Allies of Antares by Alan Burt Akers Page B

Arditchoith, had been snapped up by a party as he tumbled from a rocky ledge in the cave. Both sides had been surprised and shocked. But here was the sorcerer, wild as all hell, safely gagged and bound.
    “Make sure the gag is tight, matoc.”
    “Quidang, by Kuerden the Merciless!”
    The uproar attracted Seg and Kytun and they walked across from the flutduin lines. Presently we would have to take off with Tyfar and pray he survived his ordeal.
    Seg was just saying, “They’ll never get any information out of him if they rough him up like that,” in a judicious way when the sorcerer — by some sleight of thaumaturgy, no doubt — broke momentarily free. Those few moments were enough. His bandy legs twinkling, he broke through the startled swods, leaped for a boulder, balanced, leaped for the far side, and tumbled clean into the all-embracing arms of a party of Djangs come to see what the excitement was all about. They held him, and he would not escape them.
    “By Zodjuin of the Silver Stux!” rapped Kytun. “This fellow is a man! Let’s find out more about him.”
    The Djangs grasped the wildman and he was run up to stand defiantly before Kytun. Now Kytun is a majestically impressive figure, broad, bulky, regal of mien, and his four arms are so evidently capable of dealing out punishment and destruction that he inspires universal respect. Also, as I know, those same four muscular arms and deadly hands can be infinitely tender in caring for those he loves, and in looking after the flowers that so delight him in his garden back home in his paradise island of Uttar Djombey.
    An imposing, dominating, intimidating figure, then, Kytun Kholin Dom. The wildman sorcerer, the Arditchoith, stared furiously up through his shock of disarranged hair with a look of malignant hatred. His whole posture, the jumping of the muscles in his face above the gag, spoke eloquently of vivid resentment and animosity and nothing of fear or trembling.
    “Spying on us, were you?” quoth Kytun. “Well, we’ll soon find out if there are any more of you. Take off his gag. There are questions he must be asked.”
    Sinewy Djang fingers stripped away the leather gag.
    A frenzied chorus of shrieks battered into the air.
    “Don’t take off the gag!”
    “Stop! Stop!”
    “Keep him tongueless!”
    It was too late.
    The horrified shouts of the Hamalese soldiers changed to shrieks of consternation and fear.
    The wildman sorcerer spoke.
    What he said he spat out in no language I knew, although the language genetically coded pill I’d taken years ago enabled me to grasp at the essence of what he was saying.
    Rather — at what he was calling up.
    In a screeched invective-laden invocation he called upon the Pale Vampire Worms. His stutter of words seemed to swell and crackle among the rocks. The soldiers yelled and fought to climb aboard the nearest tyryvol or flutduin. A coldness dropped upon the platform in the canyon and clouds passed before the faces of the suns.
    From a myriad cracks grazing the surface of the platform elongated white forms emerged. They writhed. Sinewy, puffed, bloated with pale slime shining, they oozed from the dank recesses of nightmare to swarm onto the ledge and descend upon the panic-stricken people.
    A crack at my feet disgorged a plump white worm — I’d not noticed any crack there before — and as I stumbled back the thing lifted into the air. White, corrugated like a concertina, slime-running, the Pale Vampire Worm looked upon me with two round crimson eyes protruding prominently. Real power, then, he had, this wildman wizard.
    The sword was in my fist and the blade went around in a horizontal slash before I knew what was happening.
    The worm fell in two severed halves, and the tail end shriveled into a pale wormcast and the head spun about, the two bulging eyes red as freshly spilled blood, and began to grow a new tail.
    The air filled with the horrors, and those of us left on the ledge slashed and leaped and