kind of rebellion. The rain pitter-pattered among the leaves and splashed among the huddled forms in their blankets. I looked hard at Dogon.
“What is the name of the guard commander tonight?”
“Now, by the belly and brains of Beng Brandaj, how am I supposed to know that?”
“Rebels have to know things like that.”
Eventually, one of the Fristle fifis, not the one who had enticed Frandu, said it would probably be that lecherous Khibil devil with the big sword, Podar, who was a dwa-Hikdar now. Or, she added, her fur wet and bedraggled, or it might not be, and instead that passionate Fristle, Follando the Eye — and what an eye! — would have the Gate.
“If there are three guards in rotation, who has the third?”
“There is a Brokelsh called Ortyg the Bristle, and a Rapa called Rordnon the Andamak. They are ord-Deldars.”
I did not chew my lip, for that would convey my own complete indecision. But I would not delay. They had no saddle animals, so I had to walk off in the rain to rescue the princess.
“Remberee!” they called. “We will try to rescue you from the dungeons only if—” I didn’t bother to hang about to hear their stipulations.
Now the scarlet cloak and the armor I carried were not those of Hyrklana. A rapier and main gauche might be excused a dandyish officer who wished to be in fashion. The longsword was scabbarded down my back. There is a knack to drawing a blade from that position. But my equipment was clearly military and I was not inclined to toss it away and don a gray slave breechclout. For one thing, guarding a princess with your head forfeit if she escapes is vastly different from standing guard in a busy villa or palace; slaves would not be so free to move around in the Castle of Afferatu. I slogged on in the rain.
No handy soldier of the garrison popped up to be popped into the bag and his uniform donned. No one showed at all as I stood on the bank of the moat and helloed across toward the gatehouse.
The drawbridge lifted up, its bronze spikes very nasty. Lights shone from arrow slits. Everything looked gray and black and wet around those slits of light. The rain trickled down my neck. Among the vaguely discerned clumps of towers there was no telling which was the Jasmine Tower. As far as I could tell, I might have yelled my head off into Cottmer’s Caverns for all the notice anyone took of me. There was no point in waiting further. The water of the moat rippled and danced in the slices of yellow light falling from the arrow slits. The rain pranced. It was all very wet indeed.
Only a few strokes took me across the moat. The water was not overly cold, for we were in Hyrklana. As for my weapons, during the time they had been in the care of the Star Lords they had been liberally coated with grease. Removing that protective covering from the hilts had been a thoroughly painstaking task. I hauled myself out under the rearing gray walls, running water between the stones, and unwound the rope I’d demanded and obtained from those miserable rebels. It was as slick as a buttered pole at a fair, so the knots would be vital. I looked up.
The rope would never reach the top of the wall. I crabbed along until I was below a slit in a tower. The first cast missed, the bronze hook clanging back with what sounded like an infernal din. No one heard. Or, hearing, took any notice. I cast again.
The hook lodged in the slit. Hand over hand, up I went.
Gaining the slit, I edged in sideways and braced myself against the smoother stone facings. Now for the tricky bit. The next upward cast would be blind. The hook swung below making a wide arc and then flew upward. I heard the bronze strike the stone, and down the thing plummeted. Seven times I cast upward and seven times the hook missed the arrow slit unseen over my head. Eight throws, and eight misses. I took a ragged breath. Nine...
On the ninth cast the hook caught and held. Not for nothing is nine the sacred and magical number on Kregen.
Dangling in the wind-driven rain over emptiness, up I went again and so wedged myself in the next arrow slit. Just before I gained that doubtful sanctuary I took a good though rapid look up and judged the remaining distance. Just, I estimated, just. This time the hook caught on the very first cast, for the top of the tower afforded a better purchase. The knots were hard-edged under my fists. The parapet bulged, with slits frowning down. I hooked a leg, crabbed out as though going up the Futtock Shrouds instead of through the lubber’s hole, and so tumbled over onto the top platform.