Arena of Antares Read Online Free Page A

aerial battle raged and drifted away from us.
    “The Canops from the galleys will be ashore now,” I said. “If you seek this Rakker you had best follow, Horter Obquam.”
    He gestured. “I am a Strom, Horter Prescot. You really should address me as Strom of Tajkent.”
    “If it pleases you. But as for me and my friends, we are for Yaman, and the streets will not be friendly at this time of night, so we will take our leave now.”
    I could feel Turko’s brisk brightening at my words.
    The girls, whose mouths were now free of our hands, let out gasps of surprise and annoyance and, as was inevitable, fear.
    “I am not going back there, Dray Prescot!” yelped Saenda.
    “Not for all the ivory in Chem!” snapped Quaesa.
    “Then you are perfectly willing to stay with this Strom and his flying men?”
    Their outrage was both pitiful and painful. If this Strom Obquam of Tajkent tried to stop me I was fully prepared to deal with him and his flying band. As for the girls, I knew I would have to devise a scheme to get them back to their homes on the other side of the Shrouded Sea, and a good scheme at that. But Turko surprised me. I did not then understand why he wanted to go back to Yaman, the city of eerie buildings where Migshaanu had been contemptuously ousted as the Great Goddess by the Canops. He had no particular love for Mog, the old witch who had so surprisingly become Mog the Mighty, the high priestess, for all that she had doctored him and healed him of his hurts back there in the jungles of Faol.
    So it was that I turned to walk off, and said rather sharply: “You understand what it is we are about, Turko? We are making a fresh beginning. We are going to Yaman in the full knowledge that we might never leave, that we might hang by our heels from the ramparts of Mungul Sidrath?”
    “I know. I doubt it will happen, Dray.”
    I grunted, for I could find no words to express what I felt just then.
    The flying man — I suspected these were people who would not welcome being called volroks — called Quarda, who had already spoken out of turn, stepped before me. He held a weapon very like a toonon. The short and broad-bladed sword had been mounted on a shaft of a bamboo-like wood, with cross quillons also daggered. He held it as a man who knew his business.
    “You do not walk away so lightly, apim Prescot.”
    I did not reply. I looked with a hard stare at the Strom.
    He spread his hands, a gesture of resignation. “In this, Horter Prescot, a matter of honor, I may not intervene. It is between you and Horter Quarda, now.”
    The distance from my left kneecap to Quarda’s groin was almost exactly what one might have wished in the exercise yard. My knee smacked it with a crunchy
whop!
and Quarda stood for a moment, absolutely still, his mouth open. Then he dropped the toonon. His eyes began to bulge. They bulged quite slowly, and shone, a most curious sight. Slowly, he began to fold in the middle. I stood watching him, quite still, not speaking. Quarda put his hands to his middle, moving with a slow underwater finning movement, and bending forward and over, more and more, and his eyes bulged and bulged, and the cords in his neck stood out like a frigate’s sheets in a gale.
    He rolled right over into a ball, and fell on his side, and his legs kicked for a moment. He had not vomited yet, and that showed he must have been in good control. But he could not yell, and what with the yell inside him that couldn’t get out, and the stream that wanted to spurt out as well, he lay in a coil and twitched.
    I turned to the Strom of Tajkent.
    “Remberee, Strom,” I said, quite cheerfully. “Maybe we will have the pleasure of meeting another day.”
    His eyes on me remained unfathomable.
    “Remberee, Dray Prescot.”
    Taking Saenda firmly by the upper arm, as Turko took Quaesa, I marched off.
    Marched off along that dismal road toward the city of Yaman where waited horrors and battles and stratagems, were the other three, and