Prince of Scorpio

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The very tangle and interlacing tapestry of bones over and under which I leaped and dived saved me. One arrow only nicked me, a slicing shear through the leather over my left shoulder; a scratch, nothing. I dodged and ducked as best I could. These ancient bones, fossilized over the millennia and then cast adrift once again on the desiccated surface of the secret crater where these great beasts had trekked to die, surrounded me and in a weird and ghoulish way afforded me protection. The arrows sleeted about the iron-hard bones. I heard their chiming, like the bells of the damned, and I ran and leaped. One chance alone was left me now. A roaring bellow of rage pursued me. Kov Furtway had let loose his mercenaries, and the Undurkers, their proud supercilious noses high, were after me. I remember as I ran, hurdling risslaca vertebrae and all the scattered skeletons of giants of the past, that I had a most uncharitable thought about these halflings from Undurkor. Their long noses meant they could not turn their heads when loosing, otherwise the strings would have given them bloody stripes down those snouts. They used a short compound bow, and they must draw it as far as they might, to the chest, the lip, the nose. It is from the long throw of the great longbow that all its awful power is obtained, that long energy-storing thrust that gives range and penetration, when the shorter flatter staccato of the small bow slaps out jerkily.

Mind you — if an Undurker arrow skewered me now it would be just as painful as a cloth-yard shaft. The moons of Kregen floated past above and the shadows shifted strangely among that fossilized forest of bones. The hard clatter of booted feet pursued me. I ran. I dodged. There was no time for that old Krozair trick I so joyed in employing, of turning about and swatting the arrows away with my sword, something after the style of a flick-flick gobbling up flies on the wing.

“I’ll marmelize you!” a voice screeched at my back.

I ignored that kind of drivel.

I kept my bowstave horizontal so as not to foul the arching rib cages. Had my bow been strung — for like any frugal bowman I kept the stave unstrung when possible — I’d have risked a turn and a shot. But I kept on. Inky shadows barring the path succeeded by patches of pink moonlight passed, and I raced on. The avenue twisted and turned where bones too large and heavy to lift from the way imposed a turning. These serpentine windings saved me. I roared out into a cleared area. In a great circle the bones enclosed this area like a fence of fossils. In the center rose the tumbled pile of ruins. I made out three corners of a tower, shafting up like a rotten tooth. Masses of rock lay strewn haphazardly. A few lights glimmered. I had to cross this open space somehow.

Head down I started off at a tremendous pace, my Earthly muscles gaining full effect from Kregen’s gravity, knowing I had at best but a few murs before the first of my pursuers appeared at the mouth of the tunnel-like avenue through the bones.

As I went I shouted. I used up breath to bellow a warning of my approach.

“Friend!” I roared. “I’m Strom Drak! Let me in!”

A long arrow skeeted past my head. I let out a blistering Makki-Grodno oath and lifted my voice, as on this Earth I had hailed the foretop in a gale, and told them what I thought of a Vox-spawned Opaz-forgotten cramph of a bowman who tried to spit a comrade.

With all the hullabaloo I very nearly miscalculated and left my first dodging weaving too late. I slanted my run and then zigzagged back, and six arrows clumped against the rock, to carom ahead. Three of them snapped across, whereat I took note and would have smiled, were I given to that kind of facial contortion in interesting moments like this.

“Undurkers!” I screeched. “Feather a few rasts for me!”

I was almost there, now, in the shadow cast by one moon. Over my head rustled the near-silent covey of long arrows. I dodged again and then dived into the sprawled mass of ruins with the shrieks of skewered halflings in my ears.

I rolled over and jumped up. “By Vox! That sounds better for a fighting-man to hear!”

Seg said, “You took a chance, dom. I only just managed to knock Hakli’s bow up in time.”

“I knew you must have done so, Seg. Since when does a Bowman of Loh miss a running target coming straight for him!”

The dark crimson shape at Seg’s side chuckled. “Aye, Seg Segutorio. This Drak of whom you spoke is indeed a man.”

In the moonshot darkness a line of bowmen sank down into their places in the shelter of rocks and tumbled slabs of masonry. Hakli, his fire-red hair a weird color under the moons, chuckled again, and took up his station. “The cramphs have crept back among the bones, where they belong.”

“They’ll be out again, Hakli,” I said. “They have archers of Undurkor with them now.”

“Children with toddlers’ bows, by Hlo-Hli! Flint fodder!”

I turned to Seg. “The Princess Majestrix, Seg. Where is she?”

Seg looked at me. I saw the lines on his face in the streaming pink moonshine.

“Delia? She is not with us.”

Once again that frightful sensation of the solid ground beneath my feet turning and plummeting sickeningly seized me. I gripped Seg’s arm. We moved away, into the shadows.

“What do you mean, she is not with you? She left in an airboat when these kleeshes attacked Delta Dwa. She must be here!”

“No, Dray. She did not come with us. I was aboard the flier in which the Emperor fled. She did not land here.”

There had been confusion when the Emperor, warned by Vomanus, had fled for safety to these ruins in The Dragon’s Bones. Vomanus liked to come here to study the old remains; it was a hobby. There had been worse confusion when the courtiers, retainers, and guards had landed here, a chaos made worse by the great storm that had swept up the airboats like idle leaves upon a river and swept them into shattered destruction against the massive array of bones. Seg could have been mistaken.

“We’re short on food and water, Dray. There have been a few attacks, not many, and we held them off without trouble. But the men may not fight if they are not fed.”

“They have Undurkers with them out there now, Seg. If the crimson Bowmen of Loh do not fight, the Emperor is a dead man.” I looked into the ruins. “I will seek him out now. Delia must be here. If she is not — he may know where she is.”

Seg, looking at my face in the shadows, coughed, and said: “Remember, my old sea-leem. He is the Emperor. He is surrounded still by his men.”

“I know, Seg. But I have come here to find Delia-” I told him, then, that I had sent Inch to what might be his death.

Seg said, “From what you tell me of Inch, Dray, he will fight his way out of anything.”

I warmed at that. Seg’s tour of sentry duty being finished he accompanied me as I went to find the Emperor. On all sides among the ruins the mercenaries were camped, and they appeared to be a sullen, dispirited lot. I could imagine the frightful problems they were revolving in their minds. A mercenary fights for pay and will remain loyal, but if you do not pay him, if you do not feed him and give him wine. .

“Welcome, Strom Drak!” The Emperor held out his hand and we gripped in the Vallian way. He looked exhausted, with the betraying dark smudges beneath his eyes, his cheeks sunken. But there remained about him the same indomitable iron determination that kept his place as Emperor; this man would never give in until they shoveled earth down onto him. Perhaps that was where we differed, for I would not give in until I had clawed my way up and thrown down those hurling the dirt on me. “You are right welcome, Strom Drak. It is good to find loyal men still in Vallia.”

The silly old fool! He thought I had fought my way here to rescue him, or to help him in his defense!

Idiot! Onker! Calsany!

“Where is the Princess Majestrix, Majister?”

“I do not know.” He made a flat, dismissive gesture. “At least, she is not trapped here with us. But, soon, my loyal subjects will arrive, as you have, Strom Drak, and will destroy utterly those treacherous rasts led by the Trylon Larghos, may Vox tear his guts out with white-hot pincers.”

“But, Majister,” I said. “The Princess Delia — she must-” I swallowed. I shook and couldn’t stop myself. The Emperor looked coldly at me, for no stranger, no man not of the family, unless given permission, may call the Princess Majestrix anything other than that. Her name, like her person, is sacred.

“She was in an airboat — the storm — those mad leem out there. .”

Pallan Rodway, the minister in charge of the Treasury, took my arm and tried to wheel me away from the Emperor. I would not be maneuvered. I glared at them, at this Emperor and the few loyal nobles and Pallans remaining to him as we stood in that shattered tower surrounded by ruins.

“Where is she!” I yelled it; it was a demand. “The Princess Majestrix!”

The Emperor returned my glare with all the apoplectic fury of complete authority. I saw that malignant glitter in his eyes and I know my eyes returned the same ugly, evil, hateful, utterly damn-you-to-hell look. What might have happened then I do not know — and didn’t care, by Zim-Zair, then! — but the moment was broken by two almost simultaneous events.

A voice spoke, a voice I knew: “Well met, Drak! Come and drink wine with me, for there is much to tell.”

I said, “Your words to me, Vomanus, were: ‘I will do as you ask.’ Do you remember?”

He came forward into the torchlight. “I remember.” He looked just the same, handsome, careless, above the petty run of party politics, and yet. .

And then a Chulik mercenary let out a tremendous bellow.

“The cramphs! They attack! The Undurkers! They come!”

I unslung the great Lohvian longbow and with the smooth practiced forward jerk, strung it. I looked at Seg and at Vomanus. Here one was a mere private Koter in the Emperor’s bodyguard, the other a lord of a province; to me they were comrades both. We went to the perimeter of the ruins and we vied one bowman with another, in our picking off of the supercilious Undurkers as they strove to outshoot us. Nothing on Kregen, as I understood it then, outshoots the Lohvian longbow. The warriors of Kov Furtway, attacking, were feathered into heaps and piles as they sought to rush from the ruins under the cover of their own arrow shower. Oh, we took casualties. But we held that attack and hurled it back; at only one point did it come to handblows, and then our Chuliks with their chilling ferocity smashed the first wave, and the second recoiled and ran.

The metal-adorned backs of the mercenaries vanished into the fossilized forest of bones. Our wounded were cared for. The fourth moon, She of the Veils, cast down her pinkish light and picked out in a roseate glow the glimmer of weapons, the gleam from an eye-socket, the black sheen of blood, and the harsh rock and dust, the ring of bones, the ruins, the desolation.

Vomanus cornered me where a dead Rapa still clutched his sword, his bird-beak embedded in the dust, the Undurker arrow protruding through his neck.

“Dray! I never thought to see you alive again!”

We talked. Much of our conversation dealt with what I have already related to you. I found my surmise was true. He had allowed himself to become the candidate so as to discover the secret intentions of the Emperor’s enemies. His warning had been almost too late. “And now we are done for, anyway, I think, Dray. We have had bonny times, but they are over.”

From the corner of my eye I was aware of the dark crimson shape, hovering. I said, “Vomanus, tell me true — you have no desires to marry Delia? You continue to support me?”

“Of course! Need you ask? I have spoken with Delia, and no woman loved a man as she loves you.”

He chuckled, an incongruous sound in those surroundings. “Although why so ugly a looking devil as you should manage it when all the chivalry of Vallia have been spurned — Vox take it! But you are the man, Dray Prescot!”

I heard Seg gasp.

“Come here, Seg!”

These two, Vomanus of Vindelka and Seg Segutorio, stared at each other, and I recognized the amusement in me at their instinctive sizing up, their flash of temperament. I told them both a little of the fuller story, and finished: “So we three are dedicated to the service of Delia of Delphond. Very good. Very fine. But where, by the Black Chunkrah, is she?”

All that was certain was — she was not trapped with her father in the tumbled ruins at the center of The Dragon’s Bones.

Naturally, I immediately took stock of the situation with the single obsessive desire to get out. I could make a run for it, and once inside the tangle of bones, no man or beast-man would catch me. Covering that open space would be the tricky part, for I would be shot at by Undurkers in front and by Lohvian Bowmen from the rear. Of the two I gave the Lohvians the best bet on feathering me.

“Sink me!” I burst out, and the other two looked at me strangely. I knew I must appear a black-hearted devil to them, a harsh, intolerant — and intolerable — man who demanded instant obedience. But other thoughts occurred to me. This man we defended was Delia’s father. That he was the Emperor meant nothing in my book. But if I left now, and Furtway succeeded in murdering Delia’s father in cold blood

— what would she think? What would she think of me? I would be the man who had run away and left her father to die a miserable death.

Hell’s bells and buckets of blood!

I was in a cleft stick and it was damned uncomfortable.

Furtway flung his men in again, and this time they surged up to our parapet of stones. We had a few brisk moments when the swords rang and slithered, and men screeched with steel skewering their bellies. Then the third party mercenaries broke and we spitted them all the way back to the bone ramparts. Seg said, “I’m down to a dozen shafts.”

“Here, take these quivers.” I handed them out, sharing among the crimson Bowmen. They had lost all their Jiktars, their Chuktar was Opaz knew where, only three Deldars remained, and one badly wounded and dying Hikdar. Of the intermediate ranks, as you know, a man is called simply by the last and identifying portion of his full rank. Various organizations place varying numbers of degrees in each rank. The highest ranking of the three Deldars was a So-Deldar — that is, the third degree of Deldar — and he had seven more to go before he became a Hikdar. They were good men. But, as is my custom, I had been active in the fighting, shouting intemperate and callous orders in my brutal and domineering way, and they had listened to me, instinctively understanding that, for all my sins and ugly face, I was a leader, and they obeyed.

The Emperor came up and said abruptly, “Strom Drak. I have noticed how you fight, and I am pleased. Of the other matter we will talk by and by-”

I interrupted him. If you cannot imagine the full depth of my agony for Delia, the feelings of screaming madness possessing me, I can understand that. It has been given only to few men to grasp what I suffered then, and I would not wish that pain on anyone. So it was I interrupted the Emperor, and walked away, saying over my shoulder: “I will fight for you, Majister — aye, and slay those rasts for you! — but afterward we will talk, you and I.”

Pallan Rodway, a Vadvar, the High Kov of Erstveheim, two Stroms, and all the other nobles gasped their outrage. I was aware of Vomanus talking hurriedly with the Emperor; but another attack came in then and we were busily occupied in hurling the mercenaries back. But our numbers were thinning. I heard a Rapa grumbling that he had a throat drier than the Ocher Limits themselves. I gripped him by his clumsy throat, glared madly into his birdlike eyes, and I screamed at him that he’d be a dead Rapa before he drank again if he didn’t get back into the fight.

The Emperor watched all this. I was sane enough to realize that he was cunning enough to use men when it suited him; he had seen me fighting and wouldn’t arrest me — or make the attempt, Zair rot him! -

while I was useful to him. That’s how he had remained Emperor so long. I caught a whiff of perfume, a sweet, gagging stench, completely out of place in those surroundings. Across the clearing raced foemen to attack us. I looked quickly down and there, wedged into a crevice between rocks, crouched a man. He was sumptuously dressed, with a great deal of lace, silk, and golden ornaments. He wore a rapier. He smelled like a barber’s shop. I caught him by the collar and hauled him out.

“Get up and fight, you cramph!”

“No! No — I am no fighting-man!”

Once a Kregan reaches maturity he appears to age very little until the last years of his life, perhaps a few white hairs when he is a hundred and fifty or so; but I fancied this man was considerably older than my comrades. I kicked him.

“You fight, dom! You fight for your Emperor!”

An Undurker arrow whistled between us and clanged against the rock. He screeched. His face was covered in sweat. It sheened under She of the Veils like pink icing.

“Fight, cramph!”

He staggered up then, his face contorted into a look compounded of fear and hatred, pride and anger. For a second I thought he would take his place in the line of men and halflings now furiously battling with the waves of attackers as they sought to smash past the pitiful barrier of rocks. Then he crumpled and twisted away. In the wash of light I saw the colors, made meaningless by the pink moons’ light, but the emblem was unmistakable. It was a great butterfly so I knew those colors were gold and black.

“I do not want to die!” he moaned now, all the hatred and anger gone, and the pride slipping until only fear was left.

“We’ve all got to die some time, you calsany! Better in a great fight than rotten with disease in a bed!

Draw your sword! Fight!”

Some of the last vestiges of habitual unthinking pride clung to him and he looked up at me, a white face, delicate, weak, foolish. “Do you not know who I am, kleesh! I am Vektor, Kov of Aduimbrev! I do not take orders from a mere Strom.”

I looked at him, and the Emperor moved his hand. Pallan Rodway and the High Kov of Erstveheim, two old men and therefore not required in the fighting line, lifted Vektor by the armpits and took him away. I glared sullenly at the Emperor.

“That is Vektor of Aduimbrev! That is the thing you wish to marry your daughter!”

And then I laughed. I roared out a great coarse insulting gutter-bred laugh.

“You thought to rule him when he was married, keep him from getting in your hair! I despise you, Emperor Majister! You sought to soil your daughter by marrying her to a thing like that to serve your own dark and evil ways.” And then, because a wash of Chuliks poured in over the wall, such as it was, I pushed him aside. “Get yourself under cover or you will be killed.”

An Undurker arrow arched in over the ruins and dropped full for the Emperor’s chest. My rapier nicked out, cleanly as we Krozairs of Zy know how, and chopped the arrow away.

“Go on, you old fool Majister!” I roared. “I’ve a battle to fight and you’re getting under my feet!”

The Emperor stared at me with eyes in which an agony had been born. Vomanus ran up. His sword dripped blood.

“They’re through on the other side!”

“Thank the Emperor for that and the onker Vektor. They detained me when I should have been fighting. Get everyone back to the central tower, Vomanus. Move!”

He ran off and then the smash of Chuliks reached me and I had to skip and jump, slash and thrust, very busily for a space. I left the Chuliks stretched upon the dusty rocks and ran back. I could see the heads of the Bowmen of Loh in the ruined tower, but they were not loosing their deadly shafts. We had expended all our arrows.

The smaller arrows of the Undurkers were not of great use, but some of the Bowmen, who boasted they could loose a leg of ponsho and hit the chunkrah’s eye, let fly and brought down their men. Inside the tower I paused to take stock.

We had lost a lot of men. We were down to twenty-four Bowmen, and sixteen halfling mercenaries. Out there, Furtway, although he had lost large numbers, must still have three or four hundred to hurl against us. And without arrows we were in parlous state.

“Rocks!” I roared. “We will throw rocks down on them and break their skulls!”

“Aye!” shouted Seg Segutorio. “They haven’t a chance!”

The men reacted to that. Now they had faced the reality of the situation they knew they must fight on. One reality was, of course, that they had seen me thrust a Fristle through the body when he had attempted to run out toward our foemen, his hands empty and high over his head. That had not been murder. That had been execution of a traitor. I hated it, but it was done in the heat of battle, when the blood sang, when that dreadful and despised red curtain of which I have spoken drops before the eyes, and a man who is a man must struggle to reach past it. The other reality was less starkly brutal; much more of the mores of Kregen. They would earn their pay, these hireling soldiers. They had no complaints now about food and drink, for they sensed they might not live long enough to want. The Emperor approached me again. “Strom Drak, I would like to speak with you-”

“Not now, Majister. I’m busy. If you’ve a problem, see Vomanus, or Seg Segutorio.”

I spun away and roared vilely at two Chuliks who, in their eagerness to procure rocks for skull-crushing, were prizing loose a stone that would have brought down the upper corner ruins. As we sorted out that, I looked over the jagged masonry wall and saw quite clearly the quick energetic figures of Furtway’s men advancing. So Zim and Genodras had risen. So it was daylight.

“All the better for us to see them!” I roared. “They’ll be sorry they messed with us!”

We met the enemy as they advanced with a shower of rocks. Men fell, to join the piles of other bodies feathered with the long Lohvian arrows. But they pressed on. I looked for Furtway, Jenbar, and Larghos. Some new dynamic had been injected into the attack. They came on with a firm tread, ignoring their casualties, and so burst into the foot of the tower. I had ordered everyone aloft on the single rickety platform remaining. From this we hurled down rocks. Arrows sought us. Every now and then a Bowman or a halfling would clutch himself, looking stupidly at the arrow in him, and then pitch forward to crash to the stones beneath. Around then I realized — and despaired as far as ever I allow myself to despair -

that the men with me believed all was lost. They did not think we would live through this. The Emperor with his nobles had been perched right at the top in the highest of the three angled corners remaining. I prowled the canted platform below, urging my men to conserve their rocks and to hurl only when a foeman attempted too boldly to climb. I had brought us into an impasse. This was not my way of fighting. I couldn’t get at those rasts down there.

There were few enough of us left now for a breakout to be a possibility. It was our only chance to save the Emperor and his men. I had to make that attempt to save him now. For my Delia’s sake. I went up and told him.

He looked at me, and a look on his face I could not fathom made me return it with as ugly a glare as any I have bestowed on an unfortunate in my life.

“We stand a good chance now, Majister, and we will leave no one behind except the wounded who cannot run. And,” I added bitterly, “they are mostly below, poor devils, well on their way to the Ice Floes of Sicce.”

The Emperor said, “You are a wild and strange man, Drak. I thought this even when I heard of your exploits on Valka, when I signed your patent of nobility.” He pulled and pushed a ring on his middle left finger. “Well, Strom Drak. If you save me alive from here, I will do more than make you a Strom, or a Vad, or a Kov. You will be fit to be called Prince Majister of Vallia.”

“You’ll have to tie up your garments,” I said. “And take a good grip on my tunic, and belt. If you let go I can’t save you. I shall need both hands for climbing.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes. No time now. Titles mean nothing to me. Your life, Majister, means only something you wouldn’t understand.”

Vomanus came over and reported a stir below. I looked down.

Trylon Larghos was there, full of life and good cheer, beaming up, confident of victory.

“Let me speak to the Emperor!”

I hurled a rock at him and, stupidly, missed, for he jumped aside. The rock splintered and a chip struck him in the eye, and screeching and spouting blood over his hands as he clasped his face, he collapsed. I went up again.

“Now is the time, Majister.” He was ready. Vomanus and Seg assisted the other old men. We went to the back of the tower and squeezed through the lower windows. Opposite us the forest of petrified bones glittered in the mingled opaz light. We began that climb down the walls. The Emperor hung on my back a dead weight. I watched a Fristle let go and scream his way to the ground, landing in a red puddle, and I cursed the fool for betraying what we were doing.

We slid, slipped, and scraped our way down. In the song that has been made of the fight at The Dragon’s Bones, the tempo becomes mocking here, talking of the loss of skin, the sweat in our eyes, the ripped fingernails, and the blood-streaks down the ruined walls. But that is the Kregan way. They often mock where their emotions run deep.

We reached the floor of the clearing and at once we started for the bones opposite. I thought we would make it.

“Go on, Majister! I will take the rear — just in case.”

They ran on, a clump of old men, halflings, and Bowmen. I found Seg at my side, and Vomanus at the other. All our weapons were caked with blood. I spoke viciously.

“Go on, you two! Stick with the Emperor.”

Vomanus said, “You have been giving us orders very freely, Dray. Now, I think, we will disobey you.”

Seg said, “You go with the Emperor, Dray, if you like.”

Comrades.

We would do it. We were almost there.

A great swirling flood of mercenaries burst around the shattered corner of the tower and raced across the dust toward us. Many races and species were there, all thirsting for our blood. I could hear their shrill shrieks of triumph.

“Run, Majister!” I roared. “Run, by Vox, run for the sake of your daughter.”

He half turned to look back, and I waved my rapier at him and yelled: “I didn’t come here to rescue you! But you’re rescued now! Get in among the bones and you’re safe! Run!”

Then we three, Seg, Vomanus, and I, turned to face the death running so swiftly upon us.