“Well, of course!” Thelda turned to me, high of color, heaving of bosom, glowing with resolution.
“Prince, am I not Delia’s best friend?”
Very, very carefully, I said: “Yes, Thelda.”
All the old subjection to the racters that had made of Thelda a tool for political designs had gone. Her family, well-born but poverty-stricken through foolish gambling of a rake-hell grandfather, had not been able to give her any assistance in life save that of offering her as a tool for the racters in return for gold. Her marriage to Seg and her friendship with the Prince and Princess, her own status as a kovneva, and the known wildness of her friends, had protected Thelda from the unwelcome attentions of those who might have sought to employ her again.
“It’s high time we did something,” growled Inch, very tall and grim in the lamplight.
“Aye!” roared those wolfish fighting men — and those vulpine lady-friends and wives. “Aye! For Delia and for Dray!”
Well, it was all very pretty. But it shod no zorcas, as my clansmen would say. The door swung open as Young Bargom, the proprietor, hustled in. With him came Prince Varden Wanek and Natema who were staying at a merchant friend’s house because one of the children’s children had a slight fever. Nath the Needle had hurried round there, and now he came in with Varden and Natema, looking excited.
“What news, Nath?”
“It is as I suspected,” he said, swirling his cloak off and sneezing and almost putting his satchel on the table. Someone caught it. He mumbled around and produced a small vial. It held a colorless liquid.
“I refined and clarified the emperor’s spittle. There is no doubt. He has been fed solkien concentrate-”
A gasp broke from many gathered there.
Nath nodded, not pretending to lecture. “A most lethal and unpleasant poison. It is secret — and the secret of its discovery even more so. But,” he said without false modesty, “I know it. A deadly mixture of the tree Memph, the cactus Trechinolc, a little of the bark Liverspot, one or two other spicy ingredients, all balanced to waste the flesh, to dilute the blood, to destroy most subtly.”
Delia swayed. I put out a hand and she grasped it, staring into my face, trying to smile for me and failing.
“Oh- Dray!”
“Tonight,” I said. Everyone hung on my words. “Tonight we will go in by certain secret passageways I know of, ways that were inspected with Largan the Rule, the palace architect-”
“Dead and gone these many seasons,” said Vomanus.
“I’m sorry to know that. But we may make our way in and we may make our way out bearing the emperor. It is the way I should have taken today, but did not. Thelda! Can you see to the nursing facilities for Doctor Nath the Needle?”
“Of course!” She tossed her head, and then said: “And I do not wish to hear about vilmy flowers, and especially not about fallimy flowers! So there!”
Oby said: “I will see to the fliers.”
Turko said: “I’ll see to the provisions.”
“Right. And, friends all, bring your weapons sharp.”
“Aye,” they growled. I own, trying to see them critically and not as the dear friends they were, they were a cutthroat bunch and no mistake.
Of course, it had to be Vomanus, careless, bright-eyed, casual, who said: “Mind you, Dray. My half-sister is heir. If the emperor dies you would have a good claim to the throne yourself.”
I just looked. The rapscallion had the grace to look away and adopt a less negligent attitude, half-perched on a table. But the thought was there, hanging, ugly, in the air of the snug. What each one thought I do not know. What I thought I am not sure. “I want nothing of the emperor save what I already have — his daughter. Unless — unless the evil days are too evil.” My memories embraced Djanduin and what I had done there.
The door opened on the little silence and Bargom thrust his head in and bellowed: “Prince Drak!”
And here was my son, Drak, Prince of Vallia, most wroth, fuming with rage. He flung his cloak off in a great swirl and hurled it at a chair, snatching up a pot of wine from the table.
“By Vox!” he said. “By all the grey ones of Sicce! They wouldn’t let me see grandfather. They threw me out up at the palace, that bitch Melekhi and her scum! And, on the way here, stikitches tried to do for me, assassins tried to skewer me. I tell you, Vondium is become a madhouse!”
Chapter Six
Two closed carriages took the raiding party to the portcullised gate below the Jasmine Tower. The bulk of the Tower wheeled against the stars, blazing in those familiar constellations over Kregen. She of the Veils shed a fuzzy pink and golden light, icing the gables and rooftops, contouring the domes with mysterious shadows, lending a deeper menace to the darkness beneath the craggy walls. The carriages, pulled by four krahniks apiece, rolled to a stop close to the edge of the dried-up moat. Here the old Canal of Contentment, very short, curved about the rear re-entrants of the palace walls. To either hand the long curtain walls vanished into the darkness, battlemented against the sky. No one spoke a word. Seg and Inch and Turko, Balass, Vomanus, Hap and Oby. We left the carriages concealed beneath the end arch of a colonnade where moonblooms opened their petals to the drenching moonlight. We crept upon the sentry like leems. We did not kill him, for he was a Rapa, and merely earning his hire. That he was a Rapa guarding the palace in Vondium itself clearly indicated that times had changed. His vulturine face with the fierce warrior eyes either side of his beak stared blankly up at the moon. Soon She of the Veils would be joined by the Twins, and then there would be too much light for nefarious purposes.
So, we respectable citizens of Vallia crept along in the shadows like assassins, spies, drikingers. Sharp left inside the narrow wicket I turned past the buttress and so found a narrow crack in the inner wall, a crack seeming merely the ruin of time, plastered over against the fall of the towers. But the plastering was a mere shell, covering stout wood, and the wood pivoted and revealed a square opening, a foot on a side. I gripped the iron handle, shaped like the handle of a spade, and pulled. Almost soundlessly, so well wrought was the masonry, the section of stone pivoted about itself. The opening widened into a narrow doorway and onto stairs leading down.
Down we went and with the practiced knack of those accustomed to such things flint and steel lit the lanterns. The stairs leered below us, dark and sinister, running strips of water, darkly stained, brilliant in the lantern glitter.
Down we went.
Niter caked the walls lower down, and greenish slime hung in greasy tendrils. On we went along a jagged corridor where Inch appealed feelingly to Ngrangi, immediately hushing himself and rubbing that tall head of his.
These labyrinthine windings of corridor and tunnel and stair are virtually dictated by any palace architect on Kregen. A whole system of secondary channels exists alongside the proud and ornate halls and chambers. Many of these secret runnels I had had blocked up when first living here; but I had a map of those I knew of remaining in my head. To find the sick room was not difficult; merely tortuous. I put my eye to the eyehole in the wooden screen and looked out into the room in which the emperor lay dying, in which Vadnicha Ashti Melekhi had screamed invective and had myself and my friends thrown out.
Doctor Charboi was in the act of rising from the bed. A glass shone in his hand. His smooth face looked well satisfied. He spoke to someone out of my angle of vision.
“He will sleep now. Quite safely.”
The voice that answered, all cut glass and splinters, all vicious neemu-hiss, said: “Very good, doctor. See that he is not disturbed. Have the guards called at once. The young prince thinks he is very masterful. Kov Layco was most angry.”
“I have done my work well, vadnicha.”
We knew what devil’s work that was.
“I do not deny it. You will be paid.”
