The Pandahem Cycle II

Chapter two

Chapter two

The Devil’s AcademyIf the famous Watch of Peminswopt of whom Renko the Thief was so scared had chanced by just then and seen a wild bunch of ruffians breaking into what seemed a private house, they would have taken us for reivers, criminals, bandits. That piercing scream proved otherwise.

The little Och woman toppled sideways, unharmed as we crashed past. Pompino dealt with the Chulik in a summary fashion. The man was unready for such a swift and headlong assault, and he went down soundlessly.

We roared on along the passage.

“Down there!” yelled Pompino and we clattered down the blackwood stairs leading off at a right angle at the turn of the corridor. The others whooped after us. A vague orange glow from the edges of a door at the foot of the stairs abruptly bloated into brilliance. The door smashed open as Pompino put his foot to it. We all rushed through. The room beyond held four more Chuliks in iron armor and wearing brown and silver. Their weapons glistened in that orange light.

They did not hesitate. They launched themselves at us in a feral onslaught designed to smash us instantly, with no questions asked. Pompino yelled, Cap’n Murkizon’s axe whistled about, Larghos switched his sword forward. Quendur simply slid down and along the polished floor on his seat and skewered upwards. A nasty trick — dangerous, of course; but then that was Quendur the Ripper, reckless and swashbuckling. I joined them and in a trice the Chulik guards were overpowered.

“They were not guarding that entrance for nothing,” quoth Pompino. His sword indicated the curtained doorway at the far end.

The shrill and agonized scream broke out again, ending in a ghastly bubbling wheeze.

“Hurry! Before we are too late!”

The curtains whisked aside.

Pompino used his sword to open the drapes; what we saw beyond convinced us that swords would have to be used for a grimmer purpose before we were done with this place.

“The Devil’s Academy!” Pompino’s words summed up that scene. The man we had followed was in the act of dressing himself in clothes suitable for what went forward here. His assistants, meek, frightened, pallid men and women, fussed over him, oblivious of our entry. The room’s lamps shed that orange light upon the cages and the basalt slabs, the racks of knives and saws. For a foolish moment I thought we might have stumbled upon a surgeon’s operating room; but I saw no signs of tar barrels, and Kregans do not operate in quite that way. The man in the blood-stained smock over his brown and silver looked up. His fingers ran with blood. The girl child upon the slab would not live, not now. The saw in the man’s fingers was a single bar of crimson.

He shouted: “Who are you?” And then, quickly: “Guards! Guards!” For he saw our swords and understood what they meant.

The man we had followed struggled to get either into or out of the smock his attendants fussed with, and he, too, screamed for guards. It was quite clear what was going on. As Pompino said, this was the place where the priests of Lem learned their butcher’s trade.

We were too late to save the child who had screamed and so brought us here; we could try to save the four other children, three girls and a boy, penned in the iron cages against the walls. Their hands and feet were bound, and they wore blindfolds and were gagged. We did not think it was from concern over their feelings that they were thus blindfolded.

The half-dozen or so younger men in the ubiquitous brown and silver standing goggling to one side must be the acolytes, the trainees. Here they were taught the finer arts of sacrifice.

With a shout of pure horrified anger, Pompino threw himself forward. The others followed, yelling. This, I thought, was what the Star Lords wanted us to do, eradicate Lem the Silver Leem, root and branch. I gather that here on this Earth there have been discovered recently something over two hundred sub-atomic particles, including leptons, and things called glues which hold, or appear to hold, quarks together within protons. I’m pretty confident that the Star Lords know of many more sub-atomic particles if there are many more to know. These sacrifices were being divided and sub-divided, like atoms, into sub-atomic, sub-human, particles. If this was Lem’s idea of scientific research, then the Star Lords had our whole allegiance in putting a halt to it. So, nauseated, I dived into the fray, and my prime object was not revenge but to get the four children safely out of it.

The flash of sword flickered in a most particular and sinister fashion in that pervasive orange light. My comrades rushed upon the adherents of the Silver Wonder. I turned toward the cages.

As the clangor of the fight broke out at my back I looked at the cages. The iron bars bulked each with a heavy full roundness that told of strength sufficient to hold not only children. Leems would be kept penned there when required. The bolts were shot home, the locks clumsy and intricate. To one side two angerims gaped upon the scene.

Sharp-toothed are angerims, all hair and ears, and as a race of diffs who are not Homo sapiens they are an untidy, messy lot. Staring at me they backed off, holding their mop and broom up as though they were weapons.

“Just give me the keys,” I said. For the key ring at the taller of the two’s waist spoke eloquently.

“Keep off!” screeched one angerim, his hair sprouting everywhere, half-concealing his brown breechclout.

“Run!” yelped the other.

They threw down the mop and the broom and started to run toward a small door set abaft and to the side of the cages. Opaz alone knew what maze they’d disappear into if they escaped through that exit. I sprinted after them.

In their mad flight they kicked over a metal bucket containing bits and pieces. The floor stained red and slippery. I jumped. They almost reached the door when I realized this was no way to get the keys.

Instantly, I yanked out my old sailor knife, poised, and threw.

The broad blade pierced the thigh of the taller angerim and he toppled over, screeching. His companion did not wait about but simply wrenched open the door and leaped through with a long wailing cry. In a heartbeat I reached the fallen diff, saw that he would live if he reached a needleman in time, and took two things from him — one the key ring and the other my sailor knife.

The noise spurted up as Pompino and his crew sorted out the problem of the Leem Lovers. The third key fitted the lock and the first cage swung open.

The best plan would be to open all the cages first and then to release the bonds and the blindfolds. To do it the other way around would see the first child running screaming every which way, probably to fling himself in the way of a sword.

Each cage opened with its own individual key. A neat touch. Remaining on the clumsy iron ring three keys promised other doors in this place it might be worth the opening. I glanced over my shoulder. The acolytes had either run or been cut down. The two chief butchers, the instructors, must have attempted resistance, for the body of one still clutched in one half-severed hand a broken sword. The other vomited out his life over the corpse of the child.

From the distant end of this unpleasant chamber the guards at last appeared. A group of half a dozen or so Rapas rushed into sight. Predatory, beaked and feathered, their vulturine features convulsed with killing fury, the Rapas hurled themselves at Pompino and his men. No doubt they intended to avenge their paymasters.

Cap’n Murkizon let his booming roar lift over the noise.

“Hit ’em, knock ’em down and tromple all over ’em!”

This he proceeded to do with great gusto.

Confident that all was well, I returned my attention to the cages and the children.

If you wonder why I, Dray Prescot, whom my companions knew only as Jak, did not roar into a knock-down drag-out fight, but, instead, opened cages, then you profoundly misunderstand my nature. A fight is a fight; there have always, it seems, been fights and, no doubt in the nature of man and woman’s inclinations, there always will be fights. That does not mean a fellow has to hurl himself headlong into every one that comes along if there are more important tasks at hand.

Like now.

Freeing the children was easy; calming them down was an enormous task.

Only two were apim, Homo sapiens, like me. One girl was a Fristle Fifi, sleek and charming and graceful in her feline way, her fur a glorious honey-colored softness. The lad was a Brokelsh already with his coarse black body hair abristling everywhere, quite unlike the swagging growths fringing an angerim.

I’d half a mind to keep their ankles hobbled up; but after I’d spoken to them in a manner more brusque than I really cared for, they quieted. Their eyes, round and glistening, regarded me as though I was a fabled devil from Gundarlo or Cottmer’s Caverns. I tried to smile for them.

“You will all go home to your parents—” And, of course, that was the wrong thing to say. At that, they began to cry. The picture was obvious and ugly enough. So, to repair the damage, I told them that as soon as the nasty men had been dealt with we would find a new home with many sweets — in fact, I said, embroidering, “We will find you a home right next door to a Banje shop!”

A Rapa blundered past with half his beak missing and his feathers bedabbled a brighter color than their usual green-gray. I merely watched him as he struggled to reach one of the other doors in this place, for the Devil’s Academy was well-provided with exits. Larghos the Flatch, sweeping his sword in a slashing cut very suitable for a Bowman to use, helped the Rapa on his way. I held the little Fristle Fifi’s hand, and the other children clustered around. Their eyes remained large and round and glistening.

The noise quieted. The stink of spilled blood rasped in the close atmosphere. Pompino came over, looking as though he was halfway through a chore.

“Fire, Jak,” he said. “Now we burn the accursed place.”

“And hope the temple is handy.”

“Too right, very handy, to be consumed also.”

Larghos said: “That Rapa — he must be dying; but he dodged off. He could raise the alarm.”

“Then settle him, lad, settle him!” boomed Cap’n Murkizon. “By the nit-infested armpits of the Divine Lady of Belschutz! Don’t waste your sympathy on these cramphs!”

Larghos ran off, swirling his sword. Murkizon trundled along after. They were forming a right partnership, that pair.

Quendur the Ripper said: “I am glad Lisa the Empoin is not here to witness this.” He shook his head, raffish, reckless yet trying to reform.

“If she had been here,” Pompino told the ex-pirate, “she would have been more merciless than we mere men.”

“Oh, aye. That is sooth.”

I c****d an eye at Pompino. The Khibil brushed up his reddish whiskers. No doubt he was thinking of his wife, who nourished ideas above her station, and with whom Pompino no longer got on. A startling confirmation — a re-affirmation — in the coincidence of the actions of Pompino’s wife after a fight and what next occurred, a confirmation only that human nature is human nature, gave me a feeling of helplessness in the face of that very same human nature. Cap’n Murkizon returned to the chamber yelling with merriment. He fairly golloped out his glee.

Following him walked Larghos the Flatch, his head bent a little to the side and over the sleek dark head of a naked girl who walked close to him. We all stared.

“A cloak!” bellowed Murkizon. “To cover the Lady Nalfi!”

Quendur leaped to one of the less distorted bodies and whipped off the brown tunic. The silver hem was only lightly bespattered. He took the garment across, saying: “Until we can find something better for the Lady Nalfi.”

Larghos the Flatch took the tunic from Quendur. I noticed the officious way in which he acted, taking the tunic, fussing, handing it to the girl. She was in the first flush of womanhood, firm and rosy, with bright eyes in which a pain easily understood clouded the blueness. She lifted her arms and slipped the tunic on, shivering.

“Thank you, Jikai,” she said in a small voice, speaking to Larghos. He was acting as though he’d received a thirty-two pound roundshot betwixt wind and water, so we all knew his business was done for.

“The Rapa?” said Pompino, brushing aside what went forward, anxious to get on with the purpose.

“He led me to the Lady Nalfi,” said Larghos. He spoke through lips stiff with some emotion we again envisaged as being all too easy to understand. “I cut him down. And a rast of a Chulik tried to bargain with us over the Lady Nalfi—”

“Standing holding her!” roared Murkizon. “But she didn’t stay held long.”

“She just took his dagger from his belt and slit his throat.” Larghos gazed fondly at Nalfi. “A brave act for a naked girl in so perilous a position.”

She lowered her eyelids and leaned against Larghos.

“I — I had to.”

“Do not think of it, my lady, if it pains you—”

“No, no. It is not that. Just—”

Pompino burst over all this. “Find combustibles. Pile them up. Let us burn the place down and leave, for, by Horato the Potent, the stench is getting down my gullet!”

As we busied ourselves over this task, I reflected that the adherents of Lem the Silver Leem hired mercenaries of a reasonably high quality. Also, while it is said that Chuliks and Rapas are hereditary enemies, this is not strictly and invariably true. Of course, some Chuliks and some Rapas are always at one another’s throats, just as there are misguided apims who are hereditary enemies — here on this Earth just as much as Kregen, more’s the pity. But an employer will hire on mercenaries from many different races, and they will serve alongside one another for pay, and not quarrel overmuch. This system, as I have indicated, works to the employer’s advantage in that there is less likelihood of plots against him or her from the ranks of the paktuns taking pay.

The combustibles were set, the children and the Lady Nalfi drew away to a safe distance, and Pompino personally set the first flame.

We had seen no sign of the Brukaj slave who waited on the man we had followed here, and I, for one, could entertain a hope that he had escaped. Slaves are controlled, and do not always believe what their masters or mistresses believe.

Flames ran and crackled and laughed gleefully to themselves. Smoke began to waft in flat gray streamers, filling the place with a soft veil, hiding the horrors.

Retracing our steps up the blackwood stairs we encountered the little Och woman at the top, wringing her hands, crying.

Some of us were for cutting her down where she stood, there and then. Others of us, though, counseled mercy as we could not know the full story and there was certainly no time to wait to find out. Pompino shouted alarmingly, and the Och woman ran off, throwing her apron over her head. The rest of us, the children and the Lady Nalfi, came up and we headed for the front door.

Now even on Kregen in a civilized city a cutthroat gang of rascals with blood-spattered clothing and blood-reeking swords will claim attention if they attempt to march down the High Street. We halted on the steps, staring about.

The Lady Nalfi in her soft husky voice said: “I know a way. The back alleys. Come, quickly.”

Agreeing, we trooped down the steps and cut into the side alley between this house and the next. Murkizon trod on a gyp which howled and scampered off with his tail between his legs. Nothing else untoward occurred as we hurried along the alleys, past the backs of stores and houses, and so came out to a place where three alleys met. Here stood — or rather leaned — a pot house of the most deplorable kind. Only four drunks lay in the gutter outside. No riding animals were tethered to the rail. The Suns shone, the air smelled as clean as Kregan air ever can smell clean.

Pompino looked at Nalfi.

Larghos held her close and it was clear he would not relinquish her.

“If we clean off the blood—”

Pompino nodded. So we all went at the pump outside the pot house, sluicing and sloshing. Larghos eyed the four drunks calculatingly; but Murkizon told him that their clothes were far too ragged — and alive — for the Lady Nalfi.

Speaking in a solemn, careful way, in almost a drugged fashion, Larghos the Flatch said: “I shall see to it that the Lady Nalfi is dressed as befits her, in the most perfect clothes it is possible to find. Such beauty must be dressed in beauty.”

Nalfi did not reply; but her blue gaze appraised Larghos. He swelled with the importance of the task he had set himself. Pompino caught my eye, and smiled; I did not respond. Not all marriages are made in Heaven, and not all end in Hell.

When we were cleaned up we set off still keeping to quiet and less-frequented ways down to the docks.

Confidentially, Pompino said to Cap’n Murkizon: “Captain. It would be best if you asked Larghos, quietly, what he knows of this Lady Nalfi.”

Murkizon leered; but agreed.

The sea sprung no untoward surprises, sparkling pale blue with that tinge of deeper shadows past the rocks, which, in their furry redness sometimes looked perfectly in place and at others oddly out of keeping. Gulls flew up squawking as we walked along the jetty.

“Thank the good Pandrite!” exclaimed Pompino when we saw our boat was still moored up. Looking back over the spires and pinnacles of the close-pitched roofs we could see no sign of smoke. Murkizon expressed himself forcibly on the subject of fires, and when, icily, Pompino requested that he make himself plain, the bluff captain shut up.

But we knew what he was on about. Pompino had set the fires. We had all seen them burning, beginning to ease their way aloft. Why, then, had the godforsaken building not burned down?

Not until we had pulled almost up to Tuscurs Maiden and the watch, hailing us, prepared to receive us aboard, could the first wafts of smoke be seen over the city.

Pompino merely gave the smoke a single significant glance, and leaped up onto the deck. That glance spoke more eloquently than any “I told you so!”

Standing on the deck I said to Pompino: “I know a man, a fellow by the name of Norhan the Flame. His hobby is throwing pots of blazing combustibles about.”

“Aye, Jak. A handy fellow to have along now.”

“Down in Hyrklana, though — I think, for he was moving around the last I heard.”

“Don’t we all?”

The breeze indicated a fair passage, the vessel was in good heart, if a trifle stormbeaten, and she’d been careened and scraped at Pomdermam. Over on the shore the smoke lifted and people moved about on the jetty. Two other argenters like Tuscurs Maiden lay moored up. Well, being North Pandahem craft they were not quite exactly the same as our vessel which hailed from South Pandahem.

“It is reasonably doubtful, Pompino. But there is a chance we were observed. Therefore we may be followed.”

“We may, indeed.”

Climbing onto the quarterdeck Pompino radiated energy.

“Captain Linson,” he said to the master. “While I do not profess to understand the tides and the winds as sailors do, and while it is true that I merely own the ship, I would like you to take us to sea and toward the west at this very moment.”

Pompino, it seemed, had been learning that owners could not order their ships to perform evolutions like soldiers on a parade ground. His heavy-handed way with Linson, who was sharp, cutting, and with every instinct set on making a fortune from the sea, simply made the master even more indifferent. Linson was a fine sailor, knew his own mind, took enormous delight from tormenting Captain Murkizon, and was prepared to obey orders if they did not conflict too much with his own desires.

“We are able to sail at once, Horter Pompino. I made certain arrangements when I — ah — observed the smoke.”

“Did you now, by Pandrite!”

As Cap’n Murkizon and I sailed as supernumeraries, we had no direct part to play in getting the ship to sea, apart from hauling on and slacking off and running. This sailor activity pleased me for reasons Murkizon, who had been born on Kregen as had everyone else as far as I knew, could never understand. As for Murkizon, that barrel of blow-hard toughness ached to eradicate the imagined slight upon his honor.

The Lady Nalfi and the children, escorted below, were safely out of it. I caught Pompino’s eye as the canvas bellied and was sheeted home, and the ship began to come alive.

“Linson could see the smoke before we could, as he was higher.”

“Aye. Devilish smart is our master, Captain Linson.”

“Aye.”

Tuscurs Maiden heeled, took the breeze, and in a comfortable depth of water headed out past the Pharos. A few small craft bobbed here and there. The lookout sang out.

We rushed to the aftercastle.

“May Armipand the Misshapen take them!” burst out Pompino.

With shining oars rising and falling like the fabled wings of a bird of prey, wedge-prowed, hard, a swordship pulled after us, her bronze ram bursting the sea into foam.