Masks of Scorpio

Chapter one-1

Chapter one

GoldHow do you get on to civilized speaking terms with a daughter you haven’t met until she was a grown woman, a tiger-lady with Whip and Claw who once sought to rip your face off? It’s not all that easy. No, by Vox, not at all easy!

We sat together in the mizzen top, looking aft. Far astern two shining triangles showed where the pursuit gained remorselessly upon us in the quartering breeze. Soon they would overtake us and attempt to board and we would fall to handstrokes in the red roaring madness of battle — but far, far more important than that were these first stumbling steps in building a relationship between father and daughter.

My daughter, the Princess Dayra of Vallia, known as Ros the Claw, could not be expected to become suddenly all Sweetness and Light. After all, she’d hated and loathed me all her adult life. To find out that she had been betrayed and deceived, lied to, misled, and that I wasn’t quite the rogue she thought — not quite, but nearly, by Krun! — must have hit her with a shock that might topple less resilient minds.

As our ship, the stout bluff-beamed argenter Tuscurs Maiden, sailed on across the Sea of Opaz, bursting the water to a dazzlement of foam, she said to me: “What am I going to say to mother? I feel such a — such a—”

“I’m prepared to take most of the blame there is floating around,” I told her. “Most, but, by the Black Chunkrah! not all! You’ve got to face up to it, too. And your mother shares no part of the blame. Frankly, I don’t know how she has managed over the seasons, what with me going off and the children turning into a bunch of rapscallions — well, except for Drak—”

“Drak!” She laughed, high and perhaps a little too tensely. Her face — that gorgeous passionate face so much like Delia’s face darkened by the undercurrents of character she must inherit from me — regarded me in a wild, self-hurting way. “Drak is a sober-sides! He’s so high and mighty and filled with his own sense of integrity he’ll — he’ll...”

“He’s a good brother to you, Dayra.”

“Perhaps he tried to be. He did try to speak to me a few times... But I was surrounded by brilliant and clever people who told me—”

“Who told you a pack of lies!”

She did not answer but held out her hand for the spyglass.

“They’re catching us,” she said, the glass centered and swaying with our movement. “But they’re slow about it.”

With that characteristic half-tilt of the head and a swift squint up she established the positions of the Suns. The great red sun, Zim, and the smaller green sun, Genodras, the twin Suns of Antares shed their streaming mingled radiance upon the face of Kregen and Dayra wrinkled up her nose and said: “I doubt they’ll overhaul us before nightfall.”

“The Maiden with the Many Smiles is due early,” I pointed out. As the largest of Kregen’s seven Moons, the Maiden with the Many Smiles would afford light enough for boarding.

“True. But there will be cloud.”

“You’re sure?”

“No. But it is likely. Zankov was always complaining about the clouds.”

I made no reference to Zankov, the chief instigator of my daughter’s ills. My comrade, Cap’n Murkizon, in breaking Zankov’s back, had not quite killed him. I couldn’t honestly say I wished greatly for the rogue’s recovery.

As though the thoughts in our heads followed a similar train, Dayra said — and with a tartness that was not all mischievous twinkle: “Suppose I told this bloodthirsty crew you’ve gathered around you just who you are? If I told them you were the Emperor of Vallia — what d’you think they’d do?”

“That’s easy. They wouldn’t believe you. I’m just Jak, or Jak the Shot, or Jak the Whatever Has Recently Happened. They’d laugh in your face. But, still, if you care to, try it. Tell them.”

“And your foxy Khibil partner, Pompino?”

“Well, I’ll allow he might believe it. He has heard the name of Dray Prescot mentioned before.”

She steadied the glass upon the two pursuing ships.

“Oh?”

“The lord of Bormark — whose coast is just visible to the southward — Kov Pando, and his mother, the Kovneva Tilda, knew me when I told them I was called Dray Prescot. They remain firmly convinced that I used the name as an impostor. They believe I am Jak, for they met the real Emperor of Vallia on an unhappy occasion for them. That, they tell me, was not me. So I think Pompino will take the same tack. It is not easy to persuade ordinary folk that emperors and princesses go wandering around among them — as you should know, Ros the Claw.”

“You call me Ros Delphor!”

“Agreed. I merely made a point.”

Mind you, young Dayra for all her artistry with the Whip and the Claw, the rapier and the dagger, for all her cunning and resourcefulness, was still not yet your fully accomplished spy. She unthinkingly used Vallian expressions. She swore by Vallian gods and spirits. Down here in Pandahem, whose various nations had over the seasons fought many costly campaigns against reivers from Vallia, Vallians were not welcomed with open arms. She’d chosen to adopt the new name of Ros Delphor. Now, I happened to know where Delphor was, although it boasted but one claim to fame, and that within the boundaries of Vallia.

Delphor was a tiny, insignificant, placid village situated in a pleasant and verdant spot in Delia’s Imperial province of Delphond. Its one claim to fame was that, some five hundred years or so ago, the puissant and much-respected Sister of the Rose, Vasni Caterion ti Delphor, had been born in a tiny thatch-roofed tumbledown. As I say, this information would mean nothing outside the island empire and, one has to admit, precious little inside, except to those who cared. I just happened to know through the insights vouchsafed me into the Sisters of the Rose and allied sororities by the Everoinye, the Star Lords. The point was, Delphor was a Vallian name. It had the ring of Vallia. Dayra ought to have chosen a name either more neutral or positively Pandahemic in its associations.

So said I, watching those two bloodhounds forereaching on us, and gauging the descent of the Suns, and worrying over Dayra, and, in general, not overmuch enjoying myself.

“You all right up there, Jak?” bellowed up Pompino from the quarterdeck.

I leaned over. His reddish whiskers bristled, his arrogant foxlike face shone ruddily. I bellowed back.

“All all right. They gain on us steadily.”

“May the black flux of Armipand suck them down!”

Dayra said to me: “Do I detect a querulous note in our proud Khibil?”

“Oh,” I said. “Pompino’s top class on land, and in a fight on the sea. But since he bought his fleet of ships he’s turned into a worry-guts over them, coddling them like a hen over chicks, always worrying that something will bring disaster—”

“Something usually does!”

Those sort of laws operate on Kregen as on Earth...

Dayra had only recently won free of her evil friends, and we had had little time together in which to pack all the talking necessary. Mingled with the wondering reflections on our previous conduct when we had met were all the painful readjustments we had both to make. There was no sense in trying to rush all this.

Pompino yelled again, and the lookout perched in the crosstrees screeched down the enlightening information that our pursuers gained on us, slowly but relentlessly.

“I’m for a wet,” I said.

“I’ll race you down.” With that Dayra hoicked a long and shapely leg over the side and started down the ratlines, going like a grundal of the rocks. To do what any self-respecting middy would do, and slide down the backstay, would see me on deck well in the lead. I did not. I clambered down after her and we touched the planks at the same time, flushed and with something of that mad helter-skelter enthusiasm that comes of rapid descents. Eiffeltoweritis, you could call it.

“Ha!” Pompino greeted us with a flourish, twirling up his mustache. “You two have something to cheer you up, then.”

“Unlike you, Pompino, who has the cares of a fleet of ships on his shoulders.”

“Aye! Well may you mock! Every time I put to sea I am beset with pirates, with storms, with everything to upset a fellow!”

“That’s the way of it when you’re a sailorman.”

No one aboard knew that Dayra was my daughter. She was known as Ros Delphor, a good companion, and handy with a rapier. If those two ships tracking us managed to board, Dayra would be in there, hacking and slashing with her Claw and thrusting with her rapier. She was worth two in a fight like that.

That I felt absolute horror at the prospect, that I heartily wished my daughter was not involved, is only half the truth. Certainly I wished that Dayra was not into all this fighting. But, as this was Kregen and she was a princess, a Sister of the Rose, and engaged on hazardous missions, then what must follow would follow and there was precious little I could do about it.

Captain Linson, master of Tuscurs Maiden, spoke in his brisk efficient manner. A valuable man, this, one who while seeking his own fortune enhanced the fortunes of the Owner. That Pompino would see this arrangement the other way around was, besides being amusing, a part and parcel of the relationship these two had.

“We’re in for a blow,” said Linson.

I stopped myself from the instinctive snuff at the air. For what may appear simple reasons, I had pretended to have no knowledge of the sea. This was a foible which amused me at the time I’d first begun it; now it dragged a trifle. All the same, I would persevere...

“You think so!” exclaimed Pompino. He bristled. He took it as a personal affront when the gods of the waves heaved in wrath and upset his insides.

“Green Nasplashurl of the Seaweed Mane will ride tonight, I think,” went on Linson with dry relish.

Pompino cast a hunted, a furtive look around.

“Is there no cove where we may shelter, captain?”

“With those two beauties on our tail, horter?”

“Oh, we’ll blatter them, good and proper, when the time comes. I’m thinking of my supper.”

“You mean, dear Pompino,” said Dayra, “that it is likely not to remain your property for long?”

A booming laugh brought Cap’n Murkizon, barrel-bodied, startlingly red of face, fiery-eyed, alongside. “I’ll warrant you’ll keep your supper down, horter Pompino, if we get to handstrokes with those fellows! By the decaying gums and putrescent eyeballs of the Divine Lady of Belschutz! There’s nothing like a little blattering to tighten up a fellow’s insides!”

I felt for my comrade. He and I both worked for the Star Lords and carried out perilous missions for them. We’d come to this strange, unspoken, understanding that each was responsible for the other in the eyes of the Everoinye. They might not see it that way, for they were superhuman, mysterious powers who spoke to us through the agency of a giant scarlet and golden bird. But we felt it. For sure.

“The pity of it,” I said, “is that this ship is from South Pandahem. Up here in the north — well, what do you know of the shoals, the navigation points, the hazards? Cap’n Murkizon? Captain Linson?”

Both shook their heads.

“We sail without charts here — and that is a fool’s pastime.” Linson had not suffered to let his view on this folly be known.

“Unless we take charts from some wight or other...” Cap’n Murkizon let his words trail off, uncharacteristically.

“From them?” I said, and jerked my thumb sternwards.

The rascally leanings of these rapscallions were proving a joy to me, used as they were in the service of the Star Lords and Vallia. In the fertile loam of their scheming brains the idea rooted itself instantaneously, grew, flowered, and their reactions exploded in a thunderous chorus of: “Aye!”

I was, as the saying goes, showered in petals.

Since the time when he’d counseled us to refrain from fighting the hideous Shanks and then we went ahead to fight them, Cap’n Murkizon fancied his honor impugned and considered he continued on in life with a slur attached to his name. This was not so. What it did mean was that, the Cap’n Murkizon with us at the moment would not, most certainly would not, be the one to mention the odds. He would not point out that we would have to fight two ships. A few moments ago all we had been thinking of was running away from them and taking the treasure we had — liberated was the right word here, by Krun! — to where we could share out the spoils; now we turned our scheming minds to the question of how best to ensure the destruction of our pursuers.