Only a few long paces separated me from the door. With a howl of such savage ferocity as would wake the dead, if they were not already awakened, I burst through the last of the kaotim. A single smashing backhanded blow and I was through the door.
To slam it shut was the work of an instant and then I hared on tottering legs along the corridor. I could recall the layout — I could dodge the traps — I could take the correct twists and turns, and fight my way through the miasmic spirit-sucking atmosphere of this place. I could!
Mind you, memory ducks and dimples hereabouts. I recall some of the passageways and I think — I am almost certain — there appeared a pair of Kataki twins who were left in four or five pieces. But that could have been a dream. I thundered on.
I came to the foot of an enormous spiral staircase. I gulped air, tasting the flat stale dustiness of it where there was no real dust upon the floor, and started up.
What I expected, I do not know. Surely, by this time, Csitra or her uhu, Phunik, must have disengaged themselves and be watching me? Perhaps they continued to play their wicked games. They had turned Spikatur Hunting Sword to their own ends, and been discovered. Their pleasures were of the dark and ghastly kinds. They but toyed with me, I thought, and then came out to the top of the stairs and so hurried through the corridors. No, they could not be free yet, could not be spying on me, I thought, and tried the passageways and so came to the last chamber. Here we had all entered in, apprehensively, boldly, fearfully, but we had all gone in. And the Pachaks had entered cheerfully, lusting after plunder. I was glad they were still with Seg. More than ever I was confident he would get out safe, alive and well.
The radiance of jade and ruby, streaming in through the archway!
Ah! The supreme blessedness of the Suns of Scorpio, shining refulgently, beckoning me on!
Outside lay the jungle. That was a mere nothing to a man in my mood, a man who had dared the dangers of the Coup Blag and beaten them. I’d swing through the forest to freedom.
I would have, too... I am confident of it...
Mouth open, hair flying, limbs aching, eyes glaring, I stumbled on toward that beckoning radiance.
The brilliance of Zim and Genodras thickened and tinged with blue.
The blueness grew about me, dazzling me and a chill touched my skin. I gaped upward. Hovering, bloating, enormous, the outline of a Scorpion, radiantly blue, leered down upon me.
“No!” was all I could gasp before I was sucked up and whirled away through unguessable dimensions.
I opened my eyes.
I was sitting in a chair, and the chair, hissing, rushed along a lighted corridor. But I knew I was in no corridor of the Coup Blag.
I unfurled my tongue and wet my lips and managed to husk out: “Star Lords!”
The chair rushed around a corner and into a wide room. It hissed. It swiveled. It deposited me before a blank wall, and stopped, and I remained, sitting. It is most unlikely, whatever the necessity, that I could have stood up.
A voice: “Dray Prescot.”
“I know that,” I said. And, then, I thought to say: “The Shanks. They have reached Paz?”
“Not yet. There is time. There are things you must witness.”
“Aye,” I said. “There are things I
have
witnessed!”
“If you are to serve both your will and ours, if you are to save Paz, watch and listen.”
I opened my mouth, but the effort was too great, and I closed it again, clamping my black-fanged winespout shut, and I watched as light bloomed on the wall before me.
By Beng Dikkane, the patron saint of all the ale-drinkers of Paz! I could do with a wet right now!
The glow grew like an unfolding flower. The light showed me a picture within the flower shape, a picture of color and movement and sound, and thought. I stared and listened, enthralled.
“You see what may happen, Dray Prescot.”
Seg! Seg Segutorio, and with him Milsi, and Kalu and his Pachaks, and Fregeff! And complaining old Exandu, helped along by Shanli, with Hop the Intemperate to look out for them. They moved along a stone corridor, and the radiance of the suns lay before them.
“Thank Opaz!” I said.
“Remember, what you see is only what may happen.”
“It will... It will!”
And then the weirdness of hearing the inner thoughts of the people in the picture overcame me. Seg was tortured by guilt — guilt over abandoning me — and yet in his thoughts the strong belief shone through that he knew of me, as I knew of him, that we would both soldier through.
And Milsi’s thoughts overcame me also, and I hungered for Seg to know the truth.
And the others... I shut my mind to their thoughts. This was eavesdropping! This was contemptuous invasion of privacy! This was, this was—
“It is necessary, Dray Prescot, onker of onkers, that you
know
.”
“Know what?”
“Know what it is needful for you to know. No more.”
“I needn’t really have asked, need I?”
And then all the foolishness was swept away.
The picture changed.
The voice said, “This has happened, this is smoke blown with the wind.”
I saw a small and secret chamber banked with flowers. I could smell the scents, heady, intoxicating. A woman sat at a low table, gracious in the way she bent to untie the last thong on her calf-high boots. She was garbed in hunting leathers of russet, and propped against the table stood a rapier and scabbarded to the other end of the belt and lying on the table, lay the matching main gauche. A shimmer moved all across the picture and now the woman, still with her back to me, was dressed all in sheerest white. Her shining brown hair fell softly in gentle waves, her form dizzied me. She lifted her arms to unfasten the white gown, and I realized that time must have passed since the moment, a mere heartbeat or two ago, that I had first seen her. A night had passed in that short interval.
She turned to face me.
Yes — yes!
I had known, known from the first moment I had seen her. And now my Delia smiled, that smile that can twist me up and wring me out and deposit me like a limp dishrag at her feet — when she chooses. She smiled in welcome.
“You know I must leave you now? I wish it were otherwise, but—”
She spoke to another person in that secret flower-bowered room. The shadow moved across the table as the other person approached.
A fierce voice said, “I know you must leave, and I hate it!”
“I have to, so no more need be said. And I am late already.”
A man moved into the picture, his back to me, and all I could see was a hulking great fellow, naked to the waist, with the muscles like boa constrictors, and a stupid yellow breech-clout. I stared. I tasted ashes.
Delia said, “You will not fret when I am gone — no, no — of course you will. Well, now you know what it is like.”
And the man’s obnoxious bellow said: “I know! But, before you change into your hunting russets, and your black boots, and do on your rapier and dagger, I think — my heart, I really do think there is time.”
And Delia of the Blue Mountains, Delia of Delphond, laughed, delightfully mocking at the great hulking brute of a beast. She rose, glorious as a woman who knows she is a woman, and knows a woman’s power and does not abuse that privilege. Splendid she was, so splendid as to catch the breath in the throat. Nothing else in two worlds mattered to me save Delia, and this ugly brute took her up in his arms as a leem might seize on its prey, and held her close; and I saw the way he held her, the gentleness and the tenderness so extraordinarily at odds with his appearance.
And so this — this person — swung Delia about and I saw his face.
And it was me.
So I remembered, this scene I was watching, recalled it with a pang as just one of the many many times Delia had gone off about her secret affairs for the Sisters of the Rose.
I collapsed back into the hissing chair of the Star Lords, and I shuddered. For I could sense the flowing thoughts as Delia mourned for the parting, mourned as I mourned, and we poor wights caught up in the toils of duty that sundered our paths. Pitiful, yes, of course; but there was more to this life of ours than that, a great deal more...
“Watch, Dray Prescot,” said the voice. “Watch and listen.”
“Spikatur—”
“You have smoked out their lair. You know how they will be dealt with, how they must be dealt with. These pictures before you now, they are your new reality.”
Wrought up as I was, bloody, tattered, exhausted, I could not leave alone the horrors through which I had been.
“And that uhu brat of Yantong’s?”
“Shastum! That is to be. Watch and listen and learn!”
So I watched.
I watched as Delia, the Empress of Vallia, put on her russet hunting leathers, and pulled up her tall black boots. I saw the professional way she strapped her weapons about her: rapier and main gauche scabbarded at her sides, the Lohvian longbow built for her by Seg over one shoulder, the quiver of arrows, fletched with the superb crimson feathers of the zim-korf of Valka, angled cunningly to hand, the long narrow Valkan dagger down one boot. She disdained the cape the pictured representation of myself offered her, throwing her head back so that the lights caught and gleamed in those outrageous chestnut highlights in her hair, reckless, glowing, filled with life.
Had she been with Seg and me as we tramped through the Snarly Hills she would have been more dangerous than either of us, than both of us put together, I did not doubt, by Zair!
Sitting sunken in a daze of longing wonder, exhausted, I watched the pictures, fired with passion, shaking with fear, exhilarated beyond reason, as the moments passed.
I, Dray Prescot, watched and suffered and triumphed with my Delia, my Delia of the Blue Mountains, my Delia of Delphond.
The fate of our Vallia was being decided as I watched and hearkened, and through the terrors that near drove me insane with fear for Delia I saw how she marched so blithely along and I thought I understood a little more of what the Star Lords wished me to know.
What the Everoinye did was done with knowledge and forethought, and what few mistakes they might make had no effect whatsoever on their plans.
A table hissed up from somewhere and brought refreshments. I sat, sunken, gripped by terror for Delia, watching. At last, the picture died. I had touched nothing of the food and drink on the table.
When the enormous blue Scorpion of the Star Lords came for me I cared nothing for Spikatur Hunting Sword, nothing for the Shanks. One thought, and one thought only, possessed me.
I stretched out my arms and soared into the blue infinity.
[i]
Here Prescot gives a résumé of the Battle of the Flaming Vosks, fought against the Shanks, and much old-soldier talk is quoted which I am almost sure is parody.
A.B.A.
[ii]
Jikai: this word here quite clearly carries the meaning of Crusade.
A.B.A.
[iii]
db: Dwaburs per bur. A dwabur is five miles approx and a bur is forty minutes approx.
A.B.A.
Alan Burt Akers was a pen name of the prolific British author Kenneth Bulmer, who died in December 2005 aged eighty-four.
Bulmer wrote over 160 novels and countless short stories, predominantly science fiction, both under his real name and numerous pseudonyms, including Alan Burt Akers, Frank Brandon, Rupert Clinton, Ernest Corley, Peter Green, Adam Hardy, Philip Kent, Bruno Krauss, Karl Maras, Manning Norvil, Chesman Scot, Nelson Sherwood, Richard Silver, H. Philip Stratford, and Tully Zetford. Kenneth Johns was a collective pseudonym used for a collaboration with author John Newman. Some of Bulmer’s works were published along with the works of other authors under "house names" (collective pseudonyms) such as Ken Blake (for a series of tie-ins with the 1970s television programme The Professionals), Arthur Frazier, Neil Langholm, Charles R. Pike, and Andrew Quiller.
Bulmer was also active in science fiction fandom, and in the 1970s he edited nine issues of the New Writings in Science Fiction anthology series in succession to John Carnell, who originated the series.
More details about the author, and current links to other sources of information, can be found at
www.mushroom-ebooks.com, and at wikipedia.org.
The Delian Cycle:
1. Transit to Scorpio
2. The Suns of Scorpio
3. Warrior of Scorpio
4. Swordships of Scorpio
5. Prince of Scorpio
Havilfar Cycle:
6. Manhounds of Antares
7. Arena of Antares
8. Fliers of Antares
9. Bladesman of Antares
10. Avenger of Antares
11. Armada of Antares
The Krozair Cycle:
12. The Tides of Kregen
13. Renegade of Kregen
14. Krozair of Kregen
Vallian cycle:
15. Secret Scorpio
16. Savage Scorpio
17. Captive Scorpio
18. Golden Scorpio
Jikaida cycle:
19. A Life for Kregen
20. A Sword for Kregen
21. A Fortune for Kregen
22. A Victory for Kregen
Spikatur cycle:
23. Beasts of Antares
24. Rebel of Antares
25. Legions of Antares
26. Allies of Antares
Pandahem cycle:
27. Mazes of Scorpio
28. Delia of Vallia
29. Fires of Scorpio
30. Talons of Scorpio
31. Masks of Scorpio
32. Seg the Bowman
Witch War cycle:
33. Werewolves of Kregen
34. Witches of Kregen
35. Storm over Vallia
36. Omens of Kregen
37. Warlord of Antares
Lohvian cycle:
38. Scorpio Reborn
39. Scorpio Assassin
40. Scorpio Invasion
41. Scorpio Ablaze
42. Scorpio Drums
43. Scorpio Triumph
Balintol cycle:
44. Intrigue of Antares
45. Gangs of Antares
46. Demons of Antares