“Here, Seg. Munch on these—”
“No time, Dray! Don’t you realize what they’re going to do to Thelda?”
I pushed the palines at him.
“Take them, Seg! You need them!”
I stared at him, eye to eye. With a savage curse he pushed past me, scooped up a mass of the palines and stuffed them into his mouth. Then, and only then, I ran for the door.
The guards had just reached the first turn in the corridor. We ran swiftly and silently down toward that corner. I checked at the bend beside an alabaster statue of a risslaca seizing a leem, and the leem in its turn seizing the risslaca, and peered around. Seg hopped with impatience. The guards were moving Thelda along briskly. A few other slaves and functionaries moved along the corridor, which here broadened with a supporting aisle of thick-bodied columns down its center. I had visited the palace enough times to have a vague and general idea of its layout; but unlike most of the palaces I had encountered on Kregen this one, because it had been built in the midst of a city closed up around it within its encircling walls, had not sprawled out in an ever-growing maze of passages and courts and halls.
We marched smartly out and cut along the corridor.
Slaves looked at us, but slaves are slaves, and they took only enough notice of us, two warriors, to keep out of our way. I hate and detest slavery; here was one facet of slavery clearly apparent. The guards hustled Thelda around another bend. When we reached the corner where a vast pot of Pandahem ware — and how old it was I wouldn’t care to guess — brought up a few memories, I saw before me a double-corridor I recognized from its decoration. Down that corridor lay the council chamber where Lilah, the Queen, was now meeting the scouts who had brought information of the whereabouts of Umgar Stro.
Without hesitation I started off down the corridor.
“Dray! They went this way. . .”
I turned. Seg was looking at me, and I could not read the expression on his tanned face. A stray shaft of torchlight caught in his blue eyes and gleamed back lambently.
“Umgar Stro—” I said.
“The guards have taken Thelda down here, into the dungeons!”
At once I came to myself. This was Seg Segutorio, the man who had unhesitatingly followed me to the tower of Umgar Stro in Plicla to rescue Delia. Now I must go with him to rescue Thelda. Of course. How could I have thought otherwise? I would fight my way to Umgar Stro — never fear. So I thought as I ran after Seg down the corridor branching at right angles, through the bronze-bound lenken door at its end, and down bare stone steps into the dungeons of the Queen of Pain.
It was not as easy as I have made it sound. Every cell of my body screamed in agony that I must go to seek my Delia, my Delia of the Blue Mountains. I did not think then, I could not, of what might be happening to her. But the agony I suffered would only increase if I allowed poor Thelda and Seg to be destroyed. I knew my Delia would understand that and approve; and I also knew I used her acquiescence as a mere excuse.
The guards had been joined by men in the traditional uniform of their trade. They wore black aprons and black masks and their brawny arms were bare. Thelda’s pitiful brown rag had been stripped from her and she huddled against a stone wall where iron rings fixed into the stone gaped open for her. Two sets along they supported a skeleton clothed in decayed scraps of flesh and skin.
One of the men gripped Thelda and lifted her arm toward the iron ring. Beneath the mask his fleshy face showed a vastly unpleasant sniggering enjoyment.
Seg had sheathed his sword.
Before I could run in with my brand naked in my fist Seg’s first arrow punched meatily into the broad black-leather-clad back. The torturer screamed like a de-gutted vosk and toppled away. Then I was in among the guards. I laid about me with the flat of my sword, for in all the desperate anger blazing in me I still retained sense enough to try to mitigate the Queen’s rage. One torturer she might overlook; more would cause untold problems for Seg and myself.
“Don’t kill them, Seg!” I yelled, as I felled the Deldar and swung back and laid my blade flat into his companion’s guts, bringing the hilt down on his head as he doubled.
Seg gasped and swore and stowed that great longbow away and thwacked his long sword down onto the guards. So sudden, so vicious, so fierce was our onslaught that the guards wilted and fell in swathes. Only two managed to bring their steel-tipped spears up and these we slashed through with our brands and then knocked their wielders out, a neat one-two flicker of movement,
“I’ll make a swordsman of you yet, Seg!” I said. The brisk action had stirred my sluggish blood.
But Seg Segutorio was cradling Thelda in his arms, holding her naked body to him, crooning unintelligible words over her.
“Oh, Dray!” shrieked Thelda. “I knew you would come! I knew you would save me!”
“Thank Seg,” I said with a harshness of tone I had no need to simulate.
“But — Dray—” She struggled free of Seg. She stood there, her arms outspread, her bosom panting, her color very high and flushed. “That Lilah — that Queen — female cramph! I hate her! But you, Dray — you have saved me!”
I did not look at Seg.
He said, in a hard clipped voice: “We must get out of here. Now. Before these sleeping beauties awake.”
“Put your dress on, Thelda,” I said. “You and Seg must get away at once.” I stripped a long, lavishly embroidered cloth from the Deldar, rolling him over and over so that his nose squashed on the filth of the stone floor. “Put this on, too, as a cape. You can make the outside safely; you know the way—”
“Dray! Aren’t you coming?”
I did not laugh. “I have a matter to discuss with Lilah.”
Thelda started back as though I had struck her.
“You — Dray — you — and the Queen!
No!
”
For all her words a change had come over Thelda, my lady of Vallia. Much of her bounce had gone. I remembered her screams as the guards had dragged her off. She thought then that she was doomed; dark fears of that memory would haunt her for the rest of her days, I expected. She looked more haggard, the plumpness of her sagging; her eyes looked dull.
“Not Lilah and me, Thelda, no — not like that. She has news of Umgar Stro, and I must have news, also.”
“If you go to stand before the Queen,” said Seg, “then I go with you to stand at your side.”
“Seg—”
“And me?” shrieked Thelda. “I dare not go—”
“I do not think, Thelda, the Queen will harm you if Dray intercedes for us all.”
Seg’s words, so calm, so sure, so filled with all the dark wisdom of his hills of Erthyrdrin, rattled me. Loh was, indeed, a continent of mystery.
“I am frightened—” Thelda looked it, too.
I started to walk out of the chamber, back up the stone stairs. “The Queen will listen to me,” I said. “Let us go.”
We were not molested on our way to Queen Lilah’s council chamber.
It is a strange fact to me now to recall that I have only the dimmest memories of her council chamber. Oh, it was wide and lofty and supported by the massive Hiclantung pillars with their garlands of risslaca and snake, and with pediments fashioned in the form of corths; there was color and torchlight and many people; but I recall only the tall scarlet form of Lilah, with her piled mass of gem-encrusted red hair with its wedge-shape over her forehead, of her deep dark eyes and the upslanting eyebrows, the shadows beneath her cheekbones and that scarlet-painted, small, firm, and yet sensuous mouth.
“So you have come back to me, Dray Prescot.”
I remembered her, prostrate before me, groveling, imploring me to take a seat at her side on her throne, offering me everything. Her chin lifted as though she, too, understood my thoughts.
“If you have news of Umgar Stro, oh Queen, then tell me that I may take his throat between my hands and squeeze until he is as lifeless as a rag doll.”
“Gently, gently, my Lord of Strombor! It is not sure. The scouts believe; we await confirmation.”
“Tell me where and I will confirm—”
“Not so fast.” Lilah looked at Thelda. Guards surrounded us, their steel spear-points glinting. Seg held his strung bow in his left hand, and idly held an arrow in his right hand. I knew he could bend the bow and send that shaft clear through the heart of this Queen of Pain long before he was cut down by her spearmen. “Not so fast. What is this — woman — doing with you?”
I stared at Lilah, challengingly, eye to eye. I forced my meaning upon her.
“She is innocent in all this, oh Queen. We found her in circumstances that would displease me mightily if I thought they were of your doing.”
She returned my stare. Our eyes locked.
“I see.”
“There is a man, a Wizard of Loh, a San, one called Lu-si-Yuong.”
She gasped. “What of San Yuong?”
“Seg Segutorio and I rescued him from the tower in Plicla. He was the only prisoner. He will enter Hiclantung when the gates are open at dawn, although I venture he would find it a blessing if you sent guards to let him in now. There are leems.”
“Yes.” She gestured and a Hikdar moved off at once to carry out her unspoken orders. “The San is precious to me. I grieved at his loss in the massacre. And you have rescued him!”
“Seg Segutorio and I.”
“Yes.” She seemed somewhat at a loss. It was with a considerable reduction of her powers that she said: “It seems I am in your debt again, Dray Prescot.”
“You know what I seek. Umgar Stro. Tell me—”
“As soon as the news of that evil person’s whereabouts is brought to me you shall be told. But, my Lord of Strombor, I put a thought to you. We believe he is in Chersonang.”
Chersonang was the adjoining country and city in hereditary rivalry with Hiclantung. I could foresee problems.
Lilah leaned forward a little on her throne, her white hand beneath her white chin, brooding on me. “I shall send all my army up against Umgar Stro in Chersonang. I believe we can break both him and them, together. This will be your opportunity, Dray Prescot, to seek and find the woman you desire. I offer you the chance to command my army, with my generals, to go up against Umgar Stro at the head of a host. Come, what do you say?”
At my side Thelda gasped.
The guards pressed more closely about us now.
There was no need to discuss with myself my answer.
“I thank you, Lilah, for your offer. It is generous of you. But I cannot wait. I will leave for Chersonang at once — sleep will have to wait, instead.”
“You fool!”
I turned to go and Seg’s hand flashed up with the arrow between his fingers and a spear point tripped him so that he fell sprawling before the throne. My sword was half drawn when something — a spear butt, the flat of a sword — sledged down on my head and I tumbled down that long smooth slope of black oblivion.
The army of Hiclantung marches out
If you choose to think my actions at this time — and, indeed, for some time past — had been irrational, I could not argue the point with you.
Truly, I now feel that the belief my Delia was dead had deranged me. I know I had acted in ways completely outside my usual fashion, and, yet, too, in ways I have been told are typical of me, as witness that wild moment when I defied the Queen of Pain to rush out from the windlass room in the corthdrome upon the indigo-haired assassins of Umgar Stro. I must have been in a state of shock that allowed me to walk and talk and act and yet held me all the time in a kind of mental stasis.
The ancient Chinese, we are told, had perfected the art of torture by water, the expected drop of liquid crashing onto the victim’s forehead like a weight crushing into his brain. A single small drop could not do that; it was the expectation and the mounting terror of the inevitable, alternated with the passive bouts of cringing waiting. First I had thought Delia dead, then I had heard she might be alive, then her death was once more certain, and now again she might be missing and, perhaps, better dead. The sheer vibrationary pressure, the nightmare nutcracker rhythm of it all, had made of me a different animal from the man who had flown over The Stratemsk.
Of only one thing could I be sure. Whether dead or alive, Delia would fiercely insist that I go on with life, that I persevere, that I never give in.
Seg and I recovered quietly in a comfortable room set deep within the palace. The room was as luxuriously furnished as anyone could wish, windowless, lit with samphron oil lamps, and set everywhere with the motionless and watchful figure of guards, spearmen of the Queen’s own household in their embroidered robes and gleaming helmets, their steel-tipped spears. We were both naked. We had no weapons.
Seg said: “We could take the spears from these dummies, easily, you and I, Dray!”
I said: “We could. We could fight our way clear if we went together. But — what of Thelda?”
His look distressed me.
“Thelda,” he said, and he bowed that mane of black hair to his brawny forearms.
So we pondered our chances of breaking free and taking the plump Lady of Vallia with us.
Wherever we were marched within the Queen’s palace we were accompanied by an overwhelming escort, consisting of spearmen and bowmen. These latter, we knew, effectively prevented the sudden dash for freedom. And yet, even then, we knew we were not prisoners in any ordinary sense of that term. We became aware of a sense of heightened purpose within Hiclantung. Soldiers moved everywhere. Preparations were being made and Seg was moved to express a fierce dark satisfaction in the demeanor of the men.
“They have not forgotten what Umgar Stro did to them. Through the treachery of one man, that Forpacheng, their pride was humbled.” Seg moved his hands meaningfully. “Well, now they are regrouping, remembering their traditions. They will not suffer the same fate again.”
Hwang, the Queen’s nephew, came to see us, distressed by what Lilah was forced to do to us — as he said, for our own good.
His young face wore the kind of look one associates with a child’s awareness of some mischief, and the desire to brazen it out. He flung his embroidered robes away from his legs, kicking them petulantly, as he sat down. Seg hospitably poured wine — it was a purple beverage of excellent vintage, I recall, full-bodied yet not too sweet, from the western slopes of Mount Storr — and Hwang took the goblet as though prepared to sup and to forget what was on his mind.