Alan Akers - Savage Scorpio

“Why did they risk so much?” The fair-haired girl had been merely pretty before her immersion. “They say a Wizard of Loh was among their number. Yet the Wizards, you teach us, fear the Savanti-”

“They have cause.” Maspero smiled, gesturing. He looked exactly the same as I remembered him, the same dark curly hair, the same air of vivacity, the sense of completeness as a person. “As to why they came, it is always the same story. They hear of a miracle cure. But, this time, they did not even seek our permission.” He looked about at the ribboned reflections of the cave, the milky-white liquid shooting shards of colored light against the groined arches. He took a sharp breath. “There is an old story you will be told concerning a man you must know of. A man who — I had an affection for him — a man who failed the tests.”

“He would have been a Savapim?” The aspirant questioned, hanging on Maspero’s words.

. “Yes. But in his nature were darker depths — yet my affection for him remained. He was ejected.”

“Vanti. .?” said the dark full-faced man with the features of a Roman emperor.

“Yes.” Maspero gestured for them to descend from the lip of the Pool and make their way to the exit. The only sound I could hear for a space was my own hoarse breathing and the spurting clicking of their sandals on the rocks. All that I saw jumped and leaped, like a reflection in a racing stream, and the bands of fire about my head, constricting about my body, searing that shattered arm, crushed in, agonizing, choking, deadly. “Yes. Vanti ejected him as was his duty. But he was not with these people who so recently profaned this shrine, as I had expected, knowing him, to be. They were banished. They left their air-boats and all their belongings. We have them now. Safely. Soon, I believe, we shall find out more about them, for this is a serious business, unique. As to where they came from-” He stopped there, and laughed in that old wry manner.

Harding drew his sword in preparation for the return. “Yes. Wherever it was, they are back there now.”

And he, too, laughed with the others.

“And this man,” asked an aspirant “This man of whom you speak and who failed.”

“I often wonder,” said Maspero, “far more often than I should, just what has become of him on Kregen.”

The remark sounded strange.

“If we fail,” said the aspirant with the close-cropped hair and the fighter’s face. “If we are ejected. .”

They walked toward the cave entrance. I understood that of the aspirants one was Italian, one French, one German, and one, the hard-looking girl with straight dark hair bound with a fillet and a lean muscular body, might not be from Earth or Kregen at all.

The last I heard was Maspero saying, not lightly but with a grave resonance of meaning in his voice: “I do not think you will be called on to face the temptation that destroyed the man — the man for whom I cherish still an affection — the man of whom I speak.”

When they had gone I tried to rouse myself to crawl out and drop into the water. I imagined myself crawling. I did not move. I could not move. My muscles locked. Sweat started out on my forehead and along my limbs — all three of them. I strained. If I did not reach the pool. . Every last ounce of will power left must be summoned. Sheer muscular power was long since passed. Only by a last enormous effort of will could I drag myself over the harsh stones to the water’s edge. I moved.

Creaking like unoiled leather, my body answered the savage commands I imposed. I moved. Like a half-crushed beetle I crawled out of the rocks. A smear of blood followed in a trail where wounds opened. The whole world of Kregen revolved, inside and outside my skull. If I were to go staggering down to the Black Spider Caves of Gratz I would go down, as ever, clawing and fighting and struggling like a maniac every last inch of the way.

Slowly, laboriously, agonizingly, the water came nearer.

The liquid moved gently with spiraling wisps of vapor rising from the surface, like heating milk. The refulgent blueness of the place pressed down more strongly. I gasped. I do not know what my face looked like; and I am glad I do not know.

The rocky edge scraped under my chest. I leaned over the Sacred Pool of Baptism and I drew a deep shuddery breath and gave thanks I had at last reached its miraculous healing powers. My friends had reached here and the emperor had been cured. Maspero had said so. The tutors had laughed — why had they laughed? If I have given some semblance of a continuous narrative to my experiences here then that is purely illusory. Everything reached me in chopped-up segments, distracting, dazzling, obscure. My head expanded and contracted with pain. My arm — no, I prefer to forget that, for all the numbing effects of the journey wore off as I trembled on the edge of the pool, trying to find the energy for one last agonized dragging of my body over the stone lip to topple over and into a blessed surcease from agony.

Why did I hesitate? Why did I not make that final effort and plunge to resurrection?

And then — and then! For, of course, I realized almost too late why I hesitated, why those tutors had laughed. My friends had all bathed here with the emperor and they had all been banished, every last one, back to whence they came.

They had been ejected and returned to their homes on Kregen.

If I dropped into the Sacred Pool as I so ardently wished, then I, Dray Prescot, of Kregen and of Earth

— I would — as I had been once before, so I would inevitably be again — I would be ejected and sent hurtling across the dark spaces between the stars back to Earth where I had been born. If I achieved the healing and surcease I craved I would be flung headlong back to Earth. But, if I did not recuperate, if I were not healed, I would die.

To go back to Earth, flung there by the agent of the Savanti, this Vanti whose monstrous bulk moved in the pool, must mean a banishment that might last a thousand years. For in that case the Star Lords would not have banished me and therefore in their distant way might have no further interest in me. So cruelly beset by pain and indecision and torment was I that the thought seemed natural; later I questioned that assumption.

There were two evils, and I must make a decision. The decision was made for me, of course. I dare not allow myself to die. Delia — I would be of no use to Delia if I were dead and wandering like a wraith through the echoing vastnesses of Cottmer’s Caverns.

So I must live to fight another day and take my chances of ever returning to Kregen. Perhaps, I thought, maundering, raging with fever, delirious, out of my head — I remember it all in flashes and spurts and jolting savage impressions of pain and horror and urgency — perhaps it would be better for me just to die, after all, just to let slip rather than live out a thousand years of meaningless life on Earth.

But, as it was in the nature of the scorpion to sting the frog, so it is in my nature to struggle and never give in, however foolish that makes me. There had to be a way around this. I tried to grasp onto my whirling thoughts — confusion, a roaring in my head, a drugged empty feeling as though the evil concoctions of the black lotus-flowers of Hodan-Set wafted through my brain — desperately, near despair, I tried to think and reason this out, trying to act in the puffed-up character of the cunning old leem-hunter so many people credit me with being. I am just an ordinary man — oh, yes, I am blessed or cursed with a thousand years of life and I have seen and done much; but I am no superman. If I–I remember turning and rolling, slowly, agonizingly, over onto my stomach alongside the stone lip of the pool. First things first. If I — cautiously I plucked at the ghastly bundle that wrapped all that was left of my arm. If I–I did not want to disturb that mess. I may have a strong stomach; I do not think I could have withstood the impact of the horror of my own body that must have been revealed. Slowly, cautiously, I inched out over the water, and let the thing dangle down. The milky fluid closed around my arm. I felt — well, I wondered if I did feel anything through the bite of agony. Then the warm comforting sensation as of a soft mouth kissing me, a million tiny needles pricking my skin, rather, pricking the shreds of skin and fragments of bone. The rags would all be melted away. I waited, feeling the warm glowing sensation increase and expand. I managed to shift around so my shoulder dipped.