emperor, gain his confidence — and then betray him?”
“Yes.”
The emperor moved and I reached out my hand and grasped his forearm, and gripped enough so that he understood. Truly, the times had wrought on him. He stood, a bleak dark statue, in the shadows of the bed at my side, and, together, we listened as Queen Lushfymi of Lome choked out her confession. Phu-si-Yantong.
She had never met him. But his agents and his own lupal projection had convinced her. The terrors she felt were reflected palely in her stammering voice. Yantong had moved into Pandahem in the wake of the dissolution of the Hamalese armies and in his own surreptitious, cunning, devious ways had exerted his own authority. His puppets now occupied the thrones of the kingdoms of Pandahem. A fleeting twinge of guilt at thought of Tilda and Pando passed across my mind; but that was of and for another time. Here and now the dark and treacherous scheme to destroy Vallia was being revealed to us.
“See!” cried Queen Lush, her laugh too close to hysteria for my liking. She drew from her sleeve a black feather. “See! I was prepared to make the emperor a convert to the Great Chyyan; but you, Dray Prescot, destroyed that scheme. Now my master sends warriors to do his work.” She blew the black feather from her. It gyrated and was lost in the shadows. She laughed again, the hysteria hideously near, so near as to be madness. Her glimmering form moved in the shaded lamplight of the bedchamber. Silently, the emperor stood at my side, watching and listening.
Queen Lush drew from the bosom of her dress a dagger, sheathed, ornate, crusted with gems, the style of weapon a queen might carry. She waved it wildly. “Look upon the death of the Emperor of Vallia, the man I love, the man I was forced to betray, the man for whom I would give my life — the man for whom I
The stiletto flashed clear of the scabbard. Twin deeply cut grooves marked the shining blade.
“This blade is poisoned. One nick and the emperor is dead. I am to stab him, when my task is done — but I cannot, I cannot.”
Moving with a purposeful slowness I reached out across the bedclothes and hooked my hard old fist around the hilt of the rapier that hung by the bedpost, angled so as to be drawn in a twinkling. I had vaulted ahead in my thoughts. Khe-Hi-Bjanching had shown me what gladiomancy could do and although I did not know if a Wizard of Loh could manipulate a sword or dagger over immense distances, I wouldn’t put it past that Wizard of Loh who had contrived our downfall. I said sharply: “And will the death of the emperor make so much difference to the schemes of Phu-si-Yantong?”
“He must die. The master has said so and must be obeyed.”
“This evil man is no longer your master, Queen Lush. Do not think of him as your master ever again.”
She turned her head, slowly, tilting, peering at me with her head on one side, half over her shoulder. She looked quite mad. “No. He is my master-”
“He is not your master. He is a real right bastard and a kleesh — a damned Wizard of Loh. But he owns you no longer.”
The poisoned dagger looked mightily unpleasant.
Now the emperor was an emperor and anyone who forgot that deserved to have their heads off; but, far more important, he was the father of my Delia. That was the fact that gave him character in my eyes, and now he proved himself.
Without faltering, he moved past the bed, stood upright in a patch of light thrown by the shaded lamp. He stared at Queen Lush, who regarded him with a bright, avid look that made my hand jump on the rapier hilt.
“Queen!” declared the emperor. “You say you love me as I love you. We have meant much, one to the other, in these dark times. Will you stab me? Can you slay me? I am here — see, I lift my arms. Stab, Queen Lush — if you can.”
As they stood, facing each other, frozen, I wondered if the old devil realized how he had called his queen.
She took a tottering step. Another. The dagger lifted. I eased the rapier out and stood up. With a shriek of virulent fury or of hysterical triumph — a shriek of such violence that the emperor jumped — Queen Lush hurled the dagger to the floor. It thwacked into the floorboards through a priceless carpet of Walfarg weave, thrummed with the gems glittering in its hilt, the poisoned slots dark and sinister along the blade.
“No, my emperor-” Then they collapsed into each other’s arms.
A sharp and chilling tang struck through the close air of the bedchamber. Queen Lush screamed. The emperor, still holding her, swung about. We all stared at the far wall. In a ghostly swirl of color and shadow, a mist of madness, a shape formed in thin air against the wall. Hunched, that dire form, hunched and malicious, malefic with power as the two dark eye sockets abruptly glittered with twin spots of light. The ghostly form thickened and solidified and yet remained insubstantial, unreal, a projection of the mind.
“Master-” croaked the queen. She would have fallen but for the emperor’s arms. The lupal projection of Phu- si-Yantong writhed in my bedchamber. What forces he was employing to overcome or bypass the sealings placed there by Khe-Hi-Bjanching I could not know; but the lupal projection wavered as sand wavers on a stream bed, as the mirages dance in the burning deserts. An arm lifted. Clawed finger pointed. The queen screamed as though tormented with red-hot pincers. The emperor shouted, an agonized bark of pure horror.
I saw the tableau hold for a heartbeat; then the sorcerous image of the wizard shimmered and faded and I thought I heard the distant sound of golden bells, tingling and tinkling in a dream, fading, dying, gone.
“Dray!” gasped the emperor.
His face looked gray in the patch of lamplight, gray and filled with a horror so great he could barely stand.
The woman slumped in his arms, the white dress strangely loose.
He turned her so I could see her face.
Queen Lushfymi — so glorious, so darkly glittering, so regal with beauty and voluptuousness — hung slackly on the emperor’s arm. Phu-si-Yantong had smitten her with chivrel. Her white hair straggled in brittle strands, her shrunken face bore a spiderweb of cracks, the wrinkles destroying all the purity of that face. Spittle slobbered from brown and leathery lips.
Hideous, a hag, Queen Lush whimpered feebly and clung with skeleton arms to the Emperor of Vallia. The decaying smell of her stank in our nostrils.
Nineteen
The moment of doom for Vondium the Proud could no longer be delayed. The day dawned with a particularly brilliant flood of jade and ruby lights, pouring in commingled beauty from the Suns of Scorpio. But this day would see the end of the empire, the death of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people, the enslavement of hosts, the shedding of blood to stink rawly into the shining benign sky.
We did what we could for Queen Lush. An aged crone, trembling, shaking, her white hair brittle as dried leaves, she gasped with the effort of breathing, her eyes filmed, her mouth slack and drooling. The devil-cast chivrel had not much longer to run for her. Old before her time she was doomed as the Empire of Vallia was doomed.
The emperor was stricken.
“My strong right arm,” he said, clasping his head, his strong handsome face ashen. “Stricken down -
torn from me when I needed her most”
I was torn, also, at sight of this great and puissant emperor in these straits. I had little cause to care for him save only that through him I had been blessed with Delia. He had ordered my head off — had banished me — I do not to this day know whether he hated me or merely tolerated me. Certainly from time to time, when he recollected, he showed he appreciated a little the services I had rendered him. But now all that was mere tawdry tinsel. The empire was doomed, Vallia was rent asunder and Vondium burned.
The manner of the burning was strange, for we could seethe boiling black smoke clouds from one section or another of the city rising into the bright air, and then they would dwindle away and die. Fresh smoke would rise
