A Life for Kregen by Alan Burt Akers Read Free Book Online Page A

Tarek Malervo Norgoth, and I felt the old blood thumping and I gripped my fists together into the small of my back and ground my jaws down, tightly, so as to keep the proceedings on a halfway decent level of civilized transaction. But it was hard, by Zair, it was hard.
    At last I unclenched those old rat-traps of mine and managed to say in a quiet voice: “Here and now, Norgoth? Then you must expect the answer to be no, surely?”
    “Aye! That we do expect. I have said so all along.”
    “But I have not!” burst out Ralton Dwa-Erentor. His young face looked sullen, determined, as though he had built up a charge and now it was coming spilling out. The sullenness was very close to mutiny. “We must stand with honest Vallians against the Racters and the bastards from Hamal and their Opaz-forsaken cramphs of mercenaries.”
    They tell me that friends and friendship are becoming dirty words in this wonderful new civilization we are building here on Earth. That may be, and may be for the worse. But as I stood watching Ralton as he spoke so vehemently, I felt that in other circumstances we could have been friends. The determination in him to say out what he believed in, against the feelings of the ambassador, warmed me.
    I bent my brows on Malervo Norgoth.
    “Why does Layco Jhansi choose you to lead the deputation, if you seek only rejection as an answer?”
    Ralton fired up at this; but the woman turned her battleship-old-head and he simmered down. But he glowered most handsomely.
    “We knew the Racters were sending. That, alone, seemed good enough reason.” The contempt in Norgoth stung.
    Everyone spied on everyone else. Of course. That was just another of the pretty little ways of life an honest old sea dog had to understand. And, in all this, just how much was the devil’s work of Phu-Si-Yantong?
    “I still see no value in this mission from Jhansi.”
    “Will you or will you not stand with us against the Racters?”
    “I have said, I will ponder this and give you my answer presently.”
    A rattle from the sorcerer drew my attention away from Norgoth.
    A blank and horrifying whiteness shrouded his eyes so they looked like corpse-eyes, glaring sightlessly upon me. Foam speckled his lips and dripped in white-tinged green streamers upon the unkempt beard. He trembled. He shook as a tree shakes in the tempest. The hard bean-rattle of his morntarch clicked and clattered like the claws of rats. His right arm lifted and extended horizontally. The clenched fist uncurled and the long brown fingernails, rimmed in grime, spread and the forefinger pointed at my breast.
    His panting filled the anteroom with opaque beats of sound.
    “Now you will see why!” shouted Norgoth. His thin legs carried that gross body sideways, away from the sorcerer, and his face betrayed a glee made manifest in his delight at my coming destruction.
    I felt the blast of psychic power.
    I felt it. Like a wall of rushing air as one puts one’s head over the shield in a flier. Like the blow from an axe against the brim of the helmet. Like the nuzzling embrace of a graint as that great beast seeks to crush ribs and pelvis and skull. All of these sensations flared in the scything attack. I staggered. I took a step backwards.
    Norgoth yelled again, urging his sorcerer, this Rovard the Murvish, to greater effort, demanding that he render me incapable and in his power.
    So they did not wish to kill me. They had deeper designs. Their object was to place me in hypnosis, a saturated psychic state in which I would obey every command they chose to give me, in which I would be their puppet.
    Well, I have been the puppet of the Star Lords, aye, and of the Savanti, too. I have been used by Wizards of Loh in ways that are passing strange, and have fought. And I have been the recipient of favors from Zena Iztar, that superhuman woman who from time to time had appeared to me, exhorting me to courage and to perseverance, and who had enabled the genuine formation of a