or white and black. The red and the green, it seems, are reserved for real battle. So to take my mind off waiting, Tharu and I settled to a game of Jikaida.
I make it a practice whenever it is practicable never to sit with my back to a door. When the door to our room smashed open and the mailed men burst in, their faces covered with red scarves, I jumped up. Tharu, whose back was to the door, was knocked flying across the table. Jikaida men went flying in a shower of blue and yellow. The table tangled my legs. My rapier was lying on the floor at my side, casually in reach but scabbarded — for this was a great city and who would expect attack within a palace? — and by the time I had the blade free a poniard stuck its tip into my throat and a single move would mean my instant death.
At that moment I felt that I was growing old — I, Dray Prescot, who had bathed in the sacred pool of Aphrasoe and would live a thousand years!
I was trussed up like a vosk and between two of the burly thugs was carried like a roll of carpet out and through a secret passage behind a full-length portrait of some arrogant Magdag swifter captain in the midst of a hypothetical destruction of a Sanurkazz fleet. Naturally, I had had no idea of the passage’s existence. Far below I was carried out and flung into a dung cart which reminded me of the galley slaves’
benches. We bumped along cobbles. I had had no sight of my attackers. I could hear no sound from them. I was gagged, and so I did not expect to hear from Tharu.
They threw me down in a stone cellar where green slime ran on the walls. I looked at their red scarves concealing their faces. Only their eyes, bright and quick, like rasts’, shining at me over the red cloths, were visible.
Afterward I learned I spent five days in that cellar, bound loosely but sufficiently to prevent escape, fed on slops, without exercise and with a bucket for toilet purposes, and with two men on guard at all times. Tharu was not with me.
On the sixth day I was rescued. My guards stood up with a casual air as mailed men entered; then they stiffened and although I could not see their faces I could imagine the sudden terror there as they scrabbled to draw their weapons. The newcomers cut them down without mercy, even though the last man attempted to surrender. As he sank onto the floor, his blood oozing from the deep gash smashed through his mail, his killer snatched up the red scarf.
He held it up, and spat on it.
“See!” he cried. “It is the work of those vile heretics of Sanurkazz! The stinking vosks of Zair have done this-”
He bent quickly and slashed my bonds free. Others of his men helped me rise. “But now you are safe, Kov of Delphond!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“My Lord Kov,” said Glycas to me, formally. “I make the most profound apologies. It is unthinkable that such indignities should happen to an honored guest in Magdag. But-” He spread his hands. His dark eyes were most bright upon me. “These are troublous times. The vermin of the red swarm everywhere-”
“Drak should be thankful we saved his life,” said the Princess Susheeng. She lolled in a hammock-type chair of silk and fringing tassels of gold thread; one of her arms was thrown back over her head, drawing up her body into a sensuous curve. “Those sea-leem of Sanurkazz will all be destroyed and put down one day. But I am happy that we saved you from them, Drak.”
The high balcony overlooking the harbor received a cooling breeze for which we were grateful, the heat being excessive at this time. Magdag, being north of Sanurkazz, is somewhat cooler, but neither basks in the strong bracing breezes that sweep in over the Sunset Sea to cool Zenicce, far to the east. A long and powerful warm current, the so-called Zim-Stream, sweeps up from the south past the coasts of Donengil, the southernmost portion of Turismond. Driving in an arc toward the northeast it pushes in a clearly demarcated line of differently colored water through the Cyphren Sea between Turismond and Loh and so washes all the western and southern shores of Vallia. Its southern branch retains enough energy on occasions to reach Zenicce on the western coast of Segesthes.
“I do thank you,” I said. Then, holding myself tightly under control, I said: “It seems they took everything I possess.”
Glycas nodded. “Everything you had with you. Strange things, I have no doubt.”
“From Vallia,” said Susheeng.
I quivered alert.
“Hardly any,” I said, offhandedly. “I have been collecting curios from the Eye of the World, artifacts of Magdag — and of Sanurkazz.”
“Ah — of course,” said Glycas, in a silky murmur I didn’t trust.
“Had your Vallian ship captain not taken his ship to so distant a berth, no doubt your gallant companion, Vomanus, would have been here.” Vomanus had been enraged to a purple fury when he had at last seen me safe. Tharu, that harsh, stern man, Kov of Vindelka, had not been seen since the attack. Everyone considered him to be dead. I felt that if he was not dead, then he might look upon that state as something to be desired if he had been sent to the rowing benches of a Magdag galley.
“These stupid uprisings continue to occur,” Glycas said smoothly. “The slaves on the buildings to the greater glory of Grodno seek to invoke the vile heretical worship of Zair, the misbegotten one. We shall make inquiries and punish the guilty.”
“And meanwhile?”
The Princess Susheeng rose like a graceful and deadly leem from the hammock-chair. She smiled on me and her red lips were moistly sensuous. “Oh, we shall, of course, accept entire responsibility for you, my dear Drak, until another Vallian ship calls.”
“It will not be wise for you to continue on in this palace, alone,” said Glycas briskly. “We hope you will do us the honor of taking apartments in our own palace — it is the Emerald Eye Palace, after all. Only the king, above whom no man dare seek to lift himself, has a finer palace in all Magdag.”
“So be it,” I said, accepting the inevitable. Then I had the wit to add: “I thank you most sincerely.”
So it was that I moved in with Glycas and his rapacious sister Susheeng into the Emerald Eye Palace. The place was large, ornate, not particularly comfortable, noisy — and it had been built with slave labor. At every opportunity I would clear out of the place and stroll about the city. Although Vallia was my objective, I still looked at the defenses of the city with the eye of a raiding Krozair from Sanurkazz. Glycas had insisted that I take with me an escort of half a dozen Chuliks. I had protested, but the manner of his insistence indicated that he would not have me say no. I thought of that scorpion I had seen on the rocks of the Grand Canal; that was how this man Glycas appeared to me: quick, sudden, and deadly. The city smoldered under the lambent fires of the twin suns. I walked about the paved streets and avenues, studied the architecture, patronized a few drinking dens and amusement arcades. I even forced myself to look in on a small arena where groups of drug-inflamed slaves fought each other for the shrieking enjoyment of the Magdag nobility. Sickened, I left. Sectrix racing, I thought, might tempt me. But horse racing as it is practiced on Earth has never appealed to me — the degradation of man and beast and the motives thus revealed do no credit to Homo sapiens — and the men of Magdag had evolved no different method. I yearned, then, for the free ranging races with my Clansmen as we sped over the Great Plains, joyous in the race, astride our zorcas or voves. So it was natural that, saddling up a sectrix and with my bodyguard similarly mounted, I rode out from the Magdag city gate on the landward side and headed for the megalithic complex of obsessive building. On several occasions I had spoken to architects, often at one of the many intimate dinner parties Susheeng delighted in arranging, hurling shrill abuse at her slaves as they scurried about doing the actual work of preparation. These scented and elaborately coifed men had assured me that the buildings were essential for the soul and spirit of Magdag. Only through this continual erection of stupendous monuments of stone and brick could Magdag find a purpose in life. I heard talk of the Great Death, of the time of dying, and now I knew this to mean the period of eclipse, when the green sun was eclipsed by the red. This astronomical event would in the very nature of
