pools.
Triumphantly shrilling, the Phokaym dragged me away.
Had they had eight limbs each, I would have believed in them, and my long sword would have drunk cold reptilian blood. Had they had eight legs, I would have believed. Six legs, even. .
CHAPTER FOUR
An old crone of an Och came to me in the corner of a cave where the Phokaym had flung me, still tightly bound in the thick blood-red strands. She was old and her stringy bleached hair hung lankly down. She stood before me on her legs, holding the pannikin of foul water with her middle limbs, and brushed the scum from the surface of the water with one of her upper hands, while the other dipped the stone spoon and so dribbled water between my lips.
“They want you alive and healthy for the voryasen.”
The spoon was merely a dumbbell-shaped piece of stone with one end hollowed out. Most of the water trickled down my chin and into my beard — which was longer and more ragged than I customarily allowed — but the drops I sucked in, despite my knowledge of their stinking condition, tasted like the best Zond wine.
The Och made no attempt to free me. She cringed at the slightest sound, shutting her eyes and hunching her head down into her neck. She spilled more water than I got, but at least I felt a little more myself. I asked her impatient questions, and when I mastered myself enough to soothe her, she was able to speak, albeit falteringly and with many frightened glances over her shoulder. Outside came the noise of people moving about, the rhythmical gong-like notes as stone struck against stone. The suns had set, but it was still hot.
“The Klackadrin.” The old Och woman sighed. Her name, she said, was Ooloo. She had no clear memory of any life before this; yet she must have been brought here in some way, if she had not been born here. She did not remember. “The Klackadrin. It is evil, weird, ghosts and bad spirits dwell there. No one can cross it at all — only the roads, only the roads-”
How many of these poor devils had sought to escape via the roads, only to have the fearsome Phokaym astride their risslacas hunt them down and bind them with the blood-red cords and cast them to the voryasen?
“Devils,” she said, muttering, and cast a terrified glance toward the cave mouth. The Klackadrin, she told me, was not a great distance in an east-west direction, although its north-south axis, meandering and curving, stretched she did not know how far into North Turismond and ended, she thought, far down into the south, perhaps as far as the Cyphren Sea where the Zim Stream sweeps up from unknown oceans.
“Evil dreams, nightmares, madness, that is all the Klackadrin can offer. There are monsters there -
monsters-” She shut her eyes. I had had no food and when I asked she brought me a piece of raw opossum which, as a warrior, I knew I must eat to keep up my strength, yet tasted hard and stringy and needed much chewing.
“One day, perhaps, the Phokaym will go away and leave us in peace,” said Ooloo. It was pathetically transparent that she did not believe this would ever happen.
By continuous perseverance I discovered I could move my fingers a little within the constriction of the blood- red strands. I kept working away, pushing and pulling one muscle against the next in well-remembered drill, seeking to keep them flexible and the blood coursing through my body. If I was to escape I could not have the agony of blood returning to circulation slowing me down. I was working on my upper arms when the Phokaym amid a loud noise of clashing weapons and scaled armor came for me.
“The voryasen!” whispered old Ooloo. As I was dragged out with a great shouting and much buffeting I heard her say, “Jikai, Jikai,” and I thought she sobbed.
We warriors always felt a trifle contemptuous of Ochs with their little round shields when it came to combat; but I think I can trace my emergence of a better feeling for them from that encounter with old Ooloo there in the fetid caves of the Phokaym.
Clouds drifted across the sky and She of the Veils, the fourth moon, shone more fitfully even than usual, while the first moon, almost twice the size of our own moon, the Maiden with the Many Smiles, was already setting far across the Owlarh Waste.
The collection of food and the production of tools and utensils were the primary concerns of the crushed- down people, both men and half-men, under the despotic rule of the Phokaym. Tonight was to be a spectacle night, an occasion when the risslaca Phokaym emphasized their absolute power. A man was to be tossed to the voryasen. Consequently, so I gathered, more torches than usual were lit, painfully gathered by the slaves from the waste, twisted and gnarled branches they had so painfully gathered set alight gleefully by the Phokaym to illuminate their celebrations. I saw stone jugs passing from claw to claw as the Phokaym gathered. Their scales glittered in the torchlight. It was difficult to distinguish just what was armor and what was their own scaly hide. I was dragged toward the stone lip of a great pit. Above the pit an arrangement of wooden supports lashed together projected, like the boom of a crane. The Phokaym crowded toward this pit. I was hoisted upside down and my lashed ankles were fastened by a rope painstakingly woven from dry stems. Torchlight glared upon the scene, ruddy and orange, streaming light and driving weird shadows cavorting among the rocks and the stunted bushes.
Up I swung, twisting and turning, upside down, hanging from the rope. The boom moved and turned and I was carried out over the pit. I looked down.
A voryas is a form of risslaca one might imagine in nightmare, part crocodile, part tylosaurus, a giant fang- filled mouth, all jaw and muscle, and an agile scaly body and bludgeoning tail, that one would do well never to imagine, even in nightmare, let alone care to encounter. Bound and helpless, with all my weapons about me and unable to use them, I swung upside down above a water-filled pit crawling with the saurian horrors.
They lifted from the surface of the water, hissing and spitting, their jaws wedges of fangs, their eyes red and wicked and glaring upon me with voracious intent.
The Phokaym had fun.
They kept paying out the rope and lowering me down toward the surface of the water so that the voryasen would leap up at me, giant scaled forms gleaming dully emerald and amber, surging upward to fall back, baffled, hissing their rage, as the rope was hastily hauled in. Up and down I went, and the voryasen leaped and hissed, and the world turned scarlet from the thrum of blood in my head and my eyes threatened to start from their sockets, and my body grew numb. By a stupendous effort I managed to jackknife my body and look upward. A Phokaym, his teeth glinting as carnivorously as any voryas in the pit below, held out a blazing torch. He was touching the fizzing and sputtering torch to the rope holding my bound body above the pit.
Furiously I struggled with the blood-red cords, but they would not yield. If I could swing, I could reach the timber support of the boom from which I hung suspended. The smells, the shrieks, the whole cacophony of noises spurted up to rumble and roil in my head. I was helpless. Below me the carnivorous water-predators saw the flame of the torch and their hissing redoubled. They knew what would happen when the torch burned through the rope. They knew!
I was sweating now; everything whirled about me. One crunch of those gigantic fanged jaws below and I would be cut into two bloody halves.
There could be no last-minute rescue. There was no one within a hundred dwaburs who could aid me now — no one anywhere on this wild and savage world of Kregen.
The pit yawned beneath my dangling head. Torchlight splintered back from the scales and the eyes of the voryasen below. Now their hissing bounced back in magnified echoes from the pit walls. I craned up again — the rope was burning!
I could see the frayed and blackened strands parting, one by one, curling out like spent matches. The torchlight burned into my eyes.
The shrieking and yelling of the Phokaym deafened me.
I swung. .
My mouth was wide open, but I was not yelling.
This might be the end of it all, of all the high dreams I had had, here on Kregen, of winning my princess and
