violence of the wind and rain, all were supernormal. I clung to the gyrating voller and I cursed the Star Lords. Oh, yes, I cursed them blue!
Another voller narrowly avoided crushing mine, for this craft that yawed away was a monster and I could see the deck covered with iron cages. Weight is of no consequence to a voller. In those cages, illuminated eerily by the flickering shards of lightning, wild beasts leaped and yowled and screeched. This was a flier bringing prize specimens for the arena.
Both vollers hit the ground at the same time. Mine went somersaulting over a low brick wall, smashing a thatched roof, ripping through a loloo yard, came shudderingly to rest against a low thorn-ivy hedge. I scrambled out. I had no wish once again to go breeches first through a thorn-ivy hedge. The cages had burst on impact. Screams and yells, horrid in the uncertain light, created a bedlam. The aftercabin of the flier, a two-deck construction, had splintered to destruction, and costly silks and satins, mashcera and damask, floated and strewed the shattered house. Men and women were running in crazy circles. I saw Rhaclaws carrying torches and whips trying to round up some of the beasts — I saw a strigicaw tear the head off one and spit it out before racing for a second. In that incredible scene of confusion with maddened wild beasts, of a ferocity known only to Kregen, terrifying humans, halflings, and apims alike, I stood for a moment. I knew I must help but knew, also, I was likely to get killed in affording that help.
Any hesitation was instantly banished as from the shattered wreckage of the cabin’s upper deck the slim and half-naked form of a girl leaped and ran, screaming. Her hair blazed flame in the torchlight, by which I assumed she might hail from Loh. Now the thatch of the house was alight and in that curdling orange radiance I saw the low feline shape of a neemu racing after the slender white form of the girl. The neemu had been injured, for it ran favoring its off front foot. Four legs have the neemus, round and smooth their heads, with squat triangular ears, and wide slit eyes of a lambent smoky-gold. All black are neemus, sleek and deadly, their fur highly prized, their ways amoral and feral. Their red jaws and sharp white teeth love nothing better than closing upon rosy living flesh. Vaguely puma-like, the neemu, vicious and treacherous and utterly deadly.
No thought was necessary.
I leaped forward, drawing my sword.
The girl cast me one terrified, appealing look, and collapsed, her foot twisting under her. I stepped forward and the neemu did not hesitate.
It leaped.
That long sinuous black body packed with muscle sprang and in that rounded smooth head the lambent golden eyes glittered at me with deadly intent.
I slid the first lashing claw and because the beast was injured in its right paw was able to lean to my left and bring the thraxter around and down in a short and savagely chopping stroke at the neemu’s neck. It screeched as it went past. It landed short of the girl, who cowered back, one hand to her mouth, her eyes enormous. Without giving the neemu a chance to recover — for that blow, mighty as it had been and bringing a gout of blood from the gash in the beast’s neck, had not killed it — I jumped in again. This time the sword cut and thrust as it was built to do and the neemu shrank back, hissing and screeching, its glossy black fur dappled with blood, and so rolled over, slumped, and died. It did not die easily. Seven lives, neemus have, so goes the old superstition. I gave it seven thrusts, and then seven more, just to make sure.
The girl could not rise. She lay there, her gauzy scraps of clothing only partially covering her glowing body. She tried to speak, and I heard the whispered words “Hai Jikai!”
And then rough and ungentle hands seized me, and a giant Rapa cunningly cast chains about my limbs, and his fellows, Rhaclaws, Rapas, Fristles, and apims, manacled and fettered me.
“What are you about, you yetches!” I roared.
But they struck me across the face and then gagged me, so that I could not yell the curses that boiled and spluttered in my head. What nonsense was this, that I should thus be chained?
The answer to that bore down on me with all the old sense of injustice that festers in many parts of Kregen, as, indeed to our shame, it does on this Earth in the here and now. I was taken swiftly aboard another flier, for the storm inspired by the Star Lords had died as swiftly as it had begun, and with the passengers from the beast- carrying voller was carried with the utmost dispatch to the frowning fortress of Hakal, which dominates the city of Huringa in Hyrklana.
In certain essentials one fortress is much like another, although in Valka I have made certain changes that make of the Valkan castles the finest and most impregnable in all of Kregen, or so I fondly believe. Almost all Kregan castles are comfortable, of course, for comfort and Kregan nobility are tolerably well acquainted. I was taken wrapped in my chains and bundled down into a cell, where sundry Rhaclaws picked me, a Rapa bit me (the Rapa beaks are notorious), and a Fristle flicked me across the face with his tail. Had my mouth not been gagged he, at least, would have regretted his conduct. I kicked a number of them where it would materially impair their mating instincts; but in the end I was beaten down and chained up. They used a great deal of solid iron chain on me so that, finally, I was helpless.
After some time — time meant nothing among the nobility when dealing with their inferiors — I was hauled out and beaten again just to remind me. Then I was dragged helplessly up stone stairs and so through many back stairs and corridors into a low-ceiled room hung with many bright tapestries and furnished luxuriously with the wealth of empire, and flung down before Queen Fahia of Hyrklana. I was hungry.
My chains chafed and my muscles were cramped and twisted. I had a headache and I was in the foulest of foul bad tempers.
The queen sat in a simple curule-styled chair, a zhantil pelt strewn carelessly upon it. A Fristle girl hovered with ready goblets of wine, another with tidbits on golden platters. A giant Brokelsh, dressed up in ridiculous finery, waved a feathered fan above her head, for it was full day and the suns pouring in through the open windows gave heat as well as light to the chamber. I took a quick squint — for my eyes were adjusted to the darkness of prison cells and not the glory of Zim and Genodras — to see whether or not the scarlet and golden Gdoinye or the white dove of the Savanti might not be looking in and having a damned good chuckle at my predicament.
“So this is the rast.”
The queen’s voice might once have been musical and low, but years of undisputed authority had coarsened it. She looked very much like her twin sister, the Princess Lilah; but there hung that coarseness about her, that reddening of artery and vein, that thickening of the flesh of her neck and chin, that cluster of lines between her eyebrows no amount of careful exercise and cosmetics could clear. Her hair had been plaited and dressed into a magnificent golden pile upon her head, ablaze with gems. She wore a long green gown and over that a bodice that seemed to be made from a blaze of jewels. Her feet were clad in satin slippers. She took a goblet of wine from the fifi and sipped reflectively, gazing at me over the rim. She was a beautiful woman, who was slowly losing the battle against too rich food and too much wine and too little exercise. She was aware of her beauty, and, probably, not completely able to grasp that she was losing that glory.
If I do not mention the lines of habitual cruelty that had sunk into her skin around her mouth and pinched her nose, I do so only out of pity for her. Zair knows, she had need of pity!
Now, when I was thrown at her feet, chained and gagged and helpless, she was at the height of her powers. She completely dominated all of Hyrklana, having pushed the kingdom’s bounds out to every part of the island, and in the continual nagging misunderstandings with Hamal, the giant neighbor country in the northeast of Havilfar, having quite a few notable successes. Surrounded as she was by subservient pallans and courtiers, her merest whim was unbreakable law. She might live in a dream world, but where that world impinged on the greater world without, the dream world of the Queen of Hyrklana would always prevail.
Princess Lilah had said to me that she longed to return to her father’s palace in Hyrklana. I was to learn that the old king still lived, in retirement, having abdicated in favor of his daughter Fahia. He had opposed this obsession with the Jikhorkdun, and Princess Lilah, also, had wanted no part of the arena scene. I remembered her horror at the idea of the Manhounds of Faol hunting people. The King’s retirement had been engineered by his daughter Fahia. Fahia’s husband, Rogan, the present king, was a mere cipher, a nonentity.
At the queen’s side, reclining in a low couch wide enough for six, lay four beautiful girls. They were diaphanously clad and smothered with feathers and gems. One of them was the flame-haired girl I had rescued from the wounded neemu.
She looked at me now so piteously that I cursed my gag and bonds afresh, for I judged she blamed herself for my position, and I would have comforted her.
