“See, majister,” he said, and reached far back into Chuan-lui-Hong’s Neemu drin. His slender fingers closed on the Pallan.
The Pallan is the most powerful piece on the board. He combines in himself moves that include those of the chess Queen and Knight, plus other purely Jikaidish possibilities. Chuan-lui-Hong was playing Yellow.
His Pallan stood in such a position that he could be moved up to the end of the long file of yellow and blue pieces — and vault.
The instant Master Hork touched the Pallan I saw it.
“Yes,” I said, and my damned throat hurt with that confounded arrow wound. “Oh, yes indeed!”
For the Pallan vaulted that long file and came down on the square occupied by his own Chuktar. The Pallan has the power to take a friendly piece — excepting the Queen, of course. Chuan-lui-Hong used his Pallan to remove his Chuktar from the game. Now the Pallan stood there, an imposing and glittering figure, and with the moves at his disposal he trapped, snared, detained, entombed Queen Hathshi’s own Queen.
“Hyrkaida!” said Master Hork. And, then, as Chuan-lui-Hong must have done all those dusty seasons ago, he said: “Do you bare the throat?”
“I fancy Hathshi bared her throat with good grace, Master Hork; for it is a pretty ploy.”
“Pretty, yes. But obvious, and one that she should have foreseen three moves ago when Hong’s Pallan made the crucial move to place him on the correct square within the correct drin.” Master Hork screwed his eyes up and surveyed me. “As majister, you should have seen, also.”
With Seg, I said, “Hum.”
Casually, Master Hork said, “Jikaida players say I am the master of the right-wing Chuktar’s attack. This is so. But in my last ten important games, against Jikaidasts of great repute, I have not employed that stratagem. Not in the opening, the middle or the end game. There is a lesson there, majister.”
I was perfectly prepared — happy — to be instructed by a master of his craft. But what Master Hork was saying was basic to cunning attack. Be where you are not expected.
“You are right, Master Hork. More wine — may I press this Tawny Jholaix?” From this you will see the truly high regard in which we of Kregen hold Jikaidasts, for Jholaix is among the finest and most expensive wines to be obtained. As Master Hork indicated his appreciation, I went on: “I have likened all Vallia to a Jikaida board. But how you would denominate the Phalanx I do not know for sure, for where they are they are, and there they stand.”
“I saw the Phalanx, majister, at the Battle of Voxyri.” He drank, quickly at his memories, too quickly for Jholaix, which should be savored. But I understood. When the Phalanx sent up their paean and charged at Voxyri it was, I truly think, a sight that would send either the shuddering horrors or the sublimest of emotions through a man until the day he died.
We talked on, mostly about Jikaida, and it was fascinating talk, filled with the lore of the game. As ever, when in contact with a Jikaidast, my memories flew back to Gafard, the King’s Striker, Sea Zhantil. Well, he was dead now, following our beloved Velia, and, I know, happy to go where she led, now and for ever.
“Many a great Jikaidast,” Master Hork was saying, “set store by the larger games, Jikshiv Jikaida and the rest. But I tend to think that there is a concentration of skill required in the use of the smaller boards. Poron Jikaida demands an artistry quite different in style.”
“Each size of board brings its own joys and problems,” I said, sententiously, I fear. But my head was ringing with sounds as though phantom bells tolled in my skull. I felt the weakness stealing over me, and growing, and pulling at me.
Master Hork started up. “Majister!”
There was a blurred impression of the Jikaida board spilling the bright pieces to the floor. That resplendent Pallan toppled and tumbled into a fold of the bedclothes. Master Hork made no attempt to save the scattering pieces. He turned, his face distraught, and ran for the door, yelling for the doctors. His voice reached me as a thin and ghostly whisper, faint with the dust of years. That Opaz-forsaken arrow wound! That was my immediate thought. By the unspeakably foul left armpit of Makki-Grodno! There was much to do, and all I could turn my hand to, it seemed, was playing Jikaida and lolling in bed.
And then…
And then I saw a shimmer of insubstantial blueness.
The radiance broadened and deepened.
So I knew.
Once again I was to be snatched away from all I held dear and at the behest of the Star Lords who had brought me to Kregen from Earth be flung headlong into some strange and foreign land. The injustice of this fate that doomed me rang and clangored in my head with the distant sounds as of mighty bellows panting. And the blueness grew and brightened and took on the form I knew and loathed. Towering over me the lambent blue form of a gigantic Scorpion beckoned. Once again the Scorpion of the Star Lords called…
Chapter Two
Around me the blueness swirled and I knew no doctors or Kregan science could save me for I was in the grip of superhuman forces that made of human aspirations a mere mockery. Yet I had thought the Star Lords possessed a superhumanity in keeping with their superhumanness. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe they were entirely inimical. Still, as the gigantic Scorpion leered on me, blue and shimmering with all the remembered menacing power, I saw the betraying flicker of greenness suffusing through the blue. That Star Lord whose name was Ahrinye and who was evilly at odds with the rest of the Everoinye had his hand in this. He it was who summoned me now.
He was the one who wanted to run me hard, to run me as I had never been run before. I made a shrewd assessment of what that would mean. My life, over which I had been gradually assuming some kind of partial control, would never again belong to me. Ahrinye would have me continually at his beck and call.
“You are called to a great task, mortal!” The voice was as I remembered it, thin and acrid, biting. In those syllables the power of ages commanded both resentment and obedience.
“Fool!” I shouted, and my voice brayed soundlessly in that bedchamber. “Onker! Do you not-”
“Beware lest I smite you down, mortal. I am not as the other Everoinye.”
“That is very clear.” My bravado felt and sounded hollow, false, a mere mewling infant’s bleatings against the storms of fate. “They would soon see in what case I am.”
The idea that the Star Lords couldn’t actually see me when they summoned me was not worth entertaining.
The blueness sharpened with acid green. The green hurt my eyes, and that, by Vox, is far from the soothing balm that true greenness affords.
“You are wounded, mortal. That is of no matter. I speak to you. That is something that you cannot grasp, for the Everoinye speak to few.”
“Aye,” I bellowed in that soundless foolish whisper. “And I’d as lief you didn’t speak to me.”
The shape of the Scorpion wavered. I knew that for this moment out of time no one could see what I saw, that no one could hear what I heard. Master Hork would, for all he knew, run out to fetch the doctors. When he returned he would find an empty bed and I would be banished to some distant part of Kregen to sort out whatever problem this Ahrinye wished decided in his favor. That was, and I realized this with a sudden and chilling shock of despair, if he did not smash me back contemptuously to Earth, four hundred light years away. I must keep a civil tongue in my head. Yet, for all that, I was involved in some kind of dialogue with this Star Lord. Many a time I had engaged in a slanging match with the gorgeous bird who was the spy and messenger of the Everoinye. But that scarlet and golden bird, the Gdoinye, was merely a messenger, and we rubbed along, scathing each other with insults. But this was far different. Never before, I fancied, had I thus talked to a Star Lord and, too, never before — perhaps — had a Star Lord been thus spoken to by a mere mortal.
“Your wound is not serious and you merely sulk in bed and play at Jikaida.”
“That is what I say, and not what the doctors say.”
Was it possible to argue with a Star Lord? Was it perhaps conceivable that one might be swayed by what I
