Savage Scorpio [Dray Prescot #16] Read online

  “And has the emperor really pardoned me?"

  “Not yet. I said that, for it needed to be said. But he will."

  I smiled at Tilly and she laughed, and sobered at once.

  “You remind me once again of the Jikhorkdun in Huringa."

  “And the silver chains are all melted down—master."

  That little minx Tilly knows how to infuriate me, and how I detest being called master by her.

  As for Thelda, Seg's wife, she could not do enough for Delia. She had been in Vondium, and Seg had called there after the meeting of the Brotherhood, arriving well before me. Thelda fussed and organized and sorted out all the tangles, she would have everybody running, and was properly reverential when she came within three doors’ distance of the sick room. I do Thelda an injustice. She had made Seg a fine wife, and she was a good and loving mother to her children, and yet, and yet, still, I could not stop myself from remarking on the silver heart in blue flowers, from time to time, jocularly, and then feeling the biggest villain in two worlds. Poor Thelda!

  “And Nath the Needle is most hurt, dear Dray,” said Thelda. A magnificently-shaped woman, Thelda always looked incipiently plump, and yet was not. A disturbing trick to play on a man.

  “Nath attempted to treat the emperor,” said Seg. “He was rebuffed by this Doctor Charboi. He has an enormous reputation and is newly come from Loh. He is not,” Seg added, “a Wizard of Loh. But he acts with all the highhandedness of one of those—those—"

  “Yes,” I said. Ordinary men perforce spoke carefully when they mentioned any Wizard of Loh.

  “Aunt Katri was so upset,” said Delia. “She frets in Esser Rarioch, I am sure. Everything seems so—so odd."

  I could feel the unease within the palace as in all Vondium. Things had changed in Vallia, imperceptibly, and little attention had been paid when, for instance, the old Pallans died or retired and new Pallans—secretaries or ministers of state—had replaced them. Dag Dagutorio had left suddenly for Loh, and Rog Rogutorio had taken his place as Chuktar of the Crimson Bowmen. The emperor's chief adviser in these latter days was a kov I did not then know, one Layco Jhansi, the Kov of Vennar. His was a name I was to come to know passing well—to my sorrow, I may add—but at the time he was regarded as the savior of Vallia, the man who would hold the empire together, the emperor's Right Hand.

  Automatically I thought of Gafard, the Sea-Zhantil, the King's Striker, who had died so far away from Vallia, loving still the memory of our daughter Velia, and I would sigh, and—then—wonder if this Kov Layco could give half the loyalty and allegiance past blindness that Gafard had given his mad genius King Genod.

  We passed on and the presence of the Princess Majestrix opened all doors. Yet I gained the distinct and unsettling impression that our little group formed, as it were, a conspiracy, here in the palace. Once the difficulty of my banishment had been cleared up it should have been plain sailing. But it seemed to me, incredibly, as though we hatched a plot. And all we wanted to do was have a doctor we trusted give a second opinion on the condition of the emperor.

  Slaves scuttled about their eternal tasks, always an affront. The Archer Guard of Valka which I had instituted had been sent, so I was told the moment I mentioned their absence, to Evir, the most northerly province of Vallia, to help quell a disturbance there. I felt as we walked on that I would welcome the presence of my Archers of Valka right there and then, above that of the mercenary Chuliks, for all their worth and valor as fighting men, and above the Crimson Bowmen, who were fresh strangers to me.

  The mood of the palace baffled me. I sensed the heavy oppression, and yet I felt the heady intoxication of terror could not be adequately explained away merely by the emperor's impending death. The factions would fight. There would be slaughter and murder. There would be burnings and looting. But, all the same, the intense, indrawn, coiled-spring of horror I sensed in the very air of the palace contained so much more of menace that, quite instinctively, my hand rested on my rapier hilt as we walked—rested not in an affected, courtly way of fashion, but in the hard professional grip of the bladesman ready to draw in a twinkling.

  Doctor Nath the Needle looked exactly as when I had first met him, when I'd been recovering from the infection from the shorgortz and the intemperate orders of the man who was now my father-in-law, the man who was now dying and whom Nath had been forbidden to attend. Dried up, wispy, wearing his old dark-brown clothes, his tawny yellow hair roughly combed, he looked just the same, and he held the same old velvet-lined sturmwood case of acupuncture needles under his arm.

  “I am happy to see you, prince,” he said, most formally.

  “And I you, doctor,” I answered gravely. “I do not know what this nonsense is about your being refused an audience of the emperor; but we'll go in and see him now."

  Nath nodded and then, because, as was proper, the Princess Majestrix walked first, and Thelda and Katrin walked a half-step to her rear, and Seg was trying to catch a bundle of wool about to fall from Thelda's bag, Nath and I walked at the rear.

  Nath began to talk as these savants do, increasingly oblivious of his surroundings, absorbed by his own thoughts.

  “The shorgortz poison—you remember that, I am sure, my prince—is proving of fascinating interest. The Blue Mountain Boys captured a specimen in a pit and, knowing my interest, for I sent messages and gold to Korf Aighos, they extracted the poison and forwarded me a sample. It is indeed remarkable. Incredible, if a doctor may ever use that word. I have conducted experiments, see—” Here he halted and began pulling papers from the pockets in the flaps of his old brown coat. I swear dust flew. He bashed the papers about—they were ordinary paper and not the superb paper made by the Savanti—and crumpled them up and dropped some. I helped him collect up these vital medical discoveries.

  “I shall look at your work with great pleasure, doctor; but later. Now I want you to see the emperor and tell me just what is the matter with him and what must be done to cure him."

  Nath the Needle favored me with a look, jolted back to the reason for his presence here. He made a singularly apt remark about Charboi; but he was perfectly willing to try again. He sneezed a couple of times, stuffing the papers away.

  If I thought the obstacles to Nath the Needle seeing the emperor had all been overcome, then I was an onker indeed.

  We debouched beneath overhanging arches lavishly decorated with exquisite mosaics depicting—oh, the pictures were filled with the fire and passion of Vallia's turbulent past. Across the wide marble-floored space where cool fountains sparkled in the perfumed air, where fruit trees bloomed and delicately colored birds flitted from branch to branch, the long white wall barring off the emperor's quarters as approached from this direction showed a solid crimson and black band along its foot.

  The guards stood shoulder to shoulder, a Crimson Bowman and a Chulik, alternating. Pacing toward us came two Jiktars, high officers, one a Bowman of Loh, the other a Chulik.

  Delia proved herself a princess in her handling of them.

  Haughtily, yet with just the right amount of friendliness stopping this side of condescension, she avowed the Prince Majister was now free to walk in Vondium, that she intended to see her father, and her suite would go with her. The guards stood back. We walked through. Although I did not smile, my fist no longer rested on the rapier hilt. A little thing—but revealing...

  There was no mistaking the abrupt dispatch of a Bowman runner, a lithe young man fresh from Loh, learning his trade.

  The light chilled. Heavy doors swung inwards. I knew just where we were, now, and had studied the plans of the palace drawn up many seasons ago when this wing had been built. At last, past a bevy of waiting nurses and minor doctors, we entered the sick room.

  The place struck me with a chill repulsion. Delia visited her father constantly, had been drawn away by Tilly's startling news. He lay in the wide bed, on his back, the covers drawn to his chin and pettishly pulled half down one side. His wasted face spider-webbed with
etched lines, the cheeks sunken in. I saw the hand he extended to his daughter and was shocked at its skeletal aspect. He had always been a firmly fleshed man.

  His flesh was wasting away. His condition really was serious, and Delia's concern struck me, suddenly, with an anguish for her I detested and found biting and acid and altogether hateful. My Delia! Well, everyone must go through the agonies of seeing loved ones die. Because Delia and I had bathed in the Sacred Pool of the River Zelph in far Aphrasöe, the city of the Savanti, the Swinging City, we were assured of a thousand years of life and the rapid recovery from wounds and illness. The wounds I had taken in the Jikai of the Brotherhood of Iztar against the Shanks were already healed. And yet, I had held my daughter Velia in my arms as she died. What agonies mortality tortures us with.

  Nath the Needle moved carefully forward in his best professional manner and shooed us from the bed. He took immediate command of the four nurses, pale women, nervous, worried, and at his directions one of them turned back the coverlets and the others lifted the emperor's shrunken body and opened the fancy silk shirt over his sunken chest. I went with Seg to stand over in the bay window where a flick-flick plant looked as though it needed a heaping handful of fat flies. The six flunkeys, armed, who stood along the far walls, blankly regarding the proceedings, could be ignored. The emperor, apart from certain follies, lived a spartan life.

  I said to Seg: “D'you know what's happened to Queen Lush? I thought for sure she'd be sobbing at the bedside."

  “She had to return to Lome. Some pressing affair of state. The emperor saw her off—Thelda says he was in full health then."

  “We haven't seen the last of her. She has designs on the emperor. This dire news will bring her scurrying back."

  “Aye. It's bad, Dray."

  “Yes. How stands Falinur?"

  He knew what I meant. The old recklessness of his face sobered, for the men of Erthyrdrin, Seg's homeland, are fey and wild and also highly practical. “I have worked hard there, trying to make the kovnate into the kind of paradise you have in Valka. There are always cramphs against whatever I try to do. Their malignancy lingers on. They remember. I wouldn't take a sheaf of arrows on their loyalty."

  I made no comment on this bleak if expected news. “And Inch? I fancy the Black Mountains will stand with us."

  “The Blue Mountain Boys have resolved their ancient quarrels with the Black Mountain Men. That is more Inch's doing than Korf Aighos's—he is one man I wouldn't trust with my bow—but he is loyal to Delia. Between them they have made those mountains and the zorca plains into a stronghold."

  “There are other nobles willing to stand up and be numbered. As for Delphond—” I sighed. I thought, then, that Delia's pretty little province of Delphond, a charming, lazy, contented place, now that the Chyyanists had gone, could never raise even a pastang of real fighting men. There had been changes in Delphond the last time I had been through, as you know; but the old carefree, easy-going ways persisted—and I would not change them.

  “Lord Farris will bring in Vomansoir."

  “Yes. And, if it comes to the fluttrell's vane, we can strike across quickly and so pinch out—” I stopped. Delia and Thelda with Katrin came over to us and the conversation became general, still concerned, low-voiced. I glanced at the doctor. Nath the Needle looked grave. He peered into the emperor's mouth, pulled down his lower eyelids, felt and prodded him, tut-tutting to himself. No acupuncture needles had been used by Doctor Charboi, and Nath had not opened his sturmwood case, so I gathered the sick man was in no pain.

  Very carefully, using a piece of verss, that finest of snow-white linen, Nath wiped the emperor's mouth. He folded the cloth delicately and placed it into his lesten-hide satchel. Sight of the piece of pure verss reminded me vividly of the Kroveres—for verss represented the purity for which the old vers of Valka had been famed.

  Nath glanced up and met my gaze. He nodded and indicated he was ready to leave, which surprised me, and the door burst open with a crash onto the somber sick room and a group of violently angry men and women entered.

  As I stared at them, at their red faces and their gesticulating, ring-laden hands, the sumptuousness of their dress, their jewels and lace, all the habitual airs of wealth and command and authority, I felt repulsion. I felt revulsion. Their vicious unthinking demands on everyone about them they could master, these I had witnessed many times, on Earth as on Kregen, and despaired of, and resisted, and, I own the matching of violence with violence to be a sin, there, in that sick room of a palace where an emperor lay dying, I was particularly revolted by their violence. I am a peaceful sort of fellow, liking the quiet life, and yet I have, to my shame, been forced many and many a time to match violence with violence. The Kroveres of Iztar were one response. I own, I have never made a secret of it, I own the matching of violence with violence to be a sin, and yet I hoped for so much from the Kroveres in milder civilized ways.

  But—these people. You will meet them all as my story trundles along. Of them at the moment it is fit you should see just three.

  The first was Doctor Charboi. Here on Earth he would have been impeccably dressed, crowned with a distinguished mass of silver hair. He would have worn a neat Harley Street suit, and have commanded the highest prices for nostrums and soothing words from the highest in society. On Kregen, where a person's hair does not ordinarily turn white until past two hundred, Charboi had the red mop of Loh, and he presented the full-fleshed, country-club figure of a man in the prime of life, brisk, efficient, demanding. And violent.

  “Out!” he shouted. He was violent. No doubt of it. “Out!"

  The second man hulked in the room. Massive, bulky, he towered against the lamplight and it was clear from the set of his mouth and the clamping thrust of his jaws and chin that he spoke seldom. Apim, he was, but built like a Chulik. All the time his powerful figure remained planted at the shoulder of his mistress. He wore the heavy brown tunic called a khiganer, double-breasted, the wide flap caught up over his left side with a long flaring row of bronze buttons, from belt to shoulder, and from point of shoulder to collar. That collar stood stiff and hard and high, encircling his neck. Gold glittered there. He wore buff breeches and tall black Vallian boots, gleaming with polish, spurred. He wore no baldric; but the lockets for a rapier and empty main gauche swung from two jeweled belts. His sleeves were banded after the fashion of Vallia, indicating his allegiance. Brown and green bands, with three small diagonal slashes, marked him for Venga. The sheer ferocity of that lowering face impressed me, the lambent bestiality slumbering in the tiny dark eyes, the cragginess of the jaw. He was a notorious Bladesman.

  This was Nath the Iarvin, ruffler, Bladesman, bought body and soul by his mistress.

  The third person was a woman.

  Thin, she was, hard-edged like a diamond, brittle and bright, with a flame about her that consumed all who were unfortunate enough not to know how to handle her. Her dark hair was caught in a diamond-encrusted net. She wore riding leathers of a sheening green, making her mannish figure even more angular, and long black boots, like a man. On her left shoulder was pinned a golden brooch fashioned into the form of a wersting seizing a korf, the vicious Kregan dog crunching down on the soaring bird. A rapier and dagger were scabbarded at her narrow waist. I fancied she could use them passing well. High, her face, white and scornful, with deep, grey-green eyes, and arched black eyebrows. Red, her mouth, thin and bitter and drawn in at the corners, red and like a wound above her sharp chin. She could have cut ice with her glance.

  This, then, was Ashti Melekhi, the Vadnicha of Venga.[3]

  [3 * Vad is the title of Kregan nobility immediately below Kov. Nich is the suffix denoting the second twin. Nicha is feminine. Vadnicha therefore is the twin sister of the Vad, with certain responsibilities within the same Vadvarate. The Vad's wife is the Vadni. A.B.A.]

  She stared at us narrowly, reminding me of the way those carnivorous hunting risslacas stare unwinking at their prey.

  “Get out
,” she said. And her voice, I swear it, hissed asa risslaca hisses before he pounces. “Schtump! Layco Jhansi, the Kov of Vennar, the emperor's Chief Pallan, has placed me in charge of the sick room and of all the emperor's wants, answerable only to him. I do not care who you are. The Princess Majestrix may stay, because she is the emperor's daughter. The rest of you—out! Schtump!"

  I did not speak.

  She pointed her riding crop at me. It did not waver.

  “You may be the Prince Majister. But you are nothing more than a trumpery clansman, a hairy barbarian. And you dare to bring in another doctor! Have a care lest you go too far."

  The crop circled to include Seg and Thelda and Katrin, and then rested, accusingly, on Nath the Needle.

  “Let the emperor die in dignity, as befits the end of a great man. You profane his greatness. This doddery buffoon pries and prods—beware lest your heads topple before the suns descend."

  I opened my mouth—and then closed it. I speculated on the inner mysteries of philosophy, how the worlds roll through space, how a woman may change a man and the man change an empire, how violence breeds violence, how women are so often nonsensical creatures unfit for their own company, let alone a man's, how I was the new Dray Prescot.

  She slashed the crop down. “Now get this rabble cleared out! Go, now. Or I call the palace guard."

  Seg was staring at me with that old half-mocking smile on his face. I knew what he expected. Nath stood back from the bed, outraged; but keeping his composure remarkably well. Thelda was already boiling up and Katrin was standing by ready to lay in after. These two ladies were high born, coming from great families, kovnevas both. Delia—Delia looked at me and I managed the smile I can always find for her, and I shook my head, ever so slightly, and so she smiled back at me, uncertain, disturbed, but ready to follow my mood, trusting me. What a wonderful woman is my Delia among all women!