Fliers of Antares Read Online Free PDF Page B

arena, but had had his dreams shattered, to be replaced by a vision of a greater future — and who must, I suspected, figure in the shadowy schemes of the Star Lords.
    All of them might in the next few murs be lying dead, pierced through and through with arbalest quarrels. Or they might be staggering up to be chained as was I and be carried off into slavery.
    Oh, Delia, my Delia!
    I rolled my eyes at the Lamnia youth, Fanal. He saw me looking at him. I could not cry out. But he could. He could warn the airboat. Across my face that old evil look of power and arrogance passed, and my eyes glared with a mad berserker brilliance, so that he flinched away. But he turned his head, and would not look at me, and he did not cry out a warning.
    No one would shout voluntarily.
    So I must do something horrible.
    Reterhan’s foot slid from my neck as I squirmed. I got my linked chains up and swung the small bight they had allowed me, and so snared that curved blade mounted at the end of his whiplike tail.
    Metal splines ran down from the blade to give stiffening and protection to the end two feet of tail.
    The chains snagged beneath the blade where it curved from its socket I rolled and lurched and staggered up and I pulled.
    I pulled Reterhan’s tail.
    It was not a gentle pull. It was a savage, barbaric sinew-and-muscle-bursting jerk.
    Reterhan yelled.
    He could not stop himself.
    The Kataki opened his mouth and yelled blue bloody murder.
    His shout of agony bellowed across the open space.
    I was not content.
    Circling, I twisted the tail about me and jerked again with utmost vicious force. The Kataki leaped and toppled toward me, and I truly think had he not done so I would have wrenched his tail out all bloody by its roots.
    His agonized screaming knifed through the air where the mingled streaming light of the Suns of Scorpio threw twin shadows of the flier across the packed dirt.
    The chains so cunningly bighted around by ankles and knees would not allow me to walk, let alone run, and that stumbling circle was the only progress I could make. I fell to the dirt and tried to roll myself like a barrel of cheap dopa out into the cleared area. A warning! My brain blazed with the single desire to warn my comrades in the voller.
    The rolling did not get me far, but it saved my life, for two crossbow bolts sizzled into the earth, gouting clods, where I had been.
    Covered in sweat and caked dirt I dragged in a lungful of breath and glared at Reterhan, who was crouching up, his left hand clamped bone-white across his mouth, his right hand feeling his injured tail. He was in no position to hit me again for some time.
    The flier halted its descent. It hovered a dozen feet above the open space.
    The rows of heads that had been showing over the bulwarks had all vanished, and I heaved a great gasp of relief. Those men of mine up there were alerted! They would not know what was going on down here, but now they would not come down meekly to be massacred and enslaved.
    I had expected a sheeting storm of crossbow bolts to rise toward the flier, and I was confident enough in her armoring to know it would take more than a hand-held arbalest to drive through. A good-sized varter would be needed, and the Katakis, as far as I knew, did not dispose of varters here.
    But this Kataki Notor was a cunning lord. He also held his men under a strong controlling rein, for he had not given the order to shoot, and so no one loosed.
    No one shot at me, either, so I guessed the Notor had a scheme afoot.
    I saw him giving swift orders; then he divested himself of his war-gear. Off came the scaled tunic, the greaves, the close-fitting helmet. His thraxter and stuxes were grasped by an attendant. Two more worked rapidly on his tail and soon they unstrapped that wicked curved blade.
    The Notor snatched up a net-needle and its spool of thread from a draping net by a wall. Clad only in his breechclout — that scarlet kilt! — he walked slowly, bent over and shuffling, into