A Fortune for Kregen (13 page)

“You have the right of it, San Yagno,” said Prince Nedfar. At this the sorcerer preened. He looked both ludicrous in his fussy and over-elaborate clothes, and decidedly impressive to those of a superstitious mind. He had powers, that was sooth; what those powers might be I fancied would be tested very soon.

“Speak up, then, and do not keep us waiting,” growled Tarkshur.

The sorcerer gathered himself, lifted his amulet of power he kept hung on a golden chain about his neck, and said, “The answer is there is no answer this side of the deepest of Cottmer’s Caverns.”

His words echoed to silence, and the doors opened of themselves.

We pushed through, the masters first, their retinues next, and we slaves last. For the slaves this order of precedence had suddenly become highly significant.

The next chamber, lighted by torches, contained two doors.

The obvious question was — which?

From our breakfast I had filched a helping of mergem mixed with fat and bread and orange honey, rolled into a doughy ball. Now I took a piece of this from where it snugged between me and my breechclout, rolled it around my fingers for a time, then popped it into my mouth and began to chew. Let the great ones get on with solving their riddles of the right door. That was their business — not mine.

A heated debate went on. In the end they solved whatever puzzle it was and they chose to take the left-hand door.

I didn’t say, “You’ll be sorry!” in a singsong voice, for I didn’t know if they were right or wrong; but it would have been nice to understand a little more of what the hell was going on. We picked up our gear and trailed off through the left-hand doorway.

Shouts warned us, otherwise we would have fallen.

A steep stairway slanted down. The walls glistened with moisture and mica drops. The stairs were worn.

So somebody had chosen the left-hand door and gone down here before. We descended. I began to suspect that the whole hill, the entire structure of the Moder, was honeycombed with a maze of corridors and tunnels and stairways and slopes up or down, a bewildering ants nest of a place.

At the bottom three doors confronted us. I had enjoyed my piece of mergem and felt I might take an interest in whatever the puzzle might be. There was no puzzle. Each door was opened to reveal a long corridor beyond. The three corridors ran parallel.

“The left-hand one again?” said Prince Nedfar.

“I always prefer to stick to the right,” said this tall swarth-rider. He was full and fleshy, with a veined face, and his armor was trim and compact, surprising in so worldly a lord. He carried a small arsenal of weapons, in the true Kregan way, and his people were all well-equipped.

“An eminently sensible system,” said Nedfar, and from where I was standing in the shuffling, goggling throng of slaves, his easy air of irony struck me as highly refreshing.

The woman said something, and then the man who wanted to go right snapped out, “I shall go alone, then—”

The way he offered no special marks of deference to the prince was immediately explained as the mysterious figure in the red and green checkered cloak spoke up.

“Best not to split up too soon, kov. There is a long way to go yet.”

“If the prize is at the end — I shall go,” said this kov.

Well, with seventy-five slaves all milling about and shouldering their burdens, I was pushed aside. The retinues of the great ones closed up, further obscuring my view. When it was all sorted out we went traipsing along the center corridor.

There were quite clearly other decisions that were made by the important people up front. We slaves tailed along in a long procession that wound through corridors and crossed chambers and penetrated the shadows, one after the other when the way was narrow, pushing on in a gaggle across the wider spaces.

We went through open doorways following the one ahead and so had to make no heart-searching decisions. We halted at times, and then were called on, and so we knew that some one or other of the clever folk up front had solved another puzzle.

A tough-looking Fristle eased up alongside of me as we passed through a corridor wide enough for two.

His cat face showed bruise marks, and he had lost fur beside his ear.

“I hope the master falls down a hole,” he said, companionably.

He was not one of Tarkshur’s slaves.

“Who is your master?”

“Why, that Fristle-hating Kov Loriman — Kov Loriman the Hunter, they call him. And he hunts anything that moves.”

He had to be the armored swarth-rider, and he had to be the Kov Loriman the Hunter against whom I had played Execution Jikaida. A few questions elicited these facts. Loriman was renowned for hunting; it was his craze. He had visited the island of Faol many times — only, not recently. Now he was on this expedition because he had heard rumors of gold and magic and gigantic monsters, and he was anxious to test himself and his swordarm against the most horrific monsters imaginable.

“Well, dom,” I said to the Fristle. “You don’t have to go far on Kregen to find yourself a horrific monster.”

“I agree, dom. But these ones of Moderdrin are special.”

We were just passing an open door in the corridor as he spoke, and we both looked into the room beyond.

The charred body of a slave lay in the doorway, headless, and his blood still smoked.

“See?”

Well, I mean — where on two worlds these day can you expect to stroll along and pick up gold just lying about without something getting in the way? And — magic as well?

So there were monsters.

Hunch gave me a queasy look.

Nodgen rumbled that, by Belzid’s Belly, he wished he had his spear with him.

Hitching up the coil of rope, which had an infuriating habit of slipping, I said, “I’d as lief have these chains off. They do not make for easy expeditioning.”

“Galid the Krevarr has the key.”

On we went until our way was halted by a press of slaves crowding back in the center of a wide and shadowed hall. Tall black drapes hung at intervals around the walls, and cressets lit the place fitfully. A monstrous stone idol reared up facing us, bloated, swag-bellied, fiery-eyed, and blocking the way ahead.

Four tables arranged in the form of a cross stood near the center of the hall, and a chain hung suspended from shadows in the roof. Each table was covered with a series of squares, and each square was marked with a symbol. In addition, the squares were colored in diagonals, slanting lines of red, green and black.

The slaves formed a jostling circle about the tables as the leaders contemplated the nature of this problem.

“Judging by what has gone before,” observed Prince Nedfar, “it would seem that we are to select a combination of these squares, depress them, and then pull the chain.”

“Ah, but,” said the fellow in the red and green checkered cloak. “If the combination is not the right one

— what will pulling the chain bring?”

We slaves shivered at this.

“What do you suggest, Tyr Ungovich?” The woman spoke and I looked at her, able to see her more clearly than before. She wore a long white gown that looked incongruously out of place in these surroundings, and her yellow hair, which fell just short of her shoulders, was confined by a jeweled band.

Her feet were clad in slippers. I shook my head at that. Her face — she had a high, clear face with a perfect skin of a dusky rose color, and with a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose I imagined must cause her acute embarrassment, quite needlessly. The habitual authority she held was delightfully softened by a natural charm. I could still think that, and she a slave owner and me a slave.

At her back stood two Pachaks, clearly twins, and their faces bore the hard, dedicated, no-nonsense looks of hyr-paktuns who have given their honor in the nikobi code of allegiance into good hands. At their throats the golden glitter of the pakzhan proclaimed that they were hyr-paktuns, and conscious of the high dignity within the mercenary fraternity that position conferred upon them.

“My lady?” said this Tyr Ungovich, and he did not lift the hood of his checkered cloak to speak.

“It is to you we owe our safe arrival here,” said the flying man. He rustled his wings. “Your guidance has been invaluable, Tyr Ungovich—”

Yagno, the sorcerer, pushed himself forward. “The answer appears a simple progression of symbols —

the alphabet reversed, or twinned—”

“Or tripled, or squared, perhaps?” The voice of Ungovich, cold and mocking from his hood, congealed in the dusty air.

Old Deb-Lu-Quienyin stood with the others and said nothing.

“Well, we must get on!” Loriman the Hunter spoke pettishly. “If there is gold here, then it keeps itself to itself. Have a slave pull the chain, anyway—”

“Yes,” said Ungovich. “Why not do that?”

The backward movement among the slaves resembled the rustling withdrawal of a wave as it slips back down a shingly beach.

Kov Loriman beckoned. “You — yetch — here.”

The slave to whom he pointed was one of his own, as, of course, he would have to be. The fellow shrank back. He was a Gon, and his hair was beginning to bristle out in short white spears. Loriman shouted, and one of his guards, a Rapa, stalked across and hauled the Gon out. The fellow was shaking with terror.

“Haul, slave!” said Loriman in that icy, unimpassioned voice of the man who has ordered slaves about unthinkingly since he could toddle.

Seeing there was nothing for it, the Gon took the chain in both fists. The chain was of bronze and the links were as thick as thumbs, as wide as saucers.

“Haul with a will,” said Loriman, and stepped back a pace.

The Gon stretched up. His wire brush bristle of white hair glinted. He hauled.

Instantly, with an eerie shriek, the chain transformed itself into a long bronze shape of horror. Like a python it wrapped folds about the Gon, squeezed.

His eyes popped. He shrieked. And, over the shrieks, the sounds of his rib cage breaking in and crushing all within in a squelching red jelly drove everyone back in the grip of supernatural horror.

“By Sasco!” Loriman fought his panic, overcame it, gave vent to his anger.

The others reacted in their various ways. Watching, I saw this Kyr Ungovich standing, unmoved.

The lady put a laced cloth to her mouth.

Prince Nedfar said, “No more. We read the riddle.”

The bronze chain dangling from the shadows became once more a bronze chain. Slaves dragged the crushed corpse into a corner. Another mark was chalked up against this great Kov Loriman the Hunter.

They tried series of patterns, pushing various symbols and trying the chain. They lost more slaves. Not all were crushed by the serpent chain. Some vanished through a trapdoor that opened with a gush of vile smoke. Others charred and then burned as the chain glowed with inner fires.

Every slave prayed that his master would not attempt to read the riddle, and having done so, pick on him to prove him right — or wrong.

A young man, just about to enter the prime of life, standing with Prince Nedfar and Princess Thefi, chewed his lower lip. I had taken scant notice of him, foolishly, as I learned. He wore simple armor, and carried as well as a rapier and main gauche, a thraxter slung around him. Also, and this I did remark, swinging from his belt hung a single-bladed, spike-headed, short-hafted axe. When he moved toward the cross of the four tables, and spoke up, I took notice of him.

His features were regular and pleasing, with dark hair and frank bold eyes which he kept veiled, as I saw, and he moved as it were diffidently, as though always hiding his light.

“Father,” he said, “let me try.”

Prince Nedfar gestured to the four tables.

“The riddle is yours, my son.”

Princess Thefi looked at him with some concern, as though she understood more of her brother than anyone else. I did not think they were twins. He smiled reassuringly at her, and moved with his hesitant step to the tables, and looked down.

He spoke up as though he had pondered what he would say during the preceding tragedies.

“There are lines of red, green and black. No one has marked them before. The symbols have taken all attention.” He looked up and gestured to the walls. “See the long black drapes, separated? Then, I think, this is the answer.” And he stabbed his hand down a long row of the black squares.

“Perhaps—” said the sorcerer, almost sneering.

The others waited. Prince Nedfar motioned to a slave and this wight moved reluctantly forward. He shook uncontrollably.

“Wait!” The Young prince stepped toward the chain. Before anyone could stop him he seized the links in his two fists, reached up and hauled down with a will.

“No!” Princess Thefi shrieked. “Ty! No!”

She leaped forward, her arms outstretched.

The chain rattled down from the shadows, a mere bronze chain, clinking and clanking into a puddle of bronze links on the stone floor.

And the monstrous idol moved. Groaning, spitting dust from its edges, it revolved. Beyond lay a round opening, black as the cloak of Notor Zan.

“By Havil, boy!” said Nedfar. His face expressed anger and anguish. He shook his head as though to clear away phantoms. Lobur the Dagger leaped forward. He clapped the young prince — this Ty — on the shoulder in a familiar gesture of friendship.

“Bravo, Ty! Well done! It is a Jikai — prince, my prince, a veritable Jikai!”

The shouts broke out then, of acclamation and, from us slaves, of heartfelt relief. Very soon we picked up our bundles and burdens and followed the great ones into the tunnel with flaring torches to light our going.

When the tunnel opened out into a proper stone corridor once more and we faced five doors, each of a different size, and so halted to tackle the next problem, I made it my business to edge alongside one of the slaves I knew to be the property of the Hamalese.

This slave was a Khibil, and his proud foxy face was woefully fallen away from its normal expression of hauteur, such as I was used to seeing on Pompino’s face. I struck up the aimless kind of conversation that seemed fitting to these surroundings, and at my more pointed questions the Khibil grew a little more animated.