As he leaped, the black chyyan cloak spun away from him. The black feathers floated free. And Makfaril stood revealed clad all in glittering armor, with thraxter and rapier and parrying-stick, a glorious golden numim, powerful, ferocious, bellowing savage commands.
“By Vox, Rafik!” I said, and leaped.
Headlong I leaped from the high ledge and crashed down onto the heads of the priests. They scattered and I felt bones crunch and break. There was no time for me to be winded. I was up and running and the sword in my hand cut left and cut right and there were dead men in a blood-soaked swath behind me and I scarcely heeded them. Only one thing I saw. Like a maniac I raged through the press and reached the slab of black obsidian.
The screams and shouts roared in the cavern. Arrows splintered about me. I cut down two priests, saw Himet running away, shrieking, scrambled onto the plinth.
Four slashes, four sure quick cuts, and Delia was free.
The blood must be paining her cruelly, but she forced herself to stand beside me. Masichieri were running. If we were to die here then we would die. How we died would matter only to us. I did not forget my daughter Velia in those mad manic moments of blood. Death could touch me. I knew that.
“My heart!”
“They said you were safe!”
“So I was, until Melow was wounded.”
I cut down the first of the masichieri. If I was exalted, if I was drunk on the red rage and the red blood of battle, then I admit it. I fought. My scarlet breechclout felt wet and sticky with blood and my body gleamed a single crimson flame of blood. But so far none of the blood was mine. Delia had a dagger, snatched from the severed hand of a mercenary. Then she had a thraxter. We fought off the dais and back past the toad-thing. An arrow nicked my left shoulder. I stumbled back and hacked a priest across the face, drove the point past the guard of a masichieri, past his oval shield, deeply into his neck. Delia slashed a fellow off my back and I withdrew and whirled back again and chopped the man trying to chop Delia.
Like two blood-splashed phantasms, we hacked and hewed our way toward the back of the statue. We could not go on. There were just too many of them.
The blood stood out in livid patches across Delia’s skin.
Black feathers swirled about me. Black chyyans painted on shields closed up and bore in. A golden gleam glinted at the back of the masichieri. A great numim voice bellowed: “Do not kill him!”
As soon call off hunting dogs from the carcass of a kill when the hot madness is on them. I slashed and beat away the lunging points, slid the slashing blows. Delia was a brilliant form of red and white, of tanned skin and spilled blood. I snarled deeply and charged headlong at the clustering shields. No coherent thought was left to me now. Only the desire to slay Makfaril and thus avenge our deaths. . Somewhere through the madness beating in my skull I heard Delia yell. “Dray! Keep your fool head down!”
Through all the red roaring madness on me, through the thunder of blood in my head, the beat of blood about my body, the roar of warring multitudes in my brain, I heard my Delia. I dropped flat and squirmed about, and Delia was at my side, gasping and laughing, and a masichieri tumbled down on top of us with a long shaft feathered through him.
Screams burst out from horror-stricken throats.
From the walls, from the niches where the rotting idols slumbered, the Crimson Bowmen of Loh methodically swept the whole cavern with the arrow storm. That sleeting hail punctured skull and leather armor, struck through mail vest and oval shield alike. Among the Crimson Bowmen were the lithe and lissome forms of girls, all clad in trim rose-red tunics, slender and quick, shooting with a deftness to equal the men’s.
“The Sisters did not forget me, then, after all!”
I looked for Seg as we shielded beneath a barrier of dead bodies, but I did not see him. This was the emperor’s work. The Crimson Bowmen of Loh, and the Sisters of the Rose. The shrieks died down to moaning whimpers and soon a dread silence hung over that cavern of death. Slowly Delia and I stood up. I swirled a black feathered cape about her glowing blood-spattered loveliness, and so we waited as Naghan Vanki walked slowly through the heaps of slain. The Bowmen had killed with that sleeting storm of clothyard shafts and not a priest or masichieri remained alive.
“So you were not Makfaril, Vanki,” I said.
His expressionless features, white and contained, did not reveal a single iota of himself as he said, “Had I been, you would surely be dead, Prince.”
Then, with cool insolence, he turned and bowed deeply to Delia. “Princess Majestrix,” he said in that flat and chilling voice. “The emperor my master will be overjoyed that you live.”
Delia is, after all, a princess, and knows how to conduct herself. She held out her hand. I saw the bloodstains.
“Thank you, Naghan. You have proved yourself a loyal servant to my father today. And to me.”
“Always, my Princess, to you.”
So that solved that problem.
Even then I still could not make up my mind how I regarded all those gallant men of Vallia who adored their princess and would gladly die for her — aye! — as so many did die and joy in the giving of their lives for that of my Delia.
“And Makfaril?” I said in my surly, oafish clansman’s way.
“He ran back through the idol of Hjemur,” said Vanki. Then, waspishly, he added, “I had thought you would stop him, Prince.”
The cool effrontery of the man had no power to enrage me now. I felt amused. He served the emperor. He was the emperor’s spy and, as I more than half-suspected then, the emperor’s spy-master. Now girls crowded up and quickly more seemly clothes were found for the Princess Delia. We walked toward the exit, past the droves of dead bodies. I saw the Jiktar in command. He looked a little at a loss, for once Naghan Vanki’s use for him was finished, Vanki lost all interest in him. I said,
“Jiktar! Gather up all the arrows! Send search parties to comb out all the runnels. Have the dead disposed of and if you find any living, question them. Check all the cells.” Then, because I was the Prince Majister and these things are expected of simpletons in that position, I added: “And, Jiktar, you and your men are to be congratulated. You shot as I expect Bowmen of Loh to shoot. There are barrels to be broached tonight.”
I did not mention the great word ‘Jikai.’ This had not been a Jikai. Rather, mention of barrels brought vividly to mind what the shooting had been truly like. Fish. .
Naghan Vanki and an advance party of his men had climbed down the rope ladder. Makfaril — Rafik Avandil — had discovered the ladder, but I had prevented his immediate arrest. Vanki was cutting about that. “And this villain Rafik has been close to you, Prince. He led us to you. Why he wished to have you under so close an observation we do not yet know. But, when he is found, we shall question him.”
Naghan Vanki, the emperor’s spy-master, might not know. But I knew. When my wizard Khe-Hi set up his sorcerous interference, preventing the monstrously egomaniacal wizard Phu-Si-Yantong from spying on me, that villain had sent his tool to seek me out and report my whereabouts and continue the spying on my movements. Yantong wished to rule all Vallia through me. Well, his plans to bring about the destruction of Vallian life and open this land to his greedy authority had fallen into ruins this day.
“And you suspected Avandil all along?”
“Since he came here from Hamal pretending to be a loyal cheerful Vallian koter. The emperor’s agents never sleep. We dogged his footsteps, except when interfered with. That he was Makfaril was a surprise.”
“And the emperor knew of this?”
A look of such cold hardness passed over Vanki’s corpse-white face as to make his resemblance to the imagined devils of Cottmer’s Caverns vivid and repulsive. “The emperor, may he live forever, knows we serve him as best we may. He has other problems weighing on his mind.” Then Vanki looked at me with all the chilling presence of a dedicated, clever man who understands not only his own power but also his own limitations. “The racters. . you must realize, Prince, how much more powerful they are now? Had you been seen visiting them you would have been taken up.”
“But, Naghan,” said Delia, smiling, holding my arm. “Not now, I think?”
“There is a night to be lived through yet, my princess.”
I pointed to four Bowmen who marched in step. They carried a burden between them by arms and legs and
