Free Fires of Scorpio by Alan Burt Akers Page A

up. He dragged back on the lady Scaura Pompina’s head and his blade glittered.
    The Rapa bristled. Ashti squirmed. I caught a glimpse of her face, golden, shining, furious, and then it seemed her face disappeared behind two rows of teeth. She opened her mouth and bit. The Rapa screamed.
    “Good for you, Ashti,” I said and went full tilt into the apim.
    My sword flicked away his blade. The hilt lifted and descended and thunked, and the man toppled and sprawled, his eyes crossed, his mouth glugging open.
    Without pausing to see if the lady fell off her chair or not I whirled. Ashti was doing all right; but the feathered Rapa with his vulturine beakhead would soon master her. So I tapped him on the back of the head and snatched Ashti from him as he pitched onto his beak.
    “Jak!” she said, chattering. “He hit me!”
    ‘And you bit him.”
    “Serve him good — nasty man.”
    The Brokelsh, all hair and uncouth roaring noises, recovered from the kick up the backside, charged at me. He was brave if not over-bright. When he, too, lay slumbering with his three comrades, I took stock of the situation.
    There was the fellow with the crossbow at the front door who, it seemed to me, must come running in to investigate the cause of the uproar. Cautiously, I poked my head around the other door and looked along the corridor. The light glimmered from side windows, fell across the floor and across the humped shape beneath the far door. That had to be the front door. The shape did not move — but the door jerked against it, opened and pushed, and then closed, only to open and push against the shape once more.
    Very carefully — just in case there were more of these bandits — I walked along the corridor. The shape on the floor was the dead body of a Stroxal, with a spear through his face. I recognized the spear. I pulled the body away and called out.
    “Hai! Chulik! You got him. It is all safe now.”
    You will observe I called Chenunga the Ob-eyed merely Chulik, and not by his name. Even then, after so many seasons on Kregen, I remained still bristly around Chuliks. As for Katakis, with the exception of Rukker — and he was a marginal case — I’d so far never met a halfway-decent Kataki. Which was a tragedy, for all of Kregen. And Chuliks — the door opened and he came in, looking suspiciously around. He saw the body and he saw me.
    “Yes,” I said. “The others are unconscious.”
    “The mistress—?”
    “She is safe.”
    “The children?”
    “Bound in their beds, so I am told. I have not seen them.”
    “I will attend them at once.”
    All the deference dropped away as he asked his questions. Something of the old coldly ferocious Chulik manner broke through, an echo of the time before he lost his eye and his tusk.
    The quick light patter of feet along the corridor brought the Chulik around. His hand reached for the spear.
    “All right, Ashti,” I said. “The Chulik is on our side. Don’t bite him.’”
    She turned her head. She looked sorry not to get the opportunity to fasten her teeth into the Chulik.
    “They will wake up in there—” she said.
    “Then we must tie them up.”
    Chenunga the Ob-eyed went off to find the two sets of twins and Ashti and I went back into the room where we’d had the fight. We stopped on the threshold. The stink of spilled blood gusted up, raw and vile.
    Ashti looked quite calmly on the scene.
    The lady Scaura Pompina was just about to rise from her knees. The front of her dress was a mere red shining mass. There had been four of them, an apim, a Brokelsh, a Rapa and the other fellow.
    Scaura Pompina had slit all four throats.
    Ashti wandered across and picked up a discarded trident. She started to poke at the Rapa’s dead body.
    “All right, Ashti. He’s on his way to the Ice Floes of Sicce now. He can’t feel you sticking him.”
    “But I can feel me sticking him.”
    Against logic of that kind it is difficult to argue.
    The woman laughed suddenly, throwing her head