Alan Akers - Manhounds of Antares

Mog insisted we hide the voller in a grove of trees on the outskirts. She said the trees were sacred to Sidraarga. Then, hitching our clothing and weapons about us, we set off for the home of one Planath the Wine, who owned a tavern that one might take a newly wedded bride to, as Mog put it with a cackle. Coming home had brightened and invigorated her. If we ran across a Canop patrol I felt she would not be the one to run screaming in fear.

Once again I trod the streets of a strange city in a continent of Kregen new to me. The houses reared to either hand, strange shapes against the starshot darkness, with She of the Veils riding low in the clouds, and very few lighted windows there were to see, and only a few hurrying pedestrians who avoided us with as much fervor as we avoided them. An air of mystery, of an eerie horror no one would mention aloud, hung over the city of Yaman.

As we hurried along in so strange a fashion I could feel the excitement rising and rising in me. Only a few short steps to go and then Mog the Migla witch would be in the hands of her friends, and I would be free! By this time I felt convinced Mog must be the one whom the Star Lords had sent me to Faol to rescue. I had felt this about Tulema, and been proved a fool. That could not happen again, by Vox, no!

But, all the time, I kept expecting at any moment to see that hated blue radiance and the enormous insubstantial shape of a scorpion dropping upon me from the pink-lit shadows. The cobbled streets of Yaman passed by, and the darkened fronts of houses and shops, the ghostly emptiness of squares and plazas. I saw the moon-sheen upon the sluggish waters of the River Magan and the black blots of islands riding like stranded whales, the fretting of river boats against stone quays and wharves. In my ears the night sounds of a city ghosted in thinly. We pressed on and Mog led us down past the narrow entrances to alleyways, past wide flights of steps leading to the quays, down and through even narrower alleyways, and across slimed steps where, below, barges sucked in the mud. At last we reached the tavern of Planath the Wine.

This was, I thought, a strange place to find a remnant of an outlawed and proscribed religion. A gnarled tree hung over the crazy roof of the tavern. All the windows leered at us, dark ovals pallidly reflecting a pink sheen of moonlight. Around to the rear padded Mog, with many a cunning glance about, and so she rapped upon the door, a complicated series of rhythms, like a drum-dance. The door was snatched open and a hoarse breathy voice whispered: “Get in! Get in, in the name of Migshaanu the Virtuous, before we are all taken!”

In we all bundled, with Mog cursing away at barking her skinny shins against the jamb, and so came into a dark, breathing space where I knew people stood about waiting for the door to close so they might turn up the lamp.

And now, to give you who listen to this tape an understanding of what then happened, there in the back room of The Loyal Canoptic as a concealed taper relit the samphron-oil lamp, it is necessary to tell you a number of things all at the same time.

The first thing I noticed, something I had been wondering about ever since my interest in Mog had been so brutally forced on me, was the physical appearance of these halfling Miglas. They were not apim.

The people gathered here, about a score, sitting on benches along the walls so that the central floor area of polished lenk remained clear, all possessed two arms and two legs, and one head with features. But those features could never be mistaken for human features — always bearing in mind what I have said about that prickly word, “human.” The old women looked a little like Mog, although nowhere so bent or vicious or cunning. The old men looked like nothing so much as those thick-legged, thick-armed, stumpy-bodied, and idiot-headed plastic toys the children on Earth nowadays play with. Gnomes, if you like, thick-heads, bodies as squat as boilers, dummies, grinners, with ears that swung like batwing doors, they all stared at Mog with looks of reverence and shock and holy awe — and vast surprise. The younger men and girls, although far more prepossessing in the manner of bodily proportions, all wore that idiot grin, that flap-eared dog-hanging look of bumbling good humor that masks a cranial cavity filled with vacuum.

They all wore ankle-length smocks with scooped-out necks and no sleeves. The color was a uniform rusty crimson, as though the dye used, probably from a local berry or earth, had not taken properly in the coarsely weaved stuff. Their hair was dark and vivid and cropped, even the girls’. I stood behind Saenda and Quaesa as the lamp flared up and Mog stepped forward. Turko moved at my side, and Rapechak moved out from the other side.

Insane shrieks burst from the Miglas. The women clawed the children to them, the girls flying to crowd around the old folk at the far end of the room. The noise burst inside my head with the unexpected force of a magazine explosion. The Migla men rummaged frantically behind the benches. They swung around to face us, pushing past Mog, who yelled at them.

“Do you not know who I am? I am Mog, your high priestess!” She used a number of those special words and phrases that meant a great deal in the religion.

The men — eight of them — stood resolutely before us, their womenfolk and children screaming behind them.

The eight looked highly comical, their flap-eared faces slobbering with fury and fear. They held the spears they had snatched up from behind the benches in grips that — I guessed Rapechak would have seen and Turko never failed to miss — were amateur in the extreme.

“Do you not hear, migladorn? These are my friends. They are the friends of the high priestess of Migshaanu!”

The heftiest man, with a fuzz of side-whiskers, spat out: “You are the Mighty Mog! But these cannot be your friends! They have tricked you! Two are apim warriors, one is a Rapa warrior, and two are shishis!

They must all die!”

From the lighting of the lamp to the utterance of that word — “die!” — scarce a handful of heartbeats had passed.

The eight spear points leveled. Then, with sudden and astonishing speed, a ferociously lethal and completely unexpected reaction, the front three Migla men hurled their spears. And — there was nothing amateurish about that spear throwing. With terrifying accuracy the deadly shafts flew toward us.

Three spears flashed toward us.

We were: one, a Rapa mercenary; two, a Khamorro; and, three, an Earthman who had made Kregen his home.

We reacted in three different ways.

With a fluid litheness of movement so fast no untrained eye could follow him, Turko slid the spear and it thunked solidly into the lenken door.

With the least amount of physical effort, Rapechak let his body lean to the side, and as a precaution, thrust up his forearm, so that the spear hissed past, to thunk into the door alongside the other. I, Dray Prescot, had to show off — and yet, in truth, my way had been proved in the past and was to prove in the future by far the superior — and I had not needed the Krozairs of Zy to teach me this. I took the spear out of the air, my hand closing around the shaft with that familiar solid-soft chunking of wood against flesh, and so I reversed it and hefted it and said, “I will let you have your spear back, if you wish.”

Over the women’s screaming Mog lifted her voice and, there in that bedlam in the back room of The Loyal Canoptic, I heard for the first time the high priestess.

“Put down your spears! I am Mog the Mighty, high priestess of Migshaanu! Put down your stuxes or risk my certain wrath! These apim and this Rapa have aided me and brought me here.”