Quest of the Golden Ape, Paul W. Fairman and Stephen Marlowe [ereader with android TXT] 📗
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Whistling, he pushed his way through the crowds and was lost to sight just as the giant who went before him.
"B'ronth of Utalia!" Prokliam the seneschal proclaimed. Volna the Beautiful nodded. The doddering old seneschal had already told her about the Utalian. She was prepared to receive him now. If he knew what he claimed to know, if he knew the true details of the death of Prince Jlomec, then he must be silenced. Naturally, he wanted gold. They always wanted gold. But gold was not the way to silence them. Gold never worked. It only made them greedy for more.
With Volna were, instead of her usual ladies in waiting, two discreet palace guards. Grinning, she looked at their whip-swords. That was the way to silence one such as B'ronth the Utalian.
"He may enter," Volna told the seneschal. Prokliam bowed out, saying:
"And Princess, you will not forget—"
"No, Prokliam, I won't forget. You hardly knew the Prince Jlomec at all, did you? You certainly couldn't have been his favorite."
"Princess," breathed the seneschal tremulously as he withdrew.
A moment later, B'ronth the Utalian entered the royal chamber. He wore a snow-cloak. He was all but invisible except for the snow-cloak. He was, eerily, a disembodied cloak floating through air. Although, noticed Volna, if you looked closely you could see the faintest suggestion of a man's head above the cloak, as if you saw the rich wall tapestries of the room through a transparent, head-shaped glass. Likewise, the suggestion of arms and legs....
"You are B'ronth?" An unnecessary question, but Volna had not yet made up her mind what must be done.
"Yes, majesty," the cloak said in a different but somehow unctuous voice.
"You are alone?"
"No, majesty," said the cloak.
"Then—?"
"A girl. A wayfarer of the Plains of Ofrid. I accompany her."
"And the story you have to tell?"
"I realize, majesty, how the royal Princess must grieve at the loss of her royal brother, the Prince. I realize...."
"To the point, man. Get to the point. Are you trying to say you know how Prince Jlomec was slain? You know who killed him?"
"Yes," said the cloak boldly, eagerly.
Princess Volna smiled. Perhaps something in that smile warned B'ronth the Utalian. But of course, the warning came too late. In a quick jerky motion, the cloak retreated toward the doorway. "Princess...." B'ronth said.
Princess Volna told her guards: "Kill him."
B'ronth the Utalian had time for one brief scream which, if a sound could, seemed to embody all his frustrated dreams of wealth. Then one of the guards moved swiftly, his arm streaking out. The whip-sword in his hand lashed, blurring, toward the cloak. Bright red blood welled, jetted.
B'ronth the Utalian's head, no longer invisible, rolled on the floor at Volna's lovely feet. "Clean that up," she told one of the guards. To the other she said: "Now fetch the girl."
"Mind, lord, I don't question you," Hultax the Abarian said. "But it's just—"
"Did you send the message?" Retoc cut him off.
"As you ordered, sire. Yes."
"Good."
"Sire, I hate inactivity. I loathe it. I am a soldier."
"As I am," said Retoc slowly, his hard cruel eyes staring at something Hultax could not—and would never be able to—see.
"So we just sit here in this rented house in Nadia City, cooling our heels. It doesn't make sense, sire."
"Sense?" mused Retoc. "What is sense? Is it victory and power for the strongest? Well, is it?"
"Yes, lord," Hultax responded. "But—"
"And you sent the message? Our legions will come?"
"Yes, lord. Two days hence they'll be encamped on the ice fields three jeks march from the city gates. But I don't see—"
"You obey, Hultax. I see. I do the seeing."
"But I thought you ... the Princess Volna ... together...."
"The Princess can serve me, now. If she can deliver Nadia without a fight, then Tarth is mine, Hultax, don't you see? In two days all the royal blood of all the royal families of Tarth will be assembled here in Nadia for the funeral games. If Bontarc's army doesn't interfere, then I will be master of Tarth."
"But if Bontarc finds out—"
"That, Hultax," said Retoc with a smile, "is why you sent the message."
"My sire," said the proud soldier Hultax humbly.
Soon, thought Retoc, all Tarth would call him that. My sire....
Ahead of Bram Forest loomed the ramparts of the palace. He must hurry. He knew he had to hurry. He pushed impatiently through the crowd. Several times men looked up angrily, and would have said something. But when they saw his face, they turned away.
What they saw in Bram Forest's face made them afraid.
"Majesty?" Prokliam the seneschal said.
"Well?" Volna demanded. "Didn't the guards send you for the girl?"
"Majesty, I was thinking...."
"Well, Prokliam, what is it? Didn't you go for the girl?"
"Not yet, majesty, begging your pardon...."
"If you have something to say, then say it. And get the girl."
"Majesty, a seneschal knows the palace. It is his job...."
"I warn you, Prokliam, I have little patience today." Her anxiety was evident.
"No one wishes to be chosen," Prokliam blurted quickly, boldly, "even as I did not wish to be chosen to accompany the body of Prince Jlomec on the Journey of No Return. Now that you have spared me, in your royal benevolence, I thought I might in turn advise you...."
"Yes, what is it, man?"
"You should not have killed the Utalian, majesty. If it is ordained that a living man and a living woman accompany the Prince's body to the Place of the Dead, to die there with him, their spirits serving him in death, why choose from among the palace staff? We all have family, we all have friends, we all stand something to lose. But majesty, if you were to break with tradition, if you were to send instead two strangers whose loss meant nothing to the palace, the palace staff would love and revere you even more than they already do."
Volna's beautiful face smiled at him. He did not know what she was thinking. He never knew. No one did. She might reward him or have him slain on the spot. "Why do you tell me this, Prokliam?" she asked.
"For saving me when it was thought I would accompany—"
"No. There must be another reason."
"If you do this deed and if the palace and the people love you for it, and if the scepter of power should slip from Bontarc's hand to yours, and if, when it came time to select your prime minister...."
"Ha! Ha! Ha! We have an ambitious palace butler."
"But surely you—"
"Yes, Prokliam. I understand. I won't deny it. Perhaps I had the Utalian slain impetuously. But there's still the girl."
"I'll fetch her at once, majesty."
"And if," mused Volna, no longer aware of the seneschal's presence, "we could find another stranger, a man, to accompany the body of Prince Jlomec on the Journey of No Return, not only the palace, but the people as well would love me. A stranger...."
"Take me to your King," Bram Forest told the palace guard.
The guard smirked. "Do you think any stranger in the realm is granted an audience with King Bontarc, fool?"
"It is a matter of life and death."
"But whose life and death?" demanded the guard, roaring with laughter. "Yours, idiot?"
"It is about Ylia the Wayfarer."
"I know of no Ylia the Wayfarer. Begone, dolt!"
"It is about Prince Jlomec."
The guard's eyes narrowed. The word had been passed by no less a person than Prokliam the seneschal that anyone with information concerning the death of the royal Prince should be brought at once not to Bontarc but to Princess Volna. Could the guard, could he, Porfis, do less?
"Very well," he said. "Come with me."
Unarmed, but aware of his giant's strength and the mission which had seen him spend the first hundred years of his life in a crypt on Earth, Bram Forest went with the guard.
The way was long, through chambers in which priceless tapestries hung, through narrow, musty corridors into which the light of day barely penetrated, through rooms in which ladies in waiting and courtiers talked and joked, up bare stone stairs and through heavy wooden doors which Porfis the guard opened with a key which hung at his belt. The doors opened slowly.
Bram Forest entered a large room. It was, he could see at a glance, a woman's bower. Someone was standing at the far end of the room, in shadow. He squinted. He took two slow steps into the room. He began to run.
"Ylia! Ylia!" he cried.
Too late he saw the fetters binding her arms. Too late he saw her bite savagely at something and twist her neck and spit the gag from her mouth. Too late he heard her cry:
"Bram! Bram Forest! Behind you!"
He turned barely in time to see Porfis the guard, his whip-sword raised overhead hilt-first. He lifted his arm, but it was swept aside in the downward rush of the sword. Something exploded behind his eyes and all eternity seemed to open beneath his feet. He plunged into blackness with Ylia's name on his lips.
Unconscious, he was taken with Ylia through subterranean passages to the Royal Dock on the River of Ice. The barge with Jlomec's embalmed body waited. It was very cold on the river. The Place of the Dead beckoned from the unseen end of the Journey of No Return.
CHAPTER XIV
Land Beyond the Stars
t first Retoc the Abarian was too stunned by what he witnessed to think coherently. With the other Tarthians of royal blood he had received an unexpected summons to appear at the Royal Dock on the River of Ice and, before he could even try to fathom what it was about, an escort of Nadian guards had come to fetch him.
It was cold and murky on the banks of the River of Ice. The two men, Retoc and Hultax had arrived barely in time to see them unfastening the hawsers of the Royal Barge. Curious, he pushed closer through the crowd of nobles. Suddenly, before the barge was quite unmoored, as it swayed and rocked on the currents of the river, Nadian soldiers appeared with a platform on poles slung across their shoulders, the usual means of intra-city transportation for Nadian royalty. But this was no royalty Retoc saw on the platform, although they were dressed as royalty.
The woman, conscious and bound hand and foot, was the Virgin of the Wayfarers who had witnessed Prince Jlomec's death. The man, unconscious, his head propped high on pillows, was the white giant who once on the Plains of Ofrid had almost strangled Retoc.
A hatred such as he had never known flashed through Retoc's brain. He was so close he could see the gentle up-and-down motion of the giant's chest as he breathed. Then, beyond the platform, he saw Volna. Volna smiled at him. The platform bobbed by, was placed on the barge at the foot of Jlomec's bier. The remaining hawsers were cut loose.
There was, Retoc thought triumphantly, no return from the Place of the Dead.
But still, the white giant had recovered from what looked like certain death once, had vanished abruptly and fantastically when he would have died again. What was good enough for Volna the Beautiful was not necessarily good enough for Retoc of Abaria. He watched only long enough to see the royal barge pushed out into the icy currents of the river, then he turned and made his way to the second tier of observers, where Hultax stood among the lesser nobility and the military officers of the planet Tarth. He found Hultax and whispered for a time in his ear.
Hultax's face blanched. "But lord," he protested, "there is no return ... it is obvious the man will die ... you couldn't expect me to...." Hultax, frightened, confused, could neither think clearly nor express himself properly. His mouth hung open.
The boar charged while death and the Golden Ape stood grinning.
"Earlier, Hultax," Retoc said with a hard smile, "you craved action. I give you action. Take a boat. There are some moored down-river for the use of Nadian priests on their religious pilgrimages to the banks where the stilt-birds dwell. Overtake the royal barge. Board it. Slay the man and the woman."
"But I—the Place of the Dead...."
"Fool!" hissed Retoc. "I didn't ask you to visit the Place of the Dead. That's up to you. If you slay them first, on the River of Ice, and can bring back proof ... but the longer we talk,
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