Arena of Antares by Alan Burt Akers

“This is a terrible business.”
    “Aye. But it is over now. Now we begin to put everything back in place.”
    “Those poor men — the arrows are so cruel.”
    “Some deserved it, some did not. Seg is ordering a cessation. We will get help for the wounded.”
    We dismounted, for her totrix threatened to keel over any minute and I wished to talk seriously to her. We went a little apart from the others, from my dwindled group of aides, from Mog and Mag, from the trumpeters and the standard-bearer. Oh, yes, Delia had not forgotten to bring a brand-new and impeccably stitched flag with her. My own old flag — the yellow cross on the scarlet field, the flag that fighting-men called “Old Superb” — had floated over our victory.
    Turko the Shield gazed after us, but he had sense enough not to intrude.
    “We have won a victory, Delia, my heart. But you must wonder why it had to be, why I became involved with this backward country in Havilfar which is generally more advanced than other places—”
    “Really, Dray!”
    “I know what you think. But Vallia cannot produce fliers.”
    “No. But Father says this is a first step in the right direction.”
    “So it is. But I would like to tell you why, my Delia.”
    She looked up at me, perfectly aware of the seriousness of the moment, her soft lips half parted, her brown eyes brilliant upon me, waiting for me to speak. A little movement scuttled in the dusty grass at her booted feet.
    And now I must relate a thing that seemed impossible to me at the time, and still strikes as strange and weird as anything I encountered on two worlds.
    For Delia looked down sharply, and without screaming or starting, said, “Oh, Dray! A scorpion!” I looked.
    The reddish brown scorpion scuttled past Delia’s boots. It halted before me and that damned arrogant tail lifted. I did not move. Delia, with a single glance at my face, remained silent.
    And then — Dear God! — the scorpion spoke to me.
    I thought I was hallucinating again, as I had done in that first dreadful attempt to cross the Klackadrin when the Phokaym had captured me. I put a hand to my head, staring at the scorpion.
    “Dray Prescot,” said the scorpion in a reedy and shrill voice not unlike a buzz saw ripping through winter logs. I did not think anyone else might hear that baleful voice.
    “Dray Prescot. Perhaps you are not so great a fool as we thought.” The Gdoinye had spoken to me. A bird had spoken to me. Was a scorpion any the more strange in this weird and wonderful, beautiful and horrible world of Kregen? “You have done what you were commanded to do. We acknowledge your deeds. Now you have our leave to depart from here, to Hyrklana—”
    I shouted in my old savage, intemperate way. “I am not going to Hyrklana!”
    Just how it was done I did not know, could not know. But, on the instant, black clouds roiled across the sky. Huge raindrops began to fall, gouting the dust into fountains, spreading and joining and coalescing into rivulets trickling down into the Valley of the Crimson Missals. In a twinkling the darkness of the clouds shut off every other person from my sight. Thunder boomed.
    “Delia!” I shouted. “Delia!” I screamed it out, spinning around, lost and shut away and condemned.
“Delia!”
    “Dray!”
    I heard her answering call, but faint, faint. “Dray! Where are you, dearest heart?”
    “Delia! Here — I am coming to you!”
    I blundered in the direction of her voice.
    “Dray! It is dark and I cannot see — Oh, Dray!”
    The shape of a terrified totrix reared above me in the gloom, his hooves wicked.
    I ducked and heard a faint and dwindling cry: “Dray—”
    And then the blue radiance swamped down about me and that greater representation of a scorpion caught me up in its ghastly blue embrace and I was falling and spinning and tumbling away into a long blue tunnel of nightmare.

Chapter Seven
    Of the descent of a slate slab and a scarlet breechclout
    Yells of panicking men and