Allies of Antares

by Alan Burt Akers

  There were a lot of them, and they ran in from different sides, so I backtracked, taking them as they came. Some were what an unfeeling Kapt once called “blade-fodder,” some were your ordinary seasoned fighting men more at home in the line with their regiments. Some, three or four, were superior bladesmen. These consumed time. And, of course, I was never unaware that at any disastrous moment I would front up to a man — or woman — who was a better sworder than I was.

  If that happened — and it had happened and could occur at any moment — it would be highly inconvenient.

  A burly fellow with a tuft of green feathers in his helmet proved clever, working in combination with his oppo, a slighter man with a wizened face. These two held me up and others were running up, hullabalooing. I just avoided a clever cut at my thigh which changed trajectory with a cunning roll of the wrist and aimed to degut me, blades chingled and rang, I riposted against the little fellow and let my body go with the turn, avoiding the big fellow’s degutting stroke. They bored in again and two more started to circle around to my left side.

  I yelled.

  “By Krun! Behind you, rasts!”

  And, with the yell, I leaped.

  Cheap, melodramatic trick? Yes. But the big fellow flung a startled look back so that I could ignore him for the instant it took me to engage with wizened-face, circle his blade and punch him through, and then slice down across the throat of the big fellow as he pivoted back. I jumped clear. They fell. The other two hung back. But there were more. I ran. I hared off toward the vollers and saw Thefi at the controls of the green-painted courier voller we had liberated from Ruathytu and in which she and Lobur had traveled to Pandahem and back here.

  “Here, Jak! Run!”

  Without wasting any more breath I sprinted for the green flier and leaped aboard, tumbling in any old way. As it was, an arrow sprouted from the wooden coaming. I frowned as I untangled myself and then fell against Thefi as she swept the voller into the air. She could not rise at a steep angle, as we would have wished, for the vollers had been staked out in the lee of a gaggle of half-stunted trees. These were small enough, and yet large enough to be an obstacle. We went hurtling along in a wild swinging curve and then straightening to plunge up at the end of the trees.

  We never made it.

  I was just saying, “Well done, Thefi!”

  A mustard-colored voller started up at right angles to our course, coming in from the left-hand side. It hesitated, and then plunged on and Thefi, quite unable to hold the courier flier back or drive her up in time, screamed.

  We went slap bang wallop into the side of the maxi-mustard flier and I had a glimpse of Kregen cartwheeling upside down. The courier voller splintered all forrard, turning end over end, slewing away as the maxi-mustard airboat collapsed sideways.

  Thefi and I fell out in a wild tangle onto the grass.

  No time to feel winded or take notice of the bruising pain in my left shin or the thwack behind my left ear. Time only to snatch Thefi up, hurl her on stumbling across the muddy grass toward the next flier. She was the penultimate one in the tethered line. Thefi’s hair streamed loose, her helmet, its work done, long abandoned. We fled for the voller.

  The stupid pilot of the mustardy voller, who had pulled out right in front of Thefi, hung upside down from the coaming, blood streaming from his nostrils. Served the fool right.

  “I’ll do the chains,” I bellowed. “Up with you!”

  She did not argue.

  The first staple came free with a single heave. The second proved more stubborn, the cunning voller attendants having burred the staple end and cross-pinned it. I ducked out from under the airboat and called up.

  “Is there a crowbar, Thefi?”

  I looked back. The pursuers, well outdistanced by our brief flight, would soon be up with us, howling like a pack of hunting werstings. The pilot of the voller who had caused the accident, as I now saw, was a woman, not a man. She’d been no heroine trying to halt us, but some incompetent pilot who imagined a voller took up less than half the airspace required. The crowbar appeared over the side and Thefi said, “I’m all ready to go.”

  “In half a leem’s spring.”

  The crowbar snugged between chain and staple, I leaned back, forces took the strain, balanced, gave. The staple wrenched clear and the chain fell to the mud.

  Thefi yelled.

  “Guards!”

  She did not scream; but the urgency of her tone made me turn sharply enough to crack my head on the voller’s keel. I was suffering far too many of these cracks on the head just lately. Half-crouched, I stopped moving. Two boots, black and muddy, showed beneath the keelson. They were positioned in just such a way as would tell the trained eye of a sword fighter that the owner of the boots stood braced and poised, weapon lifted ready to strike down at anyone crawling out from under the flier.

  I hefted the crowbar.

  The bar of iron cracked against an ankle bone with a most unpleasant sound and the pair of boots hopped madly into the air. In an instant I was out from under the airboat and bringing the crowbar around again in a blow that stretched the guard senseless. His helmet fell off. Others of his comrades were running up, for Telmont had taken the sensible precaution of placing a strong guard on his vollers. The woman who had crashed into us had been attended to and sent off, and the guards must have gone back for a quiet wet until our commotion brought them running back.

  Using the crowbar after the fashion of an Aleyexim’s trakir, a hefty sliver of iron sharpened at both ends and hurled by the warlike Aleyexim in battle to deadly effect, I managed to knock over the first of the yelling guards. Thefi stared over the coaming, her face apprehensive and yet betraying no real concern.

  “Hurry, Jak!”

  Without answering — and remarkably heartened by Thefi’s obvious confidence — I leaped aboard. She slammed the control levers over to the stops and we shot away.

  Looking down as we passed over the last voller, I felt a pungent regret. She was not an enormous skyship, but she was an airboat of good size, of three decks and many fighting tops and walkways, and my regret really did me no credit. Gunpowder had not yet been invented on Kregen — if the Star Lords so willed it might never be invented — and that was most probably a good thing. But right there and then, the idea of toppling a keg of best gunpowder with a short fuse down onto that ship appealed to me with some force.

  “Well done, Thefi. Turn a little right and dive below the tree line. I don’t think they’ll expect us to do that.”

  She flung me a puzzled glance.

  “Wouldn’t it be best to make for Ruathytu at once? This is a fast voller.”

  “If you so order, princess, that we shall do. But I have my own voller parked down there and—”

  “Of course!” Her color was up, rosy in the radiance of the moons between clouds. “I see! And you will send me off to Ruathytu in this voller and lead them off on a false scent in yours, no doubt fighting them for the daring of it!”

  This was not sarcasm, not irony; it was the hurt of a girl being placed in a situation she detested.

  “The thought had crossed my mind—”

  “Well, uncross it then, Jak! We fly together.”

  “Very well. I just hope Garnath or one of his bully boys misses my voller. She was only loaned to me.”

  Thefi laughed, her head up, her throat exposed.

  “My father will buy you a dozen airboats.” Then she sobered, quickly — so quickly that I knew she remembered her own troubles with Lobur, black and depressing, and her laughter sounded hateful and mocking in her own ears.

  To make any of the superficial and routine comforting remarks would be redundant and clumsy. She had just discovered that Lobur the Dagger was not the man she thought he was. That order of discovery, entailing that degree of hurt, is not survived with the aid of a few kind words.

  All the same...

  “Your father, and Tyfar, too, may want to condemn Lobur too harshly, for they love you
and have been—”

  “Worried?”

  “More than that, Thefi, more than that.”

  My voice sounded hard, even in my own head.

  “And if they do — they do...”

  “But at least we can see Lobur’s reasons, why he did what he did. I can understand him, I think. He had no chance with you unless he performed some bold stroke, a Jikai—”

  “And this is a Jikai! Betrayal!”

  “When a man loves a woman concepts like that blur and lose their meaning.”

  She turned her eyes to look at me, over the bridge we had built between us out of our situation. She half-nodded.

  “You speak as though — as though you—”

  “I know.”

  Well, my Delia would confirm what I said. No doubt of that at all.

  We flew on, and talked desultorily, and soon it was clear that Thefi’s thoughts stopped her from speaking altogether. Wondering if I was doing the right thing or making matters worse, I felt I didn’t want Thefi to brood too much alone with her thoughts. If this negated my previous feelings on the matter, well, that was my privilege.

  “There is a woman,” I said. “Whose father — well, she was a girl, then — whose father ordered my head chopped off, at once. I swore at him, I remember, most heatedly. But afterward we fell into a sort of relationship we could both endure. He wasn’t such a bad old buffer, and he always wanted to get into the fighting, although his people prevented him.” I was talking to myself as well, now. This was a point that rankled still. “When he was killed I had gone — well, never mind that. He was slain by a damned traitor who makes Lobur a miracle of upright rectitude by comparison — I think — and I returned too late. So you see, Thefi, it all works out in the end.”

  She lifted her head to stare at me, for the weight of her feelings dragged down her head so that her hair fell forward over her eyes.

  “You are telling me things that pain you. I know. But, if you can, Jak, tell me. If this woman’s father ordered your head cut off and you are here — the order was not carried out.”

  “I’m not broken from the ib, Thefi, I’m no ghost. I was saved by the best comrade a man can have.”

  “And the woman?”

  “You’ll meet her. You’ll get on, the pair of you.”

  “Oh, yes? We’ll see.”

  Below us the land fled past and careful scrutiny of the sky rearward showed no betraying flickers of motion beneath the stars. The moons shone no reflections from pursuing vollers.

  Thefi said, “We keep abreast of all the foreign news, in Hamal, all the scandals and gossip.” Then, right out of the blue, she said, “We heard the story that the old Emperor of Vallia ordered that awful Dray Prescot’s head cut off, and he escaped and forced the Princess Majestrix to marry him. It was a great scandal. That was before Thyllis dragged him around Ruathytu tied to the tail of a calsany, of course. A pity he escaped, for then we would not be in such terrible trouble now. Your story, Jak, reminds me of that scandal.” She arched her brows. “Perhaps you just made that up to make me feel less—”

  “No. Did you see Thyllis’s coronation?”

  “No. But I heard about how Dray Prescot was dragged past. He was all dirt and hairs, anyway.”

  “Yes.”

  The Maiden with the Many Smiles shone forth and iced the voller in pink. The wind of our passage blew past. I pulled my lip, ruminating, staring at Thefi. Well, by Zair! And why not now?

  I said, “I did not make up the story, Thefi. I think of you as a friend, and you know Tyfar and I are comrades.”

  “I know. We owe you so much—”

  “No, no — or, perhaps, more than you think.”

  Now that was a damned stupid thing to say...!

  “Look, Thefi. We’ll work something out with Lobur. I do know about these affairs. I bear him no ill will. Do you believe that?”

  She did not reply at once. Then, “Yes, I believe you.”

  “Good. Then I can tell you that when Thyllis dragged me around Ruathytu tied to the tail of a calsany it was damned uncomfortable. And my daughter Lela, the Princess Majestrix, is deeply in love with Tyfar, as he with her, and it’s our job to do all we can to make them—”

  She put a hand to her mouth. She let go of the controls. Her face looked like a lily, pale and glimmering above a tomb.

  “You — you are joking, Jak? Jak?”

  “No joke, princess, except a joke on my fate. And not Jak, although I have grown used to the name. I am Dray Prescot — the awful, horrible, great devil, in person.”

  She did not faint.

  She might well have, seeing that she had been stuffed full of the most terrible stories of the hateful Emperor of Vallia. She swayed. I did not move. Her eyes regarded me over her hand which spread and dug so that her fingers and thumb bit deeply into the sides of her mouth.

  So, with intent and not particularly caring for the way I had to say it, I said: “Now you will understand that when I say Hamal and Vallia are friends, and comrades in arms against the Shanks and our other enemies, you will see I speak the truth.”

  She took her hand away. She breathed in. “I see you believe it.”

  “I believe it because it is true.” Then I brisked it all up and spoke smartly. “Now go and rest in the cabin. I will call you when Ruathytu is in sight.”

  She did as she was bid.

  If I say that as I stood at the controls I did not stand with my back square onto the door of the aft cabin, but rather a little to one side, you may feel contempt. I share that contempt; but, also, I am an old paktun and I would prefer to stay alive rather than be killed through an oversight. Thefi, like most princesses who survived on Kregen, would be quick with a dagger.

  She did sleep. A quiet look into the aft cabin proved reassuring, for she lay on the bunk bed, sprawled out and breathing slowly and evenly and not scrunched up into a fetal ball, hard and agonized. Some provisions had been stowed in the flier and a search brought to light smoked vosk rashers and loloo’s eggs, with a plentiful supply of the ubiquitous palines. So we could eat when Thefi awoke. She joined me and as we ate she said little, eating enough again to reassure me. She combed her hair and washed her face and dealt with the necessities of life in a way that, princess-like though it might be, revealed she was also a girl in a situation that ought to frighten her into screaming hysteria.

  She said, “Why am I not frightened, majister, emperor, Dray Prescot, great devil?”

  “Call me Jak.”

  “Oh?”

  “A lot of people do until they are easier in their minds. As to being frightened of me, if you were I would feel insulted.”

  “I would have killed you and joyed in the doing of it—”

  “That’s a lot of the trouble, Thefi. Lies make us do things we would not ordinarily dream even of contemplating.”

  She was not yet over the shock of this, to her, astounding revelation. After all, she was not accustomed to emperors who went off adventuring around the world and whose tastes did not run to gold and flunkies and having people’s heads off.

  When Ruathytu came into sight she sighed.

  “After I have seen Father and Tyfar I am going to wallow through every single one of the rooms in the Baths of the Nine!”

  “Every single one?”

  She lowered her eyelids. “Well, not in the zanvew.”[4]

  Patrols of vollers and saddle flyers whirled up to inspect us and we waved and were escorted down. I recognized some of the flutswods astride their fluttrells, and no doubt my battleship-face was familiar to them also. We touched down on the high landing platform of the Hammabi el Lamma and Thefi was instantly swept away in a bustle of women as Prince Nedfar and Tyfar advanced, beaming, welcoming, all smiles.

  “And Lobur?” they asked after the Lahals.

  I told them.

  “There is no sense in pursuing this matter further at the moment.” Nedfar looked every inch the emperor he was. “What you say of Telmont’s sweep into
the southeast concerns us more.”

  We walked through into private chambers where refreshments were served. Tyfar and his father were concerned about Telmont and his army, yet they ached to hare off — leaving me — to see Thefi. They thanked me, not effusively, but with a quiet sincerity that warmed, as I said, “It was Thefi who saved me.”

  Jaezila looked ravishing. I refused to worry over the future relationship between her and Thefi. I saw the way she and Tyfar looked at each other, the way they avoided entering too closely into the body-space of the other, the comical and yet frustrating way they circled each other like fighting men seeking an opening. I hoped Thefi, seeing the truth, would help. She might be the catalyst that would precipitate the actions everyone who knew them longed for and despaired of contriving.

  Chapter sixteen

  Affray at the Baths of the Nine

  Seg said, “Well, my old dom, I’m for the Baths of the Nine. You coming?”

  The Peace Conference had died the death. Most of the delegations from the Dawn Lands had gone home to carry on their intrigues and wars among themselves. Ortyg and Kytun had returned to Djanduin, and Jaidur and Lildra to Hyrklana. The city prepared for Nedfar’s coronation as emperor and we fighting men readied a fresh army to lead against Telmont. There was time to indulge a few burs in the Baths of the Nine.

  “You’re on, Seg.”

  “Which establishment? I have taken to patronizing The Sensil Paradise. It is perhaps a little larger than I’d prefer, but the exercise floor is splendid.”

  “Well, I suppose you can’t have it both ways.”

  There were many establishments in Ruathytu called The Paradise, qualified by gushing descriptives, and the Sensil was, indeed, a fine place, not too far from the Old Walls in the Sacred Quarter. We could take a couple of flyers from the palace and be there in no time at all.

  Tyfar breezed into the small room where we spent a deal of time arguing over the maps and eating and drinking and generally trying to keep out of the way. Instantly he declared himself ready to join us in the Sensil.