Star of Cursrah (10 page)

“Hurry up, you,” she cursed. “I’ve duties to attend!” Any excuse to get away.

Amenstar couldn’t even stand to look at the clerics. Every one bore a hideous shaved skull and drab robe the color of the resin that dyed mummies. Bald and brown, they resembled vultures, perhaps deliberately. The junior priests, called anatomists, almost looked human, but as they rose in the hierarchy they underwent obscene disfigurements to show their dedication to death and their rebuttal of the flesh. The higher priests had arcane sigils fire-branded onto their skulls. Later came tattoos, and it was whispered, amputation of their genitals. Certainly it was difficult for Star to tell if any of the priests were male or female, and like most she didn’t care. Decent folk left the priests alone to scurry in cellars like rats and carve up cadavers like ghouls.

“Hurry, hurry,” cooed the vizar. Cold fingers squeezed pus from Star’s leg wound until the patient screamed. A white sigil—a scar—crinkled in the priest’s forehead as fennel-and-hyssop poultice was daubed on Star’s wound. “We hurry through this short life, Princess, and never think of the next, but the next is the only life that counts. We suffer a few short years as flesh to live an eternity as undying—”

“Spare me your lecture, priest,” snarled the samira. “If you fish-eyed necromancers spent more time saving lives—”

“Life and death are of little consequence, Samira. Our work is to preserve Great Calim’s memory. To that end, we even fashion mummies to serve him in the afterlife.” Picking up an obsidian scalpel and a silver bowl, the vizar kneaded Star’s thigh, hunting a vein, and added, “Royal blood such as yours, the blood of genies—”

Realizing the vizar meant to bleed her, Star whipped her leg away, and said, “Let go! I’ll keep my royal blood in my royal leg, or do you moonstruck ghouls need it to make date-wine punch after hours?” A poor joke, since vizars were said to drink blood.

“Hot bile only hies to the grave.”

Sniffing, the vizar-in-waiting discarded the grim tools, then snugged the linen bandage tight; too tight, Star suspected. A junior vizar reached with a camel-hair brush to dab some yellow liquid on Star’s forehead.

“What is that?” Star snapped.

Unused to talking patients, the anatomist blinked and said, “Uh, I don’t know, Gracious Samira.”

“Then keep it!”

Star batted the dish across the lab. It smashed and splashed its contents over scalpels, forceps, needles, bonesaws, retractors, and other tools of surgery and torture. Vizars also served as the bakkal’s inquisitors. Peeling prisoners for information, it was said, was the only task at which they smiled.

“You’ll need to return each night,” gloated the vizar-in-waiting, “lest your wound turn necrotic.”

“You don’t see enough rotten flesh?” she asked. “Have you no other entertainment?”

Amenstar couldn’t look at the vizar-in-waiting’s glittering black eyes. No one knew how old the cleric was. Rumor said the highest vizars plied spells to arrest decay, channel negative energy, and steal others’ life-forces. They were insane, all of them. Probably the holy order attracted madmen at the start, or else the skull-branding cooked their brains. From the dank corridor, Star heard a dog or hyena whimper. Vizars also practiced vivisection, teasing animals to death to see its onset. The samira shivered.

Swinging her legs, Amenstar hopped off the marble slab, straightened her ratty traveling clothes, and limped out of the laboratory. Four bodyguards fell into step behind her, and together they took a spiral ramp to escape the vizars’ netherworld of icy death. Warm air and light beckoned, and cedar-resin torches scented the air, but Star rubbed her hands over her arms, still cold.

“Those slimy sons of Skahmau,” Star said to herself. “I’ll die before I ever let them touch me again.”

“Aaaah,” warbled a fluting voice rich as a bronze bell, “there you are, dear! Is your leg all better?”

Star craned her neck to see the speaker, for Vrinda was nine feet tall. An administrator genie, Vrinda had run the palace bureaucracy for fifteen hundred years, overseeing the affairs of generations of bakkals, yet she never seemed to age nor grow a gray hair. She’d been tasked by Great Calim when the Palace of the Phoenix was newly built. At some point the genie had lost her ethereal qualities and become solid flesh, but she still towered over humans, and her elevated features were golden as honey, her nose pert, her hair the color of ginger and braided into a train, her clothes puffy and brocaded, antique. Her huge hands were dyed red with henna, an ancient symbol of slavery, and under an arm was trapped a slate palette, her badge of office.

“Come along, Samira dearest,” said the genie like a nursery maid. “The seamstresses await. You want to look your best for the gala, don’t you?”

“No, I want to look hideous,” groused Amenstar. Vrinda giggled as if at a joke.

With her leg throbbing at every step, the daughter of royalty and genies threaded winding corridors, ramps, and stairways. The Palace of the Phoenix was central to Cursrah, the city’s showpiece, but no one lived there. The royal family’s living quarters was a nearby sprawl of opulent buildings and wings, all walled and guarded from curious commoners. Because summers in the valley were relentlessly hot, and winters dismal and drizzly, and so family and servants might pass undetected, the entire center of Cursrah—palace, royal family compound, civic buildings, even temples—was honeycombed with tunnels, some even passing under the palace moat. So extensive were the tunnels that icons and arrows were painted at corners lest people become lost.

Spiraling upward on the wide ramps, Amenstar heard the tramp of hobnailed sandals. As the soldiers came into view, they broke ranks and scuttled against the walls to let the genie and princess pass. From their tall triangular shields Star knew they were her father’s most elite troops, the Bakkal’s Heavy Infantry, a troop of four who marched downward to replace the afternoon’s guard detail.

The Palace of the Phoenix had many homegrown mysteries and despite living here since childhood, there existed corridors and rooms Amenstar had never seen—or been allowed to see. Still, she knew some of what the soldiers guarded.

Below even the dank catacombs of the creepy vizars, the bottommost levels under the palace held tombs of the royal dead, where Star’s ancestors lay in state as mummies, carefully wrapped in bandages and sealed in tombs, forever preserved as future attendants should Great Calim ever call them, or so she’d heard, but never seen. There might be many rooms, or who knew what, in the dark depths.

Star’s father, as bakkal, descended those depths often, sometimes gone for days. Assisted by high vizars, he communed with the quiet dead to gain knowledge unguessed by the living. Star shuddered, glad she’d never have to pry into dead, desiccated, and probably angry brains for secrets. Still, the princess wondered.

“Vrinda,” she asked, “have you ever been to the lower levels? The very bottom?”

“I?” fluted the genie. “Never. That’s the bakkal’s domain. Your esteemed father holds many irons in the fire and toils for the good of the city. Even the most lasting dynasty may wither if not tended regularly, same as an olive orchard.”

“Olive orchard? I wanted to know—uhh!” Her leg panged so sharply Amenstar cried out, despite her stubborn pride. “Those useless vizars! May the Chariot Maidens whisk those lepers to the Mother of the Nine Hells.”

Gliding alongside, Vrinda made a tiny boosting motion with one hand and Star suddenly felt light as a bird, almost skipping on tiptoes. The giddy sensation made her stomach flutter.

“Mustn’t keep the dressmakers waiting,” bubbled the genie. “They’ve brought enough bolts to clothe every woman in Cursrah.”

“We have to wrap the package neatly,” grumbled Star, “to bring a high price at auction. Did ever anyone suffer as much as I?”

“Suffering, she speaks of,” Vrinda said, her voice gaining an icy edge. “She who was swaddled in cloth-of-gold and fed caviar from a silver spoon.”

The Year of the Gauntlet

“Gold!”

First into the dim tunnel, Reiver pounced on a glimmer on the sand-strewn floor. Only pure gold could lie untarnished for centuries. Reiver held the coin to the light. It was round like a Calishite tardey; on one side frowned a king with a head cloth and serpent headband, big nose, and thin lips.

“A bakkal,” murmured Amber.

“A what?” asked the two.

” ‘He Who Rules from On High,’ ” Amber translated, taking the coin from Reiver. “Nowadays we call them pashas, but bakkals were thought to be genie-kin, or even demigods. What’s on the obver—ooh!” On the coin’s back glowed a ruffled bird rising from fire. “A phoenix… .”

“This’ll cause a flurry in the gold seller’s bazaar,” Reiver said, grinning, teeth bright in his tanned face. He took the coin back from Amber. “We might have wandered into a dragon’s lair. They drag in treasure and coins fall out of their scutes.”

“So do people’s bones,” sniped Amber.

“Don’t speak of dragons,” Hakiim hissed. “It’s bad luck.”

“You must have elven blood, Reive,” Amber said, happy to change the subject, “you’ve the eyes of a lynx. I can barely—Vipers of Kalil!”

Her eyes having adjusted, Amber shifted her capture staff to pick up a white oblong. The skull leered at her, either a dog or wolf with a blunt muzzle and bone-crushing teeth. She tossed the relic away.

“Awful,” she said. “This place is like a tomb.”

Ignoring Amber, Hakiim raised his eyebrows at the coin in Reiver’s hand and said, “Share and share alike?”

“Certainly. Next one’s yours,” Reiver said and slipped the coin into one of many pouches. “Let’s hunt up another.”

Edging past the men, Amber squinted down the tunnel, which descended slowly but steadily. How far and how deep? she wondered. “First,” she said, “let’s strike a li—Bhaelros take me!”

The daughter of pirates had brushed something with her hip. It moved. Wary of snakes, she flinched.

Too late. The tripwire parted with a pung!

Stone grated on stone, as a creak and groan sounded deep within the walls. Dust trickled from the ceiling. Amber shouted a warning. Hakiim whirled to dash for open air. Reiver, who survived by quick reflexes, rammed his hands against his friends and shoved. Amber and Hakiim lurched headlong, deeper into the tunnel, and dropped onto their hands and knees. Reiver flopped between them. Behind, the world crashed down.

Where they’d stood a second before, a stone block big as an oxcart fell into the corridor with a resounding crash. The impact lofted the intended victims a foot off the floor. Other blocks, no doubt cantilevered against the first, tilted, slid, and crashed atop. The grinding and subsequent thuds boomed like explosions in the travelers’ ears as they crawled deeper into the tunnel to escape the dust. Instinctively they yanked their kaffiyehs across their faces, and Reiver clutched his companions’ sleeves.

“Stop,” the thief cautioned. “That’s far enough. There may be more traps.”

Frozen, they hunkered in darkness, waiting for the blocks to stop crashing and sliding. Billowing dust stung their eyes and made their noses run. They hunched their backs uselessly lest giant blocks drop on them. Gradually, scarcely breathing, digging dust from their ears and eyes, they guessed the cave-in had subsided and rose stiffly, sneezing and wheezing.

Batting the swirling air, they saw that the entrance was not far away. Early evening sunlight leaked through cracks and made dust motes dance, but jumbled blocks as big as hayricks blocked the corridor, the cracks too small to crawl through.

“Ogham’s eyes! I would have been crushed running for the outside,” panted Hakiim. “How did you know?”

“Common sense, a lucky guess,” Reiver whispered. “Small traps nail a person on the spot. Big traps set the trigger at the far side so the whole party is—”

“Shhh!” Amber squeaked. “Something moved!”

A sound, part slithering, part skittering, and part chittering, came from just ahead and froze them. With a hand, Amber shooed Reiver and Hakiim against the opposite wall so slanting sunlight could lance into the depths.

The wolf skull Amber had handled twitched. Bug-eyed, Amber watched the skull skitter backward with a clicking noise. A rat, she hoped fervently, a rat had crawled inside and dragged the skull like a hermit crab … but she could see through the skull’s vacant eyes. No rat.

Hakiim groaned. Words failed him.

As their eyes adjusted to the gloom, they saw that more stark-white bones littered the tunnel, a heap almost knee-high. All the bones moved of their own will. Outlying bones trickled toward the pile. The wolf skull bumbled along to meet a crooked spine then clicked into place atop. The spine wriggled like a snake to join a dried pelvis like a broken seashell. Shoulder bones collected arms. Feet like spilled necklaces joined crumbly ankles.

With no place to run, the three companions stared, riveted. Clacking, bumping, milling like albino ants, the bones coalesced into parodies of skeletons. One lurched to its feet.

Hakiim screamed. Reiver prayed to Shar, Mistress of the Night and the Underdark, who sometimes took pity on thieves. Amber gained a terrifying insight. The skull with the bone-crushing jaw wasn’t a wolf’s or dog’s, but a jackal’s, an eater of corpses.

Whatever spell animated the monster had hashed it, for the results were grotesque, lopsided, and hapless. The jackal skull wobbled atop a human spine, rib cage, and pelvis. One arm was perfect down to nimble finger bones, but the other shoulder sprouted a snake skeleton with multitudinous ribs. Both knees angled backward, the legs of a jackal, but the twisted feet were human. Clumsy though it was, the dead creation lurched toward the living humans. Fingers wriggled in anticipation of clawing warm flesh.

More patchwork skeletons arose. A human skull, denied a torso, perched atop a pelvis and clacked cracked teeth. Another snake skeleton towed a human hand for a tail. A jackal’s body sprouted two human heads, one upside down but both jaws clacking. One human rib cage was crammed atop another so the topmost scratched the stone ceiling. Four arms sprang from a walking pelvis. Other hideous combinations jittered together until a dozen freaks blocked the corridor from wall to wall. Silently they stood and swayed as if from an invisible breeze.