Witches of Kregen Read online

  But...

  Seg, with that feyness of his race, was obviously the first to see and recognize what had happened.

  He let out a yelp, and then: “By the Veiled Froyvil, my old dom! Khe-Hi’s done it!”

  “What—?”

  “Look!”

  We all stared narrowly at the shining frogfall.

  “Yes — Khe-Hi’s done it.”

  “I like it,” said Seg, cheerfully. “I like it!”

  The column of frogs remained, as solid, as torrential, as impressively diabolical as it had been before. But now the frogs rained upwards.

  Khe-Hi-Bjanching was sorcerously sending the damned frogs back whence they’d come, we hoped to fall out of the clear sky onto the head of the witch Csitra.

  “Good old Khe-Hi!”

  “And his lady love,” pointed out Turko. “Ling-Li will have had a hand in this.”

  “I do like it,” said Seg.

  We stood to watch those damned frogs whirling back up into the sky and the relief was enormous, by Zair, I can tell you!

  The experience through which we had just gone had been mind numbing. It had blunted out senses. At least, I felt that inner dizziness as though I had difficulty merely in keeping balance, in finding the right words, in carrying out even the simplest action. Sorcery sometimes plays a great part in the lives of people on Kregen; mostly it is just there, heard of but peripheral to busy lives.

  There was little we could do until the frogs had all been returned from whence they came. A jury-rigged mast and a scrap of sail gave us control; but I felt it essential to return to the camp as fast as possible, so I bellowed out orders to land the ship. We’d go back on foot. There would be a tremendous amount of work to do back there sorting out the damage, caring for the wounded, preparing defenses, putting what regiments we could into shape for any possible attack from Layco Jhansi and his screaming fanatics.

  The tall roof of the village barn glistened into view as the upward torrent of frogs continued. The cottages buried in the squiggling mass began to show a gable here, a twisted chimney there. This tiny village of Gordoholme, although within the area occupied by the Ninth Army, was generally out of bounds, off limits, to the swods in the ranks, and the officers, too, unless on duty. We had liberated the place from the clutches of Jhansi’s offensive people; we did not wish to continue the crimes of which they were guilty.

  This village of Gordoholme represented the farthest point we’d reached in our march into Vennar so far. Jhansi had refused the great and decisive battle we’d expected outside Gliderholme. We knew he was in trouble finding fresh mercenaries, for many of his paktuns had renounced their service and either returned home or joined the usurping King of North Vallia. This puzzled us, for the journey entailed shipping in order to circumvent the activities of the Racters who were at war with the King of North Vallia.

  Whatever obscure motives prompted Jhansi and his sorcerous adviser, Rovard the Murvish, a highly aromatic Sorcerer of Murcroinim, into the various courses of action they had undertaken against us, one fact remained more than most probable — Jhansi would hurry to hire on more mercenaries, and his agents would be overseas now scouring the markets and barracks for tazll paktuns.

  In the meantime he had the mobs of ordinary people driven into a state of fanatical frenzy by the thaumaturgical arts of Rovard to hurl against us in waves of screaming humanity. This disgusted us. As I watched the stream of ascending frogs I seriously considered the usefulness of sorcery to any world among the millions of worlds in space.

  The people who had taken refuge with us in the ship — the vorlca was named Wincie Smolek II — gathered at the rails to watch. Among them I spotted a group of cavalrymen wearing pale-green uniforms, the dolmans well-frogged and the pelisses smothered in fur and gold wire. This habit of carrying a spare coat slung over the shoulder to put on when the weather turns chilly is well-known on this Earth, and is sensible enough for many fighting men of Kregen to adopt as a matter of course. These jutmen were from the Forty-Second Regiment of Zorcabows, raised and led by Strom Larghos Favana. The irony in the situation, which I savored as a man with toothache might savor a poultice, lay in their regimental name — Favana’s Frogs.

  “The damned things are nearly all gone,” I said. “If we’re going, we’d better make a start.”

  Seg and Turko did not reply but just climbed down the shattered remnants of the ladder to the ground. Nath clipped out a command to the men clustered along the rails, and they began to go over the side. They were not all chattering away among themselves as one might have expected. They were very quiet. The enormity of what had happened affected them, affected all of us, deeply.

  Soon we were marching off toward Gordoholme and the ruined camp of the Ninth Army.

  Other vessels had lifted clear and no doubt the people aboard them would be doing just what we were doing. The flying saddle birds had mostly, fortunately for them and us, been dispersed on patrol duties.

  “What a hell of a mess!” said Turko, highly disgusted.

  “We’ll soon have your army back in shape, Turko,” said Seg, striding on, his bow slanting up over his back.

  I didn’t say anything. The catastrophe might yet prove decisive. Certainly, it had put back our plans for this part of Vallia to what might be a disastrous degree.

  In his decisive way, Nath na Kochwold said, “The discipline of the army will hold up, Turko. I’ll see to that, by Vox.”

  Well, that was Nath for you, tough and uncompromising, dedicated to the ideals of order and discipline.

  He glared upon the men trooping along from the stranded sailer. His fierce eyebrows drew down.

  “Look at ’em!” he exclaimed. “By the Blade of Kurin! A bunch of washerfolk with the laundry would look smarter.”

  With that, off he went, rounding up the soldiers, bellowing orders, cutting into them. He did not wave his arms about frantically. He did not even draw his sword and brandish that. He got in among the mob and his incisive personality and reputation very quickly sorted them out.

  It made no matter who or what they were. Whether pikemen without pikes, cavalry without mounts, heavy infantry without shields, they jumped to his cracked-out commands.

  Very soon they were in a column of march, three abreast, and striding along, heads up, chests out, swinging their arms. It wouldn’t be beyond Nath na Kochwold to have them singing in a moment or two.

  “You’ve got to admire—” began Turko.

  “Aye,” said Seg. “What’s that?”

  His keen bowman’s eye picked up the tiny black cloud in the distance before any of the others. We all swiveled to look.

  Seg, Turko and a small group of the lads from my bodyguard, standing a little to the side of the marching column, watched that small cloud as Nath strode up to join us.

  “That’s got ’em...” He stopped himself, swung about, shaded his eyes against the Suns.

  Seg said: “Flyers.”

  “A returning patrol?” But Turko spoke the question without conviction as to the answer.

  Glints of light speared off the aerial riders, armor and weapons flashing in the suns-light.

  “Damned flutsmen,” I said.

  “Aye,” someone at my back ground out. “May they rot in a Herrelldrin Hell.”

  We’d all had experience of flutsmen, unpleasant experiences, tending to result in sudden death if you were not the quicker.

  Flutsmen, reiving bandits of the air, had preyed on Vallia during and after the Times of Troubles. They owed allegiance to no one apart from their own bands. They would hire out, serving as mercenaries, if the prospect of loot was good. They fought hard and viciously. They were not nice people, to use a phrase once coughed out concerning them. Loric the Wings had died after making that pronouncement. But he was right.

  “Whatever they are,” Turko said, “they are enemies to us.”

  “And if they’ve been newly hired by Layco Jhansi,” amplified Seg, carefully taking his bow off hi
s shoulder, “they’ve caught us at a remarkably inconvenient moment.”

  At this distance it was still only possible to make an estimate of the numbers of flutsmen. From the apparent thickness and extent of the flight, I judged more than a couple of hundred approached. Well, we’d find out their real strength soon enough.

  Nath shot off to the marching column not wasting any time and instantly the soldiers began to fan out and take up the best defensive positions they could find.

  “So much,” said Seg, stringing his longbow with that cunning application of flexing power that betrayed long experience and great strength. “So much for our friend Nath’s neat marching orders.”

  Around us grew little vegetation to afford cover. There was no handy river. The ground puffed dust-hard underfoot. No, we’d have to stand and fight these reivers of the air where we were.

  “I make it better than two hundred and fifty,” remarked Turko. He had no sword to draw and I noticed the way he flexed his arms, as if instinctively limbering up for a contest in which all his skills in unarmed combat could be negated. Yet that was a foolish thought. I’d rather have Turko the Shield with me, unarmed, than many and many a man lumbering in full armor and with a whole arsenal of edged and pointed weapons.

  With a flash of the old quizzically mocking Turko, he turned to me, half-smiling.

  “I do not see Korero the Shield, Dray.”

  “And I don’t see a single shield, either.”

  “So your back—”

  “My back will have to be the business of myself, and your back yours, if we are parted.”

  In that quiet way of his, Seg Segutorio glanced across as he reached out for the first shaft from his quiver, and said: “I’ll fight alongside you, Turko.”

  I nodded. The arrangement was sensible.

  Turko contented himself with: “Aye, Seg. It is a pity Nath didn’t hang onto that shield.”

  Just that, a pity. We looked as though we might be entering on the last great fight. If we were, if we were all to die here, well, I couldn’t hope to go down to the Ice Floes of Sicce in the company of finer comrades.

  The oncoming flutsmen spread out into individual dots. The dots sprouted wings and became fluttrells, and the riders on their backs, brandishing their weapons, became men.

  There were more nearly three hundred of them.

  We set ourselves and grasped our own swords and spears. Seg lifted his bow.

  Streaming their flying silks and furs, their standards fluttering in the breeze, their armor and weapons a blaze of glitter in the radiance of the Suns of Scorpio, the flutsmen swooped upon us.

  Chapter two

  Concerning feet caught in stirrups

  Seg shot. As always, he shot superbly. Four shafts spat from his bow, rose-feathered slivers of death. Four flutsmen screeched and toppled to hang from their harness, the clerketers strapped about them, their weapons falling away beneath.

  The birds’ wingbeats thrashed the air. Dust spumed. Some flutsmen circled, trying to shoot with their crossbows into the confusion. Some of my lads fell.

  The majority of these aerial bandits, seeing the great preponderance of numbers on their side, just landed their fluttrells and jumped off ready to fight.

  I, Dray Prescot, was not prepared to let any foeman, particularly not these unhanged rasts of the air, dictate the tactics of a fight. They might land and hop off their birds and prepare themselves to chop us up. Nath might very well have placed our lads in defensive positions, the proper course at the beginning when we expected to be shafted. Now, though, the situation was different...

  There is something revolting about the easy, leisurely way some people prepare to kill others. This is nothing to do with the careful preparations that must be made, for killing is an arduous task, and not one to be undertaken lightly. No, I mean in these flutsmen you could almost see them licking their lips as they dismounted and drew their weapons for ground work and so, settling themselves, decided at last to advance and finish toying with us, ending their pleasurable anticipation for the real thing.

  Well, they’d get no time allowed by me, no, by the stinking eyeballs and suppurating nostrils of Makki Grodno!

  “Form!” I screeched it out, hard and high. Nath jerked as though I’d goosed him. “Form line, two ranks deep. Bratch!”

  The lads here, many of my bodyguard corps, many from the Phalanx, were what one could call elite quality.

  They bratched. They formed a two-deep line. I had no time to think of the panache of it, of the show-off I must appear. I leaped to front and center, yelling words like “Vallia! Charge! Get stuck into ’em!”

  With a whooping yell we simply rushed pell-mell on the bunch of flutsmen as they were in the process of dismounting and thinking pleasant thoughts about carving us up.

  They had not expected this reaction.

  They were not panicked. Oh, no, flutsmen were not riff-raff. They partitioned off the sky to their own nefarious ends, and whenever we came across them we put them down. But they would not run away just because we charged them.

  They usually had the pickings of fine weapons. Their crossbows could have been deadly; but I had had long experience of flutsmen and knew that once the crossbow was discharged the fighting fever of the fellow astride his fluttrell wouldn’t allow him time or patience to reload. This was a common tactic with them, as I knew. And here and now most of them had just landed to fight. Their weaponry would be the usual mix of sword and spear. Some would have shields. As you know, the shield was still, at this date, an innovation in Vallia. These flutsmen might hail from Havilfar — almost certainly — and so would know and use the shield, although many an aerial bandit couldn’t be bothered with the flying discipline required to handle a shield aloft.

  As for us, well, the new sword we had designed and built in Valka, called the drexer, had proved itself in battle. The drexer now equipped most of our regiments. As for me, well, it is true to say that almost anyone of Vallia who walks abroad without a rapier and main gauche feels naked. In this coming dust-up I’d use my drexer, like the lads.

  And — the lack of shields would serve to remind them of earlier days, before a maniac called Dray Prescot had turned up in Vallia — to marry their princess! — and inter alia to foist upon them the coward’s weapon — the shield.

  The Suns of Scorpio shone upon the scene, a little breeze blew, the dust spumed up under the stomp of impatient feet, the smell of sweat and oiled leather, the sting of dust in eye, the slick of it along tongue and lip —well, well... A fight is a fight...

  “Don’t bother about dressing!” I screeched the words back over my shoulder. “Fast! Get into ’em!” And then, because I felt the occasion warranted the use of the great words, I bellowed out: “Hai Jikai!”

  The lads responded. They rushed on, the beat of their boots loud upon the earth. They yelled.

  “Hai Jikai! Vallia! The emperor! Dray Prescot! Hai Jikai!”

  It was all a bedlam and rush and tumult. And then, the evil flicker and tinker-hammering of swords...

  No, the flutsmen didn’t run away when we so unexpectedly charged slap-bang into them as they dismounted. But they were caught, as it were, with one foot in the stirrup.

  In that first mad rush I swear each one of our lads dispatched at least one of the thieving bastards to the Ice Floes of Sicce.

  The fight spread out, for saddle birds take up a lot of space when they flutter their wings and land. This was where trouble could hit us. If some of us were caught out of formation, straggling, chasing after the foemen, they could be cut down before we could come up with them again. The birds did not like the uproar going on about them. Some incontinently flapped up into the air again. Those that had been quickly stalked down slashed their wings about and struck here and there with their beaks, so that we gave them all very wide berths. The fight settled down to a slogging match in which, I fancied, my lads would have the upper hand.

  In a tiny segment in that scarlet rush of madnes
s, Seg, hardly panting, his handsome face hard-set, brought his man down and then turned, panther-swift, for the next. Him, I dispatched. Seg nodded.

  “They didn’t know what hit ’em. Dray.”

  We glared about between the birds, seeing the clumping as the fighting raged.

  “They picked the wrong target today, that’s for sure.”

  A flutsman flew through the air toward us.

  Nothing unusual in that? Wrong. He was flying without his saddle bird. He turned over twice and came down on his back with such a thump as must have broken his spine into smithereens. Turko smiled.

  “They are not enjoying themselves.”

  The implications were obvious.

  Seg laughed and then started off, sword poised, to where two flutsmen were chasing one of our lads around a bird. Seg was brief and to the point. The soldier — he was a brumbyte — didn’t bother to gasp out thanks but went charging off to where a group of his comrades battled equal numbers. Seg let him go and strolled back to Turko and me.

  “Seen Nath?”

  “No.”

  The area was now a maelstrom of dust, wings, the flicker of steel, and the phantom shapes of running bodies. Just how the day was going was, for the moment, impossible to tell. Seg and Turko were sublimely confident that the flutsmen would soon have had enough and would fly off.

  “They don’t like taking casualties,” I said. “That is true. They like easy pickings.”

  “May a green-fanged demon from Ledrik’s Nether Hell take ’emall.” Turko swung his arms and glared balefully about. Dust swirled about us and the fluttrell’s noise and confusion gave the whole fight an unreal air, as though we fought in a nether bird-hell of our own.

  Three more flutsmen ran at us and were summarily dispatched where they belonged. Although, to be honest, there are some flutsmen who aspire above the generality of their calling, some I have known I have even called friend. Sometimes a fellow is swept up by fate into a life not of his choosing. Well, by Zair, hadn’t I been dragged up by the scruff of the neck from Earth, four hundred light years away, to be dumped down all naked and unarmed on Kregen to make my own way?