back!” Now I could see, slanting down into the square, the welcome sight of fliers planing in. “Here come Seg and Inch! Get them, my heart, for the sake of your father!”
She knew exactly what I meant.
I did not mean that she would run to the fliers and fetch Seg and Inch and Hap Loder and Varden and Vomanus for the sake of her father the Emperor at all. I meant that she should run there for my sake, for our sakes.
She would have none of it.
I couldn’t stop.
The descending fliers had been spotted by the men of Kov Ortyg of Zamra, and they yelled in fear, and scattered, and ran. The group with the Emperor hared off away from the palace, and running with them, angling in from the side, ran Ortyg Larghos himself.
I ran.
That faintness overpowering me must not be allowed to interfere now. I loved Delia and Delia loved me, but if her father died now and my aid proved ineffectual there would be a shadow between us, a shadow never mentioned, never alluded to, but a shadow nevertheless.
The hot stones of the square burned up at me.
I caught them easily enough, for the Emperor was struggling. He was still a powerful man, and well-fed, and filled with the innate majesty of his position, so that he gave them some trouble. I truly believe that this manhandling with its attendant physical exercise changed something about that man, that dread Emperor, the father of Delia. He had never been handled so for years. So that when I caught them and laid about me, he could snatch up a sword and stand at my side.
He was no great shakes as a swordsman, and I had my work cut out to guard him as well as myself, but he kept pressing on, shouting fiercely, through his teeth: “Vallia! Vallia! By the Invisible Twins!” and, when a deflected lunge from me toppled a hapless wight into his path and he could slash down, he yelled:
“Opaz the all-glorious! Vallia! Vallia! Drak of Vallia!”
Kov Larghos shrieked at his men.
‘Take him, you fools! Cut down the barbarian! Take the Emperor!”
I could understand what Kov Larghos must be thinking. He had been a party to the plots hatched by his relative, Nath Larghos, the Trylon of the Black Mountains, and I guessed Naghan Furtway had promised him the position of Pallan of Vondium itself. Now, with no knowledge of the utter defeat of the third party, he sought to capture the Emperor and use him as a bargaining counter.
“Keep behind me, Majister,” I said. “I’ll spit you by mistake if you insist on skipping out ahead of me.”
I did not speak overpolitely to this emperor.
“This is warm work, Dray Prescot-” He slashed at an Och and the little four-armed halfling interposed his shield and the rapier bounced and clanged. The Och thrust with his lower right arm wielding a spear and I had to skip and slice and jump to avoid the sweep of the sword in his upper right. But he went down, screeching.
“By the Black Chunkrah!” I said. “Emperor, get back or I’ll drag you back by your hair!”
“By Vox!” he yelped, swishing his sword about. “I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in years!”
He had no idea of the number of times he ought to have been killed. Left to his own devices he would have rolled on the stones of the square with a half dozen rapier thrusts in his belly or his head hanging off by gristle. I beat down a fresh attack and reached out my left hand, thrust the dagger all bloody as it was between my teeth, and took a good grip of the Emperor’s hair.
I yanked.
He yelled, as much in pain and injured dignity as fear, and toppled back, whereat I pushed myself in front of him, took the dagger back into my left hand, smashed away a fresh developing attack, and so flung forward with my rapier nickering in and out, very evilly, like the tongues of risslaca. The Emperor was growing annoyed,
“Just like all my Pallans, Dray Prescot!” he shouted at my back. “Denying me any fun in life.”
I had time to yell back, most savagely: “If you think fighting and killing is fun, then you’re still a child!”
Ortyg Larghos, Kov of Zamra, had not given up.
He made a last and as he thought final effort to take the Emperor. A solid wedge of his remaining men hurled themselves upon me. I had to use all my skill with the Jiktar and the Hikdar to fend them off. Two Rapas there were, very fierce, with their predatory beaked faces leering down upon me, who hurled themselves forefront of the others. They were not to be dismissed and spitted as easily as those who were coughing their guts out on the dusty stones around the fight.
While engaged with them I saw the Emperor, with his rapier up and out in a most ungainly stance, run at the bunch of men from the side. His face looked then — and Zair forgive me if I felt a tiny spark of joy
— very much as my Delia’s looked when she stood by me, shoulder to shoulder, against ravening foemen.
Larghos saw his chance. His final chance.
“Take him!” he screeched.
Green and purple feathers bobbed above the Emperor. Yellow and blue arms reached out for him. I yelled.
The Rapas before me whickered their rapiers about in most professional passes, making me use skill and strength on them, and I could feel my strength slowly seeping away.
Ortyg Larghos was jubilant.
“Stick him, Rapas!” he was yelling.
I fended a thrust on my main-gauche, essayed a pass, took the other rapier rather too low and so had to give and bend to let the blade hiss past my side. I brought my wrist around for the next pass and a steel-tipped clothyard shaft sprouted clear through the Rapa’s long roosterish neck. His companion had no time to make a sound as a second arrow feathered itself through his own scrawny neck. Without turning around I shouted and I leaped for the men surrounding the Emperor. I shouted just one word:
And then followed as marvelous an exhibition of shooting as any man can ever have performed and any man can have had the privilege of witnessing. For as I fought those remaining third-party men in their green and purple, slicing them, spitting them, so Seg shot out anyone who sought to close with me. His arrows sped silently above my shoulders and feathered themselves into the breasts of the men facing me. They could not stand against this whispering death, and they turned, and ran, and they were all dead men, for now the shorter arrows from my clansmen’s bows fell among them.
Ortyg Larghos, Kov of Zamra, staggered across the stones of the square to fall at his Emperor’s feet. His chest and back sprouted the steel heads and the bright feathers of many arrows.
“You pulled my hair, Dray Prescot.”
“Aye,” I said viciously. “And I’ll pull it again if you rush upon naked steel like that again!”
He lowered his strong square face upon me. “I am the Emperor,” he said, but he was not boasting, he was not trying to overawe me. Come to that, he had crawled out of the thicket of dinosaur bones to face my victorious men, and so he could never really boast of being emperor in quite the same way again. He was trying to explain something that saddened him. “I am never allowed to enjoy myself,” he said.
“Never. It is always inexpedient, bad politics, unsafe.”
This was the man who had intemperately ordered my head cut off. I was to marry his daughter, and so that must have made some change in his attitude. I could understand him a little now, and, anyway, some emperors feel that ordering heads cut off is all a part of their function. I turned away from him, not smiling, letting him see I was not impressed, to greet my men. Seg had collected arrows from the battlefield as any frugal bowman does, and he and my wild clansmen marched up with all the swing and panache of the immortal fight at The Dragon’s Bones still clinging to them. Inch swung his long Saxon ax with an air. Korf Aighos swung his Great Sword of War of the Blue Mountains and I caught some of the pride he and his Blue Mountain Boys felt in thus resurrecting their ancient weapon. Varden stared about with a city-bred eye.
Hap Loder and Vomanus were talking together, and I wondered what deviltry they were cooking up. Vomanus was handling Hap’s broadsword, and I hazarded a guess Vomanus was telling my Zorcander of the longswords of the inner sea, the Eye of the World.
Delia said: “If you do that again, Dray Prescot, I may be a widow before I’m married!”
I held her right arm with my left, and turned her, and so, together, side by side, we walked through the main
