Alan Akers - Warrior of Scorpio

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.

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!”