problems.
Lilah leaned forward a little on her throne, her white hand beneath her white chin, brooding on me. “I shall send all my army up against Umgar Stro in Chersonang. I believe we can break both him and them, together. This will be your opportunity, Dray Prescot, to seek and find the woman you desire. I offer you the chance to command my army, with my generals, to go up against Umgar Stro at the head of a host. Come, what do you say?”
At my side Thelda gasped.
The guards pressed more closely about us now.
There was no need to discuss with myself my answer.
“I thank you, Lilah, for your offer. It is generous of you. But I cannot wait. I will leave for Chersonang at once — sleep will have to wait, instead.”
“You fool!”
I turned to go and Seg’s hand flashed up with the arrow between his fingers and a spear point tripped him so that he fell sprawling before the throne. My sword was half drawn when something — a spear butt, the flat of a sword — sledged down on my head and I tumbled down that long smooth slope of black oblivion.
Chapter Sixteen
If you choose to think my actions at this time — and, indeed, for some time past — had been irrational, I could not argue the point with you.
Truly, I now feel that the belief my Delia was dead had deranged me. I know I had acted in ways completely outside my usual fashion, and, yet, too, in ways I have been told are typical of me, as witness that wild moment when I defied the Queen of Pain to rush out from the windlass room in the corthdrome upon the indigo-haired assassins of Umgar Stro. I must have been in a state of shock that allowed me to walk and talk and act and yet held me all the time in a kind of mental stasis. The ancient Chinese, we are told, had perfected the art of torture by water, the expected drop of liquid crashing onto the victim’s forehead like a weight crushing into his brain. A single small drop could not do that; it was the expectation and the mounting terror of the inevitable, alternated with the passive bouts of cringing waiting. First I had thought Delia dead, then I had heard she might be alive, then her death was once more certain, and now again she might be missing and, perhaps, better dead. The sheer vibrationary pressure, the nightmare nutcracker rhythm of it all, had made of me a different animal from the man who had flown over The Stratemsk.
Of only one thing could I be sure. Whether dead or alive, Delia would fiercely insist that I go on with life, that I persevere, that I never give in.
Seg and I recovered quietly in a comfortable room set deep within the palace. The room was as luxuriously furnished as anyone could wish, windowless, lit with samphron oil lamps, and set everywhere with the motionless and watchful figure of guards, spearmen of the Queen’s own household in their embroidered robes and gleaming helmets, their steel-tipped spears. We were both naked. We had no weapons.
Seg said: “We could take the spears from these dummies, easily, you and I, Dray!”
I said: “We could. We could fight our way clear if we went together. But — what of Thelda?”
His look distressed me.
“Thelda,” he said, and he bowed that mane of black hair to his brawny forearms. So we pondered our chances of breaking free and taking the plump Lady of Vallia with us. Wherever we were marched within the Queen’s palace we were accompanied by an overwhelming escort, consisting of spearmen and bowmen. These latter, we knew, effectively prevented the sudden dash for freedom. And yet, even then, we knew we were not prisoners in any ordinary sense of that term. We became aware of a sense of heightened purpose within Hiclantung. Soldiers moved everywhere. Preparations were being made and Seg was moved to express a fierce dark satisfaction in the demeanor of the men.
“They have not forgotten what Umgar Stro did to them. Through the treachery of one man, that Forpacheng, their pride was humbled.” Seg moved his hands meaningfully. “Well, now they are regrouping, remembering their traditions. They will not suffer the same fate again.”
Hwang, the Queen’s nephew, came to see us, distressed by what Lilah was forced to do to us — as he said, for our own good.
His young face wore the kind of look one associates with a child’s awareness of some mischief, and the desire to brazen it out. He flung his embroidered robes away from his legs, kicking them petulantly, as he sat down. Seg hospitably poured wine — it was a purple beverage of excellent vintage, I recall, full-bodied yet not too sweet, from the western slopes of Mount Storr — and Hwang took the goblet as though prepared to sup and to forget what was on his mind.
“I have just come from the dancing girls at Shling-feraeo,” he said. “They bored me.”
“Umgar Stro,” I said.
Hwang nodded. “Yes, Dray Prescot. You have it aright.”
We began a technical discussion concerning the equipment and tactics of the army of Hiclantung, in which Seg pressed hard. I might have felt amusement, with another man, at another time without worries, at the way Seg so passionately concerned himself with the prospects of this lame remnant of the glorious empire of Walfarg. Much of Seg’s home country, that mysterious land of mountains and valleys called Erthyrdrin, I came to know later; but nothing could quench the burning pride in Seg, a pride echoed in Hwang, that the ancient virtues of Loh should survive, and that he, as a man of Erthyrdrin, should participate to the full in their perpetuation. Perhaps I caught a glimpse, there in that silken scented prison room of the palace of Hiclantung, of the breaking of barriers of nationality that was so much to affect my life on Kregen.
Seg was a man of Erthyrdrin, and he had told me how his people were feared by the other peoples of Loh — there had been much wild free talk between us — and now, here he was, dourly determined to smash unknown enemies of the Lohvians.
For the enemies were unknown in the sense that the people of Chersonang were unknown to Seg and myself, and Umgar Stro clearly had not flexed all his military muscle and therefore was unknown to Hwang and the Lohvian army of Hiclantung.
Presently Hwang said to me, with a smile and a gesture of the hand holding the wine goblet: “You are a wise man, Dray Prescot, not to attempt escape. You are a man I think could escape if you willed it. But you have put both the Queen and myself into your debt; and we are conscious of that-”
“You are not in my debt.”
“For myself, thinking of you as a friend, I am glad you go up against Umgar Stro with an army, and not alone.”
“Huh,” said Seg Segutorio.
Hwang inclined his head, squinting along the goblet.
“Assuredly, Seg. By alone I meant with you and without my army.”
“You are in command?” I said.
“In a manner of speaking. Orpus holds joint-command. There are other generals. We believe you will join us, Dray Prescot, to give us the wisdom of your advice.”
“Seg is perfectly accustomed to commanding men in combat.”
Hwang looked with a strange kind of affection upon my comrade. “Yes. Seg is of Erthyrdrin, and we who remain of Walfarg know of them well. There was once a time. . Well” — he drained the goblet -
“no matter.”
He stood up to go.
Then, looking down on us, for protocol was not respected by me so long as I remained a prisoner, Hwang said: “I have had a messenger from Naghan. You remember Naghan, the spy?”
“Yes.”
“He will return very soon. His report — and it is cautious as befits a spy — says he will have news of Delia-”
