Iced On Aran (24 page)

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Authors: Brian Lumley

BOOK: Iced On Aran
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Orderly as a small army, single-file through the narrow doorway, all in the tomb filtered out into the maze beyond. Raffis Gan led the way, stiff-legged, arms like lead at his sides, eyes glazed and staring straight ahead. Behind him slaves and Kledans in no set order, with Yath-Lhi and her soldiers central in the column, then more slaves, Kledans, and finally Eldin the Wanderer bringing up the very rear.
The
official
column. But behind Eldin, all unobserved, twin shadows moved apace with the procession, drawing courage and strength from their anonymity.
LEAD THE WAY OUT!—Yath-Lhi's command repeated in Gan's numb brain. THE WAY OUT!—which the ex-Chief Regulator knew as well as any other man: WAY OUT!—for all he had to do was follow the yellow arrows painted on these walls. And the column wound through bowels of rock, coiling like a snake along a route of many angles toward the Lake of Yath.
“We're unaffected!” Ula whispered in Hero's ear, the merest breath of sound as she grabbed him in the shadows and drew his head down to her lips. “How?”
“The wine!”
“
Ah!
—eh?”
“It's all I can think—that it somehow put us outside her power, protected us.”
“What do we do about Eldin?”
“First we try to reason with him. Difficult at the best of times! Come on, let's catch up, join the column.”
“What!?”
She was alarmed.
“Let's play at zombies,” said Hero, and he stooped and picked up a guttering torch from where it had fallen from the nerveless fingers of a slave.
For all the stiff-leggedness of the ensorcelled procession, still it was making good speed. Striding awkwardly at the rear, it took Hero and Ula some little time to draw level with Eldin, who walked perhaps four or five paces behind the next hindmost. Ula took up a position on his left, Hero on his right. They couldn't talk to him, nor even whisper now, for fear of being overheard. And so, trying as best they could to match his lumbering gait, they gently took hold of his elbows. Gently wasn't good enough; he just kept right on forging ahead.
Hero dug his heels in, Ula too—and still Eldin strained forward. The column ahead had reached a crossroads, was turning sharp right. Hero nodded grimly to Ula, straightened up, resumed his stiff-legged striding. She did likewise.
The slaves immediately in front were beginning to turn the corner, now less than five paces away.
One,
Hero counted to himself.
Two,
he offered up a prayer to whichever gods of dream might be listening. And—
three
! He stepped behind Eldin, let go a massive belt with the stock of his torch to the back of the Wanderer's neck.
And
still
the hypnotized quester took another step—before crumpling. They caught him, lowered him gently as possible to the stone floor, turned him on his back. “Eh?” the half-stunned Wanderer inquired, the pain-wrinkles under his bushy brows opening to reveal
crossed eyes. And: “What the bl—?” the rumbling started; was cut short as Ula sat on his face.
“Umf?” said Eldin, squeezing the query out round firm buttocky curves. He groped about, grabbed Hero's jacket front with one great hand and yanked him close.
“Umf?”
The zombie column had passed on, hopefully out of hearing. “Shh!—you umfing great lump!” Hero hissed. And: “Ula, get off him—I think he likes it!”
“Eh? Eh? Eh?” demanded Eldin, as Ula demurely stood up. Sprawled on his back, he still wasn't all there. “Why are we whispering?” he wanted to know. “Last thing I remember, I—” His eyes widened. It was as if he saw them for the first time, as if he saw ghosts, and in the next moment he came bolt upright. “Hero! Ula! You're dead! No you're not—and neither is Yath-Lhi!” He grabbed Hero's arm. “I saw her!”
“We've all seen her,” said Hero. “The trick now is not to see her again, and for her not to see us!”
“She was dead,” Eldin babbled on, “and yet she—”
Shaken by its collision with the Wanderer's neck, Hero's torch had sent up a last burst of sparks before snuffing itself out. But it wasn't that alone which had cut the Wanderer short—it was also the flitting shadow with burning eyes which, in the fading glow of the torch's smoldering, all three had seen rushing upon them!
Hero almost had the knife out of its sheath on his calf when the shadow fell on him. Its breath was sweet where it kissed him.
“Hero!” Una breathlessly whispered. “Ula—sister—and … and
Eldin
!” She fell to her knees beside the Wanderer, hugged him, toppled him flat again. Wild, crying, unable to believe, Una threw herself from one set of arms to the next. “Alive!” she cried. “All alive!”
Eldin groaned, struggled into a sitting position again, gingerly fingered his neck. “Speak for yourself, lass,” he said. “Me, I'm not so sure!”
“HOLD!” came a telepathic command in Hero's mind. It wasn't directed at him, and it wasn't from close at hand, but he heard it anyway. Eldin, having heard nothing, used his huge lungs as bellows, aiming gust after gust at the torch's embers. They came alive again, but flickeringly. And in the fitful light: Ula, too, had heard Yath-Lhi's mind-voice, if her face was the judge.
“There's a fresh torch back here,” said Una, pointing. “Come on, quickly. This is the way out!”
“Shh!”
said Hero and Ula together. And in their minds:
“THIS IS
NOT
THE WAY! I MAY HAVE SLEPT FOR AGES, AYE, BUT AT LEAST I KNOW MY OWN LABYRINTH. NOW
I
LEAD THE WAY!”
Wide-eyed, Ula gazed at Hero. “Gan took her the wrong way?”
Una was gleeful. “They followed
my
arrows! I changed them, you see?” Then she frowned. “Are you two all right?”
Hero looked at her, at Eldin, too. “You didn't hear it?
“Hear what?” the Wanderer was bewildered.
Hero and Ula exchanged knowing glances. “The wine,” said Hero.
“And that clout on the neck you gave him,” she nodded. “We were made as one with her through receiving the wine—”
“Stealing it,” Hero put in. “And ‘one with her' only on a telepathic level.”
“—and Eldin's hypnosis was broken by the clout!”
“Something certainly was,” the Wanderer growled. “And that was you, was it?” he glowered at Hero.
“I saved your soul,” said Hero, “so don't go complaining about a stiff neck!”
“We'd better get out of here,” said Ula. And to Una: “Sister, you were obviously outside her sphere of ensorcelment—thank goodness! Now where's that torch you mentioned?”
Behind them, as they found the brand and brought it to life, there came the tramp, tramp, tramp of zombie feet slapping stone in unison. Then:
“Ula's right,” said Hero. “Time we weren't here. Una, lead on—and don't spare the elastic!”
 
 
On their way out, as they put distance between themselves and the marching menace behind them, Hero and Ula took turns to tell what happened after Gan had them thrown down the well at Regulating HQ. It was all very quickly told; likewise Eldin and Una's adventures from then till now. By which time they'd covered three-quarters of the distance to the outside world.
“And what then?” Eldin asked. “When we're out, I mean? We can't just walk away and forget it. There's that bag of worms back there to think about. Are we simply to let Yath-Lhi out into the clean, sane air of the dreamlands?”
“Sane?” said Hero. “Yes, I suppose it is, compared to the Black Princess and her boys! So what's your plan?”
“My plan?” the Wanderer was taken by surprise. “I have a plan?”
The questers strode out while the girls trotted alongside, hard put to keep up the pace. “You must have had some sort of plan when you came bursting in here,” said Hero. “You could have reported all of this in Bahama, but instead you came back. So what did you have in mind?”
“Gan's blood, that's what I had in mind!” said Eldin darkly. “I planned to get in, grab Gan, gut him and get out again—if I could. If not … I thought you and Ula were dead, remember? So this was to be my revenge, and I didn't really stop to consider how to achieve it. I even had an idea to block his way out—by bringing down the tunnel right there at the entrance—and I borrowed a keg of gunpowder to do just that. But there were all of those innocent Pargans to think of. So in the end I settled for Yath-Lhi's curse. I realize now, of course, that I wasn't thinking straight; I thought the curse would direct itself only at the one who sought to steal Yath-Lhi's treasure. As to the
nature
of the curse—well, who could have foreseen that?”
Hero nodded. “All of which was to say, you don't have a plan—right? Well, neither do I. So it's a case of wait and see …”
“Floor's sloping upward,” Una took the opportunity to put in. “There's one last turn up ahead, and then—”
“Whoa!” said Hero as they reached the final bend in the gradually rising shaft. As they all skidded to a halt he inclined his head toward the corner. “You may not have heard Yath-Lhi's mind-voice, but I'm sure you can hear that!”
“Damn right!” said Eldin.
Faint but clear, the distant sounds of shouts and screams, of cannon-fire and bloody battle, echoed down to them. And superimposed on the background hubbub, the sound of running footsteps and of shouts inside the entrance tunnel itself!
“Revolt?” Eldin hazarded. “The slaves have turned on their Kledan masters?”
“I do hope so!” cried Una.
Hero stuck his head round the corner, saw three figures, Kleedans, racing toward him. The leader had a
torch held high, was shouting: “Druff—Zubda Druff—
treachery
!
”
“Hear that?” Hero said over his shoulder.
“What sort of treachery?” Eldin wanted to know.
“He'll have to shout louder than that,” said Ula with a little shudder, “if he wants to speak to Zubda Druff!”
“Here they come,” said Hero. “Three of 'em. They won't be expecting us. Eldin, are you fit?”
“Never fitter!” the Wanderer snorted. He positioned himself in the center of the corridor, went into a crouch and leaned slightly forward. “Let 'em come!”
They came, rounding the corner two fore and one aft—and met instant chaos. Una had the torch; she thrust it directly into the face of the slaver on the left. He had a beard and his head was a mass of tight black curls; all went up in flames, which he beat at with both hands, screaming and dancing to and fro. The man on the right collided with Eldin, which was about the same as running into a brick wall full tilt. The third was able to fetch a skidding halt, was reaching for his curved sword when Hero stepped forward and hit him. He at once joined Eldin's victim, groaning on the floor. Meanwhile, Ula had tripped the Kledan with the burning beard and hair, and Una had bashed him on his smoking head with her torch. As quickly as that, the confrontation was over.
“For a minute there,” said Eldin, eyeing the two girls, “I felt we were back on the Mad Moon battling moonbeasts!”
“FASTER!” said an eerie voice in the minds of Hero and Ula, not talking to them but possibly about them. “I SMELL DANGER!”
“Let's go,” Hero snapped. He, Eldin and Ula relieved the Kledans of their swords, went at a run the rest of the way up the ramp to the entrance. But even before they
reached the mouth of the excavation in the barrow where it overlooked Yath, Una had tossed her guttering torch aside. No need for that now. Beyond the entrance, night's blackness was shot with gouts of fire and flaring white balls of light!
At first it was difficult to see just who was fighting whom; but as the four emerged at the run from the barrow on to the slightly elevated level area at the head of the ramp, so they were engulfed in a roiling crush of men locked in hand-to-hand combat. A slave uprising? Not a bit of it: it was gray-clads against Kledans, and it seemed the Regulators were here in force.
Hero at once cut down a huge, roaring slaver, snatched up and tossed the dead man's sword to Una—and then they were in the thick of it. But this was a weird scrap! One minute they were surrounded by gleaming, burly blacks, and the next a hail of Regulators came literally dropping out of the skies. “I knew Bahama's gray-clads had the rep of being fly-boys,” Eldin rumbled, “but this is ridiculous!”
The questers and their girls gazed aloft into fire-streaked skies. Sky-ships were up there, locked in combat. Out over the lake, flanked by a pair of vessels who poured shot after shot into her, a blazing, badly listing Kledan ship settled for the calm water; another slaver ran south-east for Kled, but lumberingly, half her sails shot away. The third slaver was almost directly overhead, exchanging panicky cannon-fire with what looked like a staid old merchantman. And it was this last vessel which discharged Regulators, who swarmed expertly down ropes and rope ladders dangling from the decks to drop yelling into the fray.

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