Fires of Scorpio

Chapter one-3

I said, “Gods are not suns.”

“Agreed. But, all the same—”

“All the same, we’ll have to get back to the main party before they start after us and raise devils better left sleeping.”

Quickly, slurring details, I told him of the black sorcery within the mountain. “So we’d best be off. Nothing remains to detain us here.”

“And when you vanish in a puff of smoke, you’ll be gallivanting about somewhere else on Kregen?”

“Or Earth.”

“Aye.”

A lightness of spirits affected me now that I had told Seg. Two items of news had been dovetailed into a seeming one; and that economy pleased me in its use of emotional resources to the best advantage. Seg had killed to protect the honor of Delia, had filled a fellow’s mouth with blood and broken teeth in defense of mine. Deplore the violence though I might, in hard times on a hard world, honor — that tawdry bauble — sometimes has to be upheld to the utmost.

I’d do the same for Seg. That went without saying.

We went along the backtrail like a couple of savage hunting beasts — no. No, as I have said before, we were not like a pair of savage hunting beasts. We were.

Yet the chill conviction remained that against the dark sorcery within the tunnels of that gargoyle of a mountain, all our warrior skills would not prevail. We’d escaped, and had achieved a kind of victory. Now we had to make good our escape.

Seg’s reference to my disappearance in a puff of smoke was uncomfortably close to the truth. When the Star Lords sent their gigantic blue Scorpion to fetch me away from wherever I happened to be and plonked me down somewhere else it must in all seeming appear to any onlookers that I did vanish in a puff of blue smoke.

The problems we faced immediately were simple. We had to get out of this pestiferous jungle and back to civilization. Seg had to see the Lady Milsi safely home. I wanted to return to Vallia and Delia. The Star Lords had shown me that she was safe and handling her problems — handling them! She’s smashed the opposition that had enslaved her, and had taken command with all the imperial majesty and grace that makes her the supreme Empress of Vallia.

So that although Delia was safe and well, I hankered to get back to my island empire of Vallia and try to unify the place and make the place a real empire again, as it had been in the old days before the Times of Troubles.

“One sun, one moon,” Seg said to himself, half disgustedly, half with the pleased confrontation with a new idea that sounded impossible.

“And no diffs.”

“I can’t see how a world can have only apims like us. It is against nature.”

“Yet the apims of Earth might call the diffs of Kregen menagerie men—”

“Bone-skulled idiots! Ask your pal Unmok the Nets about that. He’s in the beast-catching business.”

“Probably,” I said, cautiously. Unmok the Nets would for a surety be on a dozen different schemes at once, if I knew him. A small animal broke cover ahead of us, and darted away to vanish into the greenery to our right. A thin screen shielded the lake here, the carved wall of the mountain lay to our rear, and ahead stretched the way we must go to win free.

“You are a kov without a province to govern,” I said. “There are provinces in Vallia. Will you take the Lady Milsi there — if she wishes to go?”

“If she wishes it — yes. I regard Vallia as my home.”

“As do I...”

“But I shall have to fight for my province.”

“Would you wish it another way?”

He heaved up another sigh and slapped his bow up and drew the arrow already nocked, and let fly. The rumbling bulk of the dinosaur that broke the screen of bushes and started for us took the shaft clear through one yellow eye.

Before the enraged beast’s bellow crashed out again a second shaft followed the first. Seg loosed a third time. Blinded, stuck through the pulsing skin of his throat, staggered, the dinosaur — all scales and fangs and claws — screeched and turned tail and blundered back into the bushes. A tremendous sloshing splash sounded. After that a succession of sucking noises, and splashes, and a screech or two, indicated where the denizens of the lake were feasting.

“Quick,” I said.

“No. The first shaft hit before I loosed the second.”

“True. Slow, then.”

“No. The third was in the air before the second struck.”

“True.” I c****d my head judiciously. “There was no wager on it, though. Had there been—”

“One, two, three,” said Seg.

And I laughed.

More than one person had judged this little foible of ours — of gambling on the outcome of shots in battle — as degrading, decadent, altogether horrible. In truth, it was some of those things. But, also, it served a deeper and more fundamental purpose in the horror of battle. My daughter, Princess Majestrix of Vallia, the Princess Lela whom we called Jaezila out of love, had instantly perceived the inner truths we men so clumsily sought to express by this betting on shots.

We had gone adventuring across the face of Kregen, Jaezila and I. Now, as Seg and I walked along the path leading to the camp where the rest of the party waited for us, I reflected that I was like to do much more of this adventuring than of ruling as an emperor. And, I would have it this way. My son Drak, the Prince Majister, would run the Empire of Vallia, and run it well. We had superb advisers, men and women we could trust.

Echoing my thoughts, Seg said: “So we’ll be off adventuring again, then?”

“We will, Seg, if the Star Lords do not demand some fresh service from me. There is no way, as yet, that I can stand against them, for they are superhuman. But I am working on some few ways of attempting to resist them. One day, I hope, I shall be able to take charge of my own destiny.”

The smell of woodsmoke reached us. In daylight, away from the jungle, the air was freer, we could talk, and not feel the pressures of instant destruction all about us.

Seg laughed. “It seems to me you’ve run your destiny pretty much as you willed it. By the Veiled Froyvil, my old dom! Look what you’ve accomplished!”

“Titles, ranks, some property here and there. They mean little, all save one. I count as far more important the family and our blade comrades.”

Pursuing his thoughts, Seg said: “And you’ve no idea where you will be sent by the Everoinye?” He used the word Everoinye, Kregish equivalent to the Star Lords.

“None whatsoever. If I disappear, do not think harshly of me. Just remember I do all in my power to rejoin my family and friends.”

“There is a great deal still to be done in Vallia—”

“Yes. But the Star Lords pursue their interests over all of Paz, over all of this side of the world. To them, Vallia is no more important than this island of Pandahem, of the continent of Havilfar, or any of the others.”

“They must be a right weird lot. And you’ve never seen them?”

“Not one. They are superhuman. But not, I judge, immortal.”

“I wish,” said Seg, “I wish they’d take me along with you—”

“So do I!”

“A scorpion, did you say?” Seg pointed. “Look!”

He strutted out from a rock beside the path, reddish brown, glitteringly black, his stinger held arrogantly aloft, waving from side to side — waving at me.

I felt the familiar constriction in my throat.

The scorpion of the Star Lords — would he herald the Scorpion, the phantom blue Scorpion so huge he encompassed the world?

He did.

Blueness caught me up in a chill embrace. Unseen winds howled. I was falling. End over end, stark naked, winded, I was seized up by the Everoinye, tossed end over end and dumped down blinded and gasping upon some other part of Kregen to sort out a problem for the inscrutable purposes of the Star Lords.

If... if they had not contemptuously tossed me back through four hundred light-years of space to the planet of my birth.