John Dalmas - Homecoming

Moshe stepped to the speaking tube. “What is it?”

“It’s the Lady Nephthys, Sir. She wishes to come down with her attendants. She wants to look at the star people and the barbarian.”

“Wait twenty breaths, then let them pass.”

The Lady Nephthys! The clearest evidence that the Master had favored Lord Draco over the dog Ahmed was his gift to him of Nephthys. Moshe had seen her only at a little distance, but it was said that, close up, her aura was so compelling that statues had lost control of their parts and as punishment had been unmanned with hammer and chisel.

He pulled the lever releasing the entry lock, then strode out of the guard office. Protocol demanded that such a personage be met by the officer in charge. Within the tall stone stairwell he snapped his way through armed men, stopped two paces back from the stone stairs, and stood at attention, a bowman at each side with arrow ready but pointed downward. Behind them were two pairs of swordsmen. Next were four pikemen shoulder to shoulder behind tall shields. Last, just outside the doorway, two men stood by a lever, ready to drop a heavy iron door into place to shut off the stairwell should an attack threaten to succeed.

Three new men, replacing others wounded in an off-duty brawl, had been assigned to standby in the guard room until Moshe could drill them properly.

His stance became more rigid as footsteps sounded softly above; there were no orc boots in her company. Her bodyguards turned into sight-two magnificent blacks, giants, stripped to the waist, armorless except for helmets. Fleetingly beneath his screen, Moshe wondered if they were entire. They must be, he decided, for their muscles were fatless and strongly defined beneath their skin. Entire, then, and well supplied with girls so they could walk tall and haughty, their auras cold and proud despite her nearness.

As soon as she turned into sight behind them, hers was all the aura he was aware of-power, commanding beauty, and a cool sexuality that numbed his will. For seconds he was actually unaware of the presence of her female attendants. As she descended, so gracefully, her visual beauty became one with her aura, and there was no swagger at all to the stiff-spined dungeon captain when he greeted her.

“My Lady!” He couldn’t tell whether he’d spoken or only croaked.

Perfect teeth showed briefly, coolly, in her smooth-skinned black face. There was no hair, not even eyebrows, and the shape of her unadorned head was perfect on a strong, regally slim neck. She was slender, rounded, taller than himself, with a filmy white gown caught artfully about her, skin as jet black as her father’s. Beside her, her bodyguards were only dark brown, and for the first time in his life Moshe was self-conscious of his own light skin.

It took an effort to maintain his screen so near her. The poor bastards behind him weren’t up to it at all, and the wash of flustered awe and fear and male response was a psychic stink. Perhaps behind her cool reserve she laughed.

She spoke, and he led the party from the stairwell, past the rigid standby, to a dully-lit passage between two rows of cells. Some were empty; in others inmates stared or slept. Before the cage of Chandra Queiros she stopped, and slowly he sat up, huddling within his own weak-folded arms. In his unscreened mind, despondency, pain, and dull fear partially gave way to wonder and a vague sexual stirring.

“Ah! The star man,” she said. “I hear my Lord had use of him today. I’m told he sings.” She examined him deliberately, body and soul, then laughed, a throaty arpeggio in the cell block, and the prisoner, in sudden self-awareness, covered his nakedness with his hands.

“He’s a poor thing,” she observed as they walked on. “Where is the woman?”

“She has not been returned. Perhaps she’s being retained for entertainment.” For a moment the orc’s mind, unscreened, was outside Nephthys’s spell and suddenly sadistically avid.

Dark eyes glanced at him in amusement, and the cerberus’s mind withdrew in confusion behind its screen again.

The barbarian was in the farthest cell.

“Hmm. So this is the Northman, the one who escaped the arena.” She seemed to purr. “Draco won’t give him a chance to do that again.”

The Northman rose with insolent carelessness, his unscreened mind a meaningless hum discernable among the others only by concentrating. His aura, subdued now and unobtrusive, was none the less one of strength, detachment, purpose.

“He looks different,” she commented. “His scalp wasn’t shaved then.” She turned to one of her bodyguards. “If you faced each other with knives, Mahmut, could you kill him?”

The black face did not change expression, but keen hardness glinted from his mind. Moshe realized then that the man had no tongue, could not speak aloud.

“I’m surprised he seems uninjured,” Nephthys continued. “I thought my Lord questioned him.”

“Not roughly, my Lady. His face is blistered, as you see, and I’m sure his knees are painful, but that’s all.”

“No doubt he has plans for him.” She examined the prisoner for additional seconds. “I’m disappointed. He isn’t as much as I’d heard, close up. There are others as big, and he is only flesh after all. When Draco wishes, he will become quivering flesh.”

When the royal party had left, the guardsmen relaxed in their quarters. Alone in the guard room the cerberus took the flagon from his table and drank, but not deeply. That would be unwise on duty. Then he sent it into the guard quarters. As a commander he tried to be generous as well as hard; the combination made for loyalty as well as discipline. When the bottle was returned he swirled what remained, considered briefly, drank again and corked it.

Within an hour the drugged wine had felled all but three-the new men, who’d only feigned drinking. These with swords dispatched the others, walked quickly to the last cell, whispered with their minds to the Northman and took the chains from his ankles. At sword point they led him down the passage. The prisoners who saw felt brief pity, or dread, or nothing, as he passed.

They paused at the guard room long enough to free his wrists, had him don a tunic and black cape, and pulled the hood over his skull, shadowing his face. At the head of the three long flights of stairs, one turned the lock in the entry door and opened it. The guard outside was bored and thinking of other things; he did not expect danger from below, and the telepathic rebels screened well. Although a telepath himself, he was pulled through the door and dead in seconds. One of the three stood in his place to give the others time.

The remaining two walked briskly down the corridor with Nils, in step, orc boots clopping, and soon turned through a plain inset door. Narrow stairs angled sharply upward to a passage whose stone walls were moist with condensation. Occasional oil lamps bracketed on the walls flickered sluggishly in the stale air, and twice they passed manholes dogged into a wall, each with a massive lock. After some two hundred meters they pulled open a trapdoor and lowered themselves on metal rungs into another passage. Here the air was fouler, the lamps so low and far apart it was like night. His guides took off their boots, slung them over their shoulders, and led him quietly through the darkness. At length they climbed upward into an unlit room, re-donned their boots, and exited beneath stars. Alert for the sound or sense of a possible soft-shod night patrol, they entered a nearby alley. One straddled a manhole, gripped the stone cover by a ring with both hands, and removed it with a grunt. He lowered himself and disappeared.

“Now you,” the other whispered to Nils. “I must stay up here to replace the cover.”

Nils lowered himself, hung by his fingers for a second, then dropped into blackness. His tortured knees buckled at the bottom, sprawling him onto rough stone paving. Carefully he rose, and heard the manhole cover being lowered into place.