“But, Majister,” I said. “The Princess Delia — she must-” I swallowed. I shook and couldn’t stop myself. The Emperor looked coldly at me, for no stranger, no man not of the family, unless given permission, may call the Princess Majestrix anything other than that. Her name, like her person, is sacred.
“She was in an airboat — the storm — those mad leem out there. .”
Pallan Rodway, the minister in charge of the Treasury, took my arm and tried to wheel me away from the Emperor. I would not be maneuvered. I glared at them, at this Emperor and the few loyal nobles and Pallans remaining to him as we stood in that shattered tower surrounded by ruins.
“Where is she!” I yelled it; it was a demand. “The Princess Majestrix!”
The Emperor returned my glare with all the apoplectic fury of complete authority. I saw that malignant glitter in his eyes and I know my eyes returned the same ugly, evil, hateful, utterly damn-you-to-hell look. What might have happened then I do not know — and didn’t care, by Zim-Zair, then! — but the moment was broken by two almost simultaneous events.
A voice spoke, a voice I knew: “Well met, Drak! Come and drink wine with me, for there is much to tell.”
I said, “Your words to me, Vomanus, were: ‘I will do as you ask.’ Do you remember?”
He came forward into the torchlight. “I remember.” He looked just the same, handsome, careless, above the petty run of party politics, and yet. .
And then a Chulik mercenary let out a tremendous bellow.
“The cramphs! They attack! The Undurkers! They come!”
I unslung the great Lohvian longbow and with the smooth practiced forward jerk, strung it. I looked at Seg and at Vomanus. Here one was a mere private Koter in the Emperor’s bodyguard, the other a lord of a province; to me they were comrades both. We went to the perimeter of the ruins and we vied one bowman with another, in our picking off of the supercilious Undurkers as they strove to outshoot us. Nothing on Kregen, as I understood it then, outshoots the Lohvian longbow. The warriors of Kov Furtway, attacking, were feathered into heaps and piles as they sought to rush from the ruins under the cover of their own arrow shower. Oh, we took casualties. But we held that attack and hurled it back; at only one point did it come to handblows, and then our Chuliks with their chilling ferocity smashed the first wave, and the second recoiled and ran.
The metal-adorned backs of the mercenaries vanished into the fossilized forest of bones. Our wounded were cared for. The fourth moon, She of the Veils, cast down her pinkish light and picked out in a roseate glow the glimmer of weapons, the gleam from an eye-socket, the black sheen of blood, and the harsh rock and dust, the ring of bones, the ruins, the desolation.
Vomanus cornered me where a dead Rapa still clutched his sword, his bird-beak embedded in the dust, the Undurker arrow protruding through his neck.
“Dray! I never thought to see you alive again!”
We talked. Much of our conversation dealt with what I have already related to you. I found my surmise was true. He had allowed himself to become the candidate so as to discover the secret intentions of the Emperor’s enemies. His warning had been almost too late. “And now we are done for, anyway, I think, Dray. We have had bonny times, but they are over.”
From the corner of my eye I was aware of the dark crimson shape, hovering. I said, “Vomanus, tell me true — you have no desires to marry Delia? You continue to support me?”
“Of course! Need you ask? I have spoken with Delia, and no woman loved a man as she loves you.”
He chuckled, an incongruous sound in those surroundings. “Although why so ugly a looking devil as you should manage it when all the chivalry of Vallia have been spurned — Vox take it! But you are the man, Dray Prescot!”
I heard Seg gasp.
“Come here, Seg!”
These two, Vomanus of Vindelka and Seg Segutorio, stared at each other, and I recognized the amusement in me at their instinctive sizing up, their flash of temperament. I told them both a little of the fuller story, and finished: “So we three are dedicated to the service of Delia of Delphond. Very good. Very fine. But where, by the Black Chunkrah, is she?”
All that was certain was — she was not trapped with her father in the tumbled ruins at the center of The Dragon’s Bones.
Naturally, I immediately took stock of the situation with the single obsessive desire to get out. I could make a run for it, and once inside the tangle of bones, no man or beast-man would catch me. Covering that open space would be the tricky part, for I would be shot at by Undurkers in front and by Lohvian Bowmen from the rear. Of the two I gave the Lohvians the best bet on feathering me.
“Sink me!” I burst out, and the other two looked at me strangely. I knew I must appear a black-hearted devil to them, a harsh, intolerant — and intolerable — man who demanded instant obedience. But other thoughts occurred to me. This man we defended was Delia’s father. That he was the Emperor meant nothing in my book. But if I left now, and Furtway succeeded in murdering Delia’s father in cold blood
— what would she think? What would she think of me? I would be the man who had run away and left her father to die a miserable death.
Hell’s bells and buckets of blood!
I was in a cleft stick and it was damned uncomfortable.
Furtway flung his men in again, and this time they surged up to our parapet of stones. We had a few brisk moments when the swords rang and slithered, and men screeched with steel skewering their bellies. Then the third party mercenaries broke and we spitted them all the way back to the bone ramparts. Seg said, “I’m down to a dozen shafts.”
“Here, take these quivers.” I handed them out, sharing among the crimson Bowmen. They had lost all their Jiktars, their Chuktar was Opaz knew where, only three Deldars remained, and one badly wounded and dying Hikdar. Of the intermediate ranks, as you know, a man is called simply by the last and identifying portion of his full rank. Various organizations place varying numbers of degrees in each rank. The highest ranking of the three Deldars was a So-Deldar — that is, the third degree of Deldar — and he had seven more to go before he became a Hikdar. They were good men. But, as is my custom, I had been active in the fighting, shouting intemperate and callous orders in my brutal and domineering way, and they had listened to me, instinctively understanding that, for all my sins and ugly face, I was a leader, and they obeyed.
The Emperor came up and said abruptly, “Strom Drak. I have noticed how you fight, and I am pleased. Of the other matter we will talk by and by-”
I interrupted him. If you cannot imagine the full depth of my agony for Delia, the feelings of screaming madness possessing me, I can understand that. It has been given only to few men to grasp what I suffered then, and I would not wish that pain on anyone. So it was I interrupted the Emperor, and walked away, saying over my shoulder: “I will fight for you, Majister — aye, and slay those rasts for you! — but afterward we will talk, you and I.”
Pallan Rodway, a Vadvar, the High Kov of Erstveheim, two Stroms, and all the other nobles gasped their outrage. I was aware of Vomanus talking hurriedly with the Emperor; but another attack came in then and we were busily occupied in hurling the mercenaries back. But our numbers were thinning. I heard a Rapa grumbling that he had a throat drier than the Ocher Limits themselves. I gripped him by his clumsy throat, glared madly into his birdlike eyes, and I screamed at him that he’d be a dead Rapa before he drank again if he didn’t get back into the fight.
The Emperor watched all this. I was sane enough to realize that he was cunning enough to use men when it suited him; he had seen me fighting and wouldn’t arrest me — or make the attempt, Zair rot him! -
while I was useful to him. That’s how he had remained Emperor so long. I caught a whiff of perfume, a sweet, gagging stench, completely out of place in those surroundings. Across the clearing raced foemen to attack us. I looked quickly down and there, wedged into a crevice between rocks, crouched a man. He was sumptuously dressed, with a great deal of lace, silk, and golden ornaments. He wore a rapier. He smelled like a barber’s shop. I caught him by the collar and hauled him out.