And now, to give you who listen to this tape an understanding of what then happened, there in the back room of The Loyal Canoptic as a concealed taper relit the samphron-oil lamp, it is necessary to tell you a number of things all at the same time.
The first thing I noticed, something I had been wondering about ever since my interest in Mog had been so brutally forced on me, was the physical appearance of these halfling Miglas. They were not apim.
The people gathered here, about a score, sitting on benches along the walls so that the central floor area of polished lenk remained clear, all possessed two arms and two legs, and one head with features. But those features could never be mistaken for human features — always bearing in mind what I have said about that prickly word, “human.” The old women looked a little like Mog, although nowhere so bent or vicious or cunning. The old men looked like nothing so much as those thick-legged, thick-armed, stumpy-bodied, and idiot-headed plastic toys the children on Earth nowadays play with. Gnomes, if you like, thick-heads, bodies as squat as boilers, dummies, grinners, with ears that swung like batwing doors, they all stared at Mog with looks of reverence and shock and holy awe — and vast surprise. The younger men and girls, although far more prepossessing in the manner of bodily proportions, all wore that idiot grin, that flap-eared dog-hanging look of bumbling good humor that masks a cranial cavity filled with vacuum.
They all wore ankle-length smocks with scooped-out necks and no sleeves. The color was a uniform rusty crimson, as though the dye used, probably from a local berry or earth, had not taken properly in the coarsely weaved stuff. Their hair was dark and vivid and cropped, even the girls’. I stood behind Saenda and Quaesa as the lamp flared up and Mog stepped forward. Turko moved at my side, and Rapechak moved out from the other side.
Insane shrieks burst from the Miglas. The women clawed the children to them, the girls flying to crowd around the old folk at the far end of the room. The noise burst inside my head with the unexpected force of a magazine explosion. The Migla men rummaged frantically behind the benches. They swung around to face us, pushing past Mog, who yelled at them.
“Do you not know who I am? I am Mog, your high priestess!” She used a number of those special words and phrases that meant a great deal in the religion.
The men — eight of them — stood resolutely before us, their womenfolk and children screaming behind them.
The eight looked highly comical, their flap-eared faces slobbering with fury and fear. They held the spears they had snatched up from behind the benches in grips that — I guessed Rapechak would have seen and Turko never failed to miss — were amateur in the extreme.
“Do you not hear, migladorn? These are my friends. They are the friends of the high priestess of Migshaanu!”
The heftiest man, with a fuzz of side-whiskers, spat out: “You are the Mighty Mog! But these cannot be your friends! They have tricked you! Two are apim warriors, one is a Rapa warrior, and two are shishis!
They must all die!”
From the lighting of the lamp to the utterance of that word — “die!” — scarce a handful of heartbeats had passed.
The eight spear points leveled. Then, with sudden and astonishing speed, a ferociously lethal and completely unexpected reaction, the front three Migla men hurled their spears. And — there was nothing amateurish about that spear throwing. With terrifying accuracy the deadly shafts flew toward us.
Chapter Eighteen
Three spears flashed toward us.
We were: one, a Rapa mercenary; two, a Khamorro; and, three, an Earthman who had made Kregen his home.
We reacted in three different ways.
With a fluid litheness of movement so fast no untrained eye could follow him, Turko slid the spear and it thunked solidly into the lenken door.
With the least amount of physical effort, Rapechak let his body lean to the side, and as a precaution, thrust up his forearm, so that the spear hissed past, to thunk into the door alongside the other. I, Dray Prescot, had to show off — and yet, in truth, my way had been proved in the past and was to prove in the future by far the superior — and I had not needed the Krozairs of Zy to teach me this. I took the spear out of the air, my hand closing around the shaft with that familiar solid-soft chunking of wood against flesh, and so I reversed it and hefted it and said, “I will let you have your spear back, if you wish.”
Over the women’s screaming Mog lifted her voice and, there in that bedlam in the back room of The Loyal Canoptic, I heard for the first time the high priestess.
“Put down your spears! I am Mog the Mighty, high priestess of Migshaanu! Put down your stuxes or risk my certain wrath! These apim and this Rapa have aided me and brought me here.”
Then old Mog the witch glared at me as she ducked her head as the spears went down. And I knew!
Oh, I knew! She was saying to me: “Well, Dray Prescot. You brought me here, why I know not, so now what to do, hey, onker?” And, also: “And you put your spear down, too, idiot, or they’ll cast for sure and spit you like a paly!”
I lowered the spear.
A moment of natural tension was heightened as both Rapechak and Turko turned and jerked the spears from the lenk. Even then, I had time to say, just so that they could hear: “What, friend Turko? A spear?”
To which Turko the Khamorro replied: “I thought you might need another if your first missed.”
I chuckled. Oh, yes, that seemed a worthwhile moment to chuckle.
After that, with Mog the witch acting very much as Mog the Mighty — by Makki-Grodno’s worm-eaten liver! Old Mog, called Mog the Mighty! Incredible and laughable and hugely enjoyable! -
after that, as I say, we all sat down to eat and drink and for Mog to tell her news and to catch up on what had been happening in Yaman in the land of Migla in her absence. Somehow or other Saenda had seated herself on one side and Quaesa on the other, and they were both holding my arms and snuggling up against me, pouting their lips and trying to claim all my attention, and I couldn’t be too hard on them. By Vox! But they’d had a scare!
Even then, Saenda said to Quaesa, “Did you hear what that awful one with the ridiculous side-whiskers said?”
“That’s Planath the Wine-”
“He called me a shishi! I’ll give it to him when I get a chance. Nobody calls me a shishi and gets away with it.”
“Nor me!”
“What will you give him, Saenda?” I hoped I was stirring things up.
“Humph!” she said, with her nose in the air, and so disposed of my question. I didn’t care. Mog was home with her people. These Migla were gathered in secret to celebrate a rite of Migshaanu and so the news of the high priestess’ return would that more quickly spread over the city. I had done my work. Now I would go home.
Yes, I had decided. There would be time in the future to find out about the airboats and to question the scarlet-roped Todalpheme on the whereabouts of Aphrasoe. Do not think I had dismissed the importance of either of these projects, but I hungered to see Delia again, and to hold little Drak and little Lela in my arms, and tell Delia of my undying love.
Momentarily, I shuddered at the prospect of that blue radiance dropping about me with the great presentation of a scorpion, but I thought I knew, now, that I had done the Star Lords’ bidding. The two girls prattled on, one in each ear. Although only half listening to them, being far more interested in what Mog and Planath were saying of conditions in Migla, I could not fail to become aware that the girls’
intentions were becoming far more serious by the mur. Each wished me to take her to her own home, the idea that one should go to the other’s as an honored guest having, apparently, been abandoned. They waxed warm.