A Victory for Kregen Read online

  Tyfar breathed down my neck as I jumped for the alley.

  “That woman! Insufferable! Vosk-headed! Stubborn as a graint!”

  “Charming, though, you must agree.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. I noticed her at once. Although I would not say charming — in fact, charming is the last word I’d use. Attractive, alluring, beautiful — yes, she’s all those. But who can put up with seductiveness cloaked with superciliousness?”

  I peered suspiciously at Tyfar. “Isn’t that San Blarnoi? Although, to be sure, I think the quote phrases it somewhat differently from ‘put up with’.”

  “San Blarnoi knew what he was talking about. That woman!”

  “Yes?” came that smooth mellifluous voice, sweet as honey and sharp as a rapier. “What woman would that be, horter?”

  Tyfar spun about. I was facing him, and he swung back to stare accusingly at me. His whole stance, his shining face, screamed out: “You might have warned me!”

  I said, “Why, some shrewish fishwife who landladied it at our last inn. Now, we had best hurry. Those paktuns looked as though they know their job. And if Sorgan did betray you they’ll know we have an injured man.”

  “Yes,” she said, instantly forgetting the pettiness of impending annoyance at Tyfar’s incautious words.

  “We must get on. Kaldu! Make for Horter Rathon’s.”

  “Quidang, my lady.”

  We all ran down the alley, and we ran away from Blue Vosk Street and headed for the thick stand of tall timber.

  “There is a section of bog in here, lady,” said Nod the Straw. “No one ventures here.” His eyes rolled.

  “I do not like to go in — but—”

  “Needs must when you come to the fluttrell’s vane, Nod.”

  “Aye, my lady.”

  “This Rathon,” I said, “to whom we are all running like a flock of ponshos. Did Sorgan know of him and his house?”

  “No,” said Kaldu.

  Tyfar wanted to bristle up at the incivility. But I restrained him with a quiet word. How odd it is that a prince will stand for uncouthness when an arrow is aimed at his heart, and prickles up when it is not!

  Although, to give Tyfar his dues, he wasn’t the least afraid of arrows in the normal course of things. That a beautiful and well-formed woman had been the person aiming the shaft at us — that, I think, had thrown him off balance.

  The trees closed over us, a mixture of the beautiful as well as the ugly in Kregan trees. The path became distinctly moist. I looked back. Our footprints were perfectly legible to the eyes of a tracker.

  “It gets a lot stickier ahead,” said Nod. “Unfortunately.”

  “There is a boat,” said the woman. She spoke briskly. “We can cross the river without trouble, and lose ourselves in the Aracloins.[2]Horter Rathon will give us shelter.”

  “Why did you not go there first, instead of to Blue Vosk Street?”

  She gave me a withering look.

  “That was nearest. We did not know who Barkindrar and Nath were when the watch tried to take them up. When we realized they were Hamalese, of course, we stepped in.”

  “You are revolutionaries?”

  The moment I spoke I heard the fatuity of my question.

  She said, “Kaldu! Watch your step.”

  He did not answer but plunged on with Barkindrar slung over his back. The Bullet had taken a nasty cut along the leg. The wound was bound — and bound expertly, too, the handiwork as I guessed of this surprising woman.

  Along by the edge of the river where this boggy section was difficult to tell from river itself, we threaded along the narrow path. Nod the Straw led, and he was not at all happy. In any niksuth, any small marshy area, of Kregen you are likely to find uncooperative life. Teeth and fangs, spines and stings, they hop up out of the bog and seek to drag you down for a juicy dinner. Even in a city like Khorunlad. Aware of this delightful fact of Kregan bogs, I loosened my thraxter in the scabbard.

  “If no one comes here,” I said. “The watch will not think we have. There is no need to hurry, they will not know how long we have been gone from the stables.”

  “There was a quantity of blood spilled on the straw,” she said.

  “I see. Then we had best hurry.”

  “Jak,” called Tyfar.

  I swung about to look.

  He was half off and half on the path, and one leg was going deeper and deeper into a foul-smelling stink of blackness. Tendriliferous vines snaked over the oozing mud. But he got a grip on a clump of weed and arrested his sucking-in.

  He had been following up last. The girl at my side said, “The oaf!” She spoke tartly.

  Tyfar got a better grip and started to haul himself in.

  A head appeared over his shoulder, one of those snouting, fanged heads of Kregen, all scale and tendrils and gape-jaws. The eyes were red slits. It hoisted itself a little free of the ooze with two broad paddle-like forefeet. In the next instant it would open and close that fearsome set of jaws, and Tyfar’s head would provide the dinner the thing craved.

  The girl took a single step forward. She was splendid.

  The bow came from her shoulder as a skater comes off the ice. The arrow nocked, was drawn back —

  to the ear — and the shaft flew. Straight and strongly driven, that shaft. It pierced cleanly through one of those red slit eyes. The steel point must have gouged on, deep into the minuscule brain.

  I could not watch the death throes of the beast any more. A mate to the first appeared almost soundlessly beside me and the jagged-fanged jaws thrust for the girl in her russets, who stood ready with a second shaft aimed for the monster by Tyfar.

  My thraxter swept around and then straightened. Point first it drove into a red-slitted eye. The thraxter would not have cut the thing’s scaly neck deeply enough. But the solid steel punched through eye and head and into brain. I jerked back. Like its mate, it thrashed and screeched.

  The girl gave a single convulsive jump back.

  Her bow lifted, the arrow pulled — then she summed up the picture and did not loose.

  “I give you my thanks for saving Tyfar,” I said.

  He was off the ooze now and safely on the path. His leg sheened with the muck. He waved his sword at us and then started to run along the treacherous path to catch us up. I own I felt enormous relief knowing that he was safe.

  The woman looked at me. Woman? Girl? She was young, around Tyfar’s age, I judged, although men and women change so slowly over their better than two hundred or so years of life on Kregen.

  Sometimes she had the airs of a queen, and at others those of a roistering tavern wench, and both were nicely calculated. She was controlled in her emotions; but her emotions were real and could break out fiercely—

  “By Krun, Jak! That beastie nearly had me — and you!”

  “You were busy saving Tyfar, for which my thanks again.”

  “You are his father?”

  “No, no. He is a good comrade.”

  “Then you have my thanks, for what they are worth, for my life—”

  “Do not, I beg you, say, for what that is worth.”

  “Sometimes my life has meant a great deal to me, and sometimes nothing at all.”

  Tyfar panted up then, and started in at once thanking the girl. Then he said, “And I do not know to whom I owe my life.”

  “You may call me Jaezila.”

  We started off along the path again, and I felt it prudent to hang back. I did this to guard against pursuit and, also, as I realized with a sly amusement, so that they might have it out between them.

  “Jaezila,” said Tyfar, rolling the syllables around his mouth as though they were best Jholaix. “And is that all — my lady?”

  “No. It will do for you — Jikai.”

  She cut him with that great word, used as she used it, in mockery of his warrior prowess.

  “Jaezila,” persisted Tyfar, and I own I was impressed by his refusal to become warm. After all, he was a prince. “
And no more — you are Hamalese?” He sounded doubtful.

  I thought I detected a wary note in Jaezila’s voice.

  “Hamalese — does it matter? I seek to aid you, who are Hamalese. Is not that good enough?”

  “I accept that.” Tyfar passed on, following her beyond the end of a screen of curly-fronded ferns where the dragonflies, as big as chickens, flitted and flurried on diamond wings. “And what brought you to Khorunlad?”

  “Your breeding left much to be desired, dom.”

  Tyfar bridled up like a spurred zorca. To be accused of poor breeding, and a Prince of Hamal! And to be addressed so familiarly as dom, the common greeting! I watched it all, enthralled.

  Then I jumped forward.

  My Val! We had been growing very chummy with these people, with stubborn Kaldu and this enigmatic woman styling herself Jaezila. But we did not know them. I didn’t want Tyfar labeling himself a prince —

  particularly a Prince of Hamal — until we knew them a great deal better.

  “You may be surprised to know—” Tyfar was saying with his voice as frosty as the caverns of the Ice Floes of Sicce. He was going to put Jaezila properly in her place by telling her that she had the honor of addressing a prince, I didn’t doubt that. I burst in, quite rudely.

  “Come on, come! Don’t stand chaffering. I think there were sounds of pursuit along the path.”

  Tyfar immediately swung about and lifted his sword.

  Jaezila simply looked at me. “You think there is pursuit?”

  She missed nothing, this girl, nothing...

  “And if there is not, that is still no reason to stand lollygagging about. By Krun! Let us get out of this bog and onto firmer ground.”

  “Fifty paces will bring us to the bank. If you can call it a bank. I scouted this area—”

  I said, “You are not from Khorunlad, Jaezila. Hamalese? Maybe. But I do not inquire why you help us from Hamal.”

  “Do you think that the Empress Thyllis will conquer all the Dawn Lands, Jak?”

  That was a confounded question!

  It suited my purposes to be thought a Hamalese. Yet it went against the grain to have to say that, yes, mad Empress Thyllis would overrun all the Dawn Lands, one after the other.

  “She might,” I said. “If her throat is not cut first.”

  She drew her breath in. The others showed up ahead waiting under a grove of drooping missals. Beyond them the river glimmered blue as the summer sky.

  “You spoke of revolution,” said Jaezila. “Now, I see—”

  I interrupted, swiftly but courteously: “My lady Jaezila, do not misunderstand me.” Zair knew, I’d taken long enough getting myself accepted as a Hamalese, and this girl quite clearly was more than she appeared. She could go running back to Hamal with a tale that would destroy my plans. I had to dissimulate. “I spoke figuratively. We all serve the empress, do we not? Hamal is set on the road of conquest, is not this so?”

  “By Jehamnet! Hamal is set on the road to conquest!”

  Her voice contained emotions I couldn’t fathom. She swore by Jehamnet, a spirit of harvest time associated with crop failures and similar disasters, and who is known as Jevalnet in Vallia, and Jegrodnet and Jezarnet in the Eye of the World. But she had said Jehamnet, which is Hamalian. He is known as Jehavnet in most of Havilfar. I fancied she was Hamalese and therefore, down here, out doing skullduggery for Thyllis. I held my tongue.

  We gathered by the boat, a little skiff that would just about take us all and give us a hand’s-breadth freeboard. The river rippled gently in a small breeze. On the opposite bank the walls and roofs of the jumbled Aracloins offered shelter. We pushed off and Kaldu and I pulled the oars, taking it gently. There were a sizeable number of other boats on the river. A low pontoon bridge spanned the river lower down, and this impediment assisted in the formation and continuance of the boggy area upstream.

  So, moving cautiously but with purpose, we successfully reached the safety of Horter Rathon’s questionable establishment.

  Chapter nine

  We Strike a Blow for Hamal

  “By Havil! I don’t intend to sit here mewed up like a blind bird!”

  “I agree. And I’ll tell you something else, Tyfar. If we’re not back at the camp before very soon, the Pachaks will come in after us. Or even, Krun forfend, Hunch might—”

  “What!” And Tyfar lay back on the pallet and roared.

  Horter Nath Rathon joined in the laughter, although he wasn’t at all sure what the jest might be. He was like that. He was a jolly, fat, smiling, hand-washing little man, clad in a long green and red gown with a silver chain around his neck and depending from it a bunch of keys reposing on the proud jut of his belly.

  He had sent one of his servants out to spy the land.

  This fellow, Ornol — a massive Gon whose shaven head gleamed brilliantly from the application of unguents, a fashion some of the Gons have — came back to report not the hair or hide of a Havil-forsaken mercenary to be seen.

  Nath Rathon burbled and jingled his keys.

  “Excellent, Ornol. Now go and keep watch.”

  Ornol went off, his pate glistening, and I looked carefully at Tyfar. Young Prince Tyfar was high of color, and a trifle breathless, and given to wider gestures than usual. He was not drunk. The nearness of his escape from death in the little swamp was beginning to work on him, and he was going through the shakes like a true horter. Also, I fancy the idea that he had been saved and his life preserved to him by the quick and skillful actions of a girl came as a novel surprise.

  “You will assuredly have to wait until the suns set,” cautioned Nath Rathon.

  “That is a pesky long way off,” grumbled Tyfar.

  “I think,” I said, “our friends will wait until nightfall.” I did not add that I felt it highly unlikely they would venture into Khorunlad before Quienyin had sussed the city in lupu for us.

  There might well be a period of fraught explanation if his apparition appeared, ghostlike, to scare the others half to death.

  But, then, I had come to the conclusion that it would take a lot more than that, a very great deal more than that, to scare this mysterious young lady Jaezila witless.

  She had tended to Barkindrar’s wound, and the Bullet had declared stoutly that he was fit to walk out with us. The situation was complicated — some situations are and some are not and most times they are resolved by death but not always — and we understood that while the official policy of Khorundur toward Hamal was neutrality, factions inevitably arose. The common folk labored under the delusion that if the Empress Thylliss took over their country they would miraculously inherit a better life, with free food and rivers of wine and not a day’s work in a sennight. If this is pitching the stories they believed too high, think only of the slaves that would come onto the market after a successful invasion and conquest.

  Hamalian gold was in this.

  Rathon clinched that for me when he said to Jaezila when she walked in, smiling, “I fear, my lady, you will buy no vollers now.”

  She frowned, quickly, losing that smile on the instant, whereat I surmised her mission to buy vollers for Hamal was a secret one. Thyllis had been prodigal with her treasure and had given patents of nobility for gold. She had lost many fliers. Clearly, she was desirous of purchasing what she could not make.

  “Why so, Horter Rathon?”

  “You were seen when — these two Hamalese — It were best you left the city, my lady. It is hard enough work as it is.”

  He might smile and jingle his keys; but he was a man for Hamal, and if the common folk welcomed invasion, the better-off did not. That was obvious. They had hired bands of mercenaries, and because paktuns were hard to come by had had to hire men who were not of the top quality, or even of the second or third quality. I did not think the paktuns who had chased us were as low as masichieri; but I was told that masichieri, mere bandits masquerading as mercenaries when it suited them, were in the city in large numbers to keep order.


  This, as you will readily perceive, placed me in a quandary.

  I was opposed to Hamal, although pretending to be Hamalese. The poor folk were deluded. But those who were opposed to Hamal employed means I did not much relish. I would not strike a blow willingly against folk who stood up in opposition to mad Empress Thyllis. So, as I listened to the others debating what best to do, I felt myself to be shoved nose-first into a dilemma.

  “My work must be completed,” Jaezila was saying, and her composure remained. There was the hint, the merest hint, of her true feelings boiling away.

  “How, my lady?” Rathon spread his hands. “You will be taken up by the watch. These mercenaries the nobles have hired, they are little better than drikingers, bandits who will slit your throat for a copper ob.”

  “And, my lady,” put in Kaldu, “the voller manufacturers here are all rich.” His brown beard tufted.

  “Well, that follows, by Krun, does it not? They will not welcome you.”

  “And it was all arranged!” said Jaezila. Her face — what a wonderful face she had! Broad-browed, subtle, perfect of curve of cheek and lip, illuminated by a passionate desire to esteem well of life — I felt myself drawn to her. As for Tyfar, he was goggling away. “Everything was going splendidly,” she said.

  Some lesser girl would have been crying by now. “And then these people against Hamal seized the power, and the vaunted neutrality of Khorundur — where is it now?”

  “I and my associates will get the common folk out into the streets,” said Rathon. “But that is going to take time. And there will be a great deal of blood spilled.” He lifted his keys and then let them jingle against his gut. “Well, they are common folk and so ’tis of no matter.”

  I turned away from him, and took my ugly, hating old beakhead of a face off out of the way. By Vox!

  But wasn’t that the way of your maniacal, empire-puggled Hamalese bastard?