(eng) Alan Burt Akers - Dray Prescot 01 by Transit to Scorpio

Author:Transit to Scorpio [Scorpio, Transit to]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

“Ahead a truly enormous arch towered over the canal.”

The building site lay to the rear of a stone jetty. We poled in slowly and more slowly toward the jetty, the water pooling and swirling from the wherry’s blunt bows. I nodded to two of my men. They slid their poles inboard and ducked down in the center of the spaces we had left between the carefully-stacked marble blocks. I heard short sharp sounds, as of iron on iron.

A Rapa guard swung around from the bows, looking back, his vulturine face questioning. I, from my position in the stern, also looked back as though seeking, like the guard, for the noise astern. I saw another wherry following ours, loaded with marbles, its crew Rapas, its guards Ochs. It was coming in very fast, due to our loss of way, and would collide very soon. I did not mind. Now I could hear the fresh gurgle of water, bright and cheerful and inspiriting, welling from inside our wherry.

“What’s that racket?” demanded the Rapa in his croaking voice.

I lifted my shoulders to indicate I did not know, and then jumped down from the high stern and went forward, as though he had called me, trailing my pole. The wherry was appreciably lower in the water. A Rapa guard in the waist made as though to stop me. Him, I struck full force and knocked down and into the marble blocks where two of my men seized him and silenced him. Two more Rapa guards had vanished. Water sloshed and gurgled almost to the gunwale. Another Rapa guard vanished. I saw Loku, with Nath at his side, loop a coil of chain about the fifth guard’s bird-like ankles in the big boots and drag him down out of sight. His beginning shriek chopped off short, as though a bight of chain had snared his windpipe.

The following wherry had avoided us and was poling past. No one aboard seemed to be taking any notice of us—and then I saw why. Instantly fury and outrageous indignant anger spurted up in me.

The Rapa slaves on the second wherry were slaying their Och guards with their chains, were flinging the small six-limbed puffy-faced people overboard in bright splashes of water. We were now sinking. Within seconds the canal water slopped inboard. Now the plan was for us to dive and swim for the bank, covered by the confusion of the sinking wherry. But guards were rushing from every direction. The Rapa revolt had sparked an instant reaction, so clumsy, so violent had it been. Our own escape could not avoid detection now. The Rapas’ wherry touched the jetty and they boiled ashore, shrieking, inflamed, their grisly chains whirling in their fists.

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