“I know, Dray,” said Vomanus, carelessly, popping a paline into his mouth, chewing and swallowing -
a barbarous habit, for the paline is a berry of superlative performance on a man’s digestion: “I know what the emperor did and said when Delia crippled herself falling off that damned zorca. For a start he had the beast’s throat slit. But this Opaz-forsaken airboat salesman was eager to sell, and we poor fools of Vallia eager to buy his rubbish.” The old sore spot again. . “He gave names and addresses to the emperor, and Delia was sent, all neatly packaged. The fellow was some kind of defrocked Todalpheme acolyte, I believe. Came by his information evilly, I’ll warrant. Still, it must have been successful.” And Vomanus smiled broadly at my Delia as she regarded him gravely, thinking of those times. We had told no one of our experiences in Aphrasoe.
“So we do the same,” I said. “We take the emperor to this place known to the Todalpheme’s contacts. We effect a miracle cure, also.”
“Aye!” they shouted, ready to brave a world.
“But,” said Seg. “How do we start? You saw how those rasts kept him mewed up.”
“Aye. But we can find a key to open the cage.”
“I would have thought, Dray Prescot, that the emperor’s daughter and the Prince Majister, her husband, could take the emperor to a doctor without such a to-do!”
Thus spake Thelda.
Seg started to say something; but, quickly, Delia broke in gently to say: “We will, Thelda, my dear, we will. And you will aid us, I know.”
“Well, of course!” Thelda turned to me, high of color, heaving of bosom, glowing with resolution.
“Prince, am I not Delia’s best friend?”
Very, very carefully, I said: “Yes, Thelda.”
All the old subjection to the racters that had made of Thelda a tool for political designs had gone. Her family, well-born but poverty-stricken through foolish gambling of a rake-hell grandfather, had not been able to give her any assistance in life save that of offering her as a tool for the racters in return for gold. Her marriage to Seg and her friendship with the Prince and Princess, her own status as a kovneva, and the known wildness of her friends, had protected Thelda from the unwelcome attentions of those who might have sought to employ her again.
“It’s high time we did something,” growled Inch, very tall and grim in the lamplight.
“Aye!” roared those wolfish fighting men — and those vulpine lady-friends and wives. “Aye! For Delia and for Dray!”
Well, it was all very pretty. But it shod no zorcas, as my clansmen would say. The door swung open as Young Bargom, the proprietor, hustled in. With him came Prince Varden Wanek and Natema who were staying at a merchant friend’s house because one of the children’s children had a slight fever. Nath the Needle had hurried round there, and now he came in with Varden and Natema, looking excited.
“What news, Nath?”
“It is as I suspected,” he said, swirling his cloak off and sneezing and almost putting his satchel on the table. Someone caught it. He mumbled around and produced a small vial. It held a colorless liquid.
“I refined and clarified the emperor’s spittle. There is no doubt. He has been fed solkien concentrate-”
A gasp broke from many gathered there.
Nath nodded, not pretending to lecture. “A most lethal and unpleasant poison. It is secret — and the secret of its discovery even more so. But,” he said without false modesty, “I know it. A deadly mixture of the tree Memph, the cactus Trechinolc, a little of the bark Liverspot, one or two other spicy ingredients, all balanced to waste the flesh, to dilute the blood, to destroy most subtly.”
Delia swayed. I put out a hand and she grasped it, staring into my face, trying to smile for me and failing.
“Oh- Dray!”
“Tonight,” I said. Everyone hung on my words. “Tonight we will go in by certain secret passageways I know of, ways that were inspected with Largan the Rule, the palace architect-”
“Dead and gone these many seasons,” said Vomanus.
“I’m sorry to know that. But we may make our way in and we may make our way out bearing the emperor. It is the way I should have taken today, but did not. Thelda! Can you see to the nursing facilities for Doctor Nath the Needle?”
“Of course!” She tossed her head, and then said: “And I do not wish to hear about vilmy flowers, and especially not about fallimy flowers! So there!”
Oby said: “I will see to the fliers.”
Turko said: “I’ll see to the provisions.”
“Right. And, friends all, bring your weapons sharp.”
“Aye,” they growled. I own, trying to see them critically and not as the dear friends they were, they were a cutthroat bunch and no mistake.
Of course, it had to be Vomanus, careless, bright-eyed, casual, who said: “Mind you, Dray. My half-sister is heir. If the emperor dies you would have a good claim to the throne yourself.”
I just looked. The rapscallion had the grace to look away and adopt a less negligent attitude, half-perched on a table. But the thought was there, hanging, ugly, in the air of the snug. What each one thought I do not know. What I thought I am not sure. “I want nothing of the emperor save what I already have — his daughter. Unless — unless the evil days are too evil.” My memories embraced Djanduin and what I had done there.
The door opened on the little silence and Bargom thrust his head in and bellowed: “Prince Drak!”
And here was my son, Drak, Prince of Vallia, most wroth, fuming with rage. He flung his cloak off in a great swirl and hurled it at a chair, snatching up a pot of wine from the table.
“By Vox!” he said. “By all the grey ones of Sicce! They wouldn’t let me see grandfather. They threw me out up at the palace, that bitch Melekhi and her scum! And, on the way here, stikitches tried to do for me, assassins tried to skewer me. I tell you, Vondium is become a madhouse!”
Chapter Six
Two closed carriages took the raiding party to the portcullised gate below the Jasmine Tower. The bulk of the Tower wheeled against the stars, blazing in those familiar constellations over Kregen. She of the Veils shed a fuzzy pink and golden light, icing the gables and rooftops, contouring the domes with mysterious shadows, lending a deeper menace to the darkness beneath the craggy walls. The carriages, pulled by four krahniks apiece, rolled to a stop close to the edge of the dried-up moat. Here the old Canal of Contentment, very short, curved about the rear re-entrants of the palace walls. To either hand the long curtain walls vanished into the darkness, battlemented against the sky. No one spoke a word. Seg and Inch and Turko, Balass, Vomanus, Hap and Oby. We left the carriages concealed beneath the end arch of a colonnade where moonblooms opened their petals to the drenching moonlight. We crept upon the sentry like leems. We did not kill him, for he was a Rapa, and merely earning his hire. That he was a Rapa guarding the palace in Vondium itself clearly indicated that times had changed. His vulturine face with the fierce warrior eyes either side of his beak stared blankly up at the moon. Soon She of the Veils would be joined by the Twins, and then there would be too much light for nefarious purposes.
So, we respectable citizens of Vallia crept along in the shadows like assassins, spies, drikingers. Sharp left inside the narrow wicket I turned past the buttress and so found a narrow crack in the inner wall, a crack seeming merely the ruin of time, plastered over against the fall of the towers. But the plastering was a mere shell, covering stout wood, and the wood pivoted and revealed a square opening, a foot on a side. I gripped the iron handle, shaped like the handle of a spade, and pulled. Almost soundlessly, so well wrought was the masonry, the section of stone pivoted about itself. The opening widened into a narrow doorway and onto stairs leading down.