In the end Nedfar joined us with a gaggle of people from his suite, including Kov Thrangulf. That plain man was most subdued. After Thefi had eloped with Lobur, Thrangulf had shriveled into himself. Nedfar's plans for Thrangulf and Thefi to wed, thrown into disarray, might now never be realized. Yet I, along with one or two others—not, sadly, including Tyfar—saw far more in Kov Thrangulf than met the eye.
So quite a crowd of us flew off to The Sensil Paradise.
Taking the Baths of the Nine is more than merely having a good wash. It is a social occasion. The place was thronged with people. No one wore any clothes, of course. When you take a bath you do not customarily wear clothes, although the folk of Wihtess solemnly wear what they call sponge-garments when they take a bath, for they have some funny ideas about the naked human body. The halls were lofty with radiance, wide with marble floors, heated and kind. The folk filled the various chambers and rooms with chatter and vivaciousness, their skins and furs and scales of striking variety. Among the apims with rosy skins, and brown and black and golden-yellow skins, the blue and green teguments of Hem-vilar and Olinmurs added a pleasing color contrast. Very few people paid much attention to color or texture of the body-covering of the folk with whom they bathed or swam or played games.
As we walked through into the heated air and the laughter and horseplay, Seg, very quietly, said to me, “These Hamalese have got over the war very quickly."
“Aye. I'm pleased."
He caught a ball hurled by one of a group of girls whose strengths overmastered her skill, and threw it back.
“They caused enough suffering, and, by the Veiled Froyvil, look at ‘em! You'd think they won!"
This comment did not discompose me, for I was well aware Seg shared my views—in fact he had had a part in shaping mine—on our coming confrontation with the Shanks and he was merely feeling the disgruntlement of the fighting man. Seg, like myself, was no bloodthirsty warmonger. It was just that his honest sense of wages due for sins committed was outraged by the sight of Hamalese enjoying themselves, like this, now, when perhaps a more studious demeanor would be more appropriate. Then the ball flew through the air toward us again, and we realized that these jolly girls were not unskillful—far from it—but wished us to join in their game.
So we did.
The scented and heated air resounded to the shouts and laughter bouncing off the high walls and roof, and the splashes of divers and swimmers, the click and clack of gamesters in their corners. Everyone worked up a splendid sweat to be washed sweetly off in the pools.
Tall bronze doors with engraved scenes of flower gardens in their panels separated by borders of intertwined flowers gave access to the next chamber. We heard before we saw. The yells of laughter and enjoyment changed to yells of fear and screams of panic. We looked. The high doors opened. Armed and armored men pushed through, slashing with swords to clear a path. Ahead of them, speedily glimpsed through the panicking horde of naked bodies, ran a youth brandishing a sword. He saw us, he saw Nedfar and Tyfar, and he pointed the sword.
He wore a bronze mask, and his helmet bore a tuft of feathers, brown and silver.
The men following him wore over their armor short blue capes adorned with badges. I recognized the badge, for the schturval showed in outline a picture of a sword piercing a heart. This schturval was the badge of the adherents of Spikatur Hunting Sword.
How, I wondered, with a sinking feeling of despair and a scalding feeling of anger, did that fit in with the ominous brown and silver feathers?
Everywhere naked men and women, boys and girls, were screaming and running, stumbling and falling. Like a stone dropped into a pool, the group of hard dark armored men created retreating ripples around them. The youth at their head ran eagerly on, fleeting over the marble toward Nedfar and Tyfar...
“You must get away, Father!” yelled Tyfar. He grabbed the emperor's arm and started to drag him to the side. I knew well enough that Tyfar, himself, would not run. Nedfar struggled.
“I will not deign to flee from miserable assassins..."
“We are naked and unarmed!"
Seg ignored the emperor and his son. He glanced at me, and I nodded, and so we moved a little ahead. How damned strange it was to be in this situation, one of the classic idiots'—only delights detested and dreaded by Kregans! On Kregen you never go anywhere—if you are a fighting sort of person—without your sword, or bow, spear or axe. But, taking the Baths of the Nine, you expect the proprietors of the establishment to provide guards who check everyone entering for weapons. An assassin must have problems concealing a deadly weapon on his naked body. No doubt the hired guards of The Sensil Paradise were sprawled in their own blood, puddled on the floor of their guardroom.
“Now if Turko were here,” said Seg casually, flexing his muscles.
“He is a great Khamorro who can kill an armed warrior with his bare hands. He has taught you a few tricks, Seg, I know. But you'd better let me take the first fellow and his weapon."
The running youth was almost on us now, isolated as we were on the marble floor, the roof high above us, the suns light streaming mingled jade and ruby all about us. Tyfar joined us.
“Ty!” I said very quickly. I usually never called him Ty. “Let me."
“Nedfar is my father—"
The youth with his armor and sword and brown and silver feathers that were the colors of the evil cult of Lem the Silver Leem halted and stared at us. His mask glittered.
“Stand aside, unless you wish to die. The emperor is doomed for destruction."
Tyfar started to shout, “No, cramph. It is you—!"
I leaped.
The young fellow was not expecting a naked and unarmed man to leap on him, clad in armor as he was and wielding a sword ... He'd probably never been slave, and when you are slave you become accustomed to nakedness. Mind you, as I took his throat in my grip, I reflected that a bight of slave's chains might have come in handy to throttle him with. I choked him and took his sword away and threw it back. I wondered who would grab it first, Tyfar or Seg.
A single punch laid the young lad low. He was a boy and not a girl; his armor shape would not have accommodated a real girl, only, as Zolta might have said, “Those poor creatures who have not been blessed with the bounty of Zim.” As I straightened up, Seg's fruity bellow reached me.
“Stux!"
I dropped lower and the flung spear whistled past above my head. No time to grab it—but as I glared with a malevolent fury toward the assassins the next stux hurtled in. I leaned to the side, took the stux from the air, reversed it, poised ready to hurl it back. Then I changed that plan, satisfying though it was, and tossed the throwing weapon back. With its small cross-quillons beneath the head the pig-sticker would make a handy weapon for a man who otherwise must rely on bare hands.
Seg had grabbed the sword, so Tyfar took the stux.
We did not wait for the other assassins to close in. We went hurtling down into them. And Tyfar screeched, “Hanitch! Hanitch!” I pushed any thoughts of displeasure out of my mind, dodged the sweep of a sword, kicked the fellow in the guts with a tingle all the way from toes to pelvis, grabbed another man's arm, pulled him, stuck two fingers up his nostrils, threw him away, seized the chap at his side who tried to stick me with his rapier. The rapier changed hands. It is a trick.
He staggered back, his hands clasped to his face, and the blood was shared between the rapier blade and his eye.
“Spikatur!” The yells of anger lifted as the rest charged on. “Spikatur Hunting Sword!"
More naked men crowded up to range alongside us and a flung stux punched through the chest of a young Nath Hindolf. He coughed and clutched the ugly shaft transfixing him, and staggered back. I felt the anger.
“Keep out of the way until we have weapons!” I yelled. I felt mad clear through. What a waste!
Kov Thrangulf, his belly thinned over the past months, muscled up, breathing in a snorting rasp.
“I'll take a weapon, aye,
and break it over their heads, by Krun!"
I had to flick a spear away with the rapier and then we were at hand strokes with the rest of the assassins of Spikatur.
It was a right old ding-dong, to use a soldier's descriptive.
Seg's sword flashed and glittered, and then fouled with blood. Tyfar might not have been wielding an axe, but his stux went in and out like a trip-hammer, and each time he did not miss his target. Thrangulf snatched up a sword from the limp hand of a dead man and waded in, shouting blood-curdling promises. And, as he did so, so Princess Thefi and a gaggle of naked girls ran yelling from the side room pursued by more armed and armored stikitches. Although, to be fair, we did not call the assassins of Spikatur Hunting Sword stikitches in the same way we dubbed the professional assassins of Kregen as stikitches. The girls ran and we naked men tried to stay close around and so afford some protection.
Jaezila appeared, and she wielded a sword and so I knew she'd dealt with at least one of these ugly customers. As she plunged into the fight at our side, Tyfar went berserk.
“Ty!” shouted Jaezila. She plunged after Tyfar as he tore through the assassins before him.
Just how anyone might expect unarmed and naked men to hold armed and armored stikitches, let alone defeat them, passed understanding. All I had hoped to do was create enough time to enable our friends to escape. And, now, here they were, all yelling and hurling themselves into the fray!
Well, we fought. Some of us were killed. Just how many opponents we had, just how many adherents of Spikatur had broken in, we did not know. We fought them. It was not pretty. Although, in the aftermath, it must have been amusing, not to say ludicrous. As you may imagine.
Tyfar and Jaezila appeared as flashing limbs and flashing blades. Desperate with fear for my daughter, I went headlong into the bunch fronting her and Tyfar, and we sliced and lopped and hacked, occasionally as the opportunity offered time, thrusting.
This was all a desperate chancy business and entirely hateful to me. Jaezila and Tyfar, risking their necks like wild young bloods in a savage challenge of dare and counter-dare! Seg stood with me and we sliced and slashed and took cuts and felt the sting and the blood, and still we battled on.
The people who had fled screaming from the exercise hall flooded back, shrieking and moaning, tearing their hair. We heard their frenzied yells.
“The doors are locked! We cannot get out! We cannot escape!"
The interruption drew a small space about Seg and me, and in the instant I leaped for the glistening form of Jaezila—glistening with the blood of others—Seg bellowed: “The rasts have worked this sweetly, Erthyr rot ‘em!"
“Aye! We have to finish this."
Jaezila insisted on plunging on. Tyfar flung a quick look at me as I hauled on his arm, risking an instinctive blow.
“No, Jak, no! If Jaezila goes on—so do I!"
My rapier flicked up and swept a stux away. I bellowed.
“You young idiot! Get Jaezila to have sense!"
“She is too much like her father!"
By the Black Chunkrah! I pushed Tyfar aside and ran on, and the two black-clad men who tried to cut Jaezila down stared in shocked surprise first at the floor and then at the ceiling as they collapsed. I'd used the hilt, one-two and bang. Now I raced to stand before Jaezila.
Before I could speak, she said, most crossly, “Get out of the way, Father, do!"
“If you get yourself killed—"
We paused in our family conversation then as assassins strove to break past and get at Nedfar. Seg and Tyfar ran up. Tyfar had salvaged an axe. Now his true stature as a fighting man revealed itself in the short economical strokes of the axe, the way he parried and swept on, the trick he had of whirling and then, in a seeming check, sweeping on to slice a neck or a thigh. He was good, was Tyfar, very good with an axe.
The fight swirled about the great hall, and blood swirled in mocking echo in the water of the bathing pool.
Through the armor-clad ranks fronting us, and who would in the end overwhelm us with weight, I glimpsed a thin, a painfully thin, man whose eye socket glittered with gems. He was urging his men on, although not himself running to the fore.
“Gochert!"
“So that's the fellow,” said Seg. “I'll mark him."
His sword blurred and drove into the eye socket of the bulky man whose massive armor failed to save him from Seg's precise thrust. As he fell Seg stepped away and got his blade into a most painful spot through the next man's armor. But blood showed streaked across Seg's arms and chest, and the blood was his own. That blood was precious to me.
The brown and yellow feathers bristled around a Rapa's beak as he hurled his stux at Seg. I leaped, took the spear from midair with my left hand. I reversed it and hurled it back—but not at the Rapa. He squeaked and ducked away. The stux flew for Gochert. It missed. No time to curse. Time only to cross blades with the next assassin and try to stay alive.
“We're done for, my old dom,” Seg panted. “But we've had a good—” Here he parried, riposted, withdrew and the fellow who had tried to stick him—a hairy Brokelsh—dropped with only one good eye, “—time. I've no regrets. Not even Thelda, now."
“We're not done for yet, Seg!” I spoke sharply. Seg, from Erthyrdrin, possessed a fey capacity to seek the future only to fill himself with information no one needs. His wild and yet practical nature was in violent contrast. “We have to hold the rasts. Just hold ‘em!"
“Oh, aye. We'll do that."
Then we were pressed back in a confused tangle of blades. Only a few arrows arched, and in that press the assassins would as likely slay their own. Not, from what we knew of Spikatur, that that would deter them. The most obvious explanation for the lack of bows and shafts was the simple difficulty of smuggling them in. As we fought and were forced back and saw good men go down I reflected that I'd smuggled a Lohvian longbow and shafts into places more difficult than The Sensil Paradise. My opinion of the adherents of Spikatur Hunting Sword, which had vacillated up and down, now fell even more. They were going against what I felt to be the best interests of all the people now, and they couldn't even do this job properly.
Tyfar and Jaezila, with Thrangulf and young Hando and the others, pressed back around Nedfar. He was most annoyed. We could all see that even with these assassins’ lack of skill, we could not last forever.
The next fellow to tangle with me—he was a Moltingur whose horny shoulder carapace needed to be only lightly armored, and whose faceted eyes and tunnel mouth with its rows of needlelike teeth bore down to devour me—suddenly lifted himself up, tall. His eyes crossed. He looked suddenly perplexed. As he fell I saw the dint in the metal of his helmet flap over his temple. In all that uproar of clanging blades and screams and shouts and the stamp of feet, I heard the rattle of the leaden bullet across the marble.
The man before Tyfar took an arrow through his neck, above the corselet rim.
Then a shower of arrows arched and we saw the rows of men along the balconies shooting down, and slinging bullets. But I knew who had slung and loosed first. Barkindrar the Bullet and Nath the Shaft, for sure.
Jaezila's personal retainer, Kaldu, simply leaped from the balcony rail full into the armored ranks of the assassins of Spikatur.
“Kaldu!"
“Into them!” I bellowed and we all rushed forward, screeching like rampant devils. Which we were.
After that, all the people of Spikatur Hunting Sword wished to do was escape. We chased them to the doors, which now lay unlocked. We did not catch Gochert. He, no doubt, the moment he had seen the plan go wrong, had been the one to unlock the doors and the first to flee.
Panting, blood-splashed, elated, we stood on the steps brandishing our swords, and the good folk of Ruathytu gaped up at this crowd of madmen who paraded naked in the open before the steps of The Sensil Paradise. The air kissed our heated skins. The fellows couldn't stop talking. All I was thankful for was that Jaezila and Seg and Tyfar were safe.
Needleme
n were summoned to tend the wounded, and then we went back to wash off all the muck and blood. At least, we were already in the perfect place to do that.
* * *
Chapter seventeen
Delia Commands the Dance
Deb-Lu-Quienyin hurried into the little room we habitually used and, pushing his turban straight, said, “I have to inform you that the empress is coming."
I saw that he teased me, and that he shared my joy. Nedfar had no empress—or empress-to-be—since his wife had died he had not, as he put it, had the heart to marry again. So, since empresses do not flock in great numbers, even on Kregen, I could let a great fatuous smile spread all across my ugly old beakhead.
“Delia!"
“Aye, Jak, the Empress Delia, may all the gods and spirits have her in their keeping."
“When?"
He spread his hands. The mystical powers of Wizards of Loh were very great, very great indeed, and yet I fancy there are gaps and inconsistencies in what they can and cannot do in these fringes of the occult. “She speeds toward Ruathytu. There is wind and freshness and a tumult of sea far below."
“Well, I just hope she's all right—"
“Jak! Majister! I should rebuke you for a Lack of Trust.” When Deb-Lu spoke in Capital Letters in these latter days he often did so out of amusement and self-mockery. He was now, in my estimation, just about the most powerful Wizard of Loh there was, certainly in Hamal and most probably in all Havilfar and Vallia combined.
When Seg heard the news he fired up and we started making plans for enjoying ourselves in the short interval between Nedfar's coronation and our departure to deal with King Telmont.
The strong parties of guards who had, perforce, to go everywhere with the notables irked us; but slackness on our part and a relaxation of watchfulness had resulted in the ugly affray at The Sensil Paradise. We could not afford to have Nedfar killed, in a cold political way, and in the warm concerns of friendship.
Coronations, tiresome though they are in reality, are generally regarded as occasions of the utmost importance.
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