saying they wished for nothing better than to sink a bolt into the guts of the manhunters. So we waited, rather like leems, I confess, as the voller came in. Instead of an eager hunting party of untrained and amateurish nobles jumping down from the voller to slaughter, there leaped with vicious howls four couples of manhounds. The change in our fortunes rattled in so subtly, so quickly, so disastrously.
“Do not miss, my friends!” I called in a voice I made firm, driving, intolerant. I do not think that was necessary, now, looking back, but
Four crossbow bolts sped true, driven by brains and eyes trained in hatred and loathing. My bow loosed, and loosed again. That was six down and the seventh took a shaft along his flank and was on me. My thraxter rasped as it drew from the scabbard and I went over backward with the manhound all bloody and messy upon me, screeching, his teeth clicking together in rage and pain, seeking my throat. The sword was deeply buried in him somewhere low, and my left hand gripped his neck and forced those clashing jaws away. Blood and spittle fouled me. His mad blood-crazed eyes glared on me, and his thin lips worked, his tongue lolled out, and then to my infinite relief the light of intelligence faded in those crazed eyes and he slumped. I stood up carefully, throwing the carcass away so that my right hand could drag the thraxter free.
Men were yelling over by the voller.
Gynor and Rapechak and the other two halflings with swords left off plunging their blades into the mangled body of the eighth manhound. This one had been a female, and, sickened, I turned away to stare with hatred at the hunters.
They had heard the shrieks and the muffled howlings, and, too, they had seen some of their manhounds fall, stricken in mid-leap.
“Span your bows!” I spoke as I used to speak in the smoke and thunder of the broadsides, when the old wooden walls drifted down to bloody battle, and I must see my battery of thirty-two-pounders kept on firing until only myself, perhaps, was left to sponge, load, ram, and pull the lock string. The people from the voller were uncertain. One called in a loud, hectoring voice: “Gumchee! Tulishi!”
That would be the female manhound, I guessed. “Colicoli! Hapang!” They could call until the Ice Floes of Sicce went up in steam but they’d get no answer from those four couples of manhounds. Rapechak said, “We are ready, Dray Prescot. May your Opaz go with you.”
Turko shouted. He spoke loudly, angry, raging, shoving up from his bed of leaves. His face lost its look of pain and took on the semblance of superior anger more habitual to it.
“And is no one of you stinking half-men going with Dray?”
Of the nine halflings who had started with the party, only five were left now, and four were ready to do damage with the crossbows. The last, a little Xaffer, would be of no help in a fight. Mog started to cackle something and the two girls were sobbing, clutching each other. I shouted back:
“I will have to go alone. Now,
Even then Turko tried to get up, to stand and to rush out with me, but his legs buckled and gave way and he fell. Then I waited for no more but started a mad dash for the voller. I say mad dash, for I was mad, clean through, and I dashed, for the mighty hunters of the great Jikai had their crossbows ready.
I lived only because they were such lousy shots.
The only one from whom I expected real danger would be their guide, a man similar to the one I had snatched from his zorca on the plain with the Pallan Golan. Rapechak knew this, also. By the time I reached the voller three of the hunters lay with bolts skewering them. I had dodged and weaved in the last few yards. Up there and peering over the voller’s side the guide looked down. His face showed contempt and rage and only a tinge of fear — and I fancied that was for his dead clients. He lifted himself to get a good shot at me — and the last crossbow quarrel, loosed by Rapechak the Rapa, penetrated his face and knocked him back.
The hunters drew their thraxters to face me. There were five of them and I must draw a veil, as they say, over what followed. I did not kill them all. Three of them were unarmed and then my halflings had reached me, and before there was anything further I could do, there were no hunters left alive. Truth to tell, apart from not really being able to blame the fugitives for their ready justice, I could only have left the hunters there in the jungle. That would have been a more prolonged end, if they were not picked up in time.
This time I said to Rapechak: “Keep an eye on the voller, good Rapechak. We are all comrades, now, in adversity, and this flier is our means of escape.”
He took my meaning clearly enough.
Before I went back for Turko and Mog I respanned the bow, the most handsome of them all, I took from the dead hunter who lay so messily among the rotting detritus of the clearing. With Mog, Turko, the two girls, and the Xaffer I returned to the airboat. We went some time stripping the dead and cleaning their clothes and putting them on. I could not find a tunic to fit and so had to content myself with fashioning a breechclout out of the only scarlet length of material there, and of slinging a short scarlet cape over my left shoulder. Then we all climbed in and, with a feeling of some relief, I sent the voller up into the clean blue sky of Kregen, where the twin Suns of Scorpio blazed down with a light so much more genial than before.
Chapter Seventeen
“You are a get-onker, Dray Prescot! You’re a fool, you nulsh! I wouldn’t go back to Yaman for all the ivory in Chem!”
So spoke Mog, the Migla witch, as we flew out over the sea from the manhunters’ island of Faol. This voller was a larger and more handsome craft than that in which I had escaped before, and in the comfortable cabin aft Turko could lie on a settee and drink the wine we found aboard and make sarcastic remarks about Mog. The girls had recovered, and chattered about what stories they would tell at all the marvelous parties to which they would be invited on the strength of their marvelous adventures. When they heard Mog shriek at me that she would never set foot in her city of Yaman again, the girls looked up.
“We are agreed, Dray Prescot,” said Saenda, somewhat sharply. “Quaesa and I are going to Dap- Tentyrasmot, my own city, where she will be received with all ceremony. Then the halflings may return to their homes, if they wish.”
The effrontery of the girl was amazing only because she had recovered so rapidly from being slave; and was sad because these halflings were her comrades of captivity.
I said, “We go to Mog’s city, Saenda.”
Quaesa said, with a fluting sideways glance from her dark eyes, “If you wish, Dray Prescot, we shall fly to my homeland of Methydria, the land of Havil-Faril, where my father owns many kools of rich grazing and where you will be most welcome.”
By Havil-Faril she meant beloved of Havil, that is, beloved of the green sun. That was not, in those days, calculated to make me, a Krozair of Zy, amenable to her suggestion.
“Yaman,” I said. “Let there be no more argument.”
Of course, I was being selfish. I recognized that. I could have taken all these people home and then gone to Yaman. But I was tired of Mog the witch, and I wanted to get to my home, which was in Valka, or Vallia, depending on where Delia might be, and the quickest way to do that was to dump Mog where the Everoinye wished her. We could drop off a number of the halflings on our way, as we had planned to do before. Turko said, flatly, that he could not return to Herrelldrin. I did not press him. This might be because he had broken some of his syple vows with the slaves, or he might be a wanted man there. A more likely explanation, however, lay in the argument I had had when I had pointed out that a people learned unarmed combat when they were subject to another, and could not afford or were not allowed real weapons. Tulema had not wished to return home, either. I would find out soon enough; now I had to find out what the hell was up with Mog.
