Star of Cursrah (35 page)

Always curious, Amber wheezed, “How did you cross the gluefloor?”

The Flame piffed, spittle flying off missing lips, and said, “Only a fool would scavenge without knowing the simplest dispel charm. How else would one disarm a hundred traps?”

With damn fool luck, Amber thought.

Lowering her eyes respectfully, she said, “I—I thank you for rescuing me and my friends—”

Two bandits grabbed Amber’s hair and clothes and yanked her upright. The White Flame’s skeletal hand slapped Amber’s seeping cheek wound. Pain and a fiery itch made her swoon.

“Spare me your prattle, girl. I’d rather slit your nostrils and slice off your ears.” The glaring white face loomed inches from Amber’s. “I’ll behead your friends and gouge out their bowels for vultures unless you lead me to that treasure in the next ten breaths.”

“It’s down, Qayadin,” Amber panted, “deep—not the lowest level, where the mummy guards, but next-to-lowest. The slaves packed tons of treasure and guards bricked up the walls. I can lead you right to it.”

“You’d better.” The White Flame wrapped her veil around her face and said, “You’ll be watched. Run again, and I’ll blind you.”

Amber believed her. Braced by two nomads, she pointed the way down the spiraling tunnel. Terror made her take mincing steps as if crossing hot coals.

Queer though, she reflected, the White Flame never asked about the mummy.

“Here.”

The bandits frowned at a blank wall. Amber pointed at the first of many griffon-head wall sconces, brass tarnished gray-green.

“Amenstar was escorted past this corridor as slaves piled treasure.”

A nomad woman tilted back her headscarf to peer at the wall. Blue dots were tattooed on her chin, and two blue lines downturned from her mouth, as if to deepen a frown.

“I see nothing—”

“No, the flatlander is right!” A scruffy-bearded dwarf bustled up, wedged a dagger blade into a cleft, and said, “See these cracks—like spider webs? Limestone doesn’t fracture that way. Amateurs—they mixed dirt into the mortar as a disguise, but it weakened the coating.”

The dwarf rapped at the fracture with the pommel of his dagger. Mortar crumbled to reveal lime-whitened bricks.

“Tear it down,” commanded the White Flame.

Eager hands pried with daggers and pounded with rocks to expose ancient bricks. Normally taciturn, even the nomads and mountain folk quivered and gibbered with excitement. The dwarf’s fist hammered, and a dozen bricks cascaded inside. Heedless of traps, he rammed his arm into the hole and rummaged around.

Fairly dancing in place, nomads demanded, “Well?”

The dwarf jerked his arm back. A fistful of gold glittered. A ruby fell to the floor. A pearl necklace with a malachite pendant hung from a sausage-like finger. The dwarf’s bearded mouth pursed, like a girl expecting a kiss.

He squeaked, “It’s—real!”

Bricks were ripped out by a dozen hands, then everyone stopped in shock and amazement.

Torches glistened wetly on heaps within the vault. Light winked and sparkled on gold like liquid sunshine, along with gems, jeweled daggers, a crown, candlesticks, a silver mask, a tea tray, and much more in stacks high as a man’s head. As nomads yanked away lower bricks, gold coins chinged and pinged on the stone floor like kernels of wheat. The hardened warriors barely paused when a half dozen skeletons clattered out, but they crunched the bones underfoot to grab loot.

Whooping, crying, keening, laughing, people caught coins, juggled them, reveled in their fatty cold feel, showed their comrades, stuffed pockets and pouches, and drooled over exotic jewelry and artifacts. Amber noted even the White Flame seemed pleased. With her head held high, and her veil in place, she might have been a queen.

“Go ahead, my faithful ones,” the bandit leader exclaimed. “Take it all! It’s yours!”

Even Amber marveled at the cascade of wealth. She’d glimpsed treasures in her tiara’s visions, but dim pictures couldn’t compare with this tumbling haystack of gold, precious stones, and ancient gifts. Hakiim and Reiver were breathless.

The thief muttered, “There’s more than they can haul away. This tribe would need ten trips to steal a fraction of it.”

“And it’s only one chamber,” gushed Hakiim. “Amber said there were dozens of chambers like it, and none of this is even stealing … I mean, it’s free for the taking. Everyone who’s ever even heard of this city is dead.”

Except the mummy, thought Amber, who’s partly alive, or undead, or hung in some awful limbo between.

Nomads dug deep. Out came antique jewelry, gem-studded books, a gilded bird cage, a hand-carved staff topped with ivory, an ornamental helmet. Even non-precious items, such as a turquoise jar stippled with black marks that Amber recognized. Standing on the floor and buried in coins was a queer framework bristling with tin horns and flutes and tubes to conduct water. Not understanding the latter contraption, the nomads twisted off the instruments and bladders to dig out the gems beneath.

“What’s that thing?” asked Hakiim.

“The clepsydra. Part of it.” To puzzled glances, Amber explained, “The wonderful music-making engine I told you about. When it’s all together, you pour water into the top, and I don’t know, bladders squeeze so horns and flutes play tunes.”

Both men shook their heads, and Hakiim asked, “How could the ancient ones build incredible engines that we don’t comprehend? How did our ancestors forget such valuable knowledge?”

“No one wrote it down,” stated Amber, “so the knowledge vanished. Like the whole history of Cursrah … lost to the wind.”

If I get out of here alive, Amber silently vowed, I’ll write Cursrah’s history and see it’s not lost.

Amber saw Reiver flick his eyes in two directions. The bandits had clearly forgotten their prisoners. The three could have slunk away if the White Flame hadn’t stood beside.

Taking a deep breath, Amber asked humbly, “Qayadin, we’ve found you treasure. May we go?”

“Go?” Whirling, the White Flame doffed her veil, a tactic to shock her audience, and said, “Are you mad? Think me a scatterbrain? This cannot be all the empire’s treasure. You’ll uncover the rest, or I’ll flog the skin off your back!”

Amber was tired of ingratitude, dire threats and torment, and for being punished when she’d done nothing to this woman. Still, she curbed her tongue, saying only, “A dozen more vaults line this corridor, Great Chief—”

“I need magicks!” The Flame’s rasp was as dry and scratchy as an adder’s belly. “Gold will buy the army I need, but my enemies employ sorcerers who erect mighty shields and wards. I need ancient magic, powerful and unknown, to crush the stinking carcasses of my enemies into paste!”

She rattled on while nomads scooped loot and Amber and her friends feigned interest. All Amber could think was to get to the mummy and learn its otherworldly purpose—and its identity.

How to escape … ?

Her eyes fell on the blueware jar streaked with black marks and before she’d fully thought out a plan, she blurted, “That’s powerful magic. A genie jar! I saw it introduced at the princess’s ball.”

“Genie? By the pate of the Pretender! Hand it hither, quickly, you fools.”

Transformed by promises of revenge, the White Flame’s hands shook as she squatted over the jar and attacked the beeswax seal with her dagger.

“A genie,” the White Flame muttered. “If but one of these is entrapped—”

At the first leak of fresh air, the jar’s lid blew off and shattered against the ceiling. In the blink of an eye the corridor was obscured as a howling dervish boiled from the jar like a monstrous swarm of wasps.

At the first hiss, Amber spun and grabbed hold of Hakiim and Reiver; she alone knew the fury about to be unleashed.

Trapped in a narrow tunnel, at full power, with no sphere of protection to contain it, the wind walker raged like a tornado. Boiling upward in a tower of terror, the elemental struck the ceiling, mushroomed sideways and bounced off the walls, billowed downward and ricocheted off the floor, and so on, growing all the time. To those who slit their eyes enough to see, the whirling cloud seemed like a thousand rearing, hissing, spitting, angry cobras.

Each time the collective elemental hit a surface, a hundred counterparts spun off. The hundred hundred smaller billows engorged themselves on raw energy until they struck yet another surface and split and grew again. The roaring dervish threatened to flood all the tunnels below Cursrah before finding an exit.

To the humans cowering and clutching the stone floor, being trapped inside the elemental’s storm was like being shaken in a bottle. Amber and her friends were whip-stung in a hundred places as the zephyrs picked up sand and pebbles and hurled it like hail. Their skin was peppered raw, their hair and clothes were filled with sand, their clothing was drummed until fibers unraveled and leather abraded.

The furious pace increased as each new portion of the elemental storm set its neighbors spinning faster. In seconds the tornado doubled, redoubled, and quadrupled. Noise was a howling, screaming, shrieking tumult so loud the listeners’ skulls felt full of jangling metal. They discovered the air really was full of flying metal, as the whirlwind whisked up heavy gold coins and flung them everywhere. A silver coin dinged Amber’s knuckles and drew blood. The walls were rapped a thousand times by metal hail, until Amber feared the living storm would flay them to bones.

She couldn’t see, didn’t dare unscrunch her eyes lest she be blinded. Calling to her friends was useless, for she couldn’t outshout a hurricane. Even thumping on their backs didn’t send a message, for they assumed it was abuse from the storm.

Finally Amber just grabbed cloth and pulled, tugging her friends along bodily. Eager to go, they crawled. Reiver kept his shoulder pressed against the stone wall as a guide. Hakiim hung back to pull Amber along, but she punched him to get moving.

Together, like a hail-hammered, six-legged turtle, they crawled toward freedom. Winds whipped their bodies, stole their breath, chipped their skin, and yanked at their clothing until they were choked and tangled. The creeping journey seemed to take forever, and yet they made no progress. Amber ached from fighting even to remain on her hands and knees.

Suppose, she fretted, suppose I’ve unleashed too much? Suppose the wind walker expands to fill the tunnels, then bursts free of the ground? Could it fill the entire valley of Cursrah, whipping and whirling and screaming until the very stones and bedrock were ground to powder? Was such a thing possible, even for magic? She hoped not, because she and her friends would be atoms of blood and bone long before it happened.

Dragging herself along the wall, Amber bumped into Hakiim. He’d stopped, worn down, desperate for rest. They’d die if they stopped, Amber was sure. With bleeding hands, she clutched Hakiim’s collar, then thought to check Reiver ahead. He’d stopped too, huddled like a whipped dog, hugging the floor. Unable to see or hear, and barely able to feel the pounding hurricane, Amber dragged both young men after her, around and around the endless spiral. Many times her straining hands slipped free, but always she caught cloth and tugged them on. By willpower more than strength, she got her friends moving again, staggering as they crawled, blundering down seeming miles of stone floor, with the whirlwind shrieking at them every inch.

Gradually, with agonizing slowness, the maelstrom eased. Winds that had threatened to lift them off the ground and batter them against stone walls became only an annoyance, then a storm heard but not seen, and finally a distant rumble like a stampede over an unseen horizon. The travelers continued to crawl, on and on, for their ears rang so loudly, and their bodies were so battered, they didn’t know the elemental storm had abated.

Finally, when they could go no farther, they crawled into a niche in the wall and slept. In haunted dreams, Amber imagined meeting the undead thing that waited in the depths.

The exhausted adventurers roused slowly. Amber shook her head and swore her brain rattled, then snapped her fingers to assure she wasn’t deaf. Hakiim croaked for water. Reiver rubbed a blistered face with numb and bleeding hands.

To both their surprise, Amber pulled her magical tiara from her pack. Having sipped a mouthful of water, and chewed a few dried dates, she lay on her back and eased the tiara onto her temples.

“What are you doing?” asked Hakiim. “Is that wise, right now?”

“Is it nighttime?” Normally Reiver knew instinctively the time of day, but even he was fuddled. “Will the moon have risen?”

Waving away their objections with eyes closed, Amber propped one arm under her head and drifted into visions of another time, another world. As she tried to relax to better observe, questions kept churning and disrupting the picture, like bubbles disturbing a pond.

What happened to Amenstar? How was the mummy created, and why? Who’d suffered in its horrific creation? The most terrifying thought of all was that deep down she already knew the answers.

The 383rd Anniversary of the Great Arrival

Where were they going?

With her mouth and tongue paralyzed by dumbcane, Amenstar felt just as numb in body, tied by red velvet ropes into her sedan chair. What, she wanted to scream, would they do to her?

Certainly death was the order of the day. With great pomp and ceremony, the royal procession wound down and down the sloping corridors deep beneath the Palace of the Phoenix. Amenstar had witnessed many atrocities along the way, all committed by her parents or in their names.

She saw “freed” slaves writhe in agony on the stone floor, deceived with poisoned wine. She witnessed as slaves who’d faithfully packed away treasure brutally cut down with swords. At every level, musicians, maids, and other commoners were peeled away from the procession and sent to errands or their unknowing deaths. Now and then palace guards and vizars were ordered away, some to administer death, but always the royal family descended.

Soon, Star realized, they would reach the bottommost level, the one always guarded and which, in her whole life, she’d never been allowed to visit, but where rumor said resided mummies of the ancestral dead. Numb, Star felt no curiosity about the mystery chamber, only a mounting terror as to her fate.