The men at my back broke out in yells of concern.
“Majister! Hold back. Wait for us.” And: “Emperor! You endanger your life.”
The last of the light flared deceptively as the twin suns speared their emerald and ruby fires erratically through tortured cloud castles. The aragorn were confident against the naked slaves and were busying themselves in collecting riderless animals. Those who caught a steed mounted up and galloped off, although slaves hung onto them and lapped them in chains, and brought some down. It was all a shadowy, bloody, confusing fracas, the kind of nonsense in which a fellow can get knocked on the head and never know he was dead.
Not all the slavers were apim, and I crossed swords with a Rapa, who went down as I jumped past. A bleg beyond him staggered back on his four legs, and a cham tripped him and another slashed his guts out, and I helped knock him down — for their four legs make blegs mightily resistant — and jumped on past to get at an aragorn who lifted a sword against two women, naked, screaming, hugging each other in a last paroxysm of terror.
The aragorn turned to meet me. All about us men and women shrilled in horror, and chains clashed and the spears drove in. My men were still racketing away and coming on, for my last savage lunge astride the zorca had distanced them. The aragorn fancied himself as a swordsman; but I chopped him without finesse and saw another from the corner of my eye, and ducked, and swirled back. A naked figure, with a mass of dark hair and a superb body, leaped on the slaver and hauled a chain around his neck. Entangled like a wild beast trapped in iron nets, the slaver choked back. He went down and two more came at us, desperate now, determined to break past and get at the totrixes who stood, shivering in terror at the blood and noise. Together, the naked man and I met them. The drexer drank the life from one and the chains crushed the life from the other.
“Majister! Emperor!” The yells lifted and the men of my retinue were there, slashing aside a last frantic attempt by the aragorn. The light shifted, dying in an opaz haze. The dirt ran with blood. Naked flesh stained crimson. The slave with the dark hair and the body of a fighting man slumped, and he collapsed to his knees and I saw he was wounded, a jagged rent across his back.
Half-kneeling, he looked up.
The brilliantly attired soldiers of the new Vallia crowded about me. They were profuse in their expressions of concern. “Majisters” and “emperors” filled the evening air. And I looked at the slave, collapsed there in his blood and filth still gripping the harsh iron chains.
“Majister — the risks you take… Emperor, we are here to protect you…” Oh, yes, majister this and majister that, emperor and emperor…
The slave looked up and spoke.
“Lahal, my old dom,” he said. “I might have known you’d get here — given time.”
He coughed, then, and a spittle of blood trickled down his chin.
It was extraordinarily difficult for me to speak.
The babble of voices at my back, with their continual interlarded majisters and emperors… I straightened my shoulders. I found my voice.
“Lahal, Seg,” I said.
Chapter Twelve
We flew back to Vondium. The odd little thought occurred to me that had I known it was Seg Segutorio struggling all naked with his chains, I would have unlimbered the Krozair longsword and gone in raging like a maniac.
And that was a demeaning thought, to be sure; but it adequately expresses my own confessed confusion in personal relationships.
“By the Veiled Froyvil, my old dom, but that is good,” said Seg as he took the goblet from his lips. His mouth shone with fine Gremivoh, and I instantly refilled the goblet for him. We sat in my study, with the books and the maps, and Seg looked more like my old friend than a sodden wrung-out chained-up slave. The doctors had seen to him and patched him up, declaring he needed rest. His first words after that typical greeting had been: “And Thelda?” Whereat I had shaken my head. “There has been no news of her, none at all.”
“I went up to Evir,” said Seg, now, as we brought each other up to date with our doings since we had parted on the way to the Sacred Pool of Baptism in Aphrasoe. “I went into that damned pool with Delia and the emperor and the others, and then I was back home in Erthyrdrin.” He drank again, and shook his head. “Mightily discomposing, I can tell you.”
“I know.”
He looked up. “Well, you would, wouldn’t you?”
“So you made your way back to Vallia and went to Evir?”
“Yes. If I’d been sorcerously transported home, then Thelda would, too — or so I thought.”
“You were right.” I told him a little of the power of Vanti, the Guardian of the Pool, enough to allow him to understand that we had been caught up in a wizardly manifestation. He seemed satisfied with my explanation.
“She’d been there. They told me. An uncouth bunch, all right, those Evirese.”
“And?”
He moved his left hand emptily.
“I went to Falinur, then. After all, I am supposed to be their damned kov. But, for me, they can keep their kovnate and their mangy ways. I was taken up by flutsmen, and escaped, and then, being a trifle down, was easy prey for the aragorn. We’d been marching for days on end. I think — I’m not sure — I escaped a couple of times. But the lot I was with when you came up were the last.”
“You are home now, Seg.”
He gripped that empty hand into a fist. A Bowman of Loh, Seg Segutorio, for my money the best bowman on Kregen, and a kov, the Kov of Falinur. Yet he was the truest friend a man can have, and be thankful to all the Gods of Kregen he may call a friend. Now he looked down, shrunken, fearful of the terrors the future must bring.
“Home — yes, Dray, I made Vallia my home. And, now — my wife, my children, where are they?”
“You have returned. They will, too.”
“I believe that. I have to believe that. But the whole business has been a nightmare.”
He had heard the news, how the emperor’s life had been saved by his immersion in the Sacred Pool, of how all those who had taken him there had been sorcerously dispatched to their homes, of how the emperor had at last been slain in the final moments of the Fall of Vondium. He had listened stony-faced as the story of Kov Layco Jhansi’s treachery was told, and of how Zankov, the mysterious agitator, had killed the emperor. He heard about Queen Lushfymi of Lome, and expressed no great desire to meet her, despite that she worked hard and devotedly for Vallia. I knew that Seg loved his Thelda very deeply. For all her faults she was a good comrade and I often castigated myself for my treatment of her, for the supposedly funny remarks I made about her. She tried desperately hard to be a good friend to Delia, and Delia loved her, too, in her own way.
And now she was missing and might be anywhere, not only in Vallia, either. Anywhere at all on Kregen…
Seg fetched up a sigh. “Well, Thelda always means well,” he said, at which I shot him a hard look. “I just pray Erthyr the Bow has her in his keeping.”
“Amen to that, Seg, and Opaz and Zair, too.”
The doctors having told me that the Kov of Falinur needed a proper convalescence, which was not at all surprising, I made Seg see sense. In addition to seeking Thelda he wanted to know what had happened to his children, Dray and the twins. From my own bitter experiences of the past, and more recently in attempting to trace Dayra, I knew the wait might well be a long and agonizing one before any news was received. And, all this time, the work of preparing Vondium and the provinces loyal to us to resist the coming attack had to go on.
I said to Seg: “I am particularly pleased that the Grand Archbold of the Kroveres of Iztar is now with us.”
Seg showed a flicker of interest.
“The Order has admitted a number of new brothers lately. The work goes on. It seems to me, as a mere member, seemly for the Grand Archbold to welcome the new brothers.”