Secret Scorpio Read Online Free Page B

give him arguments from which to strike sparks. If so, they were consummate actors.
    ‘To the Great Chyyan with Dray Prescot!”
    The chant from below grew in volume. I took no notice. What they wanted to do with me sounded highly unpleasant. What I intended to do with them might be highly unpleasant, at first; afterward they would see clearer. At the very least, this new creed had brought to my attention disquiet in Veliadrin, a disquiet I would see was dealt with fairly and rectified, so that the people of Veliadrin might be as happy as the people of Valka, as was their right.
    So, still more confused than I probably realized, still holding down my anger, still blanking out what had been said about Delia and our dead daughter, I took my eye away from the crack in the floorboards and prepared to wriggle soundlessly back to the doorway. Seg had gone and the gap showed only a dark slit.
    The boards beneath me creaked. They groaned. A spurt of ancient dust puffed past my face. I froze.
    The gallery moved.
    They were bellowing on about what they would like to do to Dray Prescot, making a hell of a noise, shrieking the most bloodcurdling threats. The groan of the ancient timber might be lost in all the uproar.
    The rotten timbers under me sagged. Even to this day I do not know if the pure welling of savage satisfaction justified or condemned me.
    The whole wooden structure shrieked as rusted nails gave way, as wooden pins snapped, as corroded bronze linchpins bent and parted. Rotten wood powdered to dust. A miasmic stench of long-dead fish gusted over me. I was falling.
    The yells of hatred for the Prince Majister of Vallia belching up from below, the shrieks of venom for Dray Prescot, changed to a shocked chorus of surprised screams as the wooden gallery collapsed in a weltering smother of dust and chips and flailing timbers upon the mob.
    Head over heels, I, that same Dray Prescot, of Earth and of Kregen, pitched down onto the heads of the blood-crazed rabble beneath.

Two
    “It is Dray Prescot, the devil himself!”
    For an instant I lay flat on my back amid the splintered wreckage of the gallery. A damned infernal chunk of wood jabbed sharply into my back. The people broke away in a circle, yelling, struggling to tear themselves free from the descending debris. The noise and confusion, the spouting dust from the ancient building, the struggles of men and women, I suppose all the furor was rather splendid.
    But I had an eye out for the black feathers and leather armor of Himet’s masichieri. They’d recover more rapidly from the shock of surprise than the fisherfolk.
    I sprang up. I did not draw my weapons.
    People were turning to stare back at me. Broken planks slipped beneath our feet and the dust made us cough. Dust and muck festooned my hair and shoulders, and my face, I suppose, knowing my own weaknesses, revealed the struggle between laughter and downright cussing fury possessing me. To be thus chucked down like a loon among a mob yelling for my blood — well, it was funny rather than not.
    Himet stood with arms uplifted, his mouth open, glaring as though a demon from Cottmer’s caverns had miraculously appeared before him.
    Oh, yes, the cramph recognized me.
    Whoever his leader was, this Makfaril, that rast would not be pleased with his priest. For, forgetting what he had been enjoining the folk around, Himet pointed a rigid forefinger at me. His wide-eyed stare blanked into stupefaction.
    “It is Dray Prescot, the devil himself!”
    After the thunder of the gallery smashing into the floor a silent moment expanded. Himet’s voice shocked out. The fisherfolk understood the enormity of what the priest of the Great Chyyan had said.
    “Dray Prescot!”
    They repeated the name. A quick babblement flowed through the crowd. They stared at me. Like a monstrous tidal wave growing and surging landward from the wastes of the sea, like a tsunami running from continent to continent, their hatred burst up and broke. In the