A Victory for Kregen Read Free

enigmatic; but they were some kind of men and therefore amendable to the argument of steel.
    But, for all that, they possessed the only riding animals that we could expect to lay hands on around this desolate place.
    With the rising of the Twins, the two second moons of Kregen eternally orbiting each other, we rose also and gathered our weapons and set off marching across the Humped Land.
    Under the moon glitter, the dark and ominous shapes of the Moders rose from the plain about us. They stretched for mile after mile, set in patterns, and at random, some relatively small, others encompassing many miles of subterranean passages.
    “D’you fancy going down another one to see what we can lay hands on, Hunch?” I overheard Nodgen speaking thus, and half-turned. Hunch spluttered a passionate protest.
    “What! Has your ib decayed, Nodgen! Go down there again!”
    “It was a thought,” said Nodgen, and he laughed in his coarse, bristly, Brokelsh way.
    The Pachak twins marched in silence, and their eyes remained alert and they scanned every inch of the way.
    The slinger and the archer marched one each side of their lord, Prince Tyfar. He strode on, head up, breathing deeply and easily. Yes, I had seen much of goodness in this young man during those periods of horror; now, with our way ahead at least for the moment clear, I hauled alongside him and we fell into a conversation about — of all things — the state of theater in Ruathytu, the capital of Hamal.
    “A few houses play the old pieces,” he said. He sounded aggrieved. “But by far the majority play these new nonsenses, all decadence and thumping and sensation. It is the war, I suppose.”
    “Yes. Fighting men—”
    “But, surely, Jak, a fighting man needs the sustenance of the inner spirit? Needs to have himself revitalized?”
    “You mean, when he isn’t trying to stop his head coming off?”
    Tyfar breathed in. He eyed me meanly. “You mock me, Jak.”
    “Not so. I agree with you. But you are a prince—”
    “I am! But — what has that to do with it?”
    “Just that you have had the advantages and privileges of an education that was not primarily aimed at earning a living.”
    I probed deliberately here. I had opened a gambit — in Jikaida I would have been opening the files for the Deldars to link ready for the zeunting — and he was aware that I meant more than I said.
    “You know no man may inherit his father’s estates and titles as easily as he climbs into bed, Jak. You know that, one day, when — and I pray to all the gods it is a long and distant day — my father dies I shall be called on to fight for what is mine. You know that. The law upholds. But a man must uphold himself as well as the law. I have been trained as a fighting man, and much I detested it at the time.”
    I had heard how he had always been running off to the libraries as a young lad, and how he had taken up the axe as a kind of reproach to those who taught him.
    The conversation at my nudging came around to his axe and he repeated what the slaves had said. He preferred the knowledge that came from books; but he had become an accomplished axeman as though to proclaim his independence from that emblem of many things, the sword. I thought I understood.
    There was in this young prince an inner fire I found engaging. His diffident manner, so noticeable when in the company of his father, had all fallen away under the tutelage of the horrors of the Moder. He gave his orders with a snap; yet one was fully alive to his own estimation of himself and what he was doing, as though he saw himself acting a part on a stage of his imagination.
    Our conversation wended along most comfortably, and Quienyin joined us to debate again what we had discovered and our chances of the morrow. Our voices were low-toned. And we all kept a sharp lookout.
    “We must seek to move from one point of vantage to another,” I said. “If we get our backs against good cover we can deal with the swarth folk.