"Oh, don't go yet!" said Alicia hastily. "Time enough when the Dour arrives. Tell me something of your personal life and your adventures."
"Well, I have a wife in a village near Sir Fergus's ranch, and a young son plus an egg in the incubator. The boy hath not, alas, inherited my splendid sensitive organs of smell ..." Minyev proudly fluttered the plumes of his own imposing antennae.
Two goblets more and several rambling reminiscences later, Minyev slumped back into his chair and closed his eyes. A faint snore escaped him.
Alicia sprang to her feet. When nudges failed to arouse the Khaldonian, she grasped him by his belt and dragged him into a corner. Then she drew his dagger, a sizable, needle-pointed weapon, from its sheath.
Next she pulled the coverlet from the bed and tossed it over Minyev's recumbent body, arranging it so that it looked as if carelessly discarded but still hid the Khaldonian completely. She hesitated before going on with the plan she had devised as she listened to Minyev's stories. Should she try to talk Vizman out of his intentions before taking extreme measures? She quickly dismissed the thought, knowing too much of the ways of Krishnan monarchs. If he was ruthless enough to have her dragged by force all the way from Mishé, he would not he balked at this late stage, either by piteous pleas or by rational reasoning.
Alicia slipped the dagger beneath her pillow, its pommel set to be within reach of her right hand when she lay supine. Then she turned down the lamp, stripped, and arranged herself upon the bed. After an intolerable wait, she heard the crunch of heavy footsteps outside. Vizman's voice called: "Minyev!"
"He's gone, but I am here," said Alicia, trying to feign eager anticipation.
The canvas flap rose; and in came Dour Vizman, a little heavier and a little slower than eighteen Krishnan years ago but otherwise the same bulky, middle-aged Krishnan politician. He wore the traditional Qiribo costume, a square of cloth pinned across one shoulder and under the opposing arm. At the sight of Alicia, Vizman paused with a gasp.
"Alicia!" he cried. "As beautiful as ever! My dear, I have dreamed of this moment for almost twenty years! Never hath my passion for your sweet self wavered by the thickness of a hair! I love you, and you shall love me, too."
Vizman cast off his exiguous garment and kicked off his slippers. "Ah, beloved, how I have yearned through the long years!" He ran a trembling hand along her thigh.
Her heart racing, Alicia forced her lips into an inviting smile. Vizman drew a long breath and threw himself upon her.
"Ah, Bákh!" he murmured. "What joy!" Then his body stiffened, his antennae quivered, and he tightly closed his eyes in ecstasy.
Gently, Alicia reached beneath the pillow, grasped the pommel of the dagger, and drew it forth. She raised her arms, embracing his massive torso, until she could grasp the dagger hilt with both hands while directing the point towards Vizman's back. While Vizman's breath came in gasps, Alicia suddenly pulled the weapon towards herself with a powerful thrust and drove the blade home.
As the dagger buried itself in the dour's body, Vizman's eyes snapped open. Disbelief distorted his heavy features before they relaxed in the expressionless calm of death.
Pinned beneath the Krishnan's huge, inert body, Alicia felt panic. Smothering an impulse to cry out, she managed to roll the cooling corpse aside and free herself. She hesitated over the dagger but decided to leave it protruding from the would-be lover's back. To be caught with the weapon in hand was a risk that she dared not take.
Blue-green blood made a slowly widening circle on the pristine sheet as Alicia shakily snatched up her dress and shoes, turned out the lamp, and sought a way out.
Moving catlike in the dark, she observed that three of the four walls glowed faintly, the canvas being illuminated by lights in the adjacent compartments. The remaining wall, black as the night must she inferred, mark the outer limits of the pavilion.
A cautious hand along the ground revealed that the loose canvas would permit an active person to squirm under it. Lying prone and raising the tent edge by a finger's breadth, Alicia peered out. At first she could see only velvet dark, save for the crimson spark of a luminous arthropod whirling past. As her eyes adjusted to the overcast night, she made out the faint, colorless bulge of a smaller tent several meters away.
Hearing nothing but the mating songs of Krishnan arthropods, she decided that no guards were near. Well, she thought, here goes. Still clutching her dress and shoes, she squirmed forward on her elbows. She had half emerged from the tent when a rough voice rumbled in the Qiribo dialect: "Well, fry my balls! What have we here?"
Hard hands seized her arms and hauled her, kicking and struggling, to the trampled herbage outside the tent.
"Ha!" said the soldier. "Up to your old Terran tricks, eh? The gods blind me, but if I weren't on duty I'd haul you off in the bushes for a quick go myself!"
"And then you arrived," Alicia said to Reith. "You've saved me once more from my own stupidity, though I sure don't deserve it."
"Nonsense!" said Reith, affecting a heartiness he did not feel. "You saved yourself. I merely happened along at the last minute, more by good luck than good management. You're a heroine, like that woman who seduced a conqueror in order to kill him—Judith, that's her name."
With eyes downcast, Alicia shook her head. "If I'd been smart, I wouldn't have gotten into that fix in the first place; and if you hadn't killed the sentry, the Qiribuma would now be arguing over what lingering death to give me."
Reith said "Tell me, Lish, could you ever have learned to love Vizman?"
"Fergus! Sometimes you make me angry! Me, let a medieval despot tell me what to do with my life? You know me better than that." She paused. "Still, I can't help feeling a little sorry for him. He seems to have loved me, in his way."
"Don't blame yourself, darling! If I'd been there, I'd have scragged him, and done it much more painfully. He knew the risk he was running; he just pushed his luck too far. The one I'm sorry for is that sentry I shot; he may have been a decent fellow."
"I suppose they'll do something horrible to Minyev, finding him dead drunk and his dagger in the king's back."
"Don't waste your sympathy on that twerp. For all his high-flown talk about the kingdom's welfare, all he really wanted was the scholarship Vizman offered him. Let's be glad we got out of this mess as well as we did. Let's think of—"
"Fergus," she interrupted, "I can't talk about it any more. What I really want is a bath. I feel—unclean."
Reith sighed. "Okay, a bath it is. I'll drag the innkeeper out of bed to heat the water. He won't like it, but a bit of Stavrakos's gold should pacify him."
X - Jacob White
Half a moon after the escape from Vizman, Reith's gig rolled along the road westward from Mishé. Alicia sat beside him, and Timásh followed, riding an aya with two others on the lead.
They trotted through the rolling countryside of western Mikardand, where a lessening rainfall caused the forest cover to thin out to occasional copses and gallery forests along the stream beds. Elsewhere, the stony ground was only sparsely covered by the Krishnan analogues of grasses, herbs, and scrub. The garish colors of the more easterly vegetation faded out to pastels. Farms tended to cluster in areas where water was readily available; deep wells for irrigation were beyond Krishnan technology. In the wide, unfenced uplands between the farms, occasional herds of Krishnan herbivores, some four-legged and others six-legged, looked up as the gig clattered by. If alarmed, they bounded away.
The relationship between Reith and Alicia, which had been on a warming trend before the kidnapping, had cooled down to polite impersonality. Ever since Reith and Alicia had first met, interaction between them had always been lively, whether in the form of lovemaking, quarreling, gossiping, or abstract discussion. On the journey back to Mishé from Qantesr, however, they had spoken but little, and then usually for merely mundane purposes.