Free A Victory for Kregen by Alan Burt Akers Page A

rings...
    Our flying mounts skeined through the air and we drove on through the moons-washed night. When by the feel of the birds’ motion and the little draggling skip to the wings we knew they had had enough, we descended in a grove of tuffa trees, for we had flown past the end of the Humped Land and left that desolate landscape astern. The fluttrells had been hard-driven by their former owners. It is the habit of flutsmen to use their mounts to the utmost. We had a distance to travel and wished to husband the fluttrells’ strength.
    All of us, I feel, had been touched by that night flight.
    We spoke softly, doing what had to be done in the way of caring for the birds and of brewing up. Then the wine was passed around. We spoke quietly, not just because we were somewhere in Havilfar none of us knew and therefore must expect the eruption of danger at any moment. As I say, we had been impressed by that flight under the moons.
    Prince Tyfar did not raise our previous subject of conversation. I, for one, by Vox, was happy to let it lie.
    Nodgen, as a bristly Brokelsh, was content to dunk his head in the stream and splash water vigorously all over himself. Hunch, being a Tryfant — and you know how foppish they can be on occasion — had to go the whole hog and give himself the full treatment. Mind you, although I say I have no feelings one way or the other for Tryfants, I had seen enough of Hunch by now to have summed him up better, I fancy, then he guessed or knew himself. And Nodgen shared my opinion. Hunch was a Tryfant, sure enough, not above four foot six in height and full of quivers and quavers and always with an eye open for the nearest bolt hole — but he had gone with us through the horrors of the Moder.
    “Jak,” said Quienyin as I turned away from the stream, shaking myself like a collie.
    “Aye,” I said, blowing water. “Aye, Quienyin. What you have to say is overdue.”
    “Come a little way apart. Much Is To Be Said.”
    Those capital Capital Letters, as it were, alerted me. I followed the Wizard of Loh into the shadows of the tufa trees and we settled down, facing each other so that we might keep an eye open on each other’s back.
    I said, bluntly, “You have sussed Phu-Si-Yantong and you do not care for what you have found.”
    He rubbed his fingers through that reddish hair, shoving the turban aside, uncaring if it fell to the ground.
    “We Wizards of Loh set store by certain standards. We have power and we try not to abuse it.
    Certainly we lust after gold and gems and suchlike baubles — or some of us — but it is the pursuit of knowledge and its manipulation that is our goal and that sustains us. We do not seek petty princely dominion.”
    “But...”
    “But, Jak the Sturr, I have been overcome. I entertain the liveliest respect and admiration for San Yantong. He represented all that was fundamentally encouraging about us Wizards of Loh. He would make a stir in the world, we all said—”
    I stared at Quienyin. “He was your tutor.”
    Quienyin did not flinch back. “No. We do not work on that basis in Loh, where we are trained. Not at all. And, also, we never discuss this training. But our comradeship down the Moder has—”
    “It seems to me, Quienyin, there has been altogether too much talk about this comradeship. Methinks there is too much protestation going on.”
    He would not know my source for the adapted quote; but Nalgre ti Liancesmot expresses similar sentiments in Part Three of the Seventh Book of The Vicissitudes of Panadian the Ibreiver.
    He nodded again; but it was not an unthinking nod. Rather, it was the expression of a man who has reached a conclusion.
    “Now that I am a little aware of the quality of person I am to do business with, I agree with you.”
    “So you think you know who I am?”
    “Certainly. You are Jak, calling himself the Sturr, claiming to hail from Hamal — or Djanduin or Hyrklana if the mood takes him — a paktun, probably a hyr-paktun. Is there