pay off a trifle. I frowned. The wind veered and strengthened. Now the stars were being blotted out in great clumps at a time as clouds gathered. A brilliant zigzag of fire split the heavens. The thunder, when it reached us, rolled and reverberated around our ears. Rain started to slice into the sea in an abrupt and deafening uproar. In moments we were soaked, our hair tangled about our ears. Seg started to bale. The wind blew directly from the west. I knew.
This storm not only confirmed my fears that the Star Lords would not allow me to return to Magdag, it also strengthened my suspicion that after my summary ejection from the fight as my slave phalanx in their old yellow- painted vosk-helmets raged on to tear the mailed overlords of Magdag to pieces the battle had swung against us. Perhaps I had overstepped my authority when I had really and truly organized the slaves and workers of the warrens so that they could actually win the fight against the overlords? Perhaps the Star Lords did not want the overlords of Magdag crushed and banished? It could be their plans called for whatever I had done to slumber a while, to gather subterranean strength, to smolder until at some time in the Star Lords’ plans for Kregen that spirit I had kindled with the help of the Prophet could burst out in renewed fury. I did not know.
What I did know was that I could not reach Magdag.
Very well, then. Gradually a kind of structure of devices for coping with the Star Lords — if this was truly their work and not the mortal but nonetheless superhuman work of the Savanti — was being wrought out in my mind. I had successfully appealed and been granted reprieve the last time, in that I had been permitted to stay on Kregen, in a dissimilar fashion to the way in which I had been reprieved at Akhram. The idea began to grow that provided I did not actively contest the dictates of the Star Lords
— The Everoinye — I might go about my own business on Kregen beneath Antares. Yes — very well, then. I put the steering oar up and we surged away on the starboard tack. I would go to Pattelonia. Vomanus would be there if I was lucky, and I could stop him from going on to Magdag. Then — then we would take over the Hostile Territories to Port Tavetus from whence we could sail direct for Vallia.
And then — Delia!
Immediately our bows swung to the eastward with the necessary touch of southerly in the heading for Pattelonia, the wind eased off and the rain ceased. Amid a last grumbling of thunder I heard the harsh croaking shriek as of a giant bird. I looked up. In the darkness I could not see the Gdoinye — but I knew without shadow of a doubt that the gorgeous scarlet and golden raptor of the Star Lords had swung over us in its wide hunting circles.
“In the name of the veiled Froyvil himself!” said Seg. He looked about. “What was that?”
“A seabird,” I said, “caught in the gale. It seems, friend Seg, we must sail to Pattelonia — rather the chief city on the eastern coast of Proconia than any other, yes? — and we will reach it safely, never fear. You asked me what now — this is your answer. What do you say?”
“Pattelonia.” Seg spat the name. “That may be the chief city, but the fighting-men disgust me.”
“Oh?”
He swagged up a wineskin and stoppered his mouth to the spout very expertly, as the boat surged along, considering he considered himself no sailor. When he had gulped and wiped his mouth and said,
“By Blessed Mother Zinzu, that fires up the cockles of my heart!” — and what a pang of Nath there was in that for me! — he went on to say: “I hired out as mercenary to Pattelonia in one of their infernal wars, you know?”
I nodded. “I know.”
His story was commonplace, ugly, and painful. Men of Loh could usually find employment as mercenaries without trouble, for their prowess as archers was renowned throughout the known lands of Kregen. Seg had entered the inner sea by the western end, through the Grand Canal past the Dam of Days. I reflected that he had seen that colossal construction; I had not. I forbore to mention that to him; it would arouse too many questions. His fighting career had been of the normal routine and monotonous kind associated with mercenary fighting; when the Pattelonians had been defeated by a combined force of a number of the Proconian cities assisted by Magdag, he had been captured and sold as slave.
“So Pattelonia fell,” I said.
“Mayhap. I did hear that Sanurkazz was coming to our assistance, but I tripped into that damned thorn-hole and was scooped up by a diabolical overlord before it did me any good.”
I made suitable sympathetic noises.
“There are friends in Pattelonia, Seg, although I have never been there. We will be returning to Vallia.”
This was a lie. I could never return to Vallia for I had never been there in the first place; but as I had told Kov Tharu of Vindelka, I thought of Vallia for all its frightening reputation as home simply because my Delia lived there.
“Vallia?” Seg drank more wine, his shape a dark expressive blot beneath the starlight. “I took passage aboard a ship of Pandahem. The Vallian was too dear. But I know Vallia — they maintain a great fortress depot on the northernmost tip of Erthyrdrin. Many times have my people gone down against them.”
“You don’t like Vallians?”
He laughed. “That was in the past. Since Walfarg broke apart like a rotten samphron the Vallians have been markedly more friendly toward us, and now we tolerate their fortress depot and it has grown into a sizable city, and we do business with them, for they are essentially a nation of traders.”
Walfarg was a name I had heard here and there, a mighty empire of the past which had broken apart. It had originated in Walfarg itself, a country of Loh, and some of the stories of Loh hung about its faded glories. There are many countries in the continents and islands of Kregen; only Vallia, as far as I know, boasts that it is a single land mass under one government.
And that boast was to cost it dear, as you shall hear.
“So you are for Pattelonia, then?”
“A pity, Dray Prescot, your friends could not await you at a point nearer the Dam of Days. From Pattelonia we have — oh, I am not sure of the distance, five hundred dwaburs, is it? — to cover before we even reach the outer ocean. Then we must sail south past skeleton coasts to Donengil and thus swing around up the Zim-Stream and so to the Cyphren Sea — and there, before us, lies Erthyrdrin!”
For the moment I was content to let Seg believe this.
He said, with a sharpness to his voice, “You are not a Vallian?”
Vallians, I knew from the example of the glorious hair of my Delia, were often brown-haired, as I am. I had successfully passed as Kov Drak in Magdag, acting the part of a Vallian duke. But I did not wish to lie unnecessarily to Seg Segutorio.
“I am Dray Prescot of Strombor,” I said.
“So you have told me. But — Strombor. Where might that be?”
Of course — what was now the enclave of Strombor would have been Esztercari for all Seg’s life. A fierce joy welled up in me as I thought of my Clansmen riding across the Great Plains of Segesthes, of the way with good friends’ help we had taken what was to become my enclave fortress of Strombor within the city of Zenicce.
“Strombor, Seg, is in Zenicce-”
“Ah! A Segesthan — well, even that I wonder about, for I call you a stranger of strangers, and I know what I know.”
“What do you know, Seg?”
But he would not answer. That fey quality associated with mountain folk must have alerted his senses; but I was doubtful that he could guess I came from a planet distant from Kregen by four hundred light-years.
He swung away from that as the muldavy creamed through the night sea and the stars once more reappeared above. The twin second moons of Kregen, the two that revolve one about the other as they orbit the planet, sailed above the horizon and in their wash of pinkish light, strengthened by the presence of two more of Kregen’s seven moons, I saw Seg watching me with an enclosed and contained look on his lean face. He brushed a hand through his black hair.
“Very well, Dray Prescot, of Strombor, I will go with you to Pattelonia.” He chuckled. “For all that the army in which I served lost the fight, the Proconians still owe me my fair hire, and they shall pay me.”
“Good, Seg,” was all I considered necessary to say.
“And I refuse by all the shattered targes in Mount Hlabro to return to slavery.”
We slept on and off during the night and when the twin suns rose to burn away a few patches of mist, there,
