“But all the nonsense is going to stop, now, Kr. Drak. We carry the wedding gifts. The Emperor is in High Zorcady. The Princess Majestrix is there, also. So is Kov Vektor.” Hikdar Stovang sounded like a man well-pleased that a difficult and unpleasant job is finished. “Where the Emperor is, then that is where the wedding will take place. And right glad, to the glory of the Invisible Twins, am I that it will soon be over.”
Aduimbrev lay to the north midlands, and Stovang couldn’t wait to return home. The Vomansoir Cut had not gone through Vektor’s Kovnate, and I guessed we had flown over it in the ice airboat. Now I set my face forward. Oh, yes, I relished the irony of thus riding in with the very wedding gifts of my rival, but that rival held all the aces.
A few canals have been cut through the Blue Mountains, and one, the Quanscott Cut, is carried through the longest tunnel in Vallia, driven through the heart of the Blue Mountains to the coastal strip on the west where stands Quanscott, the major port on that stretch of coast. But the Emperor would be riding up to High Zorcady astride a zorca, unless he chose to ride like old women, monks, or children, and saddle a preysany.
I knew that here, all around me in the rolling wild country leading up to the Blue Mountains, roamed thousands, possibly millions, of zorcas. This was zorca country. The frowning citadel and the town that had grown up on the granite crags around it in sight and sound of rushing waterfalls was aptly named High Zorcady. On most days clouds drift around the highest towers. From the ramparts on a clear day you can look out and see so vast an expanse of country that the very coil of the world seems to lie beneath your feet.
We had some way to go yet before we reached that high and inaccessible place, full of crags and water-thunder, drifting with clouds and the wide-winged crested-korf. That night we camped in a hollow by a stream and I was able to appease my hunger with hot vosk and taylyne soup. I noticed that double guards were set. Stovang was jumpy. He had been carrying this treasure of wedding gifts all around Vallia, it seemed, in futile chase of Delia, on the run from her father’s marriage plans, but I knew that he was not apprehensive on account of the gifts.
The Blue Mountains, it seemed, were notorious.
According to Hikdar Stovang, bandits and robbers and assassins lived in every cave and crevice of the rocks.
I could see I was welcome as an extra sword. Fifty zorca riders had not been considered too many guards. Among the zorca riders in the service of Vektor and wearing his colors and insignia — a butterfly on gold and black — were halfling mercenaries, Rapas, Fristles, a couple of Chuliks. They appeared a reasonably disciplined and efficient bunch, but I slept with a hand on my rapier hilt, and with a lifetime’s experience I slept ready to leap up in an instant. This knack of sleeping soundly and yet with the ability to react to the noise that threatens usually serves me well, for it has been learned in the harsh life of seafaring, or adventuring on Kregen; it is not a gift of cloistered universities. Among the zorca riders were two Womoxes. Although outwardly as composed and drilled as their companions, they exhibited to me clear signs of a much greater degree of agitation. I had fought Viridia’s Womoxes, and found them formidable opponents, their stumpy horns mounted on their foreheads able to jab at an enemy’s eyes with terrifying power. Now they made no pretense at sleep. They stayed on guard all night, alert, their weapons drawn, waiting.
The next day as we jogged northwestward Hikdar Stovang, who had taken to me as a new companion able to enliven the journey with new stories, enlightened me, although without realizing he did so. The island of the Womoxes lay directly westward of Vallia, with the inevitable cluttering of smaller islands and islets between, and the port serving the Blue Mountains, Quanscott, lay on the same parallel of latitude as the chief easternmost port of Womox. Before Vallia had achieved hegemony and then consolidation of all the different peoples that now formed part of the empire, clearly there had been long and bitter racial enmity between the Womoxes and the people of the Blue Mountains. They were all of one nation now, under one emperor, but the old antipathies persisted here, at least. We rode on. Vektor’s men lived well, and they did not grudge me my share of food. We were made welcome at a couple of towns, where there was an influx of people foreign to these parts; then, as we penetrated higher and higher into the Blue Mountains and by following narrow tracks winding beside gorges where streams splashed and roared a thousand feet below, we knew we had left not only the plains and foothills behind but the attitudes of mind to be found there. We stayed a night at a small mountain village where the atmosphere of hostility could be cut with a terchick. We pushed on. Here local politics, local grudges, and local vendettas were carried to extremes.
“We’re all one people under the Emperor, aren’t we? complained Stovang. “If this is the family my master the Kov is marrying into, Opaz help him, by Vox!”
I was puzzled. The antagonism of the inhabitants of the Blue Mountains was a tangible onslaught on a man’s feelings; we were interlopers, unwanted, detested. Clannish feelings ran high here. Were the Blue Mountain people, as Stovang insisted, just a rabble gang of thieves and cutthroats?
What a contrast to Delphond!
Very often now, during the day, as we progressed laboriously along a narrow ledge, or negotiated a track perched between heaven and hell, we heard a long ululating call, echoing and rebounding from crag to crag. The high notes pealed in the clean chill air. The mountains rang with the gong-notes.
“We’re under observation, Opaz rot ’em,” grunted Stovang. We edged our zorcas along with care, and the animals put their dainty hooves down with a precision that showed they fully understood the situation. Highly intelligent, are zorcas.
This difficult path wended higher and higher, traversing a rampart wall of mountains. The peaks soared to either hand, their lower slopes falling away into gorge and crevasse, and so down and along and out to the foothills. Trees of all the mountain varieties grew here, and flowers of fragile beauty, and we saw mountain ponshos leaping like impiters from crag to crag. The peaks carried mantles of ice and snow. The snow-line lay high above us still, and the weather held none of that frigid bite of the Mountains of the North where I had met and rescued Furtway and his nephew Jenbar. I was grateful for that. Once we had penetrated the rampart barrier, which curved in a gigantic oval, we could descend the other side and so ride out onto the great central plateau within the Blue Mountains. But, as Stovang said with as much pleasure as he could derive from the situation, we were not traveling that far. High Zorcady had been built on its serried peaks where the pass reached its highest point. Cupped by mountains, shielded by clouds, walled by crags, High Zorcady frowned down from the mist. It was at that point, as we paused in a narrow defile to glare up at High Zorcady, eerie, pointed, and leering above us, that the Blue Mountain Boys jumped us.
All was instant confusion. The mercenaries drew their rapiers, some hurled javelins, their zorcas wheeling and colliding. I saw stones hurtling to smash against close-fitting helmets or thump against gold and black chests. I saw men in shaggy ponsho skins leaping from the rocks to lay their cudgels against skulls. I saw the frantic pandemonium of the fight, then I was down, and a man lifted a rock high over his head, straddled above me, laughing.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I reached up and took the rock away from his brown fingers and he had to let it go or his fingers would have snapped. I threw the rock away. I took his wrists in my left hand, his throat in my right, and I squeezed — a little, not much, just enough to let him know who was master here.