Masks of Scorpio by Alan Burt Akers

gold Deldys.”
    Pompino’s mouth was opening and closing like — well, like a clever foxy fellow called the Iarvin who had had his breath temporarily snatched from him. Temporarily only, mind...!
    “They’ve had a good look at our belongings,” pointed out Quendur. “They know how much gold we have—”
     
    “And she’s pitched it just right! The slag heap!” said Murkizon, bristling.
    Murkizon, unfortunately, was wrong. The lady Moincy had barely started. She wasn’t in so much of a hurry as not to be able to spare a few more moments fining us.
    Pompino at last got out: “We are honest paktuns seeking employment—”
    “Thieving masichieri, more likely!”
    “Never! We—”
    “Silence.” She motioned down and a guard hoicked out our possessions from the chest into which they had been thrown. You may imagine with what hunger we gazed upon our weapons tumbled there. The guard produced a canvas and leather bag. From this he took out and held aloft the shining, ugly, cunning Claw.
    “To whom,” said the lady Moincy in a voice on a sudden silk soft, “does this belong?”

Chapter five
Of fines, songs and fliers
    My left arm flew out, as it were on its own, and palm back pressed Dayra away. I held that arm rigid so that she could not step forward, and Murkizon’s barrel body concealed my action. I stepped out before my comrades. I looked up.
    With my back to them I could put on an imbecilic face, a vacuous grin, a semi-leering simpleton look that I can do so well — as I have all the natural advantages for it, according to my comrades. I stared up happily at the woman and said: “Why, lady, that is mine.” Before she could answer I rambled on in a loud bucolic voice: “My comrade, poor Nath the Kaktu, brought it back from some outlandish place, don’t ask me where, somewhere beyond the Pillars of Rhine where men have eyes in their stomachs; leastways, that’s what poor Nath said, and he won it in a game of Jikalla, he said, although I wonder, for you know how these brave paktuns are, and Nath, he said—”
    “Shastum! Silence!”
    “Why, yes, lady,” I said, and wheezed, and looked up at her grinning like a puppydog.
    “And do you know what it is?”
    “Why — in course, lady.”
    I heard the low gasp from Dayra at my back.
    “Well, onker? What?”
    “Why, it be a back scratcher, o’ course, and right handy at bath nights, although it’s a mite sharp if you’re—”
    “You fool!”
    “Why, yes my lady.”
    She glared at me. “You are fined a gold Deldy for being a fool, fool!”
     
    “Why, thank you, lady—”
    “And now,” she went on, hunching herself up and taking on an altogether different appearance, as though she had sprouted wings, horns and a tail. “And this !”
    From the chest the guard lifted aloft a glittering star-sparkling silver mask, a snarling mask of a devotee of Lem the Silver Leem.
    “Why, my lady,” I spoke up before anyone else had a chance to speak. “Poor Nath did say as he valued that there mask above a flagon o’ best Jholaix, which as I told him is plain silly for an honest paktun to talk, seeing that it is never and nowise ever was real silver, leastways, that’s what poor Nath said, he said, ’t’ain’t silver, he said—”
    “Shastum!”
    “Why, yes, my lady.”
    As I subsided I wondered if I was verily the fool the lady dubbed me, or clever. I had the strongest feeling that the cult of Lem had either bypassed Pettarsmot or not been well-received here. To claim allegiance to Lem, as would have been easy, would not, I judged, have been our best course.
    The guard hoisted up the golden zhantil mask worn by the people who slew the worshippers who wore the silver masks. We thought, although we did not know, that Pando had started the idea of having his fighting men wear the golden zhantil mask in opposition to the leem mask. I glared up with my lopsided grin, the simpleton to the life, ready to brazen it out, or to leap — very quickly! —