Legions of Antares by Alan Burt Akers Read Free Book Online Page B

Manchi — save a place for this rast!”
    The stylor glanced up, his chalk poised. His lips were very red. “They’re all the same to me, Deldar Hruntag. Wheel ’em up and I’ll jikaider ’em.”
    The paktuns sniggered and on we marched under the opposite roof and along a corridor where crossbowmen and spearmen stood guard and so to the anteroom of the Amak. Here I was halted and we waited. As Deldar Hruntag said: “You may be a miserable spy for the flutsmen; but the Amak has duties. You wait.”
    Now, despite all that I had witnessed, and although I could not believe it of Nulty, I was prepared in the deepest recesses of my ugly thoughts to perceive Nulty waiting in judgment. I could not believe it of him; but I was prepared for him to have taken over as Amak.
    So that when we wheeled in and I noticed the hall as a place of color and some provincial magnificence, I looked at the man sitting in his chair raised on a dais and felt a profound and grateful sense of relief.
    And, immediately thereafter, a profound and alarmed sense of concern for Nulty.
    The Amak of Paline Valley looked to be on the younger side of his first half-century, a nervous, intense, dark man, with a leanness to nose and chin and a thinness to lips I found displeasing — and then corrected my prejudiced thoughts. His hair, very dark, lay plastered to his scalp so that he looked like a weasel. He stared at me. He was not at first sight at all a nice kind of person.
    “So this is the flutsman spy.”
    I waited, looking around. I was not bound. I wore my sword. The fellow in his chair, which was done up in gilts and ivories and smothered in a truly magnificent zhantil pelt, a blaze of gold, rested his narrow chin on his fist, which looked all bone, and glowered at me.
    I waited no longer.
    “I am not a flutsman. Where is Nulty, the Crebent of Paline Valley?”
    The command Deldar gave me a backhander across the face. He would have done, except that I moved and he stumbled past. I let him topple on, merely contenting myself with tripping him.
    “Answer me, usurper! What have you done with Nulty?”
    As you see, I was just as stupid as ever I’d been on Kregen.
    All kinds of clever stratagems occurred to me when I woke up in the cells.
    The place was dimly lit by a torch mounted just outside the bars. Filthy straw half-covered the stone floor. The walls were bare. Iron chains lay here and there stapled to the walls. No skeletons lay in grotesque bone-yellow contortions within the chains; so I gathered that the Amak killed his prisoners off sharply. A bundle stirred and moaned in the shadows, and another rolled over. A voice spoke from the other side.
    “Lie still, Nath. Give your back time to ease.”
    I knew the voice.
    I said, “Nulty!”
    The voice whispered. “Is it you — the Amak — is it...?”
    A squat form shambled forward to the end of the chain’s tether. Torchlight fell across the filthy, bearded, exhausted face of my comrade Nulty, Crebent of Paline Valley.
    “When we get out of here, Nulty,” I said. “We will let this fellow who calls himself the Amak test these chains.”
    Nulty sank to his knees. He had been a laughing, barrel-bodied man, constantly in scrapes of which I knew I never learned the quarter. Then I saw his hands. They were knotted into useless lumps, so I knew the cramps that had troubled him had finally destroyed his dexterity.
    “Nulty! Brace up. We’ve been in trouble before—”
    “Aye, master. But not like this. And he was my son, my adopted son, and this is his reward for love.”
    So the story came out when Nulty got over his amazement at my appearance here. It was not clever. Responsible for the whole management of the valley, Nulty had looked around for someone to train up to replace him when he died. Having no family of his own, he had selected a bright and promising lad from a distant cousin’s union with a rapscallion of a paktun. The lad was called Hardil the Mak for his black hair. He had