Wrath of Antares

Chapter one-1

Chapter oneA madman clawed at the debris with torn and bleeding fingers. The close confines of the tunnel echoed to a hoarse and desperate gasping. The detritus spilled in a heap as massive to a distraught imagination as the whole of the Stratemsk, daunting, heartbreaking, agonizingly slow to clear. Dust choked everywhere distorting the weak light of the torch wedged into a cleft. A maniac tore at the jumbled rock. A fellow bereft of his senses cursed and choked and ripped at the sarcophagus that entombed all he loved dear on two worlds.

That poor demented creature was me, Dray Prescot.

Delia had stood here to warn me, the real, wonderful Delia and no weird phantom conjured by Illusionist magic. She had warned me — and the roof had fallen on her.

The jagged chunks of rock lacerated my fingers, scored my palms. There was blood — so what did that matter? Nothing! The insensate mass aroused such hate within me I choked with bile and dust. I had to break through! I must see what horror there was to see.

The aftershock of the explosion of the Prism of Power had brought the roof down and among my retching gaspings the roof creaked above. I ignored it. Nothing mattered in all of Kregen save my Delia... nothing!

The picture of Delia with the roof falling in shards and sharp-edged shatterings all about her burned itself past my retinas into my brain. That ghastly picture would torture me past remorse — for at the time I’d dismissed Delia as a mere apparition sent by San W’Watchun to warn me. The roof creaked again; or was that my diseased imagination demanding retribution?

A large jagged boulder resisted my efforts. I bent and pulled and hauled and shook the thing, trying to prise it away. That stupid piece of rock was ugly, hateful, despicable, disgusting. It lay there with rivulets of dust trickling from its edges and in my rage and despair I swore the nauseating thing leered back at me and mocked me.

In this waking nightmare gripping me I imagined I heard above my frantic pantings a distant shout. I distinctly felt the floor tremble — or was that me, trembling in fear and terror for my Delia?

Dust smoked into my face. The torch tumbled down and was extinguished. For a moment, a moment only, a ray of light struck past my shoulder. The rumblings in my head sounded distant and vague. But they were not in my head. For a single instant I glanced up in the darkness and saw the roof splitting apart.

The roof fell on me and the black cloak of Notor Zan enveloped me in the embrace of oblivion.

When I woke up for the first time I let out such a yell of pain I thought it would bring down this roof on me, too.

I felt the needle’s little prick, then another, and most of the pain faded away. My eyes appeared to be surrounded by yellow so I knew my head was heavily bound up with clean yellow bandages. Another needle pricked into my skin and off I went again into unconsciousness.

The second time I woke up the pain had dulled to a throbbing that permeated just about all of my body. I heard the murmur of voices at my back and tried to turn my head. At once a hand restrained me. The ceiling was completely covered with intricate paintings. The colors and shapes charmed. This Kregan philosophy of occupying the mind of a recumbent and helpless patient is capital therapy. I could look at those pictures all day quite happily—

Like the cruel blade of an axe smashing down a door another and altogether dreadful picture flashed before my eyes.

Delia! Delia of Delphond, Delia of the Blue Mountains, smashed and mangled and bloodily destroyed under tons of mountain debris. That picture tortured me so that I cried out in agony of spirit.

The acupuncture needle brought blissful emptiness.

On my third awakening I knew that, as I was Dray Prescot, I had to overcome this nightmare. Delia was gone. Therefore I had to come to terms with the horror. Delia would desire — would command! — me to go on with life. Were there not our children to cherish? Were there not our comrades? Were there not all the happy memories of our times together? Well, then, fambly, she’d say. Get on with it!

A spoon touched my lips and soothing syrup spilled over my tongue. I did not open my eyes. I took the nourishment placidly.

Then I was dispatched off to sleep again. What I dreamed I do not know. I remember nothing — and perhaps that is best. My dreams must have been agonizing.

The next time I awoke I opened my eyes to study the room, not with any interest in my surroundings or desire to know what was going on; but simply because that was what was expected. Apart from that amazing and therapeutic ceiling the room was totally unremarkable. Beige painted walls, yellow curtains, a low table with a bowl of flowers and the bed — that was the sum total of what I could see. The door must be outside my range of vision and I just couldn’t be bothered to turn my head to look.

Now, for an old and wily fighting man not to ascertain where the door in a room was located was completely unheard of in the warrior circles in which I moved. That glaring omission just goes to show how far down in apathy I was sunk.

Oh, yes, because I knew Delia would command me in her most formidable tone of voice to go on with life I would obey her and do so. But there would be no joy in it.

Thus deep in depression an idle thought occurred to me. The voices I imagined I heard at my back in the tunnel and the fresh light must have been real. Someone must have pulled me out. At once I felt impelled to action — dolt! Something I should have thought of right away, staring me in the face, half-blinded by pain though I was, something I must know immediately. A question I must ask — now!

I yelled

I shouted, I bellowed, I created an uproar they could have heard under the Pilza waterfall smashing down between its crags.

A round, frightened face appeared beside the bed, as it were hovering in the air. Two bright blue eyes opened and the little pink mouth started to stretch into a frightened scream.

I forced myself to remain calm and sober. I couldn’t smile but when I spoke I hoped I sounded like a normal man.

“Please do not scream. I am perfectly well.” That, of course, was a downright lie. “Who pulled me out? I must see them at once, right now.”

“Of course, majister.” She whisked off at once in a rustle of starched bodice and I flopped back on the bed.

My shouts must have brought everyone running and they must have been waiting outside the door. It didn’t matter how fast they were; the wait stretched and stretched for me. My old heart went clatter bang like a calsany cart over cobbles. I felt my fingers curling into fists. I yelled again: “Hurry it up there!” and on the instant heard the door open and they crowded in. They formed a ring about the foot of the bed and gazed at me.

San W’Watchun with his amazing glassy eyes favored me with a look like that of a disappointed schoolteacher regarding a backward child. The Chulik, Chekaran the Balass, slapped his half-drawn sword back into the scabbard, an action paralleled by the cadade, Ronun ti Bjorfling. The others of the Illusionist’s personal guard wore various expressions, mostly of relief that I wasn’t being murdered in my bed.

As for Mistress H’Havalini, her serene Venahim face showed no emotion save that of perfect peace. Her astonishing talents as a practitioner of the mystic healing process known as schonibium must have been practiced on me, to restore the balance of the spirit.

“Majister—” began the Illusionist.

“Who pulled me out!” I bellowed it so the words rang in the bedroom. Then, a tithe of polite conduct occurring to me, I rapped out: “My thanks, my deepest thanks. What did you see in that confounded tunnel? Did you find—?” I was astonished to discover I couldn’t speak the words. They crescendoed in my old vosk skull of a head like the famous Bells of Beng Kishi. But I couldn’t say them aloud.

Chekaran said at once: “The tunnel was cleared completely. Nothing — no one — was discovered.”

My eyes closed. I felt dizzy. My head felt as though it was coming off, spinning.

“Nothing — no one?”

“The tunnel was cleared after you were taken out. Every palm’s width of it. Nothing, majister.”

I closed my eyes. Delia had been there. W’Watchun had not sent an illusion to warn me the roof was caving in. So the Star Lords had sent Delia. Could I hope the giant Blue Scorpion had whisked her away in time? That was the agonizing point of which I could not be sure. Had she been taken up to the Star Lords a mangled corpse?

Staring upon these men of W’Watchun’s guard I reflected that I’d not known them for very long. In that time, though, we’d fought together, come a little to understand one another, lost a comrade. Not one of them was a Pachak with that race of diff’s strict code of nikobi in service. They’d given their word to obey the orders of the captain of the guard and those set under him in the mercenary form, which varied from region to region in the nature of these things. I felt that I could trust them.

All the same — all the same, I had to see for myself.

When I went to swing my legs out of the bed I found they were most reluctant to move. With a petty gesture of annoyance I swept the sheet aside. From ankle to thigh, each leg was encased in windings of yellow bandages. Most of my body was similarly wrapped. The head bandage slipped a trifle just like dear old Deb-Lu’s wobbly turban. To say I looked like a mummy was patently obvious.

In a kind of low, growly, hoarse voice, I said: “You’ll have to carry me between you. I must see.”

Well, of course, they tried to dissuade me. They failed.

By the time I’d been carried, pushed, pulled, and finally dragged to the end of the tunnel past where I’d so frantically dug at the debris, I had to admit it. Not a single sign that Delia had been there could be discovered.

My brain was not working aright, I was sure of that. A thought struck me which, simple though it was, appeared to me with stunning force. The Illusionist W’Watchun had not sent a phantom of Delia to warn me; suppose the Everoinye had not sent a flesh and blood woman but had dispatched an apparition of Delia? Well?

The thought tormented me.

After that futile tunnel expedition and the dreadful thoughts invading my brain accompanied by the incessant clanging of those famous Bells, I withdrew into myself. I drew a cocoon about me. Oh, yes, I obeyed the Puncture Lady and the needleman and Mistress H’Havalini and stayed in bed and drank my broth and slept and recovered my strength day by day.

The day came when I could actually walk unaided from one side of the room to t’other. Yellow bandages still wrapped me. Apparently this was a part of a technique practiced by the needleman, Doctor Drewinger, which he called The Clonset Jibr’chun. I called it a bloody nuisance.

This information was given me by the little round-faced, blue-eyed maiden who had popped into view when I’d yelled. Her name was Shalli, an apim lass, and with her two little colleagues, Thansi, a Fristle fifi, and Solana, an Och maiden, nursed me. They were brisk, efficient, pert and utterly charming. When the time for a pungent medicine came around, or the time to change the acupuncture needles, they were strictness itself. No jumped-up hairy Clansman who had become an Emperor of Emperors could awe them or halt their firmness.

These three maidens, although from a Nursing College and not a refined ladies’ school, were well worth Gilbert and Sullivan writing songs about them.

To be honest, they were about the only cheer I had at that ghastly time.

Orders restricting ale and wine consumption were rigidly observed. When Ronun tried to sneak in a bottle of a fine yellow, it was removed from his person with the alacrity of a devotee of Diproo the Nimble-Fingered. The three lasses kept on refilling the water jug. This, they informed me, more than a little primly, was a strict injunction from Mistress H’Havalini. “Water will help purify your ib.”