Now some of the three or four-armed folk of Kregen, and some with tail hands, who look like apims as far as faces are concerned, have been known when down on their luck to dress as apims, with their extra arms hidden. They may then wander through bazaars and markets, looking all innocence, and use their extra hidden hands to seize food and goods from the stalls and secret them inside their capacious clothes. One has to watch for rogues like this everywhere.
So — one of the guards, who looked like an apim with bad teeth and a ferocious haircut, standing guard by a door opposite the head of the bed, twitched his tunic around under his armor. I glanced across, caught by the movement, and Queen Mab called to me, lazily, a husky note in her voice.
Immediately, I walked toward the enormous bed, not wishing to give gratuitous offense, and the guard was forgotten for the moment.
A young fellow was in the act of walking away from the bed curtains, which were half-drawn. His skin was a clear smooth bronze; he had a pretty face, with crinkly hair and a rosebud mouth, and he looked sulky. His sulkiness turned to a look of hot resentment as he passed me. I ignored him.
A group of the slave girls gathered at the foot of the bed and began playing musical instruments and singing. The slaves carried enough boxes and bales to explain the instruments as well as the sumptuous clothes the queen wore. You may judge of my condition, a condition obscured from me at the time, when I say that I found the music enjoyable.
Now Delia can play the harp like an angel. Often of an evening in Esser Rarioch we would have musical sessions, and Jilian Sweet tooth would play her flute. Jilian is an accomplished flautist, and Delia’s friends would gather and play and sing and we’d have a wonderful time. It was refined, of course, and very far from my evenings singing with the swods in taverns; but it was not ludicrous. Aimee could play a Kregen instrument not unlike a zither and the harmonies the ladies produced would have charmed birds out of trees. If I have not mentioned Aimee before it is only that she has not figured in my more hectic adventures up until a little later on.
So, now, I sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the music and enjoyed it, even though they performed that miserable song out of Hamal, “Black is the River and Black Was Her Hair.” This is so painful as to be farcical.
The extent of that bed was truly amazing. The coverlet shone silkily, the pillows resembled the thighs of romance, the hanging tapestries and damasks glowed with amorous scenes. I watched as the music finished and the queen ordered her people to leave. Leaving that bed was like departing from a room of itself. The last hanging dropped into place and we were alone in the subdued glow of the lamps.
Well, she looked magnificent, like a wild beast of the jungle about to leap on her prey. She wore her golden hair loose, waving down in deep folds about her naked shoulders. The robe clung narrowly to her waist, slit from throat to ankle, and the golden lace blazed against her pale skin. Her mouth formed a luscious circle as she pouted at me. She stretched out a naked arm.
“Jikai — I am waiting.”
Well, now...
Judge of my condition when I found myself advancing upon her across the wide expanse of the bed. Oh, yes! I, Dray Prescot, savage wild leem of a fellow, moving in on this delectable woman who lay back, pillowed in her golden hair, as the robe parted. It was all beyond belief.
The thought of Delia sprang into my mind, and the queen said, “You have loved before, Jikai, I can tell. But they were nothings. Mere trifles. I own that I am surprised—”
I swallowed. Her perfume dizzied me. She was really beautiful, now, I could see that, beautiful and desirable.
The way her skin flushed delicately with rose, the way her body curved, the way her mouth pouted, red and shining with passion...
“Surprised?” I managed to stammer out. “I am surprised—”
“You should not be. I am irresistible! My surprise is for myself, that I have formed so violent an attachment for you.”
A roaring thundered in my head. There was only the body of the queen in the whole wide world of Kregen before my eyes. I inched closer, and now I was crawling over that silky coverlet. She lifted her naked arms, white and pink against the blaze of her hair.
“Irresistible! No man can resist me, not even you, Dray Prescot!”
“Majestrix,” I mumbled.
“I am tormented with longing for you,” she went on, her face flushing now, her body rising as I neared her. “I am prepared to — no matter — you are the luckiest man alive...”
She was very sure of herself. Well, she had every right to be. She
was
delectable. And she was arrogant with her power, conscious of her sway. Women have this power, it is undeniable. They use it; that, too, cannot be gainsaid. No doubt they boast of their conquests, woman to woman, in their private moments. I cannot stand a man who talks about women, and I usually withdraw when men start their boring conquest stories. As for women who boast to men...
The image of Delia rose before me, scalding.
I stopped moving forward.
She saw. Her face lengthened, her eyes brightened in the lamplight, her gaze fastening on me like the teeth of a shark, a remora, leaching away.
Two things happened, one a memory, the other a movement. I truly believe and would stake my immortal ib on it — I saw through her and jerked back before those two events occurred.
One — the memory — was what she had called me, without a Llahal or the pappattu between us.
The other — the movement — an insolent brown and red scorpion waddled out from under the pillows and stood, balanced, waving his stinger at the lush and naked body of the queen.
Saved by the bell?
No!
Saved because I understood all too tardily just what went forward here. And, then, many men would not call it being saved; they’d call me all kinds of benighted idiot. But I knew — and could guess — and in that moment the full horror hit me.
She saw the scorpion.
She screamed.
That scorpion was real to her, if not to me, real and not a part of the mumbo-jumbo.
She was off the bed and scrabbling for the curtains and they parted as Anglar thrust in, and, with him, the bulky form of the Chulik, Nath the Kaktu. Anglar swept a massive green and black cloak about the woman, massive in that it concealed her body and hooded up over her head and turned her into another being. The golden hair fell away, ripped free. Dark hair, dark and shining, swooping down to a peak over her forehead lay revealed. Her face blanched with vicious temper.
She stood and a trembling finger pointed at me.
“I shall not slay you, Dray Prescot. You resist me now. But you will submit — you
shall
submit! If it takes all your life, you shall submit!”
I said, “I do not know who you are. You are not Queen Mab. But I do not know you.”
“You will, Dray Prescot, you will!”
I took a breath. The spell was broken. I said, “You seem to call me by a name you know. How is that?”
“Fool!”
“Well,” I said, equably, “that is true, and I do not deny it. You say you have formed an attachment for me. That is your misfortune, woman, for you should know better—”
“Beware—”
“Oh, I’ll beware all right. You are not Pancresta, that is sure. But you know of Spikatur Hunting Sword?”
Anglar laughed. Even the Chulik, polishing up his tusk, grimaced — and Chuliks and a sense of humor are light-years apart.
“I know of the creeping worms! Spikatur! We took them over, and made them do our will —
our
will! And you, you ruined it all, you and your wizards! I know! Why I do not condemn you to a life of torment I cannot say—” She put a hand to her forehead, a white naked arm snaking from the black and green robe. She looked suddenly bewildered.
I looked for my ally, the scorpion, but he had vanished.
The curtains of the bed parted as Anglar and Nath the Kaktu assisted this woman to step away from the bed and out to her chair. This throne-like chair was pushed into a cleared space. I crawled off the end of the bed and thought to take up the Krozair longsword from where I’d shed it as I’d gone slinking forward under the spell of this woman. For, spell it truly was.
And then! By Zair, I tell you, my heart turned over and all the blood rushed to my head and I was almost sick, sick as any poor beaten cur dog...
A tinkling tintinnabulation of golden bells...
The woman closed her eyes, sitting erect in the throne-like chair. Her eyelids were covered in gold leaf, and not unusually in the way of that kind of cosmetic fad, the leaf split along the lines of creases. In that moment all the beauty of her face dissipated, so that the pallor of her skin and the golden eyelids resembled a corpse face, painted for the last death journey to the Ice Floes of Sicce.
The multitude of tiny bells tinkled and tingled, and I felt the blood rush from my heart.
Stiffly, I turned about. A procession entered the crystal chandelier-lit chamber. A familiar, a horribly familiar, a blasphemous procession...
“You fool,” whispered the woman, naked in her green and black robe. “What you have thrown away...”
Instead of sixteen Womoxes, bulking in their black tabards girt with green lizard skin, horns all gilded, there were but twelve. They bore a palanquin smothered in decoration and with its golden cloth of gold and embroidered curtains half-drawn. Against the red-gold sliding gleam of silks within a small shape showed, in shadow. The massed golden bells, tiny, spine-chilling, tinkled into the enveloping silence.
There were Katakis in the procession, savage, evil, predatory men, slavemasters with their low-drawn brows and snaggly teeth. Their whiptails curled boldly above their black-haired heads, and each tail was strapped with bladed steel. There were Chail Sheom, beautiful half-naked girls, chained and decorated, painted, whimpering. There were all manner of strange and obscene creatures, fashioned from nightmare, not of the Kregen I knew. There were, in this procession, things I had not seen before, and there were things missing.
The voice I had heard in that room of the blue doors, that had, all but one, turned red, whispered now.
“Mother,” said that fragile voice. “Why do you tarry? What ails you?”
The woman opened her eyes. They were now of a deep pellucid green. I looked from her to the procession, and the palanquin, and tried to discern the creature within.
I remembered the warning, burned into the portal of the Coup Blag. But he was dead! He had been blown away in the Quern of Gramarye. He had to be — he was dead, dead, dead!
“You—” I choked out. “You are dead!”
“Silence, Dray Prescot.” The woman spoke on a hiss, my name long-drawn with evil, and yet, and yet — she looked at me with those green depthless eyes, and I shuddered.
“Mother — we have won — why do you wait?”
So, then, I saw it, or thought I did, and trembled anew for the fresh evil loosed upon the glorious and forbidding world of Kregen.
Again I tried to peer past the cloth of gold curtains into the interior of the palanquin. Man or woman, boy or girl? How tell, in that eerie whispering voice?
Then, among the retinue of people following the palanquin I saw Pancresta, walking not proudly, but in a resigned, shoulder-drooping way. And I saw that we had been deceived. Spikatur Hunting Sword, we had been told, had been taken over by some new leader, some person with fresh ideas for evil and murder. And I thought I knew who that person, that devil, was; and yet I knew I did not know.
For Phu-Si-Yantong was dead.
He was not in that palanquin, so like the one I had seen him ride in before. He was a mighty Wizard of Loh; I did not think he could come back from the grave.
The woman must have read a deal of the appalled thoughts on my face. Truth to tell, by Zair, I am not sure what I thought, what I imagined, in that moment of horror.
“Yes, Dray Prescot. Yes. You are trapped. My child rides in the palanquin that was my own and only wizard’s. You and your vile sorcerous friends slew my wizard. I tried to aid him and could not. You have much to answer for, and yet, and yet...”
“Mother!” The weird whispering voice, so like its father’s voice, sharpened. Still I could not tell if the creature borne within the palanquin was wizard or witch. “Mother! The time is now. We have played the game well, and we have joyed in it. But, mother —
now
!”
Yes, they’d played their games with me. The woman had given me no Llahal when we met, and not inquired my name, had not, in her impersonation of the queen that I had fostered, inquired for news of the king. She had known. She had known all there was to know about this place from the beginning, for she and her wizard, Phu-Si-Yantong, had constructed it themselves.
No wonder the power of this place was wielded with such consummate ease!
I had to hold onto the fact that I was not dealing with Yantong. The child in the palanquin was aping her — or his — father. The woman was speaking again.
“My name, Dray Prescot, is Csitra. Mark it well. I owed you a score such as any woman would hunger to avenge. Yet I would have spared you, as you know. I would have raised you up, against the wishes of my child, the child of Phu-Si-Yantong. Know, now, that I, Csitra, am a Witch of Loh, and you are doomed!”
A Voice Speaks
I found a voice. If it was my voice, or another’s, if it spoke from the grave, or from my love for Delia, if it was fostered by some lingering aftereffect of the counter-spells worked on me by my comrade Wizards of Loh, I did not know. If it came from the Star Lords I did not know. That, even then, seemed to me so unlikely as to be a foolish wisp of a whim.
That voice issuing from my throat spoke up bravely.
“Now wait a minute!” said the voice. “Now, just hold on — hold on a moment! You say you would have spared me, would have raised me up — and this after what you say was done to your wizard. Well, and what have I — here and now — said or done that offends you? Tell me, Csitra the Witch, tell me — if you can!”
“What—” She put a hand, again, to her head.