his gaunt features, over those wine-dark eyes, that long supercilious nose, that near-lipless mouth. He looked at me, clutching his rags, and he was well aware of the horror and superstitious awe in which common folk held the Wizards of Loh.
Indeed, there was power about him in an aura no one could overlook. Many and many a time have the Wizards of Loh performed deeds any normal man would dub impossible, and what their secrets may be are still a mystery to me. They demand and obtain instant obedience from the common folk — of whom, Zair be praised, there are many sturdy souls — and for the lordly of the land they reserve a kind of watching, cynical and amused tolerance, an armed truce of checks and balances of interest. Umgar Stro, for instance, could torture this old man to obtain his services, and his men might murmur but, being barbarians, they would not react in the same way that a man of Walfarg might. Once having obtained his services, Umgar Stro would have to kill him; for, judging by all the stories I had heard, if he did not then a retribution as horrible as it was inevitable would overtake him as surely as Zim and Genodras rose with each new day.
So it was that this Wizard of Loh, this Lu-si-Yuong, thought he could now safely dictate what was to occur.
He stared at me and I saw the torchlight flicker over his grimed yet pallid face. He took a step backward.
“Listen to me, San. If you speak true, if there is no girl prisoner here, then swear it be so by all you hold sacred of Loh. For, Lu-si-Yuong, if you lie to me then you will die — as surely as anything you know of in your world!”
His tongue rasped those wrinkled sandpaper edges of his mouth.
“It is true. I swear to you by Hlo-Hli herself and by the seven arcades, I am the only prisoner here.”
We stood facing each other for what seemed a long time.
I was scarcely aware when I lowered the sword point from his shrunken breast.
“Very well.” I could not break out, not now; I could not allow myself to despair and to abandon myself to my grief. Not now, not when faithful Seg orbited outside awaiting me, in mortal danger. “Come, old man. Pray to all your pagan gods you have spoken the truth — and yet, and yet I wish you lied!”
We left the cell and walked on the footprinted way between the dust and so up the spiral stairs, past the guardroom and up to the attic. For me, Dray Prescot, this was a skulking, an undignified way, of tackling my foes.
Thelda had told me Delia had dropped into a tarn and been drowned. San Yuong told me she was not here. Did they both lie?
I told Lu-si-Yuong to wait and went back to the guardroom and took up the two toonons. The bamboo was not a true bamboo but came from the Marshes of Buranaccl. I wondered what Seg would make of the weapon. My mind was beginning to function again.
Seg was mightily joyed to see us. He brought the corths in with supple skill and I bundled up onto the trapeze with the fragile form of the Wizard tucked under my arm. We swung away into the Kregan night and the glow from the twins rolled across the eastern horizon laying pink icing across the towers, battlements, and roofs of Rapa Plicla.
The strong vulturine-shaped wings of the corths beat up and down, up and down, and we rode the sky levels away from the fortress of Umgar Stro until we could alight in a clearing among tuffa trees and so rearrange ourselves for our flight back to Hiclantung.
Seg was very quiet.
He did say, savagely: “I would have welcomed an opposition back there. We need a fight, Dray.”
“Aye,” I said. And let it lie there.
I did not believe my Delia was dead. Not after all we had been through. Only when I held Umgar Stro’s throat in my fists and choked the truth from him would I believe. And, even then, even then, I would go on hoping. .
Chapter Fourteen
One of the strange and, if the truth be told, weird, aspects of the Wizards of Loh was revealed in that grove of tuffa trees as we rested our corths and rearranged our flight program. Lu-si-Yuong, without a word of explanation to Seg or myself, squatted himself down on the ground in the pinkish light from the twin moons, composed himself and, lifting his veined hands to his eyes, threw his head back and so remained still and silent and unmoving.
Seg whispered: “I think, Dray, he is in lupu.”
“Oh?” I really hardly cared.
“Yes. They say the Wizards of Loh can see into the future-”
“A simple story for simple minds. The credulous will believe any mumbo jumbo and it puts a copper into the hands of clever tricksters.”
Seg glanced obliquely at me, his mouth open. He shut his mouth, and looked back at Yuong, and did not say what he so clearly thought. I had a mind to speak more kindly toward him, for he was of Loh, but I forbore. Delia! I remembered my anguish when among the tents and the wagons and chunkrah herds of the Clansmen of Felschraung I had heard my Delia was dead, and I recalled my determination to remain alive and fighting strong so that if, as I truly believed, she was not dead, I would be able to render her what aid I could. Now, as the Wizard of Loh went through his mumbo jumbo I made the same solemn vow.
Quietly, I said to Seg: “I came away from the tower tonight, Seg, for there were reasons why I should do so. I cannot believe that Delia is truly dead. I shall go on until I find Umgar Stro, wherever he may be. I think he was lucky not to be home tonight, and yet more unfortunate, too.”
“How is that, dom?” asked Seg in a neutral voice.
“I would have killed him tonight, stone dead. But if it takes me long to find him then there will be that amount more time in which to store resentment, and to think of ways of making him talk and — pay!”
Seg turned his eyes away from my face.
Lu-si-Yuong began to tremble. His thin shoulders shook and over all his scrawny body beneath the rags he shuddered and then he began slowly to draw his palms from before his eyes. His eyeballs were rolled up, displaying the whites like a bird-befouled marble statue’s, and his breathing had practically ceased.
“Lupu,” I said. “Is that it?”
“Aye, Dray, that is being in lupu. He is having visions. Who can tell where his mind is wandering now-”
“Get a grip on yourself, Seg!”
All the fey characteristics of his race predominated in Seg Segutorio now, all the dark and hidden lore in his native hills of Erthyrdrin pulsed and answered the weirdness of this old man, this San, this Wizard of Loh.
As the streaming pink moons-light fell upon that gaunt upturned face and turned those blind eyes into cracked yellow pits I looked about the grove of tuffa trees and at the three corths uneasily picking and pecking their feathers, and I, Dray Prescot of Earth, wondered at the faces of Kregen I had not yet seen. A gargling cry wailed from Yuong. His trembling ceased. Unsteadily, waveringly, he tottered to his feet. He opened his arms wide, the fingers rigid and outspread. Like some blasphemous cross he gyrated, like a cyclone-torn scarecrow, like a whirling dervish in the last stages of exhaustion. Then, as abruptly as he had begun, he sank down, resumed his contemplative position, and so lowered his hands flat to the ground and opened his eyes and looked on us.
“And have you looked into the future, old man?” I said.
“Dray!” Seg’s outraged cry affected me not at all.
San Yuong looked at me. I think, even then, he did not know how to size me up or to read me in the context of those people with whom he was accustomed to deal. I do know now, and admit it with only the slightest diffidence, that I must have been in a state of shock still, and hardly recking of what I did or said. In any event Yuong decided to treat me with caution. For this I was later duly grateful; at the time I merely remarked to myself that I must be wearing that old devil’s mask of a face again — and joying in it, Zair help me, joying in my pain.
“The future does not concern me at this moment, my friend. I shall thank you properly for rescuing me at a suitable time. What I have been discovering is how I will be received by Queen Lilah-”
