A Victory for Kregen Read Online Free PDF Page A

proper.”
    The Pachaks lifted their tail hands in acknowledgment.
    “When the suns are over the yard arm,” I said, although in the Kregish it was not what I said at all. We lay back, munching hardtack, sipping water sparingly, and every now and then a white gleam in Hunch’s face told of his roving eyeballs gazing fondly on the wine skins.
    Truly, Moderdrin is an amazing and forbidding place. The mountains stud the plain with their humps, crowned by jumbles of towers and domes and walls, smothered in vegetation, with tumbling waterfalls and bosky avenues in which, as we knew, were to be found savage denizens.
    But, those denizens were nowise as monstrous as the horrors within the artificial mountains.
    We dozed and kept watch, and the water remained stoppered in the bottles. Prince Tyfar showed signs of wishing to protest, after the first sips had ceased to refresh him.
    “Prince,” I said, and I spoke evenly, “if you drink now you will simply sweat the precious liquid away, wasting it. Wait until the worst of the heat goes.”
    “But my mouth is afire—”
    “Suck a pebble.” I nodded at the Pachaks. The cheeks on each hardy Pachak face bulged.
    He did as I bid; and he had the sense to see the sense in it. I felt he was a young man, prince or no, who grasped the uses of sense in a way that would be approved, at least, by men who thought as I did. For your full-bloodied, rambunctious hell-for-leather rampant princeling, Prince Tyfar was altogether too much of an intellectual — and a superb axeman, withal.
    He had gone raging into the Muzzards. There was no dilly-dallying there. I fancied he was more of a proper prince than most of that ilk in Hamal.
    Three times during that day we spotted flights of flutsmen, and we stayed close. The swarths were lying down and dozing against the heat, shivering their scaly tails every now and then. We were not observed by those sky reivers.
    That night we drank sparingly, mounted up on nine of the animals, and led the remaining six bundled up with all we thought necessary to take. The ground scavengers had been at work on the corpses, but our presence had deterred the warvols from swooping down on rustling wings to join in the devouring. By morning there would be left only bones.
    At my insistence, Tyfar and Quienyin rode the two superior swarths. Tyfar, I noticed, just took the best one without even thinking about it. Quienyin looked across at me, and it was then I insisted he take the beast.
    So, mounted up, not quite as thirsty as we had been, we set off again across the Humped Land, the Land of the Fifth Note. The strong probability was that the Moder Lords organized these Muzzard swarth riders, and agreed among themselves which mound the arriving expeditions of gold-and magic-hungry adventurers should be directed into. Well, the wizards had their fun running poor crazed folk through their tombs, torturing them and extracting the last jot of enjoyment from their anguish. As for the magic items we had taken, they had been expended in our troubled ascent to the surface and escape.
    There would be no spells of paralysis, no more burning drops, no more tail-shrivelers for us now. Now we must rely on steel and muscle to see us through.
    That night passed and toward dawn we ventured to close one of the mounds where we filled the bottles at a stream and set up, stalked, and slew our supper. Everyone cheered up.
    “If it means steering out of here from Moder to Moder—”
    “Aye, Jak!” said Tyfar. He beamed. “We will be back into the grasslands in no time. And then we will hear word of my father and sister, I am sure.”
     
    I looked at the Wizard of Loh, who sat by the fire munching a leg of one of the birds brought down by Barkindrar the Bullet.
    Again we had chosen a strong place for our camp, beneath a rocky outcrop where the fire was shielded by cut branches of thorn-ivy. The swarths rested after their exertions of the night, and I fancied they were well content that