Beasts of Antares Read Free

road, to surround us. A few quick words between their leader and Naghan and we went on, riding up to the inn and dismounting.
    A warm fug of ale fumes and cooking and sweat met us as we entered. The place presented the appearance one would expect from a small village in a prosperous countryside, and the ale would be good.
    The floor was swept clean. That floor was made from sawn planks, not beaten earth. Pots glittered. The enormous fireplace gaped black and empty, save for a brass jar filled with dried flowers. The men who escorted us and the others who awaited our coming wore ragged clothing of a raffish, free-flowing kind. They were much burdened with weapons. Almost all were apims. They sat about on the settles and benches, and I surmised they would keep quiet as their chief spoke. If there was trouble — I gave them a glance that appeared casual and which totted them up and assessed them.
    Twenty. Twenty ruffians, guerilleros, as ready to slit your throat as to greet you with a pleasant Lahal.
    One of them, a fellow who wore a gaudy sash of a color I took to be plum, so dirty and festooned with gold lace was it, walked forward. His face looked like an old boot. His hair was lank. But he smiled.
    “Llahal, koters,” he said, giving us the name of gentlemen of Vallia. “The Chuktar will be here in but five murs.”
    Karidge would have started hotly demanding to know why the emperor should be kept waiting, but I silenced him. I looked about, saw a long lanky lout with his feet on a bench. Walking over, I pushed his legs off, so that his heavy Vallian boots crashed to the floor, and sat on the bench. I took off my wide-brimmed hat, placed it on the table, and said, “I will wait five murs.”
    As a mur is shorter than a terrestrial minute, the ball was, as they say, in Mevek’s court.
    The long lanky lout glowered, but he said nothing and straightened himself up. The eyes of the others in the taproom — by Krun! You could feel them, like a pack of drills.
    My companions remained standing. The fellow with the unmentionable sash and the face like an old boot swallowed.
    “I am Vanderini the Dagger. I will fetch the Chuktar—”
    He went out through a rear door in something of a hurry.
    Karidge chuckled nastily. A chuckle can express many profound emotions.
    Turko and Korero looked as though offensive smells were obfuscating the pleasures of life. Naghan the Barrel let one of his wheezing laughs shake him up, the tears pouring from his eyes. He clapped his belly.
    “I am parched. Will no one fetch a stoup, for the sweet sake of Mother Dikkana, who brought forth the saint who gave us ale?”
    Someone laughed — that was easy to do with Naghan the Barrel — and tankards were forthcoming. I sipped.
    Four and a half murs, all that took. On the fifth, as the calibrated clepsydra on its shelf above the mantelpiece showed, Chuktar Mevek walked into the taproom.
    To sum him up in a single glance would be easy, and probably completely wrong.
    This Mevek, who called himself a Chuktar, the equivalent of a brigadier general, was quite clearly hard as nails, hard-bitten, hard as old leather. He was strongly built, with a flat, impassive face in which his brown Vallian eyes were deeply set. He looked like his men, save that he wore more ornamentation. Yet I judged that to have accomplished what he had, in raising so many people willing to stand against Layco Jhansi and his mercenaries, he had a spark, a charisma, a touch of that genius Kregans call the yrium. He looked at me carefully. He reminded me by that stare, by his impassivity, of a wild animal in the moments before it leaps.
    Then: “Llahal, majister. I will not give you the full incline as all emperors are due. I hear you have banished such flummery.”
    “You are right. Llahal.”
    “They say the kov who ran off is a friend of yours.”
    “You are right and wrong.”
    He merely lifted one dark eyebrow.
    “Kov Seg Segutorio is a friend of mine. He did not run