Warlord of Antares Read Online Free PDF Page B

wondered why Seg was doing it cack-handed; there was no time to ask now as we ran on along the corridor. The floor caught at our feet, rough-hewn as it was. The light glanced weirdly from the jagged walls and roof. The place held a musty stink as of last week’s socks left and forgotten in the laundry basket.
    Before we’d reached the next corner the beast rounded his corner and rumbled along the corridor after us.
    I cast a look back.
    Nasty. No doubt of that. And the loss of two of his four eyes made his temper even worse. He looked to be all spine and scale, with grasping forelimbs, claws and, as Seg had said, a jawful of gnashers. Nasty, right enough. We ran on.
    The chamber into which we pelted around the next bend lofted high and vasty into purple mistiness where the flare of our torches merely touched the edges of mystery with orange. There appeared little comfort for wandering adventurers here.
    “This’ll do,” said Seg, full of confidence.
    Most unkindly, I said: “P’raps a flat-trajectory compound reflex might—”
    “Oho!” burst out Seg. “You’re a backstabber too, are you?”
    He thrust the torch at me, transferred the great Lohvian longbow into his left fist and took up the nocked arrow into those supremely capable archer’s fingers of his. We could hear the beast roar from the tunnel. Our torches threw a little light and I blinked, for their radiance held an odd glow to me now, as I paused in the chamber. The light glinted on scale and spine and on two fiery eyes.
    Seg loosed.
    A watcher would say he blurred into action; the loosing of the two shafts was so swift, the second following the first so rapidly, that the whole transaction was over in a twinkling, the two arrows flying almost before Seg moved.
    “Well,” said Nath the Impenitent. “I shan’t have to run dragging this damned lord about, now. I thank you for that, Seg the Horkandur.”
    Seg smiled and then looked at me.
    “Little flat bows,” he said. Then he shoved that superb Lohvian longbow up on his shoulder and whipped out his knife.
    As I went over with him to help dig out his four arrows, Seg said over his shoulder: “Not until we meet the next horror, Nath.”
    The first two arrows had merely destroyed the eyes. The second pair had penetrated deeply into the brain. I left those two to Seg.
    Truth to tell, as I believe I have struggled to explain, the death of wild animals, even monsters intent on devouring me, is always a saddening and chastening experience.
    Nath the Impenitent let rip with his grunting snort of a laugh when we rejoined him.
    “The next horror is likely to be seriously conulted by you mad pair.”
    Conulted, as I may have mentioned, means to receive a nasty shock, a body blow, and I found its usage, and particularly by a rough tough customer like Nath, in these surroundings, decidedly charming.
    Also, and this pleased me immensely, Nath with his ingrown hatred and contempt for lords and nobles, had quite grown to accept Seg and me as companions.
    “Oh, aye,” said Seg in his raffish offhand way. “We’ll conult a few more of the confounded creepy crawlies down here yet. But with half the maze vanished away I fancy it won’t be long before we’re out of it altogether.”
    The way Seg easily accepted the heights — or depths — of sorcery involved here did not amaze me. His own fey nature told him things that more lumpen mortals could never understand. With the death of the Witch of Loh’s hermaphrodite child, the uhu Phunik, its ethereal constructions had vanished. Opulent underground chambers, palaces of wonder, had not simply whiffed away with Phunik’s death. Oh, no. There had been a gargantuan upheaval as the fabric of the normal universe resumed its shape and the distortions of magical art withdrew.
    In other words, the whole lot fell down in a hell of a smother.
    Most of the people in the party who had ventured down into the maze of the Coup Blag had got away, scrambling up the slippery