: Alan Burt Akers
: Scorpio Triumph Dray Prescot 43
: Mushroom eBooks
: 9781843197171
: 1
: CHF 3.90
:
: Science Fiction
: English
: 250
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

Down in the continent of Loh many expeditions have ventured below the City of Eternal Twilight into the Realm of the Drums in search of one of the rubies of the Skantiklar. A Wizard of Loh, Na-Si-Fantong, is collecting the rubies, and it is believed he wants them for no good purpose. He has succeeded in obtaining a ruby and vanishes into the maze of tunnels under the city. Not really convinced of the importance of the Skantiklar, Prescot has to go in pursuit. Alone, he threads his way through the labyrinth, already feeling he will never catch Na-Si-Fantong...
This edition includes a glossary to the Lohvian cycle.
Scorpio Triumph is the forty-third book in the epic fifty-two book saga of Dray Prescot of Earth and of Kregen by Kenneth Bulmer, writing as Alan Burt Akers. The series continues withIntrigue of Antares.

Chapter one


I, Dray Prescot, Lord of Strombor and Krozair of Zy, crawled painfully along a narrow and jagged tunnel with dust clogging my mouth and nostrils and stinging my eyes and every now and then my head would go thwack! against a damned rocky outcrop in the roof. By Makki Grodno’s disgusting diseased black-fanged winespout and deliquescing dangling left eyeball! I’d wager that clever Na-Si-Fantong hadn’t crawled along here. Oh, no! He’d have used his sorcerous powers to create a smooth marble avenue and strolled along without a care in Kregen.

As for me, I’d hared off after the mage when he’d snatched the ruby and — of course — a whole world of rock and rubble had avalanched down at my back, shutting my friends away and shutting me in.

All I could do now was crawl on as best I could. There was a little light, either from some fungus or perhaps some clever magical scintillant stone — I didn’t give a damn which it was. I could just about see where I was going — and where that was I’d no idea at all, at all, as the song has it.

“Sink me!” I burst out to myself. “What the blue blazing hell am I doing, scrabbling about miles underground after a stupid magic red ruby when the damned Shanks are organizing a powerful expeditionary force against us?” I moved my right knee up and then my left and surged forward and — thwack! went my head against the roof. I mentioned the Divine Lady of Belschutz and forged on. Oh, no, I should be out in the fresh air and the light of the Suns of Scorpio, planning horrible retribution upon the fishy heads of the Fish Faces and their whiptailed Kataki allies.

The little kris-like curved sword I’d snatched up kept on getting in the way; but I felt disinclined to abandon the weapon. It would come in useful if I encountered any of the habitual nasties frequenting the labyrinth. I’d had no time to snatch up any clothes. In a somewhat turbulent frame of mind I pressed on along the raggedy tunnel.

As San Blarnoi says: “A day short of Eternity is still Eternity.” In the end I reached the point where the tunnel led onto a large cavern. Before I plopped out of the opening I screwed my head around checking to see what reception committee might be awaiting.

The universal mellow pearly light shone down from the overhead. The air hung still and breathless. I could hear no sound apart from my own breathing, inaudible otherwise. The floor of the cavern was artificially smooth. Set around the walls stood nine sarcophagi. I stared at them and my heart sank.Now what mumbo-jumbo nonsense was I in for?

When I was satisfied that no one else was around I stepped down from the opening. Lumps and shards of rock in a fanfall indicated that whoever had made the tunnel had broken through into this cavern.

Immediately I moved away I saw one of them. The poor devil lay alongside a sarcophagus with his head stoved in. Now — because this place, this Realm of the Drums, had been sorcerously held in