Beasts of Antares by Alan Burt Akers Page B

side and the slipping net, and the grasping fingers of Travok Arclay.
    Captain Dorndorf was a fine sailor of the skies. He understood the limitations and the possibilities of his ship.
Opazfaril
lifted a little. I felt that movement under my feet as I left Tom on the deck and began my leap for Travok. No one else was at hand; it had all been very quick. I felt the movement, I leaped, and
Opazfaril
dropped again, dropped sickeningly down. She hit the voller under us and the jar felt as though I had leaped down onto a marble tombstone. I staggered. My balance was gone.
    Without a sound I pitched over the side.
    Upside down I fell past the side of the ship.
    A flailing hand welted out and caught bruisingly in the next net by the one to which Travok clung. His net’s supports were broken through and he was slipping down. My net held firmly, and I got another hand hooked into it. I was quite safe. I looked sideways at Travok, to see how quickly I could traverse and grab him.
    “Hold on, Travok! Well soon get you out of this.”
    “I am not afraid, majister—”
    Tom poked his face over the smashed bulwark above us. He looked down.
    What followed followed fast.
    Tom looked down and saw his twin brother, to whom he was devoted. He saw his emperor. He saw us both and saw how we clung to our nets, and the way the nets swayed and ripped against their smashed eyelets.
    He did not hesitate.
    That was the thing that got to me, that screwed me up, that made — it is painful.
    Without hesitation, Tom reached over and hauled on the net to which I clung, hauling it in until he could reach me.
    I yelled.
    “No! No! Get Travok!” I screamed it out.
“Travok!”
    But Tom Arclay doggedly hauled on.
    I put my hand on a damned splinter in the ruined bulwark and I turned my head and looked down. Tom’s face was wet with tears and I could not look at him.
    Travok’s net split. It parted down the middle and Travok Arclay fell and fell, fell away, dwindling to a little spinning black dot with tiny whirling arms and legs.
    I could not watch him all the way.
    All I could do was haul myself over the side. I couldn’t look at Travok as he fell spinning down and I couldn’t look at his twin, Tom, as he collapsed on the deck.
    Truthfully, I could look at no man in that instant — least of all myself.

Chapter eight
    Zenobya
    “Hyrklana!” I said. I shouted it savagely. We were back in Vondium and a lot had happened and I was raw, ravaged, contemptuously intolerant of myself. I didn’t want fine young men dying for me, I didn’t want fine young men having to make that kind of awful decision — for me. “I’m going to Hyrklana. But before I do I am going to do one thing — send Sans Fantor and Therfenen in.
Bratch!”
    Not often do I use that hard word,
bratch!
It means jump, move, get the lead out. Sometimes, perhaps, I should have used it more.
    The messengers bratched.
    When the two wise men came in they looked pale. No doubt they had heard that the emperor was in a foul mood. Everyone who could recall what emperors traditionally did when they were in foul moods would tremble. Shoulders and heads would have air gaps. In the old days.
    “Sans,” I said. My words were hard. “Come in. There is a task to your hands I will have done immediately.”
    Among the gorgeous rams of the imperial palace this audience chamber had been refurbished, the roof not having fallen in, and the throne — a mere marble affair with only about a sackful of jewels embedded in golden settings — replaced from where it had been toppled among rubble. It had avoided being looted by this, for although a mere sackful of gems is paltry when embellishing one of an emperor’s collection of thrones, it is highly prized and valuable portable property to a reiving mercenary. This was the Chamber of Allakar, and it impressed the two wise men, who were more used to meeting me in my homely study or their workrooms.
    “Majister?” They quavered like little old gnomes