Captive Scorpio Read Online Free PDF Page B

black cloak, with a bronze helmet jammed on his head, a bronze helmet with a tall cockscomb of gold and white feathers. Only the deep-set eyes of this person glittered out over a fold of cloth, drawn up over the face.
    “Do not kill him!” The words were harsh, fierce, with a rattling, hissing viciousness. They commanded immediate respect from the Chulik mercenaries. I saw the way the swords twitched in the yellow hands. They would use the flats, now. . .
    “Take him alive! The rast who kills him will be flung overboard.”
    Again the words battered the mercenaries. The man in the concealing black cloak and face cloth clearly handled these Chuliks with the proverbial rod of iron.
    Two Och bowmen on the deck of the poop lowered their bows. They might have done for me had they loosed on me unawares. Now they would not chance a shot, under the interdiction of their lord, even though the bows were mere small flat short-bows. I leaped away from the coming attack and bellowed up at the black-cloaked figure.
    “Tell these nurdling rasts of yours I come as a friend! I am not—”
    “What you are and what you are not are of no concern of mine,” came the hoarse, hissing, rattling voice. I fancied I heard a distant resemblance in that voice to a scoundrel I had known on the inner sea, the Eye of the World; but I could not be sure. And what with keeping the swords away from me and skipping about and bellowing at them to desist, I thought no more about it at the time.
    How that little scene would have ended I do not care to dwell on — or, rather, how it should have ended with the lot of them pitched overboard — but in the event the black-cloaked figure turned abruptly half-about. He stood in a strained, attentive, silent pose for a moment and I surmised he was listening to someone whom I could not see. After a moment or two in which I came perilously close to sinking the rapier between the ribs of a Chunk who wanted to finish matters, the man turned back.
    His hard outline bulked against the last of the moonglow, for She of the Veils sank into the west and flooded the flier with a roseate light. So we had turned in mid air and were heading east. Why, I did not know. He flung up a commanding hand, and something about the gesture, some awkwardness, tugged at my memory.
    “Hold!” he bellowed. Then: “Take the flier down. Let that man stand free, do not harm him.”
    The swords glittered as they lowered.
    “Well,” I said. “By Vox! You took your time.”
    The flier slanted toward the shadowed earth. The tableau held. The eeriness of it was not lost on me. If anyone of those Chulik mercenaries made a wrong move, this time he might not be so lucky, and might, indeed, take six inches of good Vallian steel through his guts.
    The airboat touched down. A tiny pre-dawn wind sang in the trees. The shadows loomed. The land spread, dotted with tree clumps, with not a light in evidence anywhere.
    “Over with you!” shouted the man in the cloak. He pointed with his sword at my voller. “Throw that after him.”
    The Chuliks stood back, for they were fighting men and the volmen of the flier would handle details like casting a voller over the side. These sailors of the skies were men like me, apim, some of them; others were Brokelsh and Womoxes, diffs whose racial animosities were not too blatant. There were no Fristles that I could see apart from the one on the poop with the lantern, for as a rule, although not always, Chuliks and Fristles do not get along too easily, one race with the other.
    My voller was incontinently heaved up and chucked over the side. I heard the breaking and splintering of wood, the ripping of canvas.
    “By Vox!” I yelled. “Who’s going to pay for that?”
    That harsh hissing voice carried not the slightest trace of amusement. “You are a man with much gold. The trifle of a smashed voller will not trouble you.”
    He said voller, which is the word for an airboat most often heard in Havilfar, where they