Read Delia of Vallia for Free Online

other, screaming, reared to his feet and tried to bolt, and fell over tangled legs all fouled up in his reins. Delia shut her ears to the sounds.
    If these reivers of the sky were the same as those who had slain Pansi and Nath the Jokester, then her heart would harden even more. Either way, she shared most of the philosophy which attempted to stop people from killing her.
    Her second shot was flailed away by a stupidly flapping wing. Tandu scored no better and Dalki’s arrow skewered into the feathered underside of a fluttrell. The bird toppled forward. His rider went feet-first over the bird’s awkward head vane, hit the sand, and was up, raging.
    He was the first to land and whip out his sword, abandoning crossbow and bird, and come racing across the sand toward the three in the meager cover of the saddle animals.
    Delia put a shaft clear through his bronze-studded leathers. He stopped running forward, yelling like a demon, waving his sword. He stopped. He stood up, the arrow through him. Then he fell down.
    The remaining two flutsmen leaped from their birds in gouts of ochre sand. Their faces, hard, grimed, contorted with fury, bore a vague resemblance to human faces. Delia with those faces before her eyes was in no further doubt or wonder that these two had not flown off when their comrades had died. These flutsmen were driven to kill, they had been using kaff, and they were drugged past all reason. They spat foam and screeched, and rushed.
    Delia’s hand lifted to her right shoulder. Her hand, unblemished by a single ring, snapped forward.
    The terchick crossed the lessening distance to the first charging man in a blurred streak of steel. The little throwing knife, sharply-pointed, cunningly balanced, left Delia’s hand and sped through empty air and pierced through the right eye of the flutsman. The steel skewered on into his brain. He gyrated for a few foolish moments before he fell down.
    The last one barely hesitated — if he hesitated at all — before Tandu’s swords went through him and chopped him, both together.
    Dalki said, “You always were greedy, Father. I was about to loose — I could have shot you.”
    Tandu roared, and wiped one of his swords in the sand. “My hide would have turned your shot, Dalki!”
    “Well, Father, and mayhap. Next time, allow me to get a look in.”
    Delia refused to feel faint. After all, what were six dead men more or less in this world of suffering? She was well aware that flutsmen had kissed their families good-bye long before they took up the aerial reiving trade, and the only folk to mourn them would be the members of their own marauding band.
    Still, once upon a time, under a certain moon, each one of them had had a mother...
    For the sake of Pansi and Nath the Jokester, Delia felt no incongruity in wishing that those mothers had never conceived, or had miscarried, or had drowned their babes in infancy...
    And, even that was no good. Had it not been these flutsmen, then it would have been others... You couldn’t solve all your problems by killing. That had been tried. It worked for a time; but in the long run you simply finished up with nobody.
    “Majestrix?”
    She had not spoken; bluff old Tandu was wily enough to know when to jolly even an empress along.
    Dalki said: “If ever it was needed to be proved, which it never was and never will be, by Djan, then the queen is a true queen of the Djangs!”
    On that, Delia felt it time to gather up the totrixes, make a check, and mount up. Tandu, having come from Djanduin to teach Valkans to fly flutduins had never been a true mercenary, had never become a paktun. Similarly, Dalki was no paktun. They started to mount up.
    Understanding this, Delia sighed and then laughed.
    “Make a check first. See what these flutsmen have on them that is interesting to us. And, if they have gold, it is ours. Is not this so?”
    “Yes, majestrix—”
    “Tandu! Now hearken. You and Dalki may call me ‘my lady’ as well as this