Homecoming

XVIII

Svarta fagren, sajflikk henne, trant i glumen for d’ lunna Yngling, far t’ tvillingarna pa befanningen a Kassi ty han villa aga jener.

Gryma Kassi, feg erovren,

Belsabubb han a sa hette, stamfar han a orkahodern.

Imperator, dojd va kjaaren, klov ijal a makti Jarnhann, huven ligganne i dyen hel svaadlent fra blori halsen.

Alste hon d’ makti kjampe, dravare a hennes far, han som stypte jatten Kassi.

Alste Ynglingen a villa riska livet, bli d’ nodi a befria ham fra Drcka

[The dark seeress, black-skinned beauty, yearned to hold again the calm-eyed

Youngling, sire of her twin infants by command of the Lord Kazi so that he would hold his genes.

Cruel Kazi, cowardly conqueror,

Beelzebub had been his byname, founder of the orcish armies.

Caesar, rotting by the reed fen, smote to death by mighty Ironhand, proud head resting in the muck now, sword’s length from his severed neck lay.

Yes she loved the mighty warrior, loved the man who’d slain her father, he who’d felled the ogre Kazi.

Loved the Youngling and was willing to risk death if that was needed to deliver him from Draco.]

From THE JARNHANN SAGA, Kumalo translation

Moshe the Cerberus was responsible for the security of all prisoners during his watch. Very personally responsible. Should one escape or suicide, Moshe’s punishment would be slow, excruciating, and terminal. So he disliked anything not routine and would not tolerate confusion. Confusion made it difficult to monitor thoughts and feelings-nearly impossible to read the subtler nuances.

When the Master was still alive, the danger of escape had been academic, and cerberus-dungeon captain-had been an envied job, comfortable and often enjoyable, while the hazard of prisoner suicide could be minimized by denying means and by monitoring.

During the present power struggle however, two attempts had been made to free men from Draco’s dungeon, and rumors of plots were heard almost weekly. Security had been tightened and drills held regularly.

The night watch had been on duty for only minutes when the signal whistle shrilled. It was no alarm, only a signal from the entry guard above, but the two guards at the foot of the stairwell quickly nocked arrows while others clattered out of the guard quarters with pikes or drawn swords.

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.

His remaining escort whispered to him in Anglic. “I’m taking you to a storm sewer that you can follow to the canal. They have gratings across them at intervals that a man can’t crawl through; this joins one of them below the last grate. If half that is said of you is true, once you cross the canal you should be able to get away without any trouble.”

Psychically Nils nodded. The man was barefoot again, and they padded through the narrow tunnel in utter darkness, his guide with a sense of knowing the way. Before long they came to an end, a door, and the Northman sensed the other feeling for a latch, finding it. It would not move. He grasped it with both hands, still couldn’t budge it, and fear surged through him. Nils nudged him aside, explored with his fingers, closed powerful fists on it and pulled, then jerked. Then he pushed, finally lunging against it with a heavy shoulder. The orc took out his sword and pried, carefully at first, then desperately so that the point snapped.

His fear dulled to despondency. “We’re trapped,” he said with his mind. “This route’s been blocked. And we can’t get back out the way we came; it’s too high.”

Nils’s mind questioned.

“No, the other way is a dead end just beyond the shaft we came down.”

Reaching up, Nils found he could touch the overhead. “Let’s go back to the shaft,” he thought. “There’s something I want to try.”

Mentally the man shrugged. Nils led, one hand following the wall, the fingers of the other brushing along the overhead until they found the emptiness of the shaft down which they’d dropped. It was perhaps a meter and a half wide, and round, impossible to climb. He dropped to one knee, hands against the damp wall. “Squat on my shoulders,” he instructed. “When I get up, put your hands on the side of the shaft and stand. See if you can reach the cover.”

Slowly Nils stood with his burden, and carefully the orc rose to his feet; with the return of hope had come fear again.

“I can’t reach it.”

“Stand on my hands and I’ll lift you.”

The man raised his left foot, put it on one of Nils’s palms, then repeated with the other, steadying himself shakily with his hands against the wall. Nils grasped both feet firmly, and slowly raised him to arm’s length overhead. He sensed the orc reaching upward almost hesitantly, touching pavement above, lingers feeling for the edges that defined the cover, finding them. Nils braced his legs, the thick muscles of his arms and shoulders swelling as the man pushed upward against the heavy disk. It gave a little, a centimeter, then the man’s arms were fully extended and could lift no higher. Nils raised up slowly on the balls of his feet, and for just a moment they gained a little more. Then the orc fell backward, striking his head against the side of the shaft before landing heavily on the stones below. There was a stab of pain in his left elbow.

Nils knelt beside him. The orc radiated hopelessness. “I couldn’t raise it,” he whispered. “Not enough. It must be eight centimeters thick.”

Nils’s mind acknowledged. “Now what?” he asked.

“We stay here until they come for us.”

“Come for us?”

“They have dogs. For tracking, a dog’s nose is better than telepathy. When they find what happened in the dungeon they’ll track us down.”

Nils sensed the man fumbling through a belt pouch, hunting for death. He pressed an object like a pebble into Nils’s palm. “Swallow it,” he instructed. “You’ll go to sleep and there will be no wakening. If they take us alive, after what happened… When they have done with us, even dying would bring no peace. The agony would follow beyond death itself.”

Nils regarded him calmly, and after a moment the other mind shrugged. The man put the pill in his dry mouth, far back on his tongue, swallowed, shuddered, then breathed deeply and relaxed. Nils sat beside him. Presently the orc slumped against him and Nils cradled his head and shoulders. The mind was drifting, fading, the breathing shallow. Before long Nils was alone.