Allies of Antares (13 page)

“I will tell Dayra, father,” said Jaezila, and she was suddenly deadly serious. “She runs with bad company and there is a reckoning overdue for them. I will tell her.”

The fear that clutched me then was that the overdue reckoning for the villains who had bedazzled Dayra would fall upon her also. She was a headlong, vivacious girl, known as Ros the Claw, and I found it well-nigh insupportable that her enmity for me so distressed her mother, Delia.

Nedfar still held the golden goblet studded with rubies. I believe he felt the same as did I, that this goblet formed a covenant between us, the act of drinking a sacrament to and for the future of our two countries.

The news spread and the gathering turned into a party and the party atmosphere permeated the palace and extended into the city so that Ruathytu exploded to the stars. Prince Nedfar was well-liked, and now that he was emperor people could look forward to getting back to normal after the war. Things would change, of course; but life could go on and folk could breathe a little easier. Hamalese nobles crowded in to swear their allegiance. I moved a little way apart — I confess I was looking for a piece of squish pie — and I saw a reddish brown scorpion peering at me over the lip of a chased silver bowl packed with palines.

I stood stock still.

His body-segments glistened. His stinger lifted, hard and black. He stared at me. I guessed no one else in the lofty chamber could see this scorpion but me.

His feelers and his stinger waved. They moved commandingly. Still gripping my goblet of best Jholaix, I walked slowly to the nearest door and went out into the corridor and turned along past two Valkan sentries, who managed to hide their smiles and who saluted with stiff and ridiculous punctilio. The scorpion appeared ahead, along the corridor, and with a quiet word to the sentries, I followed him. The carpet muffled my footsteps. The air was close and hot and spiced with scents. The scorpion led me into a small room where two slave girls, stark naked, lay asleep on a truckle bed locked in each other’s arms. They were Sylvies. I took my gaze away from them, saw the domestic cleaning gear in the room, looked at the scorpion, wondering who had money to waste in buying seductive Sylvies to use as palace maids.

Blue radiance dropped about me.

The little reddish-brown scorpion vanished. In his place and glowing with the blue radiance of unimaginable distance, swelling and bloating over me, the immense form of The Scorpion told me I was summoned to the presence of the Star Lords. Huge, that phantom Scorpion, encompassing a crushing bulk far larger than could possibly be confined in this small room. The coldness swept over me.

The naked girls dwindled away. The room spun. I was falling and spinning, wrapped in the coldness of ice.

Winds tore at me, buffeting, roaring. Spinning end over end and still clutching the goblet, I whirled away into the vasty deeps of darkness.

Chapter eleven

The Star Lords — Allies?

The cold lingered and clung chill, and then went away and I could breathe again.

Insubstantial tremors, gossamer strokings, thistledown brushings confused my senses; I stood on grass soft underfoot and strode granite floorings, and cavorted through blustery winds high in the air. Gasping with a shudder I made no attempt to suppress, I opened my eyes.

Silver-gray veils shot through with rainbow colors like butterflies’ wings hung before me. Each hung alternately from right and left, curving gracefully to the center. Reaching out a hand I saw the insubstantial material lift away like a curtain before I touched it, rising to reveal a curtain beyond hanging from the opposite corner. As I advanced, each curtain lifted up and away to the side in turn, on and on. Do not ask why I did not look about me. The lifting veils ahead, innumerable veils, mesmerized me.

As though advancing along a corridor filled with veil after veil, I walked on, and beneath my feet the floor pulsed and banked like morning mist.

As if unraveling a tangled ball, I continued.

The beckoning veils drew away silently. The first chamber opened out ahead and on either side, walled in crimson light, floored with crimson tiles and roofed with crimson radiance. I walked on. Vague forms drifted at the edges of vision, to coalesce and glide apart again like phantom underwater fronds undulating in unfelt currents. The veils closed about like the wings of moths, soft and furred. So I went on.

The next chamber breathed a subdued greenness composed of spring grass and jungle fronds, damp and dewy, and the moss underfoot darkened with each footprint and faded as I passed along.

The third chamber after innumerable opening veils proved as I expected it to be.

All of yellow, golden amber yellows, bright brilliant yellows, light and sunshine and airiness, and that chamber passed and I went on following the opening way ahead.

In a myriad glittering lights like the eyes of dragonflies I stepped past the ultimate veil and put that curtain away and stood forth in massive silence into a chamber robed in ebon.

Here I stopped.

I looked about.

On the right hand wall of blackness three pictures were arranged in a horizontal row. They were oval in shape, thickly framed in silver, and each showed a painting of a world set against darkness, a world I recognized as Kregen, with the continents and islands of Paz clearly visible between bands and streaks of whiteness. I looked at the three pictures, and away to the other side of the chamber where the lights pirouetted. Perhaps a shape moved there; perhaps there was only a flicker of light upon shadow in my own eyes.

I opened my mouth.

“Everoinye! Star Lords!”

For three heartbeats the echo of my voice rang in the chamber.

Then—

“Dray Prescot, onker of onkers, prince of onkers.”

“Yes,” I shouted. “I am stupid, an onker, and I own it. And you — what are you?”

The rustling voice expanded within my head as well as around me in the warmed and scented air.

“We are the Everoinye.”

I cocked my head to the side in a silly instinctive gesture. Was there the faintest ghost-echo of humor in the voice, a tiny trace of mirth, like the last bubble in a forgotten glass of champagne? The Star Lords?

“You, Dray Prescot, are much changed. You were the blow-hard, the rough, tough warrior who swore and cursed and reviled us even when you faced what you imagined to be death or worse than death, even when you were slave. Now you are an emperor who makes emperors and kings, and you speak softly, owning to your state of onkerishness. Have you anything to say?”

The latter-day change in the character I ascribed to the Star Lords amazed me. They had treated me in the past not so much with contempt as with indifference. I carried out their missions for them or I was banished back to Earth. That, clearly, was a situation that had suffered change.

The black wall opposite the three pictures of Kregen was no wall as I looked broodingly in that direction, wondering what to say to the Everoinye that would convince them I was, indeed, the sober, sensible emperor and not the roaring tearaway I had been, still was, and no doubt would continue to be... That wall was an emptiness, a void, a gulf. At least, I thought it was, for it seemed, as I looked, to extend beyond the confines of infinity, if such a thought be possible, and the flickering motes of light danced and danced like fireflies in the evening.

“Say, Star Lords? Only that I have work to do on Kregen and you interfere with that work, as you have—” I stopped.

“As we have always done?”

“If you say it.”

The hollow voice sharpened and struck with a return of an ancient vigor. “Do not attempt to dissemble. We are privy to what you desire.”

“Then you must know what lies before me.”

“The continuation of our plans for Paz.”

I sucked in a breath.

And then, in that fog of bewilderment, I suddenly realized I still held the goblet of wine. It lay in my grip, hard and polished and real. I lifted the goblet, and drank, and emptied it, and so looked about — most ostentatiously — for a table whereon to place the precious thing.

Like a speeded-up growth, a mushroom-shaped table sprouted from the ebon floor.

So close it was, so quick, it nearly caught me betwixt wind and water. I looked up.

“And, had it done so, Everoinye — would you have laughed?”

The voice ghosted in on a sigh I heard with an amazing clarity.

“We were once mortal men like you, Dray Prescot. We have not forgotten how to laugh, but there is no occasion for that these days. You say you have work to do. We must warn you—”

I opened my mouth; my fists were gripped on the goblet, I opened my black-fanged winespout and I almost bellowed in the old intemperate Dray Prescot way. And then I closed my mouth and clamped my teeth, and waited.

“—warn you that your work has just begun.”

I waited.

“The Shanks.”

“They have many unpleasant names and that seems a popular one. I do not care for the results of their operations. Their hobbies are not to my taste. My people fight them. And you?”

If I expected the transformation of the Star Lords to encompass their rising to that bait, I was mistaken.

“You will fight them, Dray Prescot, for that is what we wish.”

A sudden, anguished, intolerable horror prostrated me. Was I to be hurled all naked and unarmed among the Shanks, the fish-heads, the Leem-Lovers? No, by Zair, that I couldn’t bear...

The all-pervading voice of the Everoinye encased me in words like spider-silk.

“We are old, Dray Prescot, old beyond anything even you with a thousand years of life could comprehend. There are objectives we must accomplish in due time. You have proved of value to us. We do not deny this. It is strange — as you would say, passing strange — that this should be so, for you are a harum-scarum miscreant, a rogue with delusions of grandeur, an emperor with charisma who can bring a whole world to do your bidding. And we understand the causes of your present meekness and level-headed tolerance. We approve and are not deceived.”

If this was a trap, I was not going to fall into it.

I said, “And what help can you give me?” I spoke with more harshness than I’d intended.

“We may not send you back to your planet of birth.”

Again, was there that dying champagne bubble of mirth?

“And positive help?”

“That, Dray Prescot, you must wait to find out.”

Then, understanding they would not elaborate on this point, I passed on to something I dearly wished to know.

“Tell me, Everoinye, why did you seed Kregen with so many wonderfully different races and animals?”

“You do not know that we did so, and, had we done so, it would not be for you to know the answer.”

“So you’re fobbing me off again? By Krun! I thought—”

The whispering voice was now — it had to be! — tinged with genuine mirth. “You are forgetful, emperor?”

I put the goblet on the table. It looked forlorn, perched there alone. I drew a breath. Before I could speak, the insufferable whisper said, “We had a hand in what was done on Kregen, as did Others of whom we will not speak.”

“You will not give me reasons, if you will not own up to your meddling. I fancy the Savanti may have some answers—”

“They know nothing. They objected at the time because of what the Curshin did. But the Savanti understood only some of the results; they have no knowledge of the reasons or the causes.”

“All the same—”

“Enough, Dray Prescot! We do not wish to send you back to your Earth.”

That, as you know, by Zair! was enough to scare me witless.

The Savanti, superhuman but mortal men and women, in their Swinging City of Aphrasöe, had first brought me to Kregen in order to work for them as a Savapim and help bring civilization to the world. I had failed their tests, now I was beginning to understand, because of the inherent rebellious recklessness of my nature that abhorred unjust authority. The Star Lords in their inscrutable purposes had taken me up and employed me and thus served my own ends in returning me to Kregen where all that I really wanted in two worlds awaited me. Delia! My Delia of Delphond, my Delia of the Blue Mountains! All this flummery was for her, and only her, and I wondered if these disembodied ghost voices, these vast brains, really understood that.

“You know I will not willingly return to Earth. Your determination to have your own way does go against the grain, for you are not gods...” I paused for only a moment, holding myself steady, wondering if they would blast me on the spot for what they would take as blasphemy. I went on: “You say you are old. You have plans for Kregen. Why me? Why—”

“You are not the first.”

“I suspected that.”

“Kregen is vastly different now from what it was. Our times run perilously short and there is much to do. You will do what you can against the Shanks. Perhaps that is all we can ask of you.”

To say I was astounded upon amazement upon stupefaction is to phrase my feelings very slightly. I swallowed.

“Oh, we’ll have a go at the Shanks. Nobody likes them.”

“Precisely.”

I ruminated. “What does that mean?”

“Precisely what it says. Now, Dray Prescot, lest you presume because we have told you a few small matters, be warned! The days ahead are filled with peril. Tread carefully. For all your intemperate hotheadedness, which you affect so cleverly, you may fall to the blade, to the arrow.”

“And?”

Well, insult them how you might, you wouldn’t startle a Star Lord easily this side of the Ice Floes of Sicce.

“And hew to your path.”

“Is that all?”

“It is all and enough, for it contains all.”

I rubbed the back of my neck and it was my turn to be startled. I looked down quickly. I still wore the comfortable lounging clothes I was wearing when talking to Nedfar. Odd. In encounters with the Star Lords material things like clothes and wine goblets tended to escape attention.

“Tell me,” I said, squinting at the confusing dragonfly lights, “what of your rebellious young Star Lord who challenged you. What of Ahrinye?”

“He is on a task beyond your comprehension and it is no concern of yours.”