“Any man who dares touch Delia, Princess Majestrix of Vallia, dies! Remember that!”
Fahia ducked and the stux took the Rhaclaw in his bloated head so that it burst and showered the queen with blood and brains. We left her to her shrieks and threats and ran on. A terrified apim slave girl crouched away from us as we rounded the next corner. Ahead lay a long passage studded with many doors, and then we might go on to the outer ways and so the street, or down and through the secret passages to the Jikhorkdun.
The apim girl was slave to a pallan’s wife, a noble lady who stared down her nose at us, at a savage-faced maniac with a bloody sword in his hand, and a stunningly beautiful girl clad only in the white slave breechclout of the queen’s household. Ordinary slaves wore the slave gray.
“What tomfoolery is this?” the noble lady began. I had seen her fawning on the queen. “You will be severely punished.”
She wore a fine deep-crimson robe, with a smart furred cape over that, with many jewels, and her sandals gleamed with gems. I took the robe in my left fist and twisted the noble lady about and so held her as Delia, with me at once, flicked her long slender fingers down the latchings. The robe fell free. The noble lady was screaming and struggling.
“Guards! Guards! Slay me these slaves,
Her command would have been obeyed, instantly. Only two guards arrived on the scene, for the others hereabouts were dead, and these two joined muster with them shortly. Delia donned the crimson robe. The noble lady wore a white sensil chemise.
“No time for the chemise, my heart-”
“The dress stinks!” said Delia. In truth, the noble lady’s taste in perfume was overly strong for our nostrils.
Dressed decently in the crimson robe with the furred cape flung across her shoulders and with those jeweled slippers on her feet, my Delia could proudly face the city of Huringa. We ran on.
No coldly calculating thoughts of victory or defeat entered my mind. I knew we had to get out of here. If we did not, it would be the arena for us. I had no need to be told what the stakes and the bosks would do. Queen Fahia would delight in putting us both to the supreme test. We sped past the hard and cold marble, and every now and then a mercenary guard sought to dispute our passage. Delia gasped out words as we ran and I did not stop her, for she trusted in me and I was fascinated by what she had to say.
“Only four days ago, beloved, the battle. The Battle of the Crimson Missals! When you disappeared in the thunderstorm I heard you say you would not go to Hyrklana. And so — and so-”
“I will tell you, Delia, my heart.” At this point I stopped talking and crossed thraxters with a Rhaclaw who bore a shield. He wanted to fight in the proper, ordinary, decent way of two men fighting each other. There was no time for that. I ran at him leaping in the air so that he lifted himself for my attack, and then I let myself drop to that polished marble floor and, feet first sliding on my bottom, I skidded toward him. My feet shot between his legs, I passed under the bottom rim of the shield. Flat on my back I whistled under the shield and so thrust upward with the thraxter most hurtfully, gutting him. After that we had a shield to lift on my own left arm.
“I did not wish to come to Hyrklana. But — but I did. .”
“And I followed. Seg and Inch, we took our airboats and we came to Hyrklana. But, as usual, the airboat broke down and I was taken by Rhaclaws. This mad Queen Fahia saw me and bought me-”
“Aye. She has first choice of all the most beautiful young girls, by Vox!”
“And so I was instructed to become the chambermaid to the queen.”
“That chambermaiding did not last long, thank Zair.”
“I fancy the queen is mighty angry — look out, my heart!”
I had seen the crossbowman.
He leered at me over the bolt of his weapon and I saw his shoulder bunch to pull the trigger — poor practice, that, I remember thinking as I hurled the thraxter. He died with the steel through his mouth and spearing up into his brain. I put a foot on his head and hauled the thraxter free. Still with the shield shoved up on my left arm I stuck the thraxter, all bloody and smeared with brains as it was, into my mouth, puckering my lips in the old way to avoid cutting them, and snatched up the crossbow. I whirled. A Hikdar was running toward us waving his sword as though he acted in a play. The bolt took him through an eye. I threw the crossbow down and with Delia at my side sprinted on for the far doors. They were lenken and bound with gold. The uproar behind us boiled up. I could not go on swiftly enough and so out into the street. So it must be the dark and secret ways that led to the Jikhorkdun for us. Staring down past the half-folded doors that led first of all into a narrow passageway and then a steep and slippery flight of stairs I heard a grunting gasp and a meaty chop and a mangled scream of agony behind me. I whirled. A Rapa staggered back with his beak hanging and dripping blood. Delia didn’t bother to slice him again but pointed past my shoulder, so I turned back. Armed guards with weapons bright in the lamplight boiled up that stair and crowded out past the half-folded door. The Jikhorkdun was not for us. The massive gold-bound lenken door would not be opened without a fight, and even so wonderful a girl as Delia could not open it single-handed as I held off the guards. I cocked an evil eye upward.
A small arched stone entrance was barred by a sturm-wood door. I ran at it, and kicked it in so that the lock ripped away and the wood gleamed freshly splintered. Delia bundled in before me and I hung my shield over my back, and felt the glancing shock of bolts ricocheting from the bronze-bound wooden surface.
“Up, Delia, my heart!”
“Follow close, close. .”
The door was a ruin and so valueless. The first one through was a Rapa and he went shrieking back into his comrades, beakless. The next was a Brokelsh, and he somersaulted back with half his face sheared away. The third was a Gon, and his cleanly shaved scalp abruptly gaped all bloody through the wreck of his helmet. The fourth did not appear. Instead a stux flashed through, and then another. These I caught and returned, and heard two shrieks.
Delia called from above.
“Doors, Dray — all bolted save one-” And then I heard a beginning scream from Delia of the Blue Mountains abruptly chopped off.
I went up those stairs like a devil.
A horrid screeching spitting, a diabolical hissing echoed down the stone staircase. Frantic, I roared up the stone treads and came out onto a landing with the bolted doors and one door open. In the doorway crouched the black form of a neemu, its wicked eyes smoldering gold, its sleek black fur electric in the-gloom, its mouth gaping, and the white fangs bared. On one knee the slender form of Delia waited, the dagger held before her — and I saw the fresh blood on that dagger, the blood-matted fur on the neemu’s throat, the claw marks ripped down the crimson robe, and the torn tufts of the furred cape. Delia had screamed — and had cut the scream off deliberately so as not to alarm me further as she faced a savage neemu with only a curved ornate dagger!
I hurdled Delia and, shield-first, crashed headlong into the great black cat and so, with four precise thrusts, finished it.
“Are you badly hurt, Delia — Delia. .?”
“No — I surprised it — but it was — it was-”
“Through here.”
I helped her rise. She gave me her smile, and then we were running into the long chamber beyond the open door with the ominous clashing of mailed men following us. Along the tessellated floor of the chamber we ran and then through a gallery lined with obscene idols of jade and alabaster and ivory, and so to a door, tall and narrow, hung about with emerald wreaths, hundreds of brilliant emeralds cunningly worked by a master artist into representations of triumphal wreaths. The door was of balass and it moved smoothly and silently as I pushed it open. We passed through into a great space of shadow and mystery. I closed the door behind us and lowered the counterpoised beam of lenk into its steel slots. A full-scale battering ram would be needed to smash down that high door. We surveyed this place wherein we had fled, and saw that it was a shrine raised within the fortress of Hakal to the highest state spirit, the national god, of Hyrklana, for all that other cults and beliefs were undermining the strength of the old religion.
Samphron-oil lamps glowed a mellow gleam upon the shrine within that vast chamber, picking out the fantastic wealth of decoration, the abandon of riches, the exotic outpouring of art and skill. Central within the shrine and lofting higher than fifty feet rose the idol. The image was of a morphology serene and bland, with a bewildering wagonwheel of eight arms, each hand rigidly fixed in a ritualistic pose of power. The face might have been apim,
