“Time for war, yes, Stylor. But is war all that obsesses you?”
“I should hope not!” I said.
I looked at her, at her bright eyes, the soft and supple figure beneath the shush-chiff, and the men who entered almost had me. They wore the slave gray, but they had fierce faces of overlords with the down-drooping Mongol moustaches, and they carried swords in their hands. There were four who had wrapped gray cloths about their faces so that only their eyes showed. My lunge for the long sword was made — I was on my way when the first arrow thunked into the wood
— and I did not stop then. I whirled with the long sword — and froze.
“That is better, cramph.” The overlord sneered the words.
The bent bow, the nocked arrow, the barbed head — they did not stop me, for the Krozairs make religious sport of striking flying arrows from the air with their swords. No — the arrow aimed directly at the heart of Holly, who shrank back, her hands to her mouth, her eyes enormous, choked with horror. I dropped the long sword, kicked it under the straw. They took me then, without a struggle, and all the time that merciless arrow remained pointing at Holly’s heart.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I have sojourned for a spell in many prisons in my long life and the one beneath the colossal Magdag Hall na Priags was no worse than most and a lot better than some.
Stripped naked, spread-eagled out against a damp wall, my wrists and ankles clamped in rusty iron rings, chains dangling infuriatingly from the iron hoop about my waist, I waited in the half-darkness partly lit by a ruddy radiance streaming in through the iron-barred grille. All thought of the rebellion had fled from my mind. This was not because I despaired, but because I had seen a jumbled pile of my group commanders outside my hovel, dead, hideously dead. Bolan, I had seen, running shrieking into the warrens, his bald head glistening in the streaming radiance of the fourth moon, She of the Veils, and with the arrow striking through his left shoulder. All revolt, surely, would be crushed when the green sun reappeared.
The jailers took me up to judgment. They were men, for no half-human, half-beast mercenaries were allowed in the sacred halls of Magdag during the time of the Great Death and the Great Birth. Overlords of the second class, they were of a kind with that Wengard who had so viciously ordered me a touch of old snake.
The room into which I was conducted — pushed and shoved and pummeled — was walled and roofed in uncut stone. A sturm-wood table crossed an angle. Behind this the guard commander sat, all in mail, his long sword at his side. He stroked that ugly drooping Magdag moustache as he spoke.
“You will tell us of the final plans for the rebellion, rast. Otherwise you will die unpleasantly.”
I suppose he saw that this did not convince me; he knew as well as I that they would kill me out of hand. In this, as you shall hear, I was wrong.
“We know of your schemes, you whom the slaves call Stylor. We have samples of your pitiful slave-made weapons. But we would be more exact.”
They had been incautious enough to leave me with a bight of chain between my ankles. The chains around my bound wrists would, of course, serve as a weapon. I did not bother to kick the guards next to me. I went straight over the table, wrapped my wrist-chains around the guard commander’s neck, and hauled back.
“I will leave you enough air to tell these cramphs what to do,” I said, in his ear, low and venomous. He gobbled out a shrieked order to his men to stay back. Impasse.
The door opened and Glycas walked in.
He was speaking in his abrupt, authoritarian way before he was fairly through the opening.
“Send for the prisoner, Stylor. There is a mystery about this slave I would-” Then he saw me. His breath hissed in his throat. His long sword flashed clear of his scabbard.
“I shall cut you down, slave, whether you strangle that miserable guard commander or not.” He laughed, his silky, snakelike laugh. “Perhaps I will have him strangled, anyway, for allowing you this much effrontery.” He glared around at the paralyzed jailers. “Seize him!”
The death of this Magdag overlord of the second class would benefit no one. I let him go, regretfully, to be sure.
My brown hair had grown long, my trim moustache and beard a trifle shaggy, I was filthy, grimed and mucky with sweat. I stood clear before the table. Glycas kept his sword pointed.
“I am Stylor,” I said.
“Your friends have told me a great deal. But they know little of you, slave. You will tell me all I want to know.”
“Like, perhaps, where I came from? Where I vanished to? Like, perchance, that you are a foul green- scummed risslaca, Glycas?”
He gaped. For an instant, his composure deserted him. With a jerky strut he bore down on me, the long sword pointed at my breast. He took my filthily-bearded chin in his hand and twisted my head up into the lantern light. Again he drew that hissing breath between his teeth. His fist gripping my chin shook.
“Drak, Kov of Delphond!”
“And now, perhaps, you will free me from these undignified chains, let me have a bath and scented oils, and then provide me with an explanation and an apology-”
“Silence!” he roared. He stood back and still he did not lower the long sword. He would not risk his neck in the same position as the guard commander’s. “Enough. That you are Stylor, the wanted slave traitor, is enough for me. What else you have done to my sister, is between us, not of Magdag.”
“I have done nothing to the Princess Susheeng,” I said, before he hit me. “That is her trouble.” Then he hit me.
I was to be used in the rituals to insure the return of the green sun, Genodras, and the rebirth of Grodno. A medley of emotions tortured me. If I say that in some odd and hurtful way I was glad that this was to happen, I do not believe you will understand. Since this, my third period on Kregen, I had not been myself. Always, I had felt the unseen compulsion of the Star Lords — possibly, I thought then, of the Savanti also — forcing me into actions and deeds that were not truly of my nature. The suffocating sense of that shadowy doom I knew was reserved for me had inhibited me. Strange and mysterious powers had torn me from my own Earth, and I had responded eagerly, gladly. But the doom-laden feelings I could not shake off had soured all my thoughts and actions. Clearly, here in the great Hall na Priags of Magdag, I had been abandoned by the Star Lords, their plans for me betrayed, my usefulness at an end. I felt, suddenly, free, lightened, ready to be once again plain Dray Prescot, of Earth, and to face that menacing doom with all the callous courage I could summon up.
Captives of the highest rank were used in the ritual games of Magdag to propitiate, entreat, and insure the return of Genodras. We were bundled into iron-barred cages overlooking the great Hall na Priags so that we might see what awaited us and shudder at our fate. I stood gripping the bars, staring out on that fantastic scene as the lamplight and torchlight flickered and flared on the massive walls with their festoons of paintings and carvings, their murals exalting the power of Magdag, their sculptures of the beast-gods, the overwhelming decorative detail.
What I saw astonished me.
Around the cleared area where we would be tortured to death in manners weird and horrible to the mind of a sane man the rows of Magdaggian overlords waited. They waited for the entrance of the high overlord of this Hall na Priags, who was Glycas, in ceremonial procession. A sigh went up as the smoke swirled and lifted and the priests and the sacred guards walked sedately into that vast chamber. Glycas, as square, as hard, as corrupt as ever marched with the sacred golden covering held above his head by four nobles. I looked about. I was astonished.
Every single person present wore red.
Clad all in red, they waited or walked in a rhythmic swing toward the dais, all in red, and at their sides swung long swords, broken in half, their jagged edges protruding past the ripped-away ends of split scabbards.
All in red.
