So much for the tantrums of beauty!
They did not fight, or spit, or scratch — and, indeed, it would have been an overmatched contest — but the danger signals that flashed between them crackled with eloquent if silent rivalries. Queen Lilah seemed perfectly to accept Thelda’s arrival. I suppose she could, if she wished, have tossed us both into some dank dungeon and had us tortured to death, licking her lips over us the while. As it was, Lilah simply said with devastating regality: “Does this — woman — mean anything to you, Dray?”
The question differed entirely from that question of like meaning put to me by the Princess Natema on her garden rooftop in the Opal Palace of the Esztercari hold in Zenicce. Then I had lied to save my Delia’s life. I did not need to lie now to save Thelda’s. And yet — she did mean something to me, although not what either she longed for or Lilah suspected.
“I have the highest respect for the Lady Thelda,” I said, with crude formality. The image of the night sky and a rushing wind and the tower of Umgar Stro reared into my mind’s eye. I could not wait longer. “I hold her in the same deep and cherished affection as I hold your esteemed and regal person, Lilah. No more — and no less.”
“Oh — Dray!” The wail could have come from either woman.
“I must go.”
I laid my hand on my sword hilt. An almost instinctive gesture, it brought a flush to Lilah’s pallid countenance. Such boorish behavior, clearly, was unknown in her civilized palace. Thelda started across and took my arm. She glared haughtily upon the Queen.
“I am responsible for the safe-keeping of my Lord of Strombor,” she said. “Now that his betrothed, the Princess Majestrix of Vallia, is dead.”
I would not let her say any more. I turned my wrist and took her hand in my own and crushed it, and smiled at Lilah, the Queen, and said firmly but without rancor: “I am eternally in your debt, Lilah, for your goodness to me and my friends. Now I must go to seek out this Umgar Stro and, if necessary, kill him. I believe I am doing you a good favor, Lilah, in doing that, so do not hurt Thelda here or hinder me. I am a good friend — I would not wish you to understand the depth of my enmity.”
This was all good fustian staff, but it had its effect.
As though coming to a decision, the Queen nodded, and the stiffness went out of her poise. Her figure was good, if a trifle on the thin side, but this merely added to the regality of her presence. She put a hand to her breast, over her heart, and pressed it in. Distinctly, I saw a gigantic diamond, scintillant and brilliant in the lamplight, cut into her flesh.
Her gasp forced its way past psychic, mental levels of pain completely unknown to her body.
“Very well, Dray Prescot. Wreak your vengeance on Umgar Stro. I shall not forget. I shall be here when you return. Then we will talk more; for what I have spoken to you I sincerely mean.”
“I am sure you do.”
“As for you, my Lady Thelda, I would advise a more circumspect tongue. Do you understand?”
Before Thelda, whose blood was up, could answer, I dug my fingers into her hand, so that she winced. Then I dragged her off.
Lilah, tall and resplendent in the jeweled lamplight, called after me: “I wish you well, Dray Prescot. Remberee!”
“Remberee, Lilah!” I called back.
As we got outside, Thelda jerked free and spat out: “The female cramph! I could scratch her eyes out!”
Then, and with some bewilderment, I admit, I chuckled.
Chapter Thirteen
That image of a dark night and a rushing wind I had experienced in the scented withdrawing room of Lilah’s palace had come true.
Seg and I had taken off before the twins — the two second moons of Kregen eternally orbiting each other — had appeared above the horizon and with the maiden of many smiles sinking over the western rim of the world. By her dying light we saw the sleeping city beneath us, all its watchtowers spiring into the sky where restless men kept their long vigils, and only the faint lamp-glow falling from their arrow slits to tell of life within.
We passed over the manufacturing quarters where in the enclosed atrium-style houses the work-people lay asleep, and all the long alleyways between the houses lay silent and deserted beneath the stars. Down there the forge fires softly sloughed away into grayness and cold, the hammers stilled, the bellows silent from their slave- driven wheezing. Bronze and copper and iron for implements and weapons of war, silver and gold and nathium for trinkets and objects of art, all lay quietly in their racks awaiting the morrow’s labors, for the Queen maintained her industry at a thriving rate against the tide of barbarism. Farther off lay the tanners’ quarters, and the potters’ and the glaziers’; great cities do not exist as mere palaces and villas, streets and temples, without visible means of support. As soon as Genodras flooded down in the morning the gates would open and the country folk, ever-fearful of barbarian raids, would trundle in their carts, pulled by asses or calsanys, or trudge stolidly with great burdens swinging over their shoulders at either end of long supple poles of tuffa wood, all seeking to find the best and most advantageous places within the covered markets to display their produce. The city slept; save for its guardians in their spires and along its walls. On the morrow it would awake to a new day and fresh life, and would thank its pagan female goddesses that it still survived.
I wondered, not without real concern for Seg, if we two would still live to welcome that morrow. The corths Hwang had provided, not without a deal of cutting sarcasm directed against Nath the Corthman, were docile but sturdy beasts. Their wings beat steadily and we rose and fell in the night air in a strong and soothing rhythm. They were well-trained, as any flying mount for a man must be, and we felt confident that they would do all that we required of them. We rode two and I had attached the long leading rein of the third to my flying saddle. Warmly clad in furs and silks, we lay in a semi-prone position just abaft the birds’ heads. We had to be clear of the arc the powerful wings cut in the air. A bird shaped, say, like a falcon or a hawk would be difficult if not impossible to ride; a saddle bird must needs possess a neck of some strength and length if its rider’s legs are not to smash catastrophically against its wings.
The sensation of flying thus, of hurtling through the level air, exhilarated me. This was very different from aerial navigation aboard a flier from Havilfar. I began to wonder if we would have stood a better chance of negotiating The Stratemsk astride an aerial monster like the corth, or the impiter which was so much bigger, fiercer, and more powerful.
We winged on our way following the faint glimmer of the road beneath that ran almost straight from Hiclantung. We had been given our instructions — briefed, you would say — and we had no fears of failing to find Plicla, the city of the Rapas that was now the city of Umgar Stro. Plicla was situated amid a mass of broken hills and dales, good flying country with its updrafts, and yet dangerous with its sudden precipices and vortices of air. The city had been founded by Rapas who had drifted into the area as slaves or mercenaries in the long ago, employed by Loh no less than her foes, and who now had banded together to found their own Rapa nation. Umgar Stro and his Ullars had altered all that.
We saw the high towers, the craggy cliffs supporting the massive walls, with their tops raking for the sky. A suspicious, smelly, unpleasant race, the Rapas, so I thought then, when I was young and new to Kregen and had only unpleasant experience of them to judge them by. Their bird-like faces, their fierce agile ability, made them valued as guards and mercenaries, no less than slaves. I wondered what they would be like as mere citizens of their own city-state.
Natural caution among mercenary-employing nations impelled them to hire mercenaries from many different races. Chuliks, Rapas, Ochs, Fristles — of those I had already met on Kregen — and all the other strange half-men and beast-men I was to encounter, also, when employed by a single government would rest secure in the knowledge that each individual detachment of mercenaries would scarcely ever allow itself to be cozened into a rebellion in association with any other detachment. Mutual suspicion would keep the hired soldiers apart. And no single detachment would of itself be powerful enough to topple the hiring government, when all the others would
