Free Savage Scorpio by Alan Burt Akers

suddenly, with an anguish for her I detested and found biting and acid and altogether hateful. My Delia! Well, everyone must go through the agonies of seeing loved ones die. Because Delia and I had bathed in the Sacred Pool of the River Zelph in far Aphrasöe, the city of the Savanti, the Swinging City, we were assured of a thousand years of life and the rapid recovery from wounds and illness. The wounds I had taken in the Jikai of the Brotherhood of Iztar against the Shanks were already healed. And yet, I had held my daughter Velia in my arms as she died. What agonies mortality tortures us with.
    Nath the Needle moved carefully forward in his best professional manner and shooed us from the bed. He took immediate command of the four nurses, pale women, nervous, worried, and at his directions one of them turned back the coverlets and the others lifted the emperor’s shrunken body and opened the fancy silk shirt over his sunken chest. I went with Seg to stand over in the bay window where a flick-flick plant looked as though it needed a heaping handful of fat flies. The six flunkeys, armed, who stood along the far walls, blankly regarding the proceedings, could be ignored. The emperor, apart from certain follies, lived a spartan life.
    I said to Seg: “D’you know what’s happened to Queen Lush? I thought for sure she’d be sobbing at the bedside.”
    “She had to return to Lome. Some pressing affair of state. The emperor saw her off — Thelda says he was in full health then.”
    “We haven’t seen the last of her. She has designs on the emperor. This dire news will bring her scurrying back.”
    “Aye. It’s bad, Dray.”
    “Yes. How stands Falinur?”
    He knew what I meant. The old recklessness of his face sobered, for the men of Erthyrdrin, Seg’s homeland, are fey and wild and also highly practical. “I have worked hard there, trying to make the kovnate into the kind of paradise you have in Valka. There are always cramphs against whatever I try to do. Their malignancy lingers on. They remember. I wouldn’t take a sheaf of arrows on their loyalty.”
    I made no comment on this bleak if expected news. “And Inch? I fancy the Black Mountains will stand with us.”
    “The Blue Mountain Boys have resolved their ancient quarrels with the Black Mountain Men. That is more Inch’s doing than Korf Aighos’s — he is one man I wouldn’t trust with my bow — but he is loyal to Delia. Between them they have made those mountains and the zorca plains into a stronghold.”
    “There are other nobles willing to stand up and be numbered. As for Delphond—” I sighed. I thought, then, that Delia’s pretty little province of Delphond, a charming, lazy, contented place, now that the Chyyanists had gone, could never raise even a pastang of real fighting men. There had been changes in Delphond the last time I had been through, as you know; but the old carefree, easy-going ways persisted — and I would not change them.
    “Lord Farris will bring in Vomansoir.”
    “Yes. And, if it comes to the fluttrell’s vane, we can strike across quickly and so pinch out—” I stopped. Delia and Thelda with Katrin came over to us and the conversation became general, still concerned, low-voiced. I glanced at the doctor. Nath the Needle looked grave. He peered into the emperor’s mouth, pulled down his lower eyelids, felt and prodded him, tut-tutting to himself. No acupuncture needles had been used by Doctor Charboi, and Nath had not opened his sturmwood case, so I gathered the sick man was in no pain.
    Very carefully, using a piece of verss, that finest of snow-white linen, Nath wiped the emperor’s mouth. He folded the cloth delicately and placed it into his lesten-hide satchel. Sight of the piece of pure verss reminded me vividly of the Kroveres — for verss represented the purity for which the old vers of Valka had been famed.
    Nath glanced up and met my gaze. He nodded and indicated he was ready to leave, which surprised me, and