I did not.
I staggered as Zankov writhed around, yelling.
The cruel curved talons slashed toward me. I warded them off and Ros whipped her hand back in a cunning backhand blow that revolved at the last minute and so brought the claw in a long razoring slash down my face. The slicing blow stung.
A Chulik tried to degut me from the side and the longsword twitched and he fell away a dying man.
“You devil!” gasped Ros.
Zankov was screaming now, screaming all the bile and viciousness out, screeching words — impossible words.
“Kill the rast! Slash his eyes out!”
Again the claw razored toward my face.
“Kill him!” screamed Zankov. “Dayra! Kill him. Slay him for good and all, Dayra!
Seventeen
I looked down into lustrous brown Vallian eyes. I saw that glowing face. I saw and I could not understand.
Almost, almost, then, I was a dead man.
But the longsword, of itself, sliced and slashed and the two Chuliks screamed and spun away, bloody wrecks.
The blood dripped down my face from the razor slashings of the steel claw.
“Dayra?”
Zankov screamed again: “Now is your chance, Dayra! Slay the rast and have done.”
I stepped back, out of the lethal swing of the claw and kicked Zankov in the side of the head. He slumped. My left hand reached for the last hooked chain.
“So mother was right, after all, and these fools wrong,” she said, this girl, this Ros the Claw who was my little daughter Dayra. “For no other man could do what you have done and lived.” She lifted the steel tiger talons on which my blood glimmered darkly. “You are a Hyr-Jikai.”
“Only a fool would do what I have done,” I said.
“That is sooth.”
“You have fallen among evil company — Dayra. Come with me. I must go and see if Delia your mother is safe.”
“She will be. I have given orders-”
I broke in, exasperated, still dizzy with the shock. “Don’t you know what kind of villain this rast is? He means to kill all of us — all the family-”
She shook her head. “Not true.”
“If only I had known. . They said you were arriving today.”
“How do you know that? I do as I please. I take orders from no one — from no man — least of all from a father I have never known.”
This could be resolved later, for now soldiers pressed on and time was on a short fuse. I gripped the harsh steel hook ready to slip it over the ring. “Come with me, Dayra. Your mother-”
“You are not fit to speak her name! Leave her out of it.”
An arrow pitched into the blood-soaked ground. Another punched through the fabric of the airboat by my head.
“You must hurry, Dayra, or they will shaft you, too.”
“Go, go away! Run! You have been running all your life so go on running. You betrayed us all and you will continue to betray us, no matter what you say. Go before I slash your eyes out.”
But since she had understood that I, at last, knew who she was, she had made not a single move to attack me as she had been so savagely doing before.
A quick glimpse of booted feet and the glint of a bladed tail past the keel of the flier warned me I could dally no longer. If this wayward sprite of mine would not come home with me, she would not. And if I tarried here arguing I would be dead. I gripped the hooked chain fiercely in my left hand and flicked the longsword about and so deflected an Undurker arrow.
“Then I bid you Remberee, Dayra. I shall tell your mother I have seen you.” The metal hook lifted. Around me now the guards were closing in, confident I was at last done for. There were very many of them. I could not slay them all. But not a one of them showed anxiety to be first. With the incongruity of the situation strong upon me, I said: “Take care of yourself — daughter.”
She spat at me, and slashed the claw and I wondered as I lifted the hook if she would, finally, have tried to do for me at last.
The flier jerked away as the last chain came free. Gripping the hook I was wrenched aloft, dangling and swinging under the keel of the voller, hurtling away and up into the air. A few arrows winged after me; but the voller leaped away so fast and gained height so rapidly the arrows fell away uselessly. Like a parcel of laundry at the end of a rope I was whisked up. Climbing the chain proved tricky; but without sheathing the longsword I managed that maneuver and tumbled over the leather-wrapped coaming. Presently I took the flier under command and set the controls for full speed for Vondium. Udo and Ranjal and Zankov — if his headache improved — would send the pursuit after me; but I had chosen exceeding well and the voller outran all pursuit.
When I considered what I had just discovered I was aghast I was beset by confusion, unable to believe it had really happened, and yet knowing that what Dayra said was true, true, damn the black Star Lords to hell and beyond.
The only sane course for me to follow was to do what I could for Vallia. I could not put out of my mind that terrible experience — how her claws had slashed — but I could attempt to comfort myself with the reflection that she had lived this long without me and so could live a while longer until I managed to persuade her I was not entirely the rogue, the cheat, the liar, the deceiver she dubbed me. I was those things; but not in the way she meant.
That was a dark and dismal flight back to Vondium. The claw cuts in my face could be cleaned up and in time they would heal without a scar; but the real scars on me they would leave might never heal. My own daughter! But — at the end, she had stood back. She had made no further effort to stop me. She had bid me go.
Better, I suppose, to be thrown out than to be killed, to a pragmatic kind of fellow, although the more sensitive might well dramatically prefer death. To me, they are the fools, for although one can see their artistic point of view, they do rather show their contempt of the gift of life, which is not to be taken lightly. Perhaps a taste of the Heavenly Mines would cure them. .
So I forced myself to look at this unnatural situation with Dayra’s eyes. She was perfectly entitled to her view of me. I fancied the company she kept could be revealed to her as the bunch of villains they were and their dark purposes destroy her belief in them. That was one area in which she could be straightened out. That was general. In the private and family quarrel she had with me — that was something else again.
Even then, in those bleak moments of near despair, I once again forced myself to consider the concept that Dayra’s companions were honorable people, working for what they truly believed in, and seeing Delia and the emperor and me and the family as villains overripe for the chopping. It was difficult. But, as Zair is my witness, I tried.
And, by Vox, it was not too difficult where the emperor was concerned, either. . All these worries must for the moment be pushed aside. However difficult that might be, I had to realize that all Vallia could be drenched in blood. I had to do what I could to prevent that. Also, it would not hurt to remind myself I had two other daughters, not to mention three sons, to worry over. . All the same, the story of how Dayra had spurned the Sisters of the Rose and taken the name of Ros and learned the trick of using the Claw and become involved with Zankov and that
