Prince of Scorpio

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I reached up and took the rock away from his brown fingers and he had to let it go or his fingers would have snapped. I threw the rock away. I took his wrists in my left hand, his throat in my right, and I squeezed — a little, not much, just enough to let him know who was master here.

“I could kill you now, dom. But I will not. I am not one of Kov Vektor’s men. You should have seen that from my clothes.”

He glared at me, his eyes bulging out, a bright and brilliant blue. That was interesting; nearly all Vallians have bright brown eyes, and brown hair, and some of them have the luck to have that outrageous blend of chestnut that so glorifies the hair of Delia of the Blue Mountains. I released my grip a little and he choked and coughed.

A quick glance around confirmed that all the zorcamen were down. I saw one Womox with a broken horn and blood oozing from a smashed skull. The other I could not see, nor did I ever again see that particular Womox. A Chulik was backed against a rock, his rapier slashing desperately at the cudgels of the ring of Blue Mountain Boys. I looked for Stovang, but could not pick him out. The defile looked a mess, with calsanys and preysanys milling, zorcas standing with drooping reins, the bodies of unconscious men sprawled everywhere.

“Listen, dom. You have a leader. Tell me his name — quick!”

No thought of treachery occurred to him; he told me what, in other circumstances, could not have been dragged from him by torture.

“Korf Aighos!”

I nodded, satisfied. The man was named for the powerful iridescent blue bird of the mountains, a nickname, as one might say “Eagle Jack.” The man tried to work his throat, and gulped. And I was satisfied he was cowed — how little I knew of the Blue Mountain Boys, how proud of them I am!

“Get up, dom. Shout for Korf Aighos. I would like to have words with him.”

The man rose, dragging his ponsho skin about him. He wore decent leathers beneath and his body was of the whipcord toughness required of a mountaineer. His face, brown and lined, glanced back at me with a return of his natural arrogance.

“Shout, dom,” I said.

He shouted.

There was a stir in the Blue Mountain Boys, and a man strode toward me. At first glance I knew I could do business with this man. He walked with a swinging alert gait, half arrogant, half cautious, that marks a man ready for what the world may bring him. He carried a sword, short and heavy, more of a large knife than a shortsword, and its tip shone clean and unbloodied. He was not overlarge, but his chest was massive and his arms roped with muscle. His eyes, too, were blue.

“What is this-” he began.

I chopped his words off brutally.

“Aighos! If you look you will see I am not Vektor’s man!”

“By Vox! You speak out of turn, cramph! You must be a rast of Vektor’s, or else why are you here?”

A little rascally fellow with snaggly teeth and shaggy ponsho fleeces flapping about his narrow shanks trotted up. He carried a cudgel almost as long as himself. He had but one eye.

“Stick him, Korf Aighos!” he cackled, waving the bludgeon. “Stick him and take the treasure-”

“Still your tongue, Ob-eye!” Aighos glared. “I will say who is to be stuck and who not. As for the treasure, throw it into the river for all I care.”

One or two of the ruffians, forming a watchful circle about me, started at this. Ob-eye yelped as though hurt.

“But the treasure! Stick him, I say!”

“I will stick you, by Vox, you ob-eyed rast! You know the orders of my Lady of Strombor! No killing!”

I really felt those solid mountains lurch under me. My Lady of Strombor! I, Dray Prescot, was the Lord of Strombor! There were only two ladies of Strombor in all Kregen — and one, Great-Aunt Shusha, was still there, as far as I knew, still in Strombor in Zenicce. So — so Aighos could only be speaking of my Lady of Strombor, my Delia!

No real recollection remains of how I covered the intervening space, but I was gripping Korf Aighos by the scruff of the neck, and twisting him up to me, and glaring down into his face. He glared back — and that dark, betraying shadow passed over his eyes.

“What is this of my Lady of Strombor! Speak, and quickly, or I’ll snap your neck like a rotten pitcher!”

He struggled, and a hand was laid on my shoulder preparatory to my being whirled about and struck. I back-heeled and a man screeched. I lifted Aighos, beating away his fists, for he had dropped his long knife, and I swung him about and I shouted at these Blue Mountain Boys.

“Listen to me, you creeping mountain cramphs! I mean you no harm. I visit your country and am set upon! If this rast is your leader then let him speak, or by Zim-Zair, he’s a dead man!”

I saw Korf Aighos’ eyes flick toward me, and, suddenly, he went limp in my fist.

“I will speak. But first, tell me who you are — and, for the sake of Opaz himself, put me down!”

I set him on his feet.

“I am Drak ti Valkanium,” I said — and then wondered if that had been the best thing to say. But habit had become ingrained.

He glanced at me, sidelong. He shook his head. “Now, by the Invisible Twins, I wonder!”

“Tell me of my Lady of Strombor!”

At this, as though abruptly recollecting himself and where he was, his face took on an expression of alarm immediately succeeded by grim determination.

He glanced around. He said, in a whisper, “If I tell you that, Tyr Drak, the Opaz-forsaken guards of Vektor will hear. Then we shall have to kill them all. My Lady of Strombor has expressly forbidden killing, although-” Here he spread his hands and glanced around, not, I fancy, with any too-guilty a feeling. He finished: “Sometimes the knife or the rock are the only solution.”

A pragmatist, Korf Aighos. We withdrew into a cleft in the rocks, and he eyed me so narrowly that I tensed up ready to beat him in whatever scheme he was brewing. Instead, and again the rocks of the solid mountains lurched, he said: “You called yourself Drak ti Valkanium. I gave you the honorable title of Tyr because you are clearly so. But I think if I called you another name you would answer.”

I looked at him. I know that old devil’s look flashed evilly from my face, for he swallowed, and hurried on.

“Pur Dray, Dray Prescot, the Lord of Strombor, Zorcander of the Clan of Felschraung — I know I am not wrong!”

“Yes,” I said, shattered.

“The Princess said you would come. Long and long has she waited. By stratagem after stratagem has she fended them off. Her father, the Emperor, may Opaz have him in his keeping, and that perfumed idiot Vektor — and there are others. Welcome and thrice welcome, my Lord of Strombor, to the Blue Mountains!”

“Well, sink me!” I exclaimed.

Korf Aighos rattled on, his face eager, his whole bearing animated and intense. “The Princess uses her name as the Lady of Strombor as a disguise. She trusts me.” He spoke that proudly, and I could not condemn him for that. “This idea was hers. If there are no wedding presents, there can be no wedding. She it was, the dear daring Princess, who discovered the real treasure was coming in this caravan the hard and little-used way, and the great parade of servants and slaves and guards along the Quanscott Cut was the fake treasure!”

“That sounds like Delia’s style.”

“Every man of the Blue Mountains would die for her! And of them all, the Blue Mountain Boys are her most devoted and loyal subjects.”

I had to rise to this occasion. Implicitly, in all Aighos said, there was the fact that if he agreed with Delia that she would not marry Vektor, then he must agree to her marrying me. I had to show some fire, some spirit, act a part as the great man.

“I would thank you, Korf Aighos, for your love and loyalty. I agree that we should not kill Vektor’s guards. But, my friend, I do not think you should hurl the loot into the river.”

“No?” He sounded doubtful, at which I took heart.

“Carefully spread out and spent, it would bring in much for the people of the Blue Mountains.”

“Loot!”

Had I gone too far? Was he an honest man in the sense that he wouldn’t accept loot when it came his way? Was this stealing in the accepted sense of the word? I was sailing near the wind, even by Kregan standards which are notoriously laxer than Earth’s. Perhaps-

I said quickly, “But as we are all honest men, then the treasure must be gathered together and returned to Vektor when the Princess Majestrix and I are married.”

“Amen to that, my lord.” Then he screwed up his blue eyes, and said, with a chuckle: “And I will take counsel on the question of the treasure. We are great bandits in the Blue Mountains!”

They are great ruffians, the Blue Mountain Boys.

The missing Womox had leaped voluntarily to his death, rushing back down the track out of the defile and so over a precipice. The other, the one with the broken tusk, sat crouched in mortal terror of the Blue Mountain men. I had seen the Womoxes in action, aboard Viridia the Render’s swordship; now I saw how a member of that savage and sullen race was terrified in his turn. And yet — my Delia was the princess of this cutthroat bunch!

Aighos bustled about superintending the tying of the guards’ wrists. They would be set stumbling up the track the remainder of the distance to High Zorcady in the mist. The calsanys loaded with the treasure were prodded away down the track. I looked up and saw a line of airboats appear over a nearby crag. They followed in line astern formation as neat as a rulered line on a score, sailing through the upper levels. They did not see us, down among the rocks, and so serenely flew on. I could guess why the treasure had not been brought in by flier; no one was going to trust an airboat with all this treasure among these hostile crags. The thought drew from me a gesture of respect for the men of the Vallian Air Service. Hikdar Stovang stumbled up, blood on his face, his helmet gone, his bright gold and black butterfly insignia ripped and stained.

“Traitor!” he yelled at me as I stood with Aighos. “I trusted you, you Opaz-forsaken cramph! Drak ti Valkanium! I shall remember that!”

Ob-eye swung his cudgel and slanted his one eye at Aighos, but the korf of the mountains laughed and said: “Let the braggart go!”

His men respected Aighos, that was very plain, and even Ob-eye, inclined to rumbustiousness, stayed in line, and with them all accepted me as Drak, a friend of Aighos. The korf considered it best for the time being to conceal my identity from everyone, with the exception of himself. I saw, with an amusement tinged with a wry affection for this korf of the mountains, this bandit, that he relished this knowledge, this secret he shared with a princess and a lord.

From the zorcas Aighos selected the finest specimen, that ridden by Hikdar Stovang. I remounted my own animal. The other Blue Mountain Boys selected zorcas and preysanys, and in a straggly procession we wended down away from High Zorcady.

I looked back. High Zorcady! There was a ring about that, a fineness, a sense of high yearning. The grim rearing pile spearing up into the clouds, its towers ringed with mist, the crested-korfs wheeling past its battlemented walls, all made a reality out of a fantasy of imagination. I knew I was sorry not to have visited High Zorcady.

The plan was to get me in, or to get Delia out, and once we had met, to make further plans. I did not care which, just so long as I could hold my Delia in my arms again.

“Pur Dray,” said Aighos, and then coughed and fiddled with his reins and berated the poor zorca between his knees. “Kr. Drak! We shall find hospitality at my cousin’s village. You rode past it and never saw it, so well are the houses hidden.”

He spoke the truth. The walls and buildings constructed of the rock against which they stood remained extraordinarily difficult to detect. We drank strong Kregan tea and ate a specialty of the mountains, ponsho rolled in hibisum flour and baked slowly — baked for three whole days — and then drenched in a taylyne sauce and simmered for another day. By the time the meat reaches your lips it melts like the sweetest honey. Superb! We also, being good Vallians, drank a great deal of wine of various vintages. The messenger had been sent, a lithe young girl of the mountains, striding with her skirts tucked up, springing boldly over frightening chasms, carrying laundry. The laundry would get her past the guards, and once inside she was known to friends, who would conduct her directly to Delia. Perforce, I waited. We had been quartered in the largest house, a two-story structure whose roof of sharply-angled slates would have towered over the other buildings but for the cunning use of overhanging rock-shelves. Each slate had to be fixed in place with severity; where torrents could wash over the rocks and sweep everything away the roofs had to be steep. There could be none of the shallow roofs of the valleys where the slates could lie and slumber without fear of slipping off.

I sat in a carved black-wood chair that must have been all of two hundred years old, and talked with the men. I had a strange peace, a tranquility, a sense of time standing still. So near I was to Delia that all my recent frantic scurryings appeared ludicrous. I had merely to sit here, eat and drink and talk, and she would appear in the doorway, radiant, glorious, alive!

In the corner stood a two-handed sword, fully seven feet long, of that peculiar kind used on Earth around the sixteenth century. Contrary to popular belief, these enormously long swords of war were used in combat, and not merely for color guards of honor or as symbols, but the man to wield them must be a man indeed. This one had a leather-wrapped grip, wide quillons, and also a wrapping of velvet around the blade before the quillons. The cotton would have come from Donengil and the silk, probably, from Loh. To protect the hand when grasping this shortening-section a pair of semi-quillons had been neatly set into the metal. The thing looked clean, without rust, but a casual test with my thumb showed it to be blunt.

“The great sword of war of the Blue Mountains,” said Korf Aighos. He half laughed, half sighed. “They are out of fashion now. There was a time when men raced through the ravines wielding the swords of war and none could stand against them.”

These men had never seen a Krozair longsword. Beside this enormous brute a Krozair two-hander was a subtle instrument. I had the sudden craving to feel a real Krozair longsword in my fists again. The feeling made me realize why Aighos had recognized me. He had heard me use a Krozair oath -

“By Zim-Zair!” — and no doubt Delia herself had let the resounding words fall from her lips, also, from time to time. She was fully entitled to do so.

A fracas started in the narrow walk and we went out, laughing and joking, carrying blackjacks of wine, expecting to see sport. A man raced past, screaming, his hair streaming, his face sweating, the eyes like livid coals.

“The shorgortz! The shorgortz!”

A woman screamed and snatched up her child and ran inside, slamming her lenken door. Aighos dropped his blackjack and the rich dark wine spread across the stones.

“The shorgortz,” I said. ‘Tell me, Korf, what is that?”

‘Truly you are not yet of the Blue Mountains, Kr. Drak!”

“Bring fire!” a man yelled.

“Shelter within doors and pray!”

“Fire!”

“If you light torches,” I said, at once adjusting to the peril, “you will tell the guards where we are.”

“Better the Emperor’s aragorn, or the mercenaries, than the shorgortz!”

So it was that serious, then. .

I couldn’t have them running about with torches alarming the neighborhood and alerting the men brought back by Hikdar Stovang. And, far more importantly, if there was some monster out there in the mountains, my Delia was coming. . I did not hesitate. I went back into the house, snatched up the great sword of war, brushed past its protesting owner, and strode out into the street. Men were milling. I shouted loudly, stilling them by my anger.

“Tell me, you Blue Mountain Boys! Where is this Zair-forsaken shorgortz?”

They babbled. A hundred paces along the track from the village. Along the track my Delia must walk. I ran.

I thought of the Ullgishoa and Umgar Stro. Then I had fought only with my chains and had not until later grasped the great Krozair longsword Pur Zenkiren had given me in Pattelonia. Now I held what was little more than a bar of steel. Mind you, I had bested four Womoxes with a length of lumber aboard Viridia’s swordship. . It had seemed to me that a great bashing, cutting instrument of some length would be the best weapon here, better, at any rate, than an ordinary rapier.

I saw the shorgortz.

The thing was immense, nauseating, powerful, and altogether repulsive. I did not hesitate in my headlong dash but went on, at top speed, hurling myself forward, the huge sword of war held high and cocked over my right shoulder.

The shorgortz was a reptile. It was not a risslaca, those dinosaurs of Kregen; it had twelve legs, bent and crooked, so that it walked with the body slung between. Its body was squamous, the scales rimmed with a crimson iridescence, their centers green-black. Its four eyes kept up a rapid blinking. Its tendrils groped forward, writhing, seeking, snatching at anything that ran, to snatch and grip and force the prey into the convulsively chewing parallel jaws that stretched back to the rear of its hideous head. It was of the size of, for example, a double-decker bus, and it stank. It reeked with its own effluvia and the rotting stenches of its victims.

The sword of war slashed down.

The blade struck the thing cleanly over the head — and bounced!

The damn thing was as blunt as a lead razor.

I struck again and again and then had to skip back as a tendril writhed out toward me. My blows had no apparent effect on the shorgortz. No doubt it was merely fulfilling its destiny. No doubt it was acting as its nature impelled it. But I knew that my Delia would come walking lightly down this track and if this obscene thing was alive to meet her. . I would not think of that. This time I did what I should have done at first. I ran in, thrusting, to plunge the sword of war into the top right-hand eye. Thick ichor pulsed forth, gagging with the smell of vomit. The thing lashed its tail with tremendous force from side to side, splitting and pulverizing the rocks‹ I leaped, thrust again, and now the lower right-hand eye burst.

I dodged back. A tendril lapped my body and I had to let go the sword of war with my left hand, draw my dagger and cut through. The keen steel bit. Maybe the sword of war had been a mistake? I needed a weapon that would bite!

The shrieks and hissings of the reptile screeched higher. I kept the dagger in my left hand, the curved steel guard shielding, and began a systematic slashing away of the groping tendrils. Twice the massive tail arched over at me and smashed brutishly along the ground where I stood the instant before I leaped aside. I stuck the dagger into it, but it did no good. Thrusting the dagger between my teeth, dribbling and drooling the foul-tasting blood smearing it, I took the sword of war into my fists again. This time I slashed and hacked and thrust, blotted out the lower left eye. But the thing kept jerking back, protecting its last remaining orb, and I kept thrusting and missing. And now it began to clutch out at me with its forelegs. Wickedly sharp talons raked past me. I felt my leather tunic rip and a white-hot pain scored my side. I kept on. I had to. My body was smothered with the ichor. Steam rose in the light of the mingled rays of the twin suns. I leaped and struck — I slipped and a foreleg darted for me. Only the reflex of muscles long trained and hardened barred the sword up, a barrier of steel, to chop off the blow. I felt the vibrations hammer through my hands.

On my feet, I leaped, aiming for the remaining eye. The head twisted, reared, the fanged mouth opened

— I hauled back.

In blind anger I hurled the two-handed sword down. I hauled out the rapier. I launched myself at the beast.

Two, three, four thrusts at the eye, and all parried or blocked. I brought the rapier down in a swooshing cut and the sharp steel scythed into scale. Again and again I cut, but I could see, clearly and with growing desperation, that the rapier lacked the bulk, for all that the rapier is a cutting weapon, to slice through the armored scale. The bulk inched ponderously forward on the ten legs to the rear. The shorgortz was hesitant to push on. It must recognize that it faced some being not prepared to submit to being snatched up and stuffed down the fanged mouth.

Those fangs opened and closed, chewing angrily.

The thing was no more angry than me.

I leaped again, tried for the eye, missed, slashed down furiously, and the rapier pinged and broke across.

I threw the hilt at the eye.

It caromed off the snout.

Beneath the thing’s foreclaws lay the sword of war.

I took the dagger out of my mouth and plunged it deeply between two claws. The leg wrenched back, taking the dagger with it. I seized the great sword.

A mere lump of steel. Blunt as a boxer’s chin. I took a breath. I could feel the foul gunk all over me. I poised.

Then I leaped.

The point of the sword of war penetrated the left upper eye. It burst in a showering of liquid. I slipped, fell, rolled, saw a flailing claw descending on me, and rolled on.

The talons hit the rock at my side, gouting up dust.

I leaped up and with a last and desperate thrust got the sword through the broken lower left eye. This time I did not pull it out. I leaned on it and thrust as hard as my muscles could push. I sweated and panted and thrust, my feet swinging off the ground as the beast reared. It was shrieking and I was yelling. It roared in its last agony, and I roared in my agony that it would not die before my Delia passed by. I felt the foreleg brush past me, felt the talons rip my tunic back. I felt, again, that white-hot line of acid scorch down my back.

My fingers slipped from the greasy hilt.

I toppled back.

The rocks came up, hard; but they did not knock me out, and I was able to claw up, ready to fight the thing with my bare hands if necessary.

I recall little after that.

I did hear a man shout, dimly and far off, “Hai! Jikai!”

But that held no meaning.

The thing was down, was gushing blood everywhere. I staggered back, bruised, cut, exhausted, empty-handed. Men surrounded me. I heard the clang of weapons. I heard a yelling, wrapped in the fog of nonunderstanding.

Then, sharp and clear, like a lance-thrust, words shocked out at me.

“That’s Drak ti Valkanium! Take the rast! The traitor will die, slowly. Take him and bind him with iron chains!”