Transit to Scorpio

do I deceive myself and am I influenced by all the intervening years? I do not know; but the name seemed to soar and echo and resound in my skull.

At last I managed to make my leave-the question of payment for their hospitality had delicately been raised and as delicately dropped-and I was conducted to a chamber where Gloag snored away in the corner. I dropped on the bed and sank into sleep and my last thought was, inevitably, of Delia of the Blue Mountains. As it was on every night of my life.

We roused in the late afternoon and satisfied our hunger with the fresh light crispy bread of Kregen, loaves as long as rapiers, and thin rashers of vosk-back, and palines, with the Kregen tea-full-bodied, aromatic, pungent-to finish. When we saw Wanek again he greeted us kindly. I asked for Delia.

“I will ask her to join us,” said Wanek, and a slave departed-only to come back with the word that Delia was not in her room and the slave who had with such kind care and attention insisted on attending to her was also missing. I sat up. My hand fell to the hilt of the rapier.

“Please!” Wanek looked upset. A search was instituted; but Delia was not to be found. I raged. Wanek was beside himself at the insult he was thus forced to endure-the insult to him in that he insulted an honored guest.

Delia of the Blue Mountains and I had exchanged only a few words during our escape, for Gloag was near and, at least on my part, I felt a constraint, sure that she hated and detested me for what I had done to her. She had said something that puzzled me mightily. When we had both vanished from the pool of baptism in far Aphrasoe she had opened her eyes to find herself on the beach with the Fristles bearing down upon her, so that she had not been surprised to see me. When I had, in the moment of victory, been tumbled from the zorca, she had been taken to the city and straight to the House of Esztercari. Because of their shipping interests the Esztercari did a thriving business in slaves, and they could also command those caught in other ways. Then Delia had shaken me. For, she said, the very next day, she had seen me in that corridor, dressed in those accursed clothes, and had spilled and broken the water jar.

She also told me that one each of those occasions when she had been captured or enslaved she had seen a white dove flying high, with a great scarlet and golden raptor far above. A messenger was announced. A bluff, moustached bulky man looking oddly out-of-place in the powder blue of the Ewards stalked in, his rapier clamped to his side, his face alive with wrath and baffled fury. He was, I understood, the House Champion, a position occupied in Esztercari by Galna of the white face and mean eyes.

“Well, Encar?”

“A message, my leader, from-from the Esztercari. A slave whom we trusted-how they mock us for that! — has abducted the Lady Delia of the Blue Mountains-”

I leaped to my feet, my blade half out of its scabbard, my hands trembling, and I know my face, ugly as it is, must have seemed diabolical to those around me.

It was true. The slave wench with her blandishments had arranged it all. She was a spy for Natema. She had got a message out, it seemed clear, and men had been waiting in that damned emerald livery at a tiny postern. There they had snatched my Delia, thrown a hood over her head, carried her swiftly aboard a gondola and poled away to the enclave of Esztercari. It was all true, heart-breakingly true.

But there was more.

“Unless the men called Dray Prescot freely surrenders himself to the Kodifex,” Encar went on, his bluff honest face reflecting the distaste he felt at his words, “the Lady Delia of the Blue Mountains will meet a fate such as is meted out to recalcitrant slaves, to slaves who escape-” He faltered and looked at me.

“Go on.”

“She will be stripped and turned loose into the Rapa court.”

I heard gasps. I did not know-but I could guess.

“Dray Prescot-what can you do?” asked Gloag. He had risen to stand by me, splayfooted, incredibly tough, intelligent, a friend despite his dun bristly hide.

As I may have indicated, I do not laugh easily. I threw back my head, I, Dray Prescot, and laughed, there in the Great Hall of the House of Esztercari.

“I will go,” I said. “I will go. And if a hair of her head is injured I will raze their House to the ground and slay them all, every last one.”

Chapter Fifteen

In the leem pit

Gloag wanted to fight for me.

“No,” I said.

“Give me a spear,” he growled in that rumbling voice.

“It is my business.”

“Your business is my business. At least, a spear.”

“You will be killed.”

“I know the warrens. Without me, you will be killed.”

“I know,” I said.

“Then we will both be killed. Give me a spear.”

I turned to Wanek, leader of the Noble House of Eward.

“Give my friend a spear.”

“Now may the light of Father Mehzta-Makku shine on us both.”

From Wanek I obtained a high-quality rapier and dagger, and in return told him who had been the last owner of the rapier I bore.

His delight at holding the trophy wrested from his hated enemy was keen.

“You said the hilt has value,” I said. “And, here, will you keep these gems in trust for me?” I handed over the cloth-enfolded gems. Gloag insisted his share, also, should be handed over, and then I knew he meant business, for with that wealth he could have set himself up in a small way in business in the free section of the city and lived out his life in prosperity and respect. When I told Wanek what further I requested of him he slapped his thigh in merriment, and called Encar to ready a skiff in which would go one of his men disguised to look as much like me as possible. We then went up to the roof and not without a tremor I lay down on an airboat. This was the first time I had been in one; the first time I had ever flown. Such a thing was a marvel to me. It was petal-shaped, with a transparent windshield in front, and straps to retain one in place and pelts and silks to cover the rider. Gloag and I strapped down. The driver-the word pilot was unknown to me then-except in the connotation of a ship’s pilot-sent the little craft leaping into the air into the floods of sunset light from the crimson sun. The green sun would soon follow. In the course of time, after the suns’ eclipse, the green sun would precede the red in order of rising and setting. The Kregan calendar is based on the suns’ mutual rotations to a great extent. I braced myself as we skimmed through that ruddy falling light.

I had planned to descend on the roof garden before the skiff bearing the pseudo-me reached the Esztercari landing stage. We slanted down and, thankfully, I saw the garden empty beneath us. Gloag and I leaped off and the airboat withdrew to a discreet distance. We raced for that stairway and so into the slave quarters. Wearing the slave breechclout of grimy gray we would still attract attention by reason of our weapons, so I had elected to retain my scarlet breechclout and scarlet cape, and Gloag had done likewise. Often I have been able to pass in disguise suddenly devised where, say, a man with red or green hair would find it impossible to go, although in the House of Esztercari green dyed hair, where it was not shaved off, was common.

We found a slave girl who under the threat of Gloag’s spear was only too anxious to tell us that the prisoner, whom she remembered well, was shut in the cage above the leem pit. I shuddered. Bad enough it had been to plunge once again into that towering pile of the opal palace; but far worse was it to know that we must venture down itno the depths, below the water level, where the leems slunk, furry and feline and vicious, around the damp walls of their pit. Many human bones moldered there. The leem is eight-legged, sinuous like a ferret or a weasel, but the leopard-size, with wedge-shaped head and fangs that can strike through oak. We killed them without