Scorpio Ablaze

Chapter one-1

Chapter oneThe Glitch Riders swept out of the dawn in a whirling welter of pounding hooves and spurting sand. Their furious onset billowing their desert robes laced with dust made them ghostly apparitions bursting from the half-light and shadows. Flashing blades swinging in lethal arcs and long slender lances stabbing mercilessly tumbled the sleepy caravan guards into instant ruin.

The first shrieks brought Mevancy to the flap of the tent in three lissom strides. She looked out with a caution ingrained in her. Directly before her a screaming guard running between the lines of tents threw up his arms and collapsed as the sharp narrow lance head pierced past his backbone.

The Glitch Rider reined up, withdrawing his lance, and his animal reared and his hooves pawed the dust-laden air. Mevancy saw that picture of primeval violence and mannish domination. The lance slanted down towards her, its head darkly stained. Under the brim of the turban-wrapped helmet and above the sand scarf, fierce dark eyes caught the radiance of the early suns and glittered upon her.

The Glitch Rider must have seen a defenseless woman’s figure in the tent opening, a fine shapely woman clad in a single sheer yellow nightgown. He forced his animal’s head around, hooves splaying sand, thrust the lance into its stirrup bucket and dismounted in a single smooth movement. A word into his mount’s ear quietened the beast immediately. Beyond the opposite row of tents screams blistered into the dawn air. The Glitch Rider started for the tent in pleasurable anticipation. This was the kind of loot for which he and his companions attacked the desert caravans.

Mevancy nal Chardaz lifted her left arm and held it horizontally outstretched straight in front of her breast. Her arm pointed at the advancing warrior. Her clenched fist curled below the line of the horizontal. Blood suffused Mevancy’s face. Her left fist twitched and there followed a glinting twinkle in the air. The Glitch Rider emitted just the one scream. His hands flew up to the red pudding that had been his face. The sand scarf flapped uselessly, shredded into pieces, blood stained. He doubled up, writhing, staggering, choking.

Mevancy went quickly back into the tent and snatched up her sword.

“What is it, Mevancy? What is that terrible noise?”

The girl in the other desert camp bed lifted her head and stared in understanding horror. The sounds were self-explanatory.

“Make yourself as small as possible, Bella. Make yourself look like a part of the tent. For an actress of your gifts...” and here Mevancy recognized her own cruelty. Still, she was feeling particularly aggravated and annoyed at the stupidity of the guards who had fallen down on their job, so she finished: “That should not be difficult.”

Bella Chuan-Hsei gave a tiny shriek. Her hands pulled the sheet up tightly. Her arms were pink and smooth and firmly fleshed, glowing. Mevancy swung back to the tent opening. Her own forearms were granulated with a fine honeycomb of sunken points, the deadly bindles, some of which had destroyed the desert raider’s face. What Mevancy did not say was that no Glitch Rider was going to enter this tent whilst she still swung a sword or could shoot off her bindles. She didn’t say it because she felt that kind of fustian best left to Bella’s orations upon the stage.

When she stepped out onto the sand the Glitch Rider was rolling about and greasy blood splattered between his fingers. She used her sword efficiently and gave him his quietus. She breathed deeply and almost steadily.

Noise racketed on in the camp and now the sliding screech of steel upon steel told that the caravan was coming awake and resisting the raiders. Because she had learned more of the tricks of the trade from Drajak the Sudden in their journeys, she caught the bridle of the Glitch Rider’s mount and tied the reins to a tent peg. Booty, after all, was booty.

Around the corner of the next tent along a man ran swiftly into view. He cast a swift glance back. By the cut of his desert robes, the turban-wrapped helmet, the style of his sword, he could be nothing other than a Glitch Rider. Mevancy lifted her own blade.

He saw her and momentarily checked and then came on furiously.

She lifted her left arm before her, held straight with the fist tucked down. A shadow fleeted past the corner of the tent and there were Trylon Kuong and Llodi the Voice running swiftly after the raider.

The dust kicked into the air slicked on her tongue flatly, dry, and her nostrils stung. She faced the Glitcher, a slender handsome figure of defiance.

“Keep away, my lady!” yelled Llodi. His strangdja glittered as the twin suns pierced their mingled streaming light over the tops of the tents. Light began to illuminate the world.

“Not until I’ve bindled the shint!”

The Glitcher swung up his sword expecting to cut down this girl and get clear of his pursuers. For him, at least, the raid had gone wrong. He saw the tethered animal, a narrow-flanked, spiky-headed, six-legged wegener. He saw the sprawled body of his tribesman. Unhesitatingly he sprang for the wegener.

That sideways movement took him at an angle so that Mevancy’s shot for his face splattered against the side of his helmet and shoulder. One or two of the little darts, her bindles, smacked into his cheek. He ignored the sudden and unexpected pain, reaching for the reins tied around the tent peg. Inflamed, Mevancy started for him, sword uplifted.

Kuong — young, limber, alive with a reckless passion in which honor and glory were all muddled up in his head — shouted in alarm.

“Mevancy!”

Llodi let rip a low growl of animal anger and fairly hurled himself on.

The glittering holly-leaf-shaped head of his strangdja, a killing instrument of cold steel, thrust forward as he charged. Llodi the Voice, a rough tough caravan guard who, had he been on watch, would never have been caught sleeping, put great store by his new friends, Trylon Kuong and the lady Mevancy — and, too, that hard and ferocious devil, Drajak the Sudden, who had so mysteriously disappeared. Oh, no, Llodi was not going to let anything nasty happen to the lady Mevancy.

The Glitcher reached the tethered wegener as Kuong leaped upon him and as Llodi thrust his strangdja forward past Kuong’s hurtling body.

Sword and strangdja slashed and pierced the desert raider. He let rip a screech of agony, trying to swing about, trying to get his own sword into action, and Mevancy delivered a last cunning stroke that smashed him to his knees into the churned-up sand.

The three friends stood, together, over the body, and looked about for any more of these pestiferous Glitchers. They had no need to speak. They acted as a team.

A galloping wegener in his lolloping six-legged gait crashed past with his rider dangling from the saddle, his chest a mass of red under the crushed mail. Others appeared, running, and following them a vengeful mob of Kuong’s personal guards mixed with caravan guards and mercenaries of other nobles and merchants traveling with the caravan.

“Bad cess to ’em,” growled Llodi, grounding his strangdja. “What with murdering and thieving an’ all.”

“That’s their way of life,” observed Kuong. He glanced at Mevancy and the tiniest dent appeared in his forehead between his brows. “You are — well, Mevancy?”

“By Spurl!” She tossed back her dark hair, impatient with herself. “It was just that first sight of the Gahamond-forsaken bastard that startled me. He looked so — so—” She did not repeat the thought that had slammed through her brain at sight of the Glitcher — so mannish. Instead, she finished: “His damned evil eyes flashed like those of a risslaca.”

“He was meat ripe for the chopping, my lady.” Llodi sounded positive.

“Yes.”

“Then,” said Kuong briskly, in his best manner of young nobility, “it is time we had the first breakfast.”

Not for the first time Mevancy saw with pleasure that briskness in Kuong, an attitude to life vastly different from the majority of his countrymen and women down here in Tsungfaril in Southern Loh. Of course, he was a Paol-ur-bliem, a man sentenced to the punishment of being reincarnated over and over again until he had purged himself of his own crime against the god Tsung-Tan seasons upon seasons ago.

Those who were not the Accursed, not paol-ur-bliem, lived only so that they might after death enter the paradise of Gilium. Their lackadaisical way of existing infuriated strangers who did not share their religious beliefs. Kuong had a goodly number of lifetimes to live before he could dream of entering Gilium and living in paradise for eternity.

Because Kuong was a trylon, the third highest rank of nobility, he could sit at the folding table with his friends and grandly eat the first breakfast whilst others cleaned up the camp. The Glitchers’ bodies were stripped of everything useful and then taken out and dumped.

The caravan master, Nath the Horizons, a man whose face bore the creases of seeing vast distances across the desert, walked up to the table. He looked troubled. Gracefully, Kuong invited him to sit down and partake of the first breakfast.

“Thank you, lord. I bring grave news.” He sat down but did not eat.

Levelly, Kuong said: “Tell me.”

“Those shints. May Tsung-Tan in his infinite wisdom consign each one individually to the Death Jungles of Sichaz.” The words were heavy, flat on the dusty air. “They slashed the water skins.”

“Oh, no!” burst out Mevancy before she could stop herself.

“Aye, my lady. It is serious—”

“Water must be rationed at once.” Kuong stood up. “We must gather up every last drop. We must know how much we have left.”

Llodi stood up instantly and Nath the Horizons also rose, more slowly. He was an important man in the desert, and knew it; also he was not a lord.

“There may be just enough to see us all back to Makilorn. There is no question of going on our way farther west.”

“Just so that we all arrive alive,” breathed Kuong.

Mevancy threw him a quizzical glance. The young trylon, when he died, would be reincarnated into the chosen body of a newborn baby. It could well be thought he would welcome the chance of a genuine death so as to get his punishment over with as soon as possible. Yet Kuong did not, as far as Mevancy could see, appear to share that common ambition of all the Accursed, the paol-ur-bliem.

About to throw the dregs of her cup into the sand, an unthinking action, she hauled herself up. “Every last drop,” she said.

“Aye.”

“Reminds me of the time when old Perlandi got caught in that dratted sandstorm. We were short of water, then. But we survived.”

“We will, my lady,” said Llodi with gravity, “survive now.”

She was about to agree in a rolling oath or two with Llodi when Nath the Horizons said in his heavy way: “If it is the will of Tsung-Tan, I shall accept that with joy, if he calls me up to Gilium at last.”

Llodi and Mevancy exchanged impatient, annoyed glances. Still, neither wanted to question the fanatically held religious beliefs of these people.

Mevancy contented herself with: “Well, by Spurl, I have a great deal to do. I intend to return to Makilorn in one piece.”

“And,” said Kuong, looking into her flushed face, “so do I.”

The caravan wrapped up and set off, heading east, and by agreement the second breakfast was omitted.

There was water, just, to get them through on savagely reduced rations.

When Mevancy suggested to Kuong, and he passed on the idea to Nath, that they should dump unnecessary impedimenta, thus lightening the load and increasing their speed, the reaction of most nobles was one of rejection.

“If we leave our tents and personal goods here in the desert,” protested Laygon Fariang, a stout lord with a stutter, “they will be lost! The Glitchers may come back, there are bandits — oh, no, my slaves will carry their burdens.”

“Quite right!” confirmed Stromni Yriang, purple-faced, jewel-bedecked.

“Well,” temporized Kuong, “we will see.”

In the event, when the caravan staggered with only half their animals left into the city of Makilorn, they left a trail of abandoned goods in their wake. No one sweated. Dust and sand caked them. They were a procession of ghosts stumbling to the banks of the River of Drifting Leaves.

Kuong’s people had not suffered as badly as the slaves of the other nobles. By the same token, most of his possessions now lay dumped back in the wastes of sand. Going up to his villa, he said: “I’ll send out for the gear. If it is still there.”