Captive Scorpio by Alan Burt Akers Page A

would have liked to.
    “Nothing else, Barty?”
    “Nothing, prince. The troubles of the northeast are well known. The lords up there do not like us down here.”
    “It is more likely,” said Delia, with calm firmness, as when she demanded one take a foul medicine, “far more likely that Dayra has gone up there with her — friends — to stir up trouble. It pains me to say that; but it is sooth.”
    Barty threw her a reproachful look; but he knew enough of Dayra to understand the truth of the remark.
    “Listen, Barty.” I paused and looked at him, whereat he grew red in the face and his eyes widened. It is odd how a simple calculating look from me will change a person’s appearance. Most odd. “I’ve had dealings with the Trylon of Thengelsax. He was there today, as squat and bluff and foul as ever. Ered Imlien — he nurses a grudge against me because I broke his riding crop. He had told me what you are telling me now — only he was less tactful.”
    Delia was looking at me. Barty swallowed.
    “If Dayra is mixed up with this Liberty for the Northeast rot, then, all right, so be it. We will hoick her out of it and if I have to tan her bottom for her, that I will do.” I took a breath and saw the streets passing, the wink of sunlight from a canal, the bunting and flowers and brilliant shawls. “Do you know I have never even seen my daughter Dayra?”
    “You are being rather — hard — on her, prince.” Barty spoke slowly, softly; but he did not stammer and he came right out with it. I warmed to him.
    “Of course I am. That is natural. It does not mean—”
    I stopped speaking and threw my arms around Delia, hurling her to the floor between the seats.
    “Get down, Barty!”
    The long Lohvian arrow quivered in the lenken wood pillar where it had split the crimson curtains and severed a golden tasseled cord. The feathers were all shivering with the violence of the cast. Those feathers were dyed a deep and somber purple.
    “Keep down! Sarfi the Whip!” I bellowed out at full lung-stretch. “Give the zorcas their heads!
Gallop!
”
    The chariot lurched and bounced on the leather straps of the springing. The sharp, hard clitter-clatter of the zorcas’ polished hooves on the flags of the street beat into a staccato rhythm. With Delia safely on the floor and Barty off the opposite seat, I could peer up. People were leaping left and right as we careered along. Sarfi was wailing away with his whip, sharp cracking flecks of sound through the uproar. We hurtled past a shandishalah booth and the stink whipped past to be swallowed by the fishy smells from the next stall.
    “Where the hell are you taking us, Sarfi?”
    He didn’t answer; but plied his whip. I looked back. A train of destruction lay wasted in our wake for Sarfi had belted the chariot left-handed off the main street and taken us hell for leather down a narrow souk. Overturned stalls, spilled amphorae, crates and boxes splintered and strewing their silver-glinting fish across the flags, torn awnings and smashed awning-posts, and people — people crawling away, people staggering about like Sanurkazzian drunks, people dancing with rage and shaking their fists after us.
    The smells, the sounds, the colors were wonderfully zestful to a man who has just had an arrow past his ear.
    Whoever had loosed at us had had no chance of a second shot — and then I checked my foolish thoughts. This was a Lohvian arrow. Before I’d yelled, before Sarfi had ever laid a single strand of his whip to the zorcas — a practice I abhor and will not tolerate — a Bowman of Loh could have loosed three shafts — Seg Segutorio could have loosed four and possibly five.
    So the one arrow had been enough.
    Delia said: “I will resume my seat now, and then we can look at the message.”
    Barty and I helped her up — a quite unnecessary act for she is as lithe as an earthy puma or a Kregan chavonth — and we pulled out the arrow and unrolled the scrap of paper wrapped around