I thought I was hallucinating again, as I had done in that first dreadful attempt to cross the Klackadrin when the Phokaym had captured me. I put a hand to my head, staring at the scorpion.
“Dray Prescot,” said the scorpion in a reedy and shrill voice not unlike a buzz saw ripping through winter logs. I did not think anyone else might hear that baleful voice.
“Dray Prescot. Perhaps you are not so great a fool as we thought.” The Gdoinye had spoken to me. A bird had spoken to me. Was a scorpion any the more strange in this weird and wonderful, beautiful and horrible world of Kregen? “You have done what you were commanded to do. We acknowledge your deeds. Now you have our leave to depart from here, to Hyrklana-”
I shouted in my old savage, intemperate way. “I am not going to Hyrklana!”
Just how it was done I did not know, could not know. But, on the instant, black clouds roiled across the sky. Huge raindrops began to fall, gouting the dust into fountains, spreading and joining and coalescing into rivulets trickling down into the Valley of the Crimson Missals. In a twinkling the darkness of the clouds shut off every other person from my sight. Thunder boomed.
“Delia!” I shouted. “Delia!” I screamed it out, spinning around, lost and shut away and condemned.
“Delia!”
“Dray!”
I heard her answering call, but faint, faint. “Dray! Where are you, dearest heart?”
“Delia! Here — I am coming to you!”
I blundered in the direction of her voice.
“Dray! It is dark and I cannot see — Oh, Dray!”
The shape of a terrified totrix reared above me in the gloom, his hooves wicked. I ducked and heard a faint and dwindling cry: “Dray-”
And then the blue radiance swamped down about me and that greater representation of a scorpion caught me up in its ghastly blue embrace and I was falling and spinning and tumbling away into a long blue tunnel of nightmare.
Chapter Seven
Yells of panicking men and shrieks of terrified women burst all about me as I sat up, cursing, and looked upon a bedlam. Trust the damned Star Lords to pitchfork me headlong into frantic action. I knew why I was here — wherever here might be. Someone was in danger. Someone was in deadly peril and the Star Lords wanted them rescued — so, send for Joe Muggins, Dray Prescot. He’ll land flat on his back, stark naked, unarmed, and he’ll sort out the problem, never you fear.
Oh, yes, I cursed the Everoinye to the Ice Floes of Sicce and gone as I climbed to my feet and started to sort out what the hell now the Star Lords had chucked me into.
I stood in a cavern carved from virgin rock, the marks of chisels sharp and distinct upon the walls and roof giving no indication of the age of the place. It was clean and only a little dust puffed as the crazed mob of people ran and struggled madly from the square-cut opening through which streamed the mingled streaming rays of the Suns of Scorpio.
I could hear brazen lungs yelling orders out there, and the harsh blocky silhouettes of halflings in armor packed the entrance. Men and women ran screaming past me and plunged headlong into a farther opening, smaller, in the back wall. About twenty people were left to struggle through, away from the armored halflings raging to get at them. These people wore decent blue robes and dresses, had sandaled feet, combed hair, clean faces and arms. Most of the women wore bangles and bracelets of cheap imitation jewelry: Krasny ware, but pretty in their way. Now every face was a mask of horror. There were a few children there also, running fleetly between the legs of their elders, skipping for the far opening and safety.
Then I saw the smooth slab of slate descending. It dropped smoothly and slowly down over the exit and when it touched the floor it would wall off the way of escape from the halflings and give safety to those who had passed through.
But there were still these last twenty to pass through. And the descending slab would shut them out of safety, shut them back in this cavern with the swords and spears of the halflings, who, I now saw, were Rhaclaws, most savage and unpleasant. So I, Dray Prescot, pawn of the Star Lords, must rescue them.
“By Zair!” I said feelingly. At my side on the floor — and next to an overturned sturm-wood bench and a gilt cup still rolling and spilling its dark wine across the rock, a positive indication of how suddenly and how recently all this panic had begun — lay a length of scarlet humespack. I grabbed it on my way toward that descending slab of slate, wound it roughly about my loins. People tended to get in the way as I ran, trying to thrust their way through the narrowing opening.
“Out of the way, onkers!” I roared, and barged on. I got my fingers under the hard edge of slate and then my shoulders. I braced my legs apart. I could feel the weight coming on. It grew and grew and pressed me down so that I felt my feet would puncture the rock of the floor. Men and women flung frightened glances my way, but they did not stop, and scurried past me, to left and right, as I stood there like poor old Atlas, chained by the weight of Kregen. I could feel my muscles cracking. I bent a little — I had to — and the massive slate slab inched down. Now there were barely ten people left, and I heard a woman — a short but plumply rounded woman with a tumbled wealth of dark hair falling across her face and the shoulders of her blue gown — calling to her son and daughter, as I judged.
“Hurry, Wincie, hurry, Marker! This great paktun is holding the door! It will not crush you!”
The children squealed and the little girl, Wincie, all disarrayed black hair and long naked legs and flickering petticoats, dived between my legs. Those legs of mine corded under the strain. Sweat ran down my body, and my muscles bulged, my chest arched and resisting, backbone taut. I knew I could not hold much longer, for the weight of the slab was immense. But now there were only five people left, and then three and then one.
This one halted, ducking his head to pass by my left shoulder. The edge of the slab pressed cruelly into the flesh, denting it to the bone. My fingers were bone-white as I gripped die slate, heaving against the dead weight.
“I would not believe it possible, my friend,” he said. He was a well-set young man, with quick direct eyes flecked with green. His blue robe had been tucked up into a lesten-hide belt from which swung a small, curved, overly ornamented dagger. His brown hair clustered in curls. “You must let go or you will be caught, too.”
A stux pranged off the slate above our heads and I said, “By Vox! Get inside, onker, and run!”
His handsome face flushed and he stepped past me.
Another stux barely missed my side.
I had to now let go this monstrous thing bearing down on me, and somehow summon the strength and agility to dodge backward and so let it rumble all the way down and bar off those blockheaded Rhaclaws. I was breathing in jerks and gasps, and specks and shards of fire splashed across my eyes. Sweat stung and near blinded me. Another stux nicked my calf and I cursed and tried to move my hands away and found they would not obey my will.
I could not move my body!
So great had been the pressure bearing down on me my body had locked in defiant resistance. Now I could not move. The gigantic slab of slate trapped me as a silversmith traps a bangle in the jaws of his vise.
Yet if I did not drag myself free those Opaz-forsaken rasts of Rhaclaws would be able to pass under the slab and so enter the escape tunnel. Then all my efforts would have been in vain. The halflings would be upon the terrified fugitives, hacking and cutting and capturing. I fought with my own body, there in a rocky cavern, trapped between a massive descending slab of slate and the rocky floor beneath my feet. I felt a nudge in the small of my back.
A voice said: “I am Mahmud nal Yrmcelt, oaf, as you must very well know. And I do not take kindly to being dubbed onker.” His finger jabbed me in the back again. “But I will condone it now, for you are a remarkable man. Now, oaf, let me take a part of the slab-”