Hawkwood and the Kings: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume One) (82 page)

Now they could see the true size of the peak which soared above them. Its head was lost in cloud, and though from a distance it had seemed perfectly symmetrical, closer up they could decipher broken places in its cone, ragged tears in the flanks of stone, petrified waterfalls where long-cold lava had once gushed forth. The place was a wilderness, a desert leached of colour, defined only in greys and blacks. There were dunes of what looked like ebony sand, weird bubbles of basalt, outwellings and holes and the stumps of solidified geysers. A landscape, Bardolin thought, like that which he had glimpsed through Saffarac's viewing device long ago. Lunar, dead, otherworldly.

The going was harder, and the men puffed and panted as they laboured up the steep slopes. There was still a road of sorts here, a crude pavement of tufa blocks. Cairns marked its twistings and turnings as it zigzagged up the face of the mountain. The men gasped in the withering heat, choking on volcanic dust, their faces becoming black with what looked like soot and tasted like ash. It dried out their mouths and gritted between tongue and teeth.

"I see no city," Murad rasped to Kersik and Gosa. "Where are you taking us?"

"There is a city, trust me." Gosa beamed at him, a benevolent gnome with obsidian shards for eyes. "Undi is not so easily chanced across unless one is led there by one of its inhabitants. And this is Undabane whose knees we clamber across. The Sacred Mountain, heart of fire whose rages have been tamed." He stopped. "Have patience, Lord Murad. It is not much farther."

The company became strung out despite all that Murad and Mensurado could do. It was a line of antlike figures struggling up the monstrous mountainside, the soldiers pausing to catch their breaths, the litter-bearers changing every hundred yards. So it was Hawkwood and Bardolin, at the front, who saw it first.

A cleft in the mountain's conical top, a huge rent in its perfect shape. The summit was still some six or seven thousand feet above, but here they were working slowly around its western face, and the cleft was invisible from the northern approach. A glimpse of dark walls within shooting to incredible heights, and something else.

At the base of the cleft was a monumental statue weathered almost into shapelessness by the elements. It was perhaps a hundred and twenty feet high, and vaguely humanoid. A stump of a spear in one crumbling fist. Deep eyes visible in a face which had a snout for a nose. The impression of a powerful torso. The thing had been built out of tufa blocks bigger than the carrack's longboat and they were eroding at the joins so that it seemed to have a grid imposed upon it.

The rest of the party caught up as Gosa, Kersik and the two beast-men paused. There was only one litter.

"Forza died," Murad said to the questioning looks. "We don't know when - no one noticed. We built a cairn over him," He seemed angry with himself, as though it were his fault. "God curse this pestilent country."

Gosa pursed his lips disapprovingly, but did not comment. The company moved on again, the soldiers sullen and silent, even Mensurado cast down. The sick man's death seemed like an omen.

Rocks clattered under their feet, and their sodden boots were full of ash, blistering their heels and toes. They were down to their last swirl of water in the canteens, and Murad would let no one finish it.

Into the shade of the massive statue, their heads hardly reaching to its ankles.

The world contracted. They were trudging through a narrow place whose walls soared up hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feet on either side, a snake-thin gap in the wall of the mountain through which the wind whistled and hissed like a live thing. Water dripped in glittering fringes from the gorge sides, and the men stood under the drips with their tongues out, begging. Flat, iron-tasting water full of grit, it nonetheless enabled their tongues to move about inside their mouths again.

The world opened once more, or rather exploded upon them. Like the change from jungle to ashen desert on the slopes of the mountain, the transition was abrupt and astonishing.

They found themselves on a shelf of rock, maybe a thousand feet up
inside
the mountain. Undabane was hollow, a vaster version of the crater which Murad had named the Spinero. They could look up and see the walls of the mountain rearing on all sides, sheer as cliffs, unscalable. The blue unclouded sky was a semicircle of pure colour above the rock.

And below there was a disc of brilliant jungle, as though someone had lifted it whole, a small, flat world of it, and placed it inside Undabane after knocking the summit off the hollow mountain. The view stupefied them. There was a dark curve across the crater floor, the shadow of the mountain's lip dragging in the wake of the sun. Looking at it, Bardolin understood in an instant the phases of the moon.

There were buildings down there amid the trees: pylons of black basalt monumental in size but dwarfed to insignificance by their setting, flat-roofed houses built entirely of stone, a stepped pyramid as tall as Carcasson's spires, the step faces painfully bright with gold. Avenues and roads. A city, indeed. A place utterly alien to anything they had seen before or imagined. It took speech out of their parched mouths and left them gaping. Even Murad could find nothing to say.

"Behold Undi," Gosa said with quiet satisfaction. "The Hidden City of the Zantu and the Arueyn, the Heart of Fire, the Ancient Place. Worth a trek, is it not?"

"Who built this?" Bardolin asked at last. "Who are these people you name?"

"All questions will be answered in the end. For now, we have but a little descent and then you will be able to rest. Word of your coming has gone ahead of you. There is food and drink waiting, and succour for the sick amongst you."

"Take us down there, then," Murad said with brutal directness. "I'll have no more of my men die in this hellhole because you stand there preening yourself."

Gosa's eyes flared with an odd light, though his face did not change. He inclined his head slightly and led the party onwards, down a track which had been hewn out of the side of the mountain. Kersik shot the nobleman a look of pure venom, however.

They stumbled and stared and cursed their way down to the floor of the crater, which by this time was nearly all in shadow. There were dark clouds gathering in the circle of sky thousands of feet above them, the beginning of the daily downpour. They found themselves walking along a wide, well-paved road which had rain gutters on either side. It was a street of sorts, for there were more of the flat-roofed buildings set back from it amid the trees. As they hobbled deeper into the heart of the city the trees grew sparser and the buildings closer together. And there were people here.

They were tall, lean and black and were dressed in a white linen-like cloth. They were delicately featured, with sharply chiselled noses and thin lips. The women were as tall and stately as queens, their breasts bare, gold pendants ornamenting them. Many had their bodies decorated with some form of intricate ritual scarring which swirled in circles and currents around their torsos and on their cheeks. They regarded the company with interest, and many pointed especially at Masudi, who was like them and yet not like them. But they were restrained, dignified. The company passed through what could only be a market place, with stalls of fruit and meat set out, but there was little hubbub. The people there halted to stare at the ragged soldiers of Hebrion, and then went on about their business. To Hawkwood, who knew the crazed, chaotic bazaars of Ridawan and Calmar, the orderliness was unnerving. And there were no children anywhere to be seen. Neither were there any animals, not even a stray dog or lounging cat - if they had such things in this country.

The pyramid towered above the rest of the buildings, its gold dulled now as the sun was hidden and the afternoon rain began to tumble down inside the mountain. Gosa and his inhuman companions led the company to a tall, square house off the market place and thumped upon a hardwood door. It was opened by a tall old man whose hair was as white as his face was black.

"I have brought them, Faku," Gosa said. "See they are well cared for."

The old man bowed deeply, as inscrutable as a Merduk grand vizier, and the company trooped into the house.

"Rest, eat, bathe. Do whatever you wish, but do not leave the building," Gosa told them cheerfully. "I will be back this evening, and tomorrow... tomorrow we will see about answering some of those questions you have been harbouring for so long."

He left. The old man clapped his hands and two younger versions of himself appeared, shut the doors of the room - which the company saw was a kind of foyer - and stood expectantly.

Murad and his soldiers were glaring about them as if they expected an armed host to rush out of the walls. It was Hawkwood who smelled the cooking meat first. It brought the water springing into his mouth.

Kersik said something to the old man, Faku, and he clapped his hands again. His helpers swung open side doors in the big room, and there was the gurgle of running water. Marble pools with fountains. Clean linen. Earthenware bowls of fruit. Platters of steaming meat.

"Sweet Saints in heaven," Bardolin breathed. "A bath!"

"It might be a trick," Murad snarled, though he was swallowing painfully as the smell of the food obviously tantalized him.

"There is no trick." Kersik laughed, darted into the room and snatched a roasted rib of the meat, biting into it so the juices ran down her chin. She came over to Bardolin and stood close to him.

"Will you not try it, Brother Mage?" she asked, offering him the rib.

He hesitated, but she thrust it under his nose. That secret amusement was in her eyes. "Trust me," she said in a low voice, vixen grin on her face, mouth running with the meat juices. "Trust me, brother."

He bit into the rib, shredding meat from the bone. It seemed the most delicious thing he had ever tasted in his life.

She wiped the grease out of his silver beard, then spun from him. For an instant he could see her eyes in the air she had vacated, hanging as bright as solar after-images.

"You see?" she said, holding up the rib as though it were a trophy.

The men scattered, making for the piled platters and bowls. Faku and his colleagues stood impassively, looking on like sophisticates at a barbarian feast. Bardolin remained where he was. He swallowed the gobbet of meat and stared at Kersik as she danced about the gorging soldiers and laughed in Murad's livid face. Hawkwood remained also.

"What was it?" he asked Bardolin.

"What do you mean?"

"What kind of meat?"

Bardolin wiped his lips free of grease. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know." His ignorance suddenly seemed terrible to him.

"Well, I doubt they brought us this far to poison us." Hawkwood shrugged. "And by the Saints, it smells wholesome enough."

They gave in and joined the soldiers, wolfing down meat and slaking their thirst with pitchers of clear water. But they could not manage more than half a dozen mouthfuls ere their stomachs closed up. Bloated on nothing, they paused and saw that Kersik was gone. The heavy doors were shut and the attendants had disappeared.

Murad sprang up with a cry and threw himself at the doors. They creaked, but would not move.

"Locked! By the Saints, they've locked us in!"

The tiny windows high in the walls, though open to the outside, were too small for a man to worm through.

"The guests have become prisoners, it would seem," Bardolin said. He did not seem outraged.

"You had an idea this would happen," Murad accused him.

"Perhaps." Even to himself, Bardolin's calm seemed odd. He wondered privately if something had indeed been slipped into the food.

"Did you think they would leave us free to wander about the city like pilgrims?" Bardolin asked the nobleman. The meat was like a ball of stone in his stomach. He was no longer used to such rich fare. But there was something else, something in his head which disquieted him and at the same time stole away his unease. It was like being drunk; that feeling of invulnerability.

"Are you all right Bardolin?" Hawkwood asked him, concerned.

"I - I -" Nothing. There was nothing to worry about. He was tired, was all, and needed to get himself some sleep.

"
Bardolin!"
they called. But he no longer heard them.

Fourteen

W
HAT IS YOUR
name?

"Bardolin, son of Carnolan, of Carreirida in the Kingdom of Hebrion." Was he speaking? It did not matter. He felt as safe as a babe in the womb. Nothing would touch him.

That's right. You will not be harmed. You are a rare bird, my boy. How many of the Disciplines?

"Four. Cantrimy, mindrhyming, feralism and true theurgy."

Is that what they call it now? Feralism - the ability to see into the hearts of beasts, and sometimes the craft to duplicate their like. You have mastered the most technical of the Seven Domains, my friend. You are to be congratulated. Many long hours in some wizard's tower poring over the manuals of Gramarye, eh? And yet you have none of the instinctive Disciplines - soothsaying, weather-working. Shifting.

A tiny prick in the bubble of wellbeing which enfolded Bardolin, like a sudden draught in a sturdy house, a breath of winter.