I remember yelling insanely, raving, almost incoherent with the scarlet, futile, frustrated rage burning within me.
“No! You who call yourselves the Star Lords! This is not possible! You cannot do this to me! Onkers
— rasts, cramphs, yetches! Star Lords! Everoinye!”
The flier swung and swayed and in the supernatural gloom I gripped hard on to my Delia. If a hint of that hideous blue radiance swooped on me now. .!
“Give me leave to depart, you Star Lords!” I bellowed. I was insane, then. I had won against fearful odds, and my Delia won with me, at my side, racing to freedom — and the stupid, vile, vicious, unspeakable kleeshes of Star Lords were driving me back, back to Huringa and the evil talons of Queen Fahia and the Jikhorkdun!
We crashed among the warrens clustering by the amphitheater.
My last conscious impressions were of the ground swooping up; of the warm and vibrant form of Delia clasped in my arms, and of her strong slender arms clasped about me; and of a crazed, upside-down vision of coys and apprentices and kaidurs running in the moonlight that, with a supernatural suddenness, burst through those roiling diabolical black clouds. Lightning struck down, a ferocious earth-shaking noise burst up all about me — everything coming together like a volcano in my head. Even as I knew I was being knocked senseless, I would not let go my hold upon my Delia. And she would not let go her hold upon me.
Chapter Seventeen
Queen Fahia sat in her curule chair, flanked by the sinister shadows of her pet neemus, and she taunted me. She enjoyed that. She had left to her only two neemus, and that pained her. But, she had me, she had Drak the Sword, hyr-kaidur, who had caused her that pain.
She would not be kind.
I had, of necessity, to crouch. They had loaded me with so many iron chains I could barely walk. But walking was not necessary, for they had stuffed me into a tiny square iron-barred cage where I had to crouch in a doubled-up position. The cage was carried by sixteen massively thewed Brokelsh. I twisted my head up to look at this Queen Fahia, for she interested me. They had not tortured me. I knew why that was.
“You have done much mischief, Drak the Sword. And I was foolish and weak enough to think you were my friend.”
Delia was not here. She was all I was concerned about. All this talk about friendship with this fat little woman who sat upon the throne of Hyrklana would have made Delia smile. I felt convinced, through my own agony and misery, that because I had not been harmed, Delia would not be either. I thought I knew the way Queen Fahia’s mind worked by then.
“My name is Dray Prescot. I warn you, Queen-”
“Silence, you rast! I am the queen! You are no more than a yetch of a kaidur who presumes.” She threw her head back and laughed, an unprepossessing sight, to be sure. “What! You call yourself Dray Prescot, Krozair of Zy?”
“Aye. But you do not know what that is. I am Pur Dray. But, also-”
She flicked her fingers and the Pallan Mahmud passed her the scroll wherein was written my crimes. It was not paper, which would have interested me, thinking of far Aphrasoe, but a stiff parchment. She stabbed a jeweled finger down.
“You claim to be Pur Dray Prescot, Krozair of Zy, Zorcander, Lord of Strombor, Prince Majister of Vallia, Kov of Zamra and Can-thirda, Strom of Valka!” She lifted her head and stared at me with a jovial evil over the parchment scroll. “And you seriously expect me to believe this roll of rubbish? This tirade of tomfoolery? You yetch! Think of my neemus! Think of my guardsmen!”
“I have little need to think of them, for they are mostly dead. If only they all were.”
She drew her breath. She stabbed the scroll again. “I know nothing of these impossible names — save Vallia and Valka. And Zamra. I once heard of a Kov of Zamra, for my stylors tell me his name appears in a secret document they brought from Hamal, where he visited. The Relts tell me his name is Ortyg Larghos.”
I laughed.
“Ortyg Larghos was slain by many arrows, slain in foul treachery to his emperor.”
“It is easy to claim a man is dead and take his name, when you are many dwaburs from his homeland.”
I could see Fahia was enjoying this. She was working up to a great scene when I would scream and beg for mercy, and she could turn the screw tighter and tighter, until in the end I would admit all my sins. She licked her full red lips. Even then, I truly think, I pitied her.
So far no mention of Delia had crossed my lips. What I was absolutely certain was to happen would not be swayed, now, by what I said, and I wished to start the thing as soon as possible and so spare my Delia any further protracted agony.
We must have been scooped out of the wreckage of the voller after those damned Star Lords had brought all my proud plans of escape to nothing. I had awoken to find myself as I now was, loaded with iron chains and doubled up in an iron cage. I had been given food and drink. But I was in a foul state, for all the buckets of water had been hurled over me before I had been carried into the queen’s presence. My clothes had been taken from me. I wondered where the Krozair longsword had gone, but forbore to ask. That would give one more item for them to crow about.
Presently the queen’s taunts became cruder and cruder and there is no point in repeating them. She worked herself up into a veritable passion, her blue eyes flashing at me and her features twisting. She dribbled and slashed at her slave fifis who trembled and tried to wipe the spittle away with sensil cloths. She saw the way I looked at her, and I believe then she understood that if I could get my hands around her fat neck I would have had no compunction about squeezing her evil life out, for all that I pitied her, and had recoiled from that deed before, for events had moved on apace since then, by Vox!
“By the putrescent left eyeball of Makki-Grodno!” I roared at her. “You silly fat old woman! Get on with it, for the sake of that yetch Havil the Green. Or” — and I stared her full in the face as she flinched back — “may that hyr-kleesh Lem the Silver Leem devour your mangy body entire!”
She fairly exploded then.
Courtiers ran with whips to hit me, guards milled, a number of Horters fainted, and noble ladies leaned on their noble spouses’ shoulders, shaking.
By the time the hullabaloo had subsided Queen Fahia had left her audience chamber, and her black neemus padded balefully after her, twisting their rounded heads, their wedge-ears low, their tails lolling. I laughed.
The preparations within the Jikhorkdun for this greatest of great Kaidurs were made with thoroughness. Barriers around the arena were heightened and strengthened, and solid marble walls were erected before the queen’s box, and many crossbowmen were stationed there. Her Chulik Chuktar still retained his place; but I knew it had been a near squeak for him when I had so impudently slipped and deflected his bolts and stuxes, and so barbarically hurled the bloody leem’s tail in her face. Thinking back, I would not have dubbed that a high Jikai. More likely a little Kaidur!
They brought my iron cage to a small newly created stone enclosure I did not recognize. All across one side of the stone-walled space stood a line of mercenaries, all with their crossbows lifted, loaded, and cocked, and aimed directly at me. There were fifty of them. At the Chulik Chuktar’s command — for he had taken personal control of this wild leem of a prisoner — fifty bolts would flash toward me, narrowing in a fan and piercing my heart. There would not be a lot left of that heart by the time fifty steel-headed quarrels had bedded there.