A Fortune for Kregen (22 page)

I found a stoppered jar containing a little wine and we drank companionably together. Quienyin lowered the jar and spoke reflectively. “San Orien says they go in for magical objects down here. Things that, when possessed, confer special powers.”

“My jar of yellow poison—”

“Precisely, Jak.”

The yellow light filled the close air with radiance and the fire burned with its eerie blue flames. The sentries prowled, alert, and our gazes kept flickering all about this mausoleum, surveying and noting the shadows in the corners, the corpses on their stone shelves.

“And Strom Phrutius,” I said. “What of him?”

“Gold and gems, I think. Treasure of the worldly sort.”

“Maybe he has more sense than I credited him with.”

“There is a well-known spell which will cause an armband to chain the wearer to the will of the giver.

When I say well-known I mean in the sense of its existence being well known. The spell itself is arcane and difficult. With its knowledge a man could spell hundreds of armbands and thus ensure the willing and total obedience of all who wore them.”

“Tarkshur!” I said. “That’s what he’s after.”

“It is very likely.”

“He’ll turn up again, at the exit, you’ll see.” I clenched a fist. “Katakis are devils at survival.”

“So will your two friends, Nodgen and Hunch.” Quienyin offered me the wine. I shook my head. He went on, “It is Tyr Ungovich who provokes my curiosity. He is indeed an enigma.”

“What he wants,” I said, guessing, “will likewise be found on the ninth zone.” Then, quickly, I said, “You are confident Hunch and Nodgen will reappear? They went right merrily into their paradises.”

“Illusion, as the weapons you bear. They will appear.”

I touched the Krozair longsword. The metal was warm — and hard and solid to my fingers. I shook my head. Illusion...

“It is a great pity,” Quienyin said, “that Longweill the Fluttrhim[5]was killed. His gifts would have been useful.”

“He’s down skating about on the Ice Floes of Sicce now,” I said. “May Opaz have him in his keeping, poor Thief though he was.”

Shortly after that there was a general alarm as a procession of Green-Glowing Ghoul Vampires wandered past and we had a merry set-to. They were amenable to the kiss of steel, and were driven off.

Again I noticed the fine free way Prince Tyfar fought, and, foolishly, I thought of Barty Vessler, and sighed.

When all had rested we set off to explore the nooks and crannies of the various halls containing the corpses. Prowling monsters were encountered and dealt with, each to its own peculiar fashion, and we lost a few more men.

If this was the Necromantic zone, as we believed, the key we sought — the part of the key — lay somewhere hidden. Finding it would take us a long time. And, as we explored, so we drew ever nearer the central chamber and the horrors it would most certainly contain.

There would be a dozen or more cassettes to be filled with my record of the things we encountered in that nine-armed complex before we walked along and reached the place where we had camped. So we had come full circle, had found no way in or out, and must most carefully put our heads together to discover a method of forcing ingress to the center and its mystery.

“To the right, as ever,” quoth Kov Loriman. “I will smash a way through the wall, by Lem, and then we will get through!”

He seized a corpse by its arm and pulled and the corpse snapped at once into hideous life and leaped for Loriman’s throat. The Hunting Kov was not one whit dismayed. His sword whirled, the corpse’s head flew off, and one of his Chuliks swept a broad-bladed axe around and chopped the corpse’s legs away.

They kicked the bits of mummified remains of the Kaotim aside and bringing up picks and sledgehammers started smashing into the wall.

“One has,” observed Tyfar, “to admire their enthusiasm.”

Quienyin touched my arm and we drew a little apart.

“Have you noticed, Jak, that while the vast majority of the corpses are apim, like you and me, there are every now and then a few diffs?”

“Yes.”

“There is, I think, a Pattern to be Observed.”

So, leaving Loriman and his henchmen to go on smashing the wall down, the rest of us started to inspect the arrangements of the Undead.

In the end, and inevitably, it was Quienyin who spotted the significance. He smiled and pushed his turban straight.

Now, I must of necessity spell the words in English but the final result was the same as the original Kregish. The corpses lay in pattern, as Quienyin had indicated, and their order was thus: Gon. Hoboling.

Och. Undurker. Lamnia. Och. Rapa. Djang.

Be very sure I looked long and with choked feelings at the Djangs — most of them were Obdjangs, those clever, gerbil-faced people who so efficiently run Djanduin, and whom the ferocious four-armed Dwadjangs respect with reason.

“It seems,” said Quienyin, “we are to find what we seek in the Hall of Ghoul. And it will be the ord[6]

something.”

We went carefully through the Hall of Vampires and the Hall of Banshees to the Hall of Ghouls. The yellow light showed us the ranked shelves of corpses. We all expected the Kaotim to stir and sit up and then leap upon us, uttering wraith-like wails.

In this Hall of Ghouls, somewhere, there were seven somethings, and the eighth something would give us the answer.

The sense of oppression enclosed us. We were entombed. Surrounding us lay mile upon mile of corridors and secret rooms, prowling monsters, darkness, and light more hideous than darkness.

The feeling that the domed ceiling would fall upon us choked us with primeval terrors we would not admit. The idea of clean fresh air, and the radiance of the suns, and the feel of an ocean breeze — all these things were gone and lost and buried in the grave. The oppression held us in iron bands. The feeling of hollowness, of dusty silence, of the abandonment of years, choked like skeletal fingers at our throats.

“I — I do not like this place,” whispered Ariane.

Tyfar took her hand, and held it, and did not speak.

The tough mercenary warriors looked about with uneasy eyes, drawing together, fingering their weapons.

And then a silly Hypnotic Spider as big as a carthorse fell on his thread through a trapdoor.

“Do not look into his eyes!” yelled Quienyin.

One Fristle, shocked, was too late. The cat-man stood, petrified, ridged gristle and fur, and the gigantic spider, dripping venom, swung to take the poor fellow’s head into its jaws.

Tyfar and I sprang together. His axe whirled. The Krozair longsword bit.

The Giant Hypnotic Spider burst apart like a paper bag filled with water and dropped from a great height. The squelching stink gagged us all. The spidery arms scuttled away, singly, hairs bristling, and the gross body drooped into a flaccid puddle. The Fristle still stood, petrified.

“If that is the best they can do...” said Ariane, shaking herself. She laughed, a shrill tinny sound.

They were all laughing. The reaction after the black thoughts of a moment ago shuddered through them.

But the Fristle still stood, unmoving.

“Here,” said Deb-Lu-Quienyin. He shuffled up to stand before the Fristle. He did not touch him. “Jak,”

he said in his casual conversational voice. “Just Take a Look up through the trapdoor. There May Be More Up There...”

If I were a man who laughed easily, I would have laughed then. Obediently, I climbed up a pyramid of men and stuck a torch through the opening. The trapdoor hung down. A fetid odor broke about my head and I spat. The space beyond looked empty, full of ghosts and bones and stink.

“It appears clear, although—”

“Quite!”

Now we took greater cognizance of the configuration of the roof. The dome was broken here and there by bulging cornices, grotesquely carved. From one of these the spider had dropped, and the height, reachable by my pyramid of men, was not too great. We began to study the other bulging protuberances in the roof. The decorations particularly intrigued Prince Tyfar.

“As Hanitcha the Harrower is my witness! I do not discern any pattern! What do you see, Notor Jak?”

Before I answered I killed my automatic wince at his use of the name Hanitcha the Harrower. Ah, Hamal, Hamal, that empire had done great damage to my beloved Vallia!

“If there is a pattern, prince, we must find it.”

“True, by Krun!”

“And,” said his Brokelsh slinger, Barkindrar the Bullet, “My prince — beware, in the name of Kaerlan the Merciful! There may be more giant spiders...”

We all hopped back a few paces out from under the direct drop-zone in case there might be more Giant Hypnotic Spiders.

“Catch him!” suddenly shouted Quienyin’s voice, and we whirled to see the Fristle who had been petrified running, head down, racing madly and with demoniac screams, racing away down past the ranked biers of corpses.

“By Krun!” exclaimed Tyfar. “It’s enough to give a fellow a bad heart!”

A group of the mercenaries chased after him and brought him back, calmed him down. He still shook like the leaves of the letha tree. What he had seen in the eyes of the spider no one cared to inquire.

“And have you riddled the riddle yet?” demanded Quienyin.

“No.” Ariane was short with the old Wizard of Loh.

“Well, we must see what an Old Fellow Can Do.”

“Your permission, my prince,” said Barkindrar. “There are nine bulges — whatever you call ’em.”

The great apim bear of a man, the renowned archer from Ruathytu, craned his thick neck back, stared up. “And only one, my prince, has dropped a stinking spider, by Kuerden the Merciless!”

Quienyin smiled. “You are well served, prince.”

“Yes, yes,” exclaimed Ariane. “But which way do we count?”

I said, “Widdershins would seem appropriate in this place.”

We all moved to the bulge to the left of the one from which the spider had dropped, and stared up, at a loss.

“This is becoming impossible!” Ariane tapped her fur boot against the floor impatiently. “Are all you famous Jikais fools?”

“I do not pretend to be a Jikai, lady,” said Quienyin. He spoke quite mildly; but I, at least, caught the undercurrent in his patient voice. And, I knew, his patience was forced on him by the loss of his powers as a Wizard of Loh. I glanced across at the lady Ariane nal Amklana. She was not wearing well, of a sudden, and I could not find it in my heart to fault her for that.

She was a girl on her own with us. She had left her four handmaids and their bodyguards with the main party. No doubt she missed their loving ministration. Her rosy face stared up, deeply flushed, and her bright yellow hair tangled in disarray, uncombed, with bits of dust and detritus still matting the fine strands. Her dress was in a woeful state.

Yes, I felt sorry for her, the lady of Amklana.

As yet I had not learned her rank; but I felt absolutely certain she was a kovneva. Nothing less would explain her manner and carriage. And, she had been gracious to me.

“It seems to me” I said, and I spoke deliberately loudly, “if these Moder-lords want their fun out of us they won’t have much more if we cannot get on.”

This was not strictly true. But my words made no difference. Nothing happened as a result of them, unlike the occurrences in that fire-crystal-lit corridor where I had fought Tarkshur and had summoned the key to unlock my chains. Different orders of illusion were clearly operative in the Moder. And I wondered just how the damned Moder-lord watched us — as a Wizard of Loh might do, by going into lupu and observing events at a distance?

Logu Fre-Da and his twin, Modo Fre-Da, were casting worried looks at their lady. The big numim, Naghan the Doom, was looking at the two hyr-paktuns, and his mane indicated his own concern.

The twins, I had observed with some pleasure, each had the same number of trophy rings from defeated paktuns dangling on their pakais. When a paktun defeats another noted mercenary he takes the ring with which either the pakmort or the pakzhan is affixed to the silken cords at the throat. I had once been betrayed by just such a dangling pakai. But I saw the twins fingering their pakais and I realized they were reassuring themselves, seeking sustenance from their own prowess, the pakais giving them fresh confidence in their nikobi. I have a great deal of time for Pachaks, and these two, it seemed to me, were fine representatives of their fine race.

The intriguing thought occurred to me to wonder how much swag they had concealed about their persons.

An acrimonious discussion began — at least, it was acrimonious from the lady Ariane, although Quienyin and Tyfar remained exquisitely polite. We seemed to have reached a dead end, an impasse, and no one could with any equanimity contemplate going back the way we had come.

For lack of anything better we tramped off around the Nine Halls again, passing Loriman and his men still hard at work. We encountered a few prowling monsters, and lost a Rapa, and so returned to the Hall of Ghouls and stared up at the roof once more.

The answer to the riddle was either so complicated we could not solve it — and with Quienyin with us, despite that he had lost his sorcerous powers, I did not think that likely — or was of an imbecilic simplicity.

Many folk on Kregen are fond of calling me an onker, a get onker, a prince of fools...

“Make me a pyramid of men again,” I said and, I own, my voice rasped out as the Emperor of Vallia’s voice rasped — or the First Lieutenant of a seventy-four.

At the top of the pyramid I lifted the Krozair longsword and I smote against the roof, savage blows, eight of them, eight intemperate smashes against the prominent knob of polished jet over my head.

The echoes of those vicious blows rang and rattled away along the stone biers.

And the corpses all rose up.

Every corpse rose, and from those ghastly mouths a shrill and ghoulish screaming shattered against our nerves. Every corpse rose up, screaming, and rushed away, ran blindly from the Hall of Ghouls.

They poured in a blasphemous rout through the two side openings to the Hall. We were all gathered in the inner end of the arm, that between the two side passages and the center of the mausoleum complex.