A Fortune for Kregen (17 page)

“Aye.”

“And we must find the others. Prince Nedfar has already two parts of the key.” This statement made her pause, and color stained up into those rosy cheeks. She turned her eyes on me, gray-green eyes, fathomless. “Notor Jak — do you have any part of the key?”

“No, my lady. Not a single part.”

“Oh!” she said, and bit her lip.

The picks and sledges were smashing away the stone grating.

It occurred to me to say, “And you, my lady. Do you?”

“Why, no — more’s the pity. We must find the nine parts of the key before we can unlock the door at the exit and so win free from this terrible place.”

“With,” I pointed out, “or without what we came for.”

She searched my face, seriously, and the tip of her tongue crept out to lick her lips until she remembered, and instead of licking her lips, said briskly: “Oh, but I must have what I came for. It is vital.”

Still I forbore to question her. That was her business. Mine was getting out of here with a whole skin —

as I then thought.

The lion-man, Naghan the Doom, shouted across, “The way is open, my lady.”

“Very good, Naghan. I will follow.”

And, at that, what was revealed beyond the smashed-open grating was not particularly promising. But everyone in the Moder, I am sure, felt the desire to push on. To retrace our steps would be failure and would lead to disaster.

Narrow steps led downward, wide enough for one person at a time. The walls and roof were stained with moisture and far far away, echoing with a hollowness of enfolding distance, the sound of dripping water reached up.

The steps were slippery. Men fell, and others fell with them; but there was always one stout fellow to hold and to give the others a chance to pick themselves up each time. So we penetrated down.

“We are going from one zone to another, that is certain,” said Modo Fre-Da. He half turned his head to speak to me as I followed him. The two Pachaks and the numim surrounded the lady, and my help was relegated to the rear. That suited me.

“Zone?”

“Aye—” Then there was a slipping at our backs, and we had to brace ourselves to hold the mass of men pressing down.

My thoughtless question was thus forgotten. But, all the same, it was relatively easy to guess what Modo meant by a zone. Other considerations weighed on our minds as we came out onto a graveled floor and cast the light of the torches into a vast and hollow space, filled with the sound of running water, to see what fresh terrors confronted us.

Now there are torches and there are torches on Kregen. If you can get hold of the wood of certain of the trees, and use pitch and wax prepared in certain ways, you may build yourself a torch that is a king among torches, or you may wind up with a piece of burning wood that casts its light no more than half a dozen paces. The wizards and sorcerers have means of creating lights, magical lanterns, you might call them, that cast a mellow radiance for a considerable distance. Yagno would have one of those for sure

— I wondered if old Quienyin also had one in his meager belongings.

Our torches were reasonably bright, varying in quality, and shed their lights over some seventeen or eighteen paces. Light-colored objects and movement could be picked out beyond that.

So we saw the glinting shimmering waterfall erratically revealed. We walked closer over the gravel.

The water fell from somewhere out of sight, curving to fall into a stone-faced pool in which a stone island supported a shrine. In the shrine the marble idol leered at us. I, for one, was having nothing whatsoever to do with his ruby eyeballs.

“Spread out,” ordered the lady Ariane. “And see what there is to see.”

We found ourselves in a cavern rather than a stone-faced corridor or hall. The water ran out an arched opening at the far end bordered by a stone-flagged path. Near a jut of rock that stretched into the stream lay the figure of a man clad in full armor, his arm outstretched. His mailed glove almost touched a small balass box, bound with gold, sitting on the ledge of rock. The water did not touch man or box.

“That box looks interesting,” quoth the lady.

“Mayhap, my lady,” offered Naghan the numim, “it contains the part of the key to be found in this zone.”

“That we will not discover until—”

“Let me,” said Logu Fre-Da, and he moved forward. He stretched out his tail-hand.

My attention had been occupied by the dead man. The armor was of the kind favored in Loh, a fashion I knew although not at that time having visited Walfarg in Loh, that mysterious continent of walled gardens and veiled women. The old Empire of Walfarg, that men called the Empire of Loh, had long since crumbled and only traces of a proud past were to be discerned in once-subject nations. This man had traveled far from the west, over the ocean to reach his end here. He was a Chulik, and his savage upthrust tusks were gilded. His skin appeared mummified, a pebbly green in configuration and color. In his left hand he gripped a weapon with a wooden haft some six feet long, and whose head of blue steel shaped like a holly leaf was by two inches short of a foot.

That cunning holly-leaf shape, with the nine sharp spikes each side set alternately forward and backward, and the lowest pair extended downward into hooks, told me the weapon was the feared strangdja of Chem.

Logu was a hyr-paktun, a man of immense experience in warfare and battle. He seized up the balass box in his tail hand and, even as that tail swished up and threw the box to his brother, his thraxter was out and just parrying in time the savage blow from the strangdja.

The dead man came to life the instant the box was moved.

He sprang up, ferocious, his Chulik-yellow face restored to its natural color, his tusks thrusting aggressively. He simply charged maniacally straight for Modo, who held the box, swinging the deadly strangdja in lethal arcs.

A single blow from that holly-leaf-blade might easily sunder through the Pachak’s shield, a second rip his head clean off.

“He seeks to slay the man who holds the box!” yelled Naghan. The lion-man’s own halberd slashed at the Chulik as the Undead passed, and was caught on the strangdja. For a single instant the two staved weapons clung and clashed, and then with a supple quarter-staff trick, the halberd was flung off. Naghan staggered back, raging with anger, to fling himself on again.

“Throw the box!” called Ariane in her clear voice.

The box arched up, and was caught by Logu, who waited until the Chulik advanced, madly, insensately, and then the box sailed over to me. I caught it and prepared to use the Krozair blade one-handed.

Stories of the Undead circulate as freely on Kregen as on Earth — more freely, seeing that they exist there. They are often called Kaotim, for kao is one of the many words for death, and they are to be avoided. Whether or not this example could be slain by steel I did not know, although I suspected he might well be, seeing that he had resumed his living appearance when recalled to life.

“Throw the box, Jak!” called Ariane.

I threw it — to her.

“You rast!” screeched Naghan at me, and fairly flung himself forward. But the Krozair brand flamed before him. The superb Krozair longsword is not to be bested by a polearm no matter how redoubtable its reputation or deadly its execution.

So the Chulik Kaotim sought to get past me, aiming a blow at Ariane, and I chopped him. Could one feel sorry for slaying a man who was already dead?

When the Kaotim’s second leg was chopped he had to fall, for the Undead had been hopping and fighting on one. He hit the stone coping to the stream, and struggled to rise, and his stumps of legs bathed in the water and no blood gushed from their severed ends.

Finally, Naghan, with a cry of: “In the name of Numi-Hyrjiv the Golden Splendor!” brought his halberd down. The Kaotim’s Chulik head rolled. No blood splashed. The gilt tusks shone in the light of the torches. The armored body lay still.

For a moment there existed a silence in which the roar of the waterfall sounded thin and distant.

I said, “If the key part is so important, as, indeed, it is, it would not have been entrusted to so feeble a charge.” I turned away. “Whatever is in the box — it will not be the key.”

I do not know who opened the box.

All they found was a coil of hair, and a blue silk ribbon, and a tiny pearl and silver brooch.

The lady Ariane said, “Put the things back in the box. Place it back on the ledge from whence it came.”

This was done.

We stood back.

The Chulik head rolled. The legs walked. As Osiris was joined together, so that nameless Chulik adventurer resumed his full stature, legs and head once more attached to his body. Painfully, he crawled to the stone ledge and stretched out his hand toward the box — and so once more died.

His yellow skin marbled over and granulated to that death-green color. He remained, fast locked in the undying flesh, his ib forever barred from the Ice Floes of Sicce and the sunny uplands beyond.

The torches threw grotesque arabesques of light and shadow on the ripple-reflecting roof of the tunnel.

The stream ran wide and deep at our side. We pressed on along the stone path and we took it in turns to lead, for we encountered many of the more ordinary water monsters of Kregen. Always, the two Pachaks and the numim clustered close to their lady. There were in her retinue other powerful fighting men, and between them and me we kept the way ahead clear.

“Water runs downhill,” said a Brukaj, his bulldog face savage as he drew back from slashing a lizard-form back into the water from which it had writhed, hissing. “So, at least we go in the right direction.”

“May your Bruk-en-im smile on us, and prove you right,” I said. “For, by Makki-Grodno’s disgusting diseased tripes! I am much in need of fresh air and the sight of the suns.”

After a time in which more scaly horrors were slashed and smashed back into the water, it was my turn to yield the point position. Pressing back to the very water’s edge, I scanned the dark, swiftly-running stream as the people passed along.

A soft voice as Ariane passed said: “I think you fight well, Jak. You are a paktun, I think.”

“Of a kind, lady.” I did not turn my head. The Pachaks and the numim passed along and I stepped back from the edge to bring up the rear.

Light blossomed ahead, glowing orange and lurid through the darkness. I was still in rear as we debouched into a cavern vaster than any we had yet encountered. Here the water ran into a lake that stretched out of sight, beyond the fire-crystal walls streaming their angry orange light, past the weird structures that broke the surface of the water with promises of diabolism.

“Well, by all the Ibs of the Lily City!” said Ariane. “We will not meddle with
them
!”

Fastened by rusty chains and rusty rings at the stone-faced jetty lay seven ships, sunken, their superstructures alone rising above the waters. They were carved and decorated grotesquely. Many skeletons were chained to the oars. In the clear water hundreds of darting shapes sped dizzyingly. They were not fish. Their jaws gaped with needle-teeth, and their eyes blazed. We drew back from the edge with a shudder.

The gravel expanse began where the stone ended, and then more stone flags started again, some twenty paces farther on.

No one offered to step upon the gravel.

Tarkshur, Strom Phrutius, Kov Loriman and, even, Prince Nedfar, would simply have told a slave to attempt to cross. I looked at the lady Ariane nal Amklana and wondered what she would do.

“Naghan!” She spoke briskly. ‘Tell some of the slaves to break a piece away from the nearest boat.

Throw it on the gravel.”

“Quidang, my lady!”[2]

No slaves fell in the water as a piece of the rotten wood, the gilding peeling, was broken off. It was thrown out onto the gravel. It sank out of sight, slowly but inevitably, and a nauseating stench puffed up in black bubbles around it.

“We cannot cross there, then!”

“And we do not go back—”

“We cannot swim—”

“The boats!”

But each piece of wood we tried sank, for the stuff was heavy as lead, and rotten, and putrid with decay.

“Examine the wall for a secret door,” commanded the lady.

As the slaves and retainers complied, she turned to me and bent a quizzical gaze on my harsh features.

“You say you are a paktun of a kind, Jak. And you are Jak, merely Jak and nothing else?”

Now the paktuns had called me notor, lord, without thought, and no man who is not a slave upon Kregen goes about the world with only one name. Unless he has something to hide. And anyone with an ounce of sense in his skull will invent a suitable name. I would not say I was Jak the Drang, for in Havilfar no less than Hamal, that name would be linked with the Emperor of Vallia. So, without a smile, but as graciously as I could, I said, “If it please you, my lady, I am sometimes called Jak the Sturr.”

Now sturr means a fellow who is mostly silent, and a trifle boorish, and, not to put too fine a point upon it, not particularly favored by the gods in handsomeness. I picked the name out of the air, for, by Krun! I was building up a pretty head of boorish anger and resentment at the tricks and traps of this Moder. By Makki-Grodno’s leprous left earlobe! Yes!

She laughed, a tinkle of silver in that gloomy torch-lit cavern.

“Then you are misnamed, I declare, by Huvon the Lightning.”

I did not smile. Huvon is a popular deity in Hyrklana, and I was not going to pretend to this woman that I came from that island. If she asked where I hailed from...

“And, Jak the Unsturr — where in Kregen are you from?”

“Djanduin, my lady.”

“Djanduin! But you are not a Djang!”

“No. But I have my home there. The Djangs and I get along.”

“Yes.” She wrinkled up her nose, considering. “Yes. I think you and they would — Obdjang and Dwadjang both.”

What, I wondered, as shouts rang out along the rocky wall, would she say if I told her I was the King of Djanduin? For a start she would not believe me. And who would blame her?