Mazes of Scorpio (7 page)

This was not madness.

No draught animals pulled the chair. It just went howling along across the floor, hissing, and when it careered around an invisible corner neither it nor I leaned over.

Expecting the light to turn from crimson to green and then to yellow, and to finish up in an ebon chamber with three oval pictures on the walls, I did not close my eyes.

No shimmering veils of gossamer brushed my cheeks.

Pungent scents stung my nostrils.

My eyes watered.

My nose ran.

I tried to clean myself up and the straps held my arms fast locked.

So, then, irritated beyond measure, I yelled.

“Everoinye! Star Lords! What footling nonsense is this?”

They heard me all right. I did not doubt that.

But they did not deign to reply.

After a space I gave up raging at them and calling them all the foul names I could put tongue to, and sat in a dull stupor waiting for what nonsense they would bring on next.

Abruptly, the chair stopped.

There was no sudden jolt. My insides did not give a forward lurch as we halted. One moment we were spinning along, the next we stopped. The transition, abrupt, made no difference to my posture or feelings.

The chair hummed to itself.

I looked around.

If I was not deceiving myself in the pervasive glow, the crimson walls curved away to each side as well as fore and aft. The chair and I waited in the center of a great cross, an intersection of crimson vaults.

A green oblong appeared to my right side.

The size of two men, it shone a refulgent greenness into the lambent crimson glow.

I bellowed.

“Is that you, Ahrinye?”

Ahrinye, a younger Star Lord, had made his opposition to the older Everoinye known. And younger and older...? What meanings did those words have to beings whose life spans must run into the millions of years?

With a whining hiss another chair shot out of the green oblong.

It rushed past me.

It hurtled away along the crimson floor, heading the way I had come.

One glance was all I had, one look at the occupant of the other chair.

He, in his turn, had had one good look at me.

His numim roar lashed out as he whistled past.

“Zaydo! You no good rascal! Skulking again, are you—”

And then he was gone, Strom Irvil of Pine Mountain, gone whirling away. His glorious lion-man’s face was in full flower, all his wounds healed. His fur, his hide, glowed more brightly than I had seen it before, when he’d been trapped in the bowels of the earth and sorely wounded. His bristling lion mane was a tawny umber. He roared with the righteous wrath of a great lord chastising a lazy body slave.

The body slave had been me, Zaydo, and Strom Irvil had been taken up before my eyes, taken up by the Everoinye.

Well, he’d come belting out of that green door.

I did not think he’d gone in there by choice.

Was it my turn next?

The chair moved.

Hissing, it curved past the green oblong. The greenness dimmed, dwindled, was gone.

I sucked in a breath.

Nothing like this had happened to me before.

The Star Lords had told me they were growing old. How old that might be was beyond my guessing. Were they becoming senile? Were they fumbling? They had made mistakes before. They had made a mistake with a time loop, and dropped me down into the wrong time, and, correcting that mistake, had given me all of Djanduin. Perhaps their powers were failing?

Anyway, they hadn’t given me the Kingdom of Djanduin. That wonderful country had come my way first through boredom and then through duty. I was the King of Djanduin.

The chair passed on along the crimson floor, and the vaulting rolled past above, and the whitely glittering star constellations changed and glowed and shone with supernal fires.

Another chair passed, going by in a flicker of movement.

The occupant was a man, an apim like me, a member of Homo sapiens. I add the sapiens in deference to our old friends the Neanderthals, who in these later times have become far more exciting than of yore. He sat hunched, looking ill. He was, as he would have to be to be a Kregoinye and perform the will of the Star Lords, a big strong fellow with a powerful face. His hair was long and blond and confined in braids beneath a steel helmet. His face bore the scars of battle. He wore a badge upon his chest, a thing of gold and silver threads in the form of a rampant graint. The ferocious crocodile-headed bear leered at me as the man whisked past.

He was gone, and I twisted my head around to stare after him.

He stared back at me, turning to look aft. He smiled.

I returned his smile.

This man, this blond warrior with the graint badge, was the third Kregoinye I had seen. The second was Strom Irvil. The first was Pompino, that foxy-faced Khibil of unusual talents, with whom I had shared many adventures. Would I encounter Pompino here? I looked forward to that meeting with genuine joy.

As for this third Kregoinye — his hard warrior face bore marks of illness, deeply indented lines, and a pallor that floated his tan like scabbed paint. What, I wondered, had happened to him? Then I banished all other thoughts, to concentrate on what was happening, as the chair bore me, with horrible suddenness, into total blackness.

Somewhere a loon laughed like a demented creature.

Or, more likely, someone screamed in torment.

Or, that horrendous noise could more likely be merely the hissing rush of the chair, screeching as it bore me on into the unknown.

Sparkling motes of light danced before me, thin and scattered at first, but thickening, dancing in clumps and gyrating nodules of fiery brilliance. We rushed on and through them, motes of diamond dust, brushing them aside in whirls of sparkling specklings. I drew a breath. The dots of light swung away from us. Rather, we swung away from them, surging out to hiss along an ebon floor, with all the sparkles massing and banking away to the left.

The chair stopped.

I turned my head away from the sparkles and looked to find what I expected to see.

Framed in their thick silver rims, three pictures adorned the far wall. Oval pictures, three of them in a line along the blackness, each showed a different face of the planet Kregen.

Silence dropped down. I could hear my harness creaking as I breathed, and that displeased me, a professional fighting man.

Each silver-framed picture showed an aerial view of Kregen. That on the extreme left showed the familiar outlines of Paz, the side of the world I knew.

There were the outlines of the continents of Havilfar, and Loh, of Segesthes and Turismond. The islands, too, showed clearly, Pandahem and Vallia — I stopped for a moment to dwell on Vallia. That small island at the eastern seaboard was Valka, with Veliadrin to the west. Valka! Well, my home was a long way off now, farther off even than from the flier taking Seg and me north across Hamal.

Funny. Here was I, looking down on a picture of Havilfar, and Seg and I were flying across that land.

He would be gripped in a stasis, unmoving, the butter knife in his hand, all unknowing of where I had gone.

But would he?

Perhaps he merely moved and had his being in normal time. Perhaps it was I who was speeded up in some weird way, sent spinning into the gulfs of superhumanity?

I shifted my gaze away from Paz and looked at the center picture.

This showed sea, with the hint of land at each horizon.

The extreme right hand picture showed a pattern of islands and continents I did not know — although a few of the ancient maps in the Akhram had hinted at such configurations.

I knew I was looking at a map of the other side of Kregen. I committed what I could to memory, as I had tried to do before, and a voice spoke in words and also in my head.

“Yes, Dray Prescot. Look well on the world of Kregen. It may be that you will have little time left to look on the world you call home.”

Chapter six

The Everoinye Speak of the Savanti

By this time I was past caring about how scared I was.

I said, “I suppose, Star Lords, you will as usual not bother to explain what you mean.”

No answering laugh, a bubbling chuckle, hung on the scented air. I had thought that perhaps the Star Lords retained still some elements of a human sense of humor. But the feeling of coldness drove out laughter.

“We do not need to explain, Dray Prescot. It is not acase of bothering.”

Well now...!

“Why do I have little time? Do you intend to send me...” My voice trailed. I did not want even to put into words the thought that I might be dispatched back to Earth.

The voice, in my ears and in my head, said, “We do not have a task for you to perform at the moment. We summoned you here to acquaint you with our desires for the future. Also, Dray Prescot, we wish you to know that we are well pleased that you have driven back the Shanks.”

There was so much astonishing information in those few words. I sat back in the chair. The straps confining my arms had fallen away, and I had not noticed.

“You—” I said. Then: “You are thanking me?”

By Zair!

The Everoinye, omnipotent superhuman overlords, descending — condescending — to give a mere mortal human being a word of thanks!

Astonishing!

The Shanks, who by a variety of names were bad news, came raiding up over the curve of the world from their unknown homelands. They festered along the coasts of Paz. And they had tried to invade and settle, and we had beaten them and driven them back in the Battle of the Incendiary Vosks.

The voice whispered, “Yes, Dray Prescot. You beat the Shanks. But the Fishheads are not finished.”

“That I know only too well.”

“We thank you — and your astonishment offends us. Much has happened since you were first brought to Kregen by the Savanti. We are pleased that we discovered you and took you into our service. You have performed well. But if you think that your days of toil are numbered—”

“No, Everoinye,” I said. And I let rip a gusty sigh. “I know I am a fool, an onker of onkers, but I’m not onker enough to believe that.”

“We do not dispute your self-judgment that you are an onker.”

I just let that ride by. At least, it did show that the Everoinye might still have a shaky grasp on a shoddy sense of humor.

“We said we were pleased you beat the Shanks. We did not thank you.”

So that was one in the eye for me. I had presumed, and had presumed wrong.

“But we do thank you, as you pointed out by your astonishment. We are offended at ourselves, that we have fallen away from a humanity of which once we were proud.”

“Once?”

The voice sharpened.

“We will not say — ‘still.’ We are no longer human.”

“You can say that again.”

“We are not, Dray Prescot, less than human. We are superhuman.”

Some note, some timbre, something, made me say, “You poor devils.”

For a time, then, there remained silence between us.

At last the voice whispered: “Look at the—”

The word used meant nothing.

“Look,” said the voice, and there was strained patience in its tones. “Look at the pictures on the wall. The right-hand picture.”

I looked.

Whatever word the Everoinye had used to mean the pictures, I did not know it and couldn’t reproduce it. Afterward, when I discovered alternative meanings for the word “screen,” that still was not the word. That came much later. So I looked and the continents and islands of the antipodes swam before my gaze.

“That configuration of lands is very like Paz. We call it Schan. It is a use name. The Fishheads who raid you in Paz sail from the coastal areas. There are many other peoples of the islands and continents. Unpleasant people. Now look at the center picture.”

The sea sparkled blue, almost as though it moved and struck the suns light from wave tops.

I peered more closely and then, miraculously, the sea seemed to swarm away around each side of the picture. It was as though I were falling down into the oval frame.

I jerked back in the chair.

The sea came very near. It was clear and sparkling.

A fleet sailed that sea.

A fleet of squat, square, unlovely ships, with high poops and chunky bows, bristling with armaments. I knew the waterline would be sweetly curved, the underwater parts marvels of naval construction. The masts, tall, after the fashion of poleacres, bore the tall, narrow, slantingly curved sails of the Shanks. They did not so much catch the wind and belly out, as on ordinary vessels, as take the wind and plane it over their curves as the wind planes over a gull’s wing.

“I see them,” I said. “Fishheads, Leem-Lovers—”

“Yes. They sail to Paz. They follow the advance guard which you defeated on the sands of Eurys.”

I shook my shoulders.

“I did not beat the Shanks alone. There were many with me, men and women, all brave and valiant, and all who shared in the victory—”

“Yes, yes. Paz turned out its finest.”

“I would not forget that.”

“The Shanks have been driven out of some of their homelands. They intend to take yours.”

I put my fingers to my forehead, and rubbed.

By Krun! I was tired!

“I, for one, cannot condemn them for that.”

“If you understood more, you would—”

“Mayhap. All the same, if they try to steal what belongs to Paz, they must be stopped. Or,” I added, hoping for a miracle I knew would not be vouchsafed, “perhaps, they could be assimilated, somehow — we have lands they could settle.”

“They intend to slay you all. They do not believe in half measures.”

So the ugly business persisted, the desires of men that drove out all feeling, that blinded to all save personal gain.

“And,” I said, and the weariness slurred my words, “in the half of the world you call Schan there are many more nasties behind the Shanks.”

“Very many.”

“Is there an end? Will it ever stop?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“When Kregen becomes as the Everoinye and the Savanti wish it to be. Those desires clearly conflict at the moment; when they are as one, the business will end.”