Delia of Vallia Read Online Free PDF

and the graves might be stripped for the bones to lie bare and bleached under the radiance of the suns; later on, the sand would blow back.
    Tandu moved with caution inside the wreckage of the flier. He only knocked a few broken things over. He came out with Delia’s box which he and Dalki strapped onto a totrix. That contained, besides a fine dress and other feminine essentials, wedding gifts. An earnest only. She had determined to let Vomanus see she was not pleased with him. Later on the full and lavish caravan stuffed with wedding gifts would be sent to Delka Ob. Later on.
    She felt relief she had managed to persuade herself to return. Her friends had to be buried, and their ibs commended to Opaz, although such a commendation had no need of bones, corpses or graves. She controlled her shudder. She detested illness, sickness, the stink of the sick room, the fatuous smiles of people watching friends die. When her father had been ill — poisoned by secret enemies — she had managed to hold on long enough to attend to him. But if there was a flaw in Delia of Delphond, a failing, it was this, that she had to force herself into the tasks expected of people in dealing with sickness.
    She had not in her life escaped those tasks.
    She had been born a princess, married a prince, who had made her a queen and an empress. But she had been slave. She had emptied the golden chamberpots of those who enslaved her, and had, on and off, chopped them up into diced meat for it.
    The simple ceremony over, her belongings piled on the back of a totrix, a last look at the smashed airboat, and she nodded to Tandu and they set off.
    Away over the scorching wastes of the Ochre Limits lay the Dragon’s Bones, a vast collection of monsters’ bones of many descriptions. The place was a giant cemetery for giants. There a notable fight had taken place, where her husband — before they were married — had saved the life of her father the emperor. She thought of those long ago days as the totrixes waddled along with their six-legged gait, and she sighed. Life had been — simpler — then.
    And, for all that, it had been complicated, too, Opaz knew! Just that the size of the problems these days was so much greater. Now they had half a world to ponder over.
    She itched. She was used to discomfort as well as comfort; but the wash she’d managed in the river to rid herself of the mud had not been sufficient. Now dust caked over all. She longed for a wallow and a brush and a soak and a swim in the Baths of the Nine. Mellinsmot would boast such an establishment, no doubt a provincially grand place, full of gilded stout statues and flower garlands. But it would boast, also, piping hot water and steam rooms and freezing pools and an exercise salle. Yes, she closed her eyes and fought the itches, refusing to scratch, yes, she much longed for a session in the Baths of the Nine.
    When the line of little dots appeared in their rear, high in the sky and winging strongly on, Delia frowned.
    Tandu said, “Damned Djan-forsaken flutsmen.”
    The skein bore on, and Delia counted six of them.
    If the flutsmen wished to attack there would be no escaping them. The Ochre Limits extended in barrenness all around. If they attacked, if they did not attack, all were as one to Tandu and Dalki.
    Dalia said, and the note of crossness in her voice was not unremarked: “Why in the name of Vox do we allow these thieving murdering flutsmen so free a rein? Does not the Kov of Vindelka sweep his province clean?”
    Hesitantly, Tandu said: “I know nothing of these high matters, majestrix.”
    “But you can see the flutsmen up there?”
    “Yes, majestrix. They have grown worse just lately—”
    “I thought we’d cleansed the land of them, and the aragorn and the mercenaries. I thought all our enemies were being driven back into the north. I don’t know what Vomanus is playing at.”
    Tandu and Dalki might not worry, one way or the other, over six flutsmen — for themselves.