Avenger of Antares Read online

  “Nalgre the slave-master,” he said. He spoke with great satisfaction.

  “Aye, Bartak. Nalgre.”

  We began to walk carefully toward this fine house belonging to that same Nalgre who so enjoyed to torture the slaves he prepared for the hunt. The suns beat down and there was a sweet, sickly taint of rotting jungle in our nostrils.

  “He has been sick of late,” said Bartak. “His belly troubles him.” Then he laughed. “Also his pet jiklo died. She was poisoned. It was said one of the tame slaves did it out of spite.”

  “And was Nalgre’s revenge—?”

  “Horrible.”

  The house boasted a verandah, but the reclining chairs and hammocks were empty. We padded up the wooden steps and went into the coolness within. At once I sensed the oppressive atmosphere of the place. Solidly built, the house would have been a comfortable home. But the place looked dusty and unkempt, with corners of carpets turned up, a table on its side, glasses with crushed rims still clustering on a silver tray. We heard the yowls and shrieks from the back of the house as we went in by the front door. We saw no servants or slaves. Bartak held his spear at the ready as we pushed through a bead curtain into a long, low room at the back. The screaming intensified. I had not heard its like before — save, perhaps, on those occasions I had slain a manhound.

  We gazed at that scene. We stood silently, watching.

  Long windows let angled patterns of emerald and ruby light splash upon a floor that, once polished, was now scuffed and marked everywhere by the scratch of taloned claws. No furniture cluttered that room. In the center stood Nalgre. He looked much as I remembered him, arrogant, hard, slashing his whip about, but his face had yellowed and grown gaunt, and there was a droop to the set of his shoulders. A real slave-master, this Nalgre, running the hunt for his master, the Kov of Faol; yet his sickness had taken a toll of him. Now he stood in boots and brown trousers, naked to the waist, his body yellowish and yet still full fleshed and thick with muscle. His whip snapped again and again, mercilessly. The manhound he flogged shrieked and hissed and tried to dodge, but she could not draw away for the thick iron chains that bound her by iron staples to the wooden floor.

  “His new pet, Dray Prescot,” whispered Bartak. “He is training her.”

  ‘Torturing her, I think.”

  “Yes. It is much the same to Nalgre. He whips and tortures her so that she will fawn on him and lick his boots, as his last pet did before she was poisoned.”

  “I have come a long way to see this Nalgre.”

  Bartak looked at me with some puzzlement. We stood for the space of a few heartbeats watching Nalgre as he abused the female jiklo. She was a fine well-grown specimen, savage, evil of eye, and pregnant. Whether Nalgre either noticed or cared I did not know. I fancied that if he did know he would not have cared.

  His whip cracked against her side.

  She yowled and jangled the chains in her desperation to get away from that cruel lash, and Nalgre laughed and swore at her and kicked her viciously.

  “I’ll teach you manners, you four-legged shishi! I’ll show you your master, by Havil! You’ll scream for mercy, aye, and you’ll like it, and lick my boots!” The whip smashed full upon her back, beating down her crest of matted blonde hair. Red weals stood out vividly all over her body. Again Nalgre kicked her.

  She hissed and screeched. She saw us. Jiklos are apim — that is, they were apim before they were thus transmogrified into manhounds — and still have the power of speech, no matter that they speak with a breathiness very dreadful to hear.

  The female jiklo saw us, she saw the weapons in our hands, she saw that we were naked and therefore slaves, but she did not cry out to her master that men had come to slay him.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Have you turned weakling, Dray Prescot?”

  Blood dripped upon the clawed wooden floor from the full-fleshed body of the jiklo, and blood spattered from the whip as Nalgre lashed and lashed. For the first time I saw an expression other than bestial ferocity upon the face of a Manhound of Antares. For this female jiklo’s face twisted now in a grimace of anticipatory relish.

  Bartak may have seen that expression, too, for he stepped forward with a certain deadly intent.

  Nalgre the slave-master knew nothing of our presence, understood nothing of the sudden change in his pet, until he heard my voice.

  “No, dom,” I said loudly. “Do not kill the rast, at least, do not kill him yet.”

  Nalgre jumped around as though he trod upon a rattler. He saw us. He saw our weapons. He showed not the slightest fear. He had been long accustomed to taking prisoners and breaking slaves. His arrogance and self-importance grew long roots in his evil mind. He swore vilely and shouted and jumped forward.

  “Get back to your stinking caves, you yetches! Back, slaves; crawl away before I have you punished!” He leaped for us, whirling the whip in readiness to slash at our naked hides, as he was used to doing. “Ho! Guards! Drag these nulshes away! To the flogging frames! Guards!”

  Bartak, halted by my order not to kill Nalgre, turned to look with some astonishment at me, the spear still held ready for the lethal, stabbing thrust. Nalgre’s whip looped about his body, leaving a red line upon his black bristles and making him start and yelp.

  “What do you mean, do not kill him? Have you turned weakling, Dray Prescot?”

  “No, Bartak,” I said, taking the whip and jerking it in. “I have a few questions for the cramph; that is all.” I reeled Nalgre in and, I admit with a shame I cannot defend, for all it appeared reasonable at the time, struck him upon the nose. He dropped the whip. He yelled again, but this time the yells were of a different caliber.

  “That’ll teach you to whip a pregnant female,” I said.

  He tried to hold his nose, but I had, as my contemporaries on the Downs would have said, tapped his claret. His hands dripped blood. This time it was his own.

  The jiklo snarled and hissed.

  “Well, Dray Prescot, ask him the questions and then I will thrust this spear into his guts.”

  The jiklo snarled.

  I looked at her.

  “You are safe now, manhound. He will not hurt you again.” Half turning my head I said to Bartak, “Hold the rast.”

  I approached the jiklo. She stood, trembling, suddenly still, those vicious jagged fangs revealed as her lips peeled back. I bent toward her.

  “If I unchain you, so that you may escape from this Nalgre yetch, will you harm us?”

  I could see the unreality of the situation. But I wanted to talk to Nalgre without a manhound chained to the floor between us, and a pregnant manhound, at that. Had she not possessed those short, enormously muscled, rear legs of the true jiklo, and had been standing up, I own she would have presented a very creditable picture of a woman, in body if not in face, for she was well formed. Now I stared directly into her blue eyes.

  The manhounds usually speak in a thick rasp, an unholy howl driven by their ferocious natures. Some of that coarseness comes from the clumsy local Faol dialect these jiklos used. She spoke.

  “I will not harm you.”

  Simple words. But what words to issue from the horrific fanged mouth of a jiklo!

  “Are you mad?” demanded Bartak. “Are you bereft of your senses? That thing — she will gut us as soon as look at us.”

  I stared at the female jiklo. I saw her skin, lightly downed with a golden fuzz, very white in the mingled suns-glow, with the blood dripping and the whip-marks and the ugly blue-purple and yellow bruises. She sat back to look up at me, her head on one side, the massive crusted mane of yellow hair broken away where Nalgre’s whip had struck down. Above her wrinkled pug nose, her blue eyes were clear now, steady on my brown eyes, and her lips, drawn closed over those risslaca-sharp teeth, looked so touchingly human. I marveled at myself. A Manhound of Antares, touchingly human? But I was seeing a jiklo in a totally new light. And, too, I did not forget that Queen Thyllis had bought tame jiklos for her throne-step p
ets.

  “Will you rip out our guts if I free you, jiklo?”

  Slowly, she shook her head. Nalgre, held by Bartak’s spear pressing into his navel, groped for words, gargling, trying to regain his sense of proportion.

  “This thing will not harm you further, jiklo,” I said.

  “If you free me, apim who stands upright, I swear by Kaleba the Unknown I will not harm you.”

  Just who Kaleba the Unknown might be I did not know, and I had no time to spare to marvel that these savage beasts still possessed either a culture or a religion that lifted their spirits from the ranks of true beasts.

  I bent to the iron chains.

  “Then you are free to go, jiklo.”

  “I give you my thanks. And I am called Melow, Melow the Supple — although now I carry child.”

  The situation was rapidly slipping away from me. To carry on a conversation with a manhound, when before now all my thoughts had centered on ways and means of killing them all off; the whole scene was borne in on me with a most sour suspicion that I was once again behaving like the onker of onkers I knew I really was.

  Bartak finished it for me.

  “Ask your questions of this nulsh, and then let us be off. And then free that devil — after!”

  “I have given her my word,” I said. I spoke mildly. I reached for the chains. My hand passed close to her ferocious mouth. The lips remained drawn forward; the wickedly serrated teeth remained invisible.

  “Is this your plan, then, Dray Prescot?”

  “It is now,” I said.

  I released the manhound.

  She stood up on four feet — rather, on two hands and two feet — and padded a little way off. She sat down again and began to clean herself. After a moment, without another word, I turned back to Nalgre and looked at him.

  “One question, Nalgre.”

  His yellowish face now bore a tinge of green.

  “Where is the Numim maiden? The golden lion-maid?”

  Bartak gave his spear a prod.

  “Mercy, mercy!” said Nalgre, the slave-master.

  “Tell me where the Numim maid is, Nalgre — and quickly!”

  “She was bought for the Kov! She is not here! The Kov has her in his fortress. I swear it!”

  “Is his fortress in Smerdislad?”

  “Yes, yes! His fortress is Smerdislad!”

  Nalgre, despite the pressing spear in his stomach, slumped to the floor. Bartak stared at him as a leem stares at a ponsho. Nalgre put his hands together, over his heart.

  “Spare me! I will promise you anything! I have much gold, much silver. I have Chail Sheom, jewels, zorcas, silks and furs, much gold, silver—”

  “You repeat yourself, Nalgre. And you do not mention that you have many slaves also.”

  Bartak sniggered.

  “Had many slaves.”

  “That is true,” I said.

  “Let me live — anything — my life — all I have is yours.”

  “What of yours you had is already ours, if we wished it,” said Bartak with that Brokelsh touch of brutality.

  “Chain him down to the floor, Bartak, and let us go.”

  Bartak took a delight in hauling the chains tightly. I did not wish the blood of this creature, and I was prepared to leave him to face the wrath of his master, the Kov of Faol, which is, to be sure, the coward’s way. I did not see the inevitable; Bartak had already done so.

  Pretty soon now the guards must come to the slave-master’s fine house to tell him, in fear and trembling, that a number of slaves had escaped and guards had been slain.

  We had not been molested for that reason: all the guards were out searching for runaway slaves.

  Before I left I turned back to Nalgre, who crouched, chained down to the floor, clearly bemused that he was still alive.

  “Nalgre,” I said. “Thing of joy to kleeshes. Tell me. Where is your flier? Your fluttrells?”

  He gabbled out they were parked separately from the others, half an ulm along the path at right angles to the main road. I nodded. I did not answer him, but gestured to Bartak and walked out of the room, going by the back doorway straight toward the cross-path. Bartak followed. We had not gone twenty paces when we heard the sounds from within the house.

  I stopped.

  “By the Black Chunkrah!” I said. “I am a fool. I should have thought—”

  Bartak smiled his Brokelsh smile. “Does it matter?”

  “Yes and no. It does matter, but it does not matter now.”

  All the same, I felt guilty as I saw the jiklo called Melow the Supple trot from the rear door of the house and jump, lithely still despite her condition, onto the path. She followed us as we ran swiftly along the little path. Less than half an ulm away we came to a stockade. Bartak pushed the gate open and we stepped inside. There were three fluttrells vastly excited by the smell of blood, and a small voller.

  “This, I think,” said Bartak the Hyrshiv, “was your plan, Dray Prescot.”

  “A part.”

  We climbed into the voller. It would be more suitable for what I desired. I turned to the controls at once and prepared to thrust the levers over. A soft thump sounded at my back, and Bartak let out a yelp. I swung about instantly, one of the thraxters in my fist, pointed, ready.

  The manhound sat up in the stern of the voller. Bartak drew toward me, visibly disconcerted.

  Melow the Supple said, “I cannot stay here now. There are certain signs by which it is known that a jiklo has killed.”

  “I see.”

  “We can’t take this beast with us!” said Bartak. He licked his lips and gripped his spear.

  “This is Melow the Supple,” I said. And then I astonished myself. “And she is no beast. Rather, a beast has treated her as a beast. Very well. We will take you away from here, and then you may depart safely wherever you wish to go.”

  Melow the Supple said nothing to that. Had she not previously thanked me I would have supposed manhounds incapable of gratitude.

  How wrong I was, you shall hear . . .

  The weather aloft was bright and hot, but I tossed back one of Nalgre’s flying furs; for such had been the vehemence of our escape none of us had stopped to snatch up clothes. The furs were superb, glossy and black, having at least twenty-four skins to each flying fur. The skins were from foburfs, the small four-legged mammals living in the taiga, those vast coniferous forests of South Havilfar. The skins were matched superbly, and sewn by mistresses of the needle. The pity of it is, of course, that twenty-four little foburfs apiece no longer lived in their sprawling coniferous domain.

  We took off with a savage upward acceleration and an equally violent downward swoop beyond the palisade. I guided the flier low above the treetops. As was becoming a habit — and a bad one — with me, I hammered the speed lever over to full. This voller was of the kind which do not move independently of the air currents, and so the slipstream battered back above the tiny forward screen. Bartak looked back and I looked back with him, amused by his studious avoidance of the female jiklo. We could see no sign of pursuit, although I fancied I detected little dots of flyers heading due south away from us.

  Incidentally, a female jiklo should in all accuracy be called a jikla. I found the word odd on the tongue, and Melow, herself, often referred to herself as a female jiklo. They were not called, for whatever liberated reasoning I do not know, womanhounds. There were other creatures on Kregen I was yet to meet who merited that title of horror.

  With the gorgeous black furs wrapped about us we were most comfortable. In truth, the weather system of Kregen differs much from this Earth’s. Here in the north of Havilfar the rising warm air of the equator takes up with it moisture from the oceans. When the air cools and sinks in the long meteorological rhythm it is not dry, like the air that scorches the Sahara on our Earth. Great Sahara-like deserts are found in Loh. Havilfar has wastelands, badlands, to the south of where we were but they are not true, ever-shifting, sand deserts.

  The flier s
creamed through the air and I turned to look forward to keep a lookout for the first glimpse of the promised fortress-city of Smerdislad.

  It is possible by fast flier to travel from the southern point of Faol to the northern in under three burs. This voller of Nalgre’s was nowise as fine or fast as Rees’s, as was natural, but we made good time. I kept a close lookout for flutsmen. If any of the reiving yetches crossed my path again I’d shoot first and ask questions later — or, rather, hurl a stux or three and yell derision after. As it turned out the flutsmen did not run across us. It was only too clear they were out chasing runaway slaves. I heartily wished the flutsmen bad luck, with a curse.

  Bartak the Hyrshiv, a man who spoke when he felt words were necessary, said, “This Numim maid, Dray Prescot, is she of great value?”

  “She is.” I felt it expedient to add: “But that is not why I seek her.”

  That, evidently, did not call for a reply in Bartak’s view. He went back to contemplating the sky, his black foburf fur no blacker than his own bristles.

  Over the bluster of the slipstream, Melow the Supple shouted, her hoarse voice harsh and muffled.

  “I have been to Smerdislad, Dray Prescot. They will not treat you kindly there if you arrive naked in a voller.”

  “My thanks, Melow the Supple.” I pointed down. “There are our clothes and our credentials.”

  With that I slammed the levers over and sent the voller hurtling down toward the startled party of zorcamen riding out into the clearing below.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Melow the Supple

  What followed, although it worked exactly as I had planned it to work, happened in what was to me such an extraordinary atmosphere of elation and inflated good humor I have ever after pondered the possibility that some subtle drug wafted from that Faolese jungle and addled our senses.