Free A Fortune for Kregen by Alan Burt Akers Page A

black teeth and one eye chuckled. He was half off his head already.
    “It depends who we get to act as player.”
    “May Havil shine his mercy upon us,” said a woman, and she made the secret sign of Havil the Green.
    We spent three days and nights in the hell-hole. At one point a man in resplendent clothes and a blue and yellow checkered mask over his face appeared. Lanterns illuminated his figure as he stood upon a dais beside the lenken door. The people babbled to a stupefied silence.
    “You are all given a trial, and the evidence is against you and you are all condemned.” This man, the representative of the Nine Masked Guardians, spoke in a booming, confident voice. He lifted a ring-clustered hand. “The trial was fair and just, according to the laws of the republic. You are all appointed to act as pieces in Execution Jikaida—”
    He got no further. The yells and shrieks, the imploring screams, all smashed and racketed to that slimed brick roof. He turned away, disgusted with the animal-like behavior of the mob beneath him, and walked out with a measured, pompous, confident tread. We were left to face our fate.
    What the devil had happened to Pompino and Drogo? Had they taken the voller? What ailed Yasuri?
    These questions flew up in my head, and I saw them as the petty concerns they were.
    On the morrow I faced Execution Jikaida, and, by Krun, that was a concern that shook a fellow right down to his boots.
    Execution Jikaida may be conducted in a number of different ways, and I guessed we’d get the stickiest.
    Guards shepherded us along the next afternoon — we could judge the time because the afternoon was the time for this particularly nasty form of the game — and we shuffled out, loaded with chains manacled and fettered to our hands and legs. Screams and sobs echoed about that dolorous procession.
    At a wooden door we were each given a large drink of raw dopa.
    I drank the dopa.
    Some of the people calmed down, others slobbered, some fell faulting. The guards dealt with them all faithfully.
    At last we were marched down a long stone corridor. At the far end double doors arched, and these, we guessed, led out onto the board. A Jiktar, smart in his soldier’s uniform, stood by the door, backed by a squad of men. His face, although grim, betrayed a feeling that in my heightened state I hardly recognized as pity.
    “Take heart!” he bellowed. “Not all of you will die. It depends on the game. Some will live. Pray to your gods that you will be among the fortunate.”
    Lop-eared Nath shouted up, truculent, fierce. “And who is to act as our player?”
    “You?”
    Nath shrank back. “Not me!”
     
    I said, “Jiktar, how can the player be harmed?”
    He looked hard at me.
    “You are a foreigner? Yes, I see. Then you were foolish to commit a crime in our city. The object of the game is to take the Princess, is this not so? To place her in hyrkaida? Well, then, her Pallan is the player in Execution Jikaida.”
    I saw it all.
    The Pallan is the most powerful piece on the board, and, also, as a consequence, the piece the opposing player most wishes to dispose of.
    The smells of this dismal place rose about me. The water dripped. And the people with their bellies afire with dopa moaned softly, given over to their own destruction.
    “Thank you, Jiktar,” I said, and shuffled off back into the amorphous mass of people.
    “Wait!”
    The word hit me like a leaden bullet slung by a slinger. “Yes.”
    “You, dom, will be the player.”
    The eyes of the people about me showed white. Some started to caterwaul their fears, others cried out, some shrieked.
    “But—”
    “ Shastum !” The Jiktar roared out, instantly halting the growing noise. “Silence. Move out!”
    I did not move.
    Into that cowed silence I said, “And who acts as player when I am slain?”
    “The next in line. There is no interruption in play. Move out! Grak !”
    It all made sense. Any fumble-wit might make the moves. The poorer the