Star of Cursrah (32 page)

A different crowd jammed the vast room, so late arrivals could not enter but were packed in the side corridors. Candles and torches lit sweating, frightened, noble faces. Huddled there were Cursrah’s richest citizens, her civil authorities, sages from the famous library, and the joint chiefs of Cursrah’s tiny army. Many had servants or bodyguards, some bloodied by the mob. All scuttled up, agitated, as the bakkal and first sama dismounted their sedan.

The army’s general stamped forward, gold helmet under his arm as a sign of respect. So all might hear, he bellowed, “Lord and Master, He Who Reigns from On High, praise be to Great Calim that you’ve finally come. We need your guidance. Scouts report that dust roils on the horizon. Enemies ride in force to attack our fair city. Our army shall muster and ride to Cursrah’s defense—”

“No! Great Bakkal, pray listen,” interrupted a noble in a yellow toga. “The mob riots, and now our soldiers have gone insane. They attack the roofs of the civic buildings—tear them apart with crowbars and levers and mallets—”

“Why do they not defend us?” called a woman in blue robes. “Mobs pillage our mansions! Why do you not rouse the troops to slay them? Why do we pay taxes—”

“When will we have water?” demanded another. “Our slaves ran off when our fountains dried up—”

A mute prisoner, Amenstar wondered why anyone expected the bakkal to solve their problems. Star knew her father would do nothing. A mighty descendant of genies communed with dead ancestors and distant gods. Even had he possessed mystical and arcane powers, he could not and would not, defend the kingdom or protect the populace or unleash a flood of blessed water. Water, safety, and home were concerns of the living. A bakkal served only death.

People clamored, hurling questions and bitter accusations, then hushed as the bakkal raised a hand. The first sama answered for her husband.

“The bakkal of Cursrah, and all the royal family, appreciate your services in this life. We wish you well in your future plans. Do not despair for your sovereigns. We shall be safe after invoking the Protector. Never again shall we emerge in this life, but know that Cursrah will live on in our persons. Go now, and may Calim send you sweet winds.”

“Go?” gargled a hundred mouths.

Blank-faced, they stared, and slowly knowledge dawned, then horror. For them, the bakkal had no plans at all. Cast away, they could live or die—it didn’t matter to the royal family they’d supported all their lives. Horror gave way to anger, with shouts of injustice, betrayal, and curses from the gods.

The nobles’ indignation availed nothing. At another command from the first sama, the palace guards fanned out, sweeping citizens before them. The crowd was first bullied, then nudged, then thumped. Before long, as the crowd resisted, swords and spears rose and fell. Shrieks echoed. Blood stained the pink-white marble tiles and ran in trickles between the cracks. Bodies were kicked after fleeing citizens, until brute strength won out, the corridors were cleared, and eight pairs of thick double doors were tugged shut and solidly barred.

“Come.” The sama’s single word set three hundred people into motion. Scuffling, splitting, surging, the disjointed procession flowed into corridors and down spiraling ramps.

The vizar-in-waiting recoiled from the touch of living beings, so the captive Amenstar and her guards were among the last to descend. The last thing the princess saw was the moon, Cursrah’s former protector, shining in the sky; silver white, clean and cool, aloof and distant, it glowered at the foolish mortals scurrying below.

The sedan chair was hoisted. Rocking gently, Amenstar dully bid the moon farewell. She left the world of sun and moon and life, descending to a world of perpetual darkness and death.

Before the tail of the bakkal’s parade had vanished into darkness, the palace’s destruction began.

The ancient genies and slaves who’d built Cursrah had been canny engineers who cut and fit blocks so square and smooth they needed neither mortar nor tenons. Thus painstaking construction allowed for quick demolition. Teams of men and brawny women started with levers, pry bars, and blocks and tackle at the circular cornice ringing the palace’s open roof, the sacred circle that had admitted moonlight to the royal court for centuries. Loosened blocks skidded down the gently sloping roof and smashed away exterior cornices with tremendous crashes, then all landed with a muffled thud in the mud of the moat. Within an hour, slaves scrambled down rope ladders while master masons winkled free keystones. With an earth-shaking, thunderous rumble, the gilded roof shattered onto the pink-white marble of the royal court.

The pace of demolition increased. Thin internal walls were dismantled stone by stone, carried out along the eight bridges, and pitched into the mud. Working downward from the main walls, slaves tilted giant blocks out to slam into the moat one by one. Vibrant frescoes became marred with cracks, chips, and splits, then obscured by dust. Ancient scenes of glory were nibbled away. Bold warriors and kings and gods stood decapitated, their heads toppled with the walls. Their torsos were tilted after their heads. Morning sunrise washed the vast floor with golden rays, and Calim’s Breath, rising, gradually wafted away the worst dust.

Work stopped, as into the royal court skulked a high vizar and two heavily laden acolytes in vulture-brown robes. This priest, short, gaunt, and shaven, with a horned sigil branded onto his forehead, summoned the master mason from off a ladder. Pointing, the vizar commanded that a single pink-white flagstone near the room’s center be pried up. Obeying, masons further plied chisels, star drills, and heavy iron hammers to punch a crude drop shaft through the floor’s foundation to the tunnel intersections below. The work went quickly, for all the commoners, from the college-trained mason-engineers to the lowest slaves, feared to look the vizar in the eye. Superstition whispered that anyone who saw their reflection in a vizar’s mad eyes would die before the next moonrise.

Over the drop shaft, the vizar ordered a small hut built of fallen stone, with a broken column erected inside as a pedestal. Rapidly, low walls were stacked, then broken slabs laboriously lapped into a roof. The high vizar and his two acolytes were shut inside, which suited the workers, glad to see them go.

In teams of eight, slaves streamed from the vanished palace, fracturing and collapsing all eight bridges as they went. When the last paving stone fell into the mud, the palace foundation became a true island once more. Only shattered and scattered stepping stones gave access to the island, and none dared or wanted to venture there. Sitting outside the former moat on the circular road that led nowhere, slaves ate hearty rations, sipped water carefully rationed by overseers with swords, and napped through the heat of the day.

Awakened as the sun slanted to the west, the workers picked up shovels and baskets to finish the forbidding landscaping. Slaves and overseers and masons worked side by side to fetch and dump sand by the ton. Moving inward, industrious and mindless as ants, they filled the last vestiges of the moat, burying the mud and broken stone and the last of the brilliant frescoes under clean sand. When they reached the vast round floor, the exhausted workers buried the pink-white polished marble floor under a foot of sand, then poured basket after basket of sand over the crude stone hut at the very center, until only a low knob was visible.

They hurried at this last chore, for a soldier had come running with news that made everyone look east. As the sun set behind the watchers, the last rays glowed on a tall, roiling dust cloud. Rumors were confirmed; an invading army marched toward Cursrah.

Conferring, the master mason whispered to the chief overseer, who raised his whip and pronounced, “Slaves, as a reward for your hard work, and with the blessings of our gracious bakkal, you are hereby set free.”

“Free …” The word skittered like a breeze among the clustered slaves. Freedom was a dream many had never entertained or even pondered.

One slave, bolder than the rest, shouted, “Wait—what does that mean? Who will feed us? What shall we work at? Who will protect us from this marauding army?”

The masons and overseers only hurried home to see their families to safety, if such a notion still existed in this doomed valley.

The palace of Cursrah had been demolished, leveled, and hidden under sand. Now began the work of the vizars, to see that the sacred burial spot was protected against intruders, forever, if need be.

Inside the smothered stone hut, the gaunt vizar with the horned sigil and his two acolytes crouched in darkness. Sand sifted from the cracked roof slabs onto the vizars’ shaven pates as they poked and squinted to assure no sunlight leaked into the stygian cell. Carefully they unrolled a bundle of jute, in triple layers dyed black, and draped it across the drop shaft to block any torchlight welling from the corridor below.

Satisfied that the darkness was complete, one acolyte unwrapped a square box big as a man’s head. It was folded from sturdy tin and brazed shut with bronze seams. Working clumsily in pitch blackness, plying a small chisel and hammer, they attacked the tin box and pried the lid back. Gently they lifted out a wad of more black cloth, and carefully peeled back the folds. Working by feel, they arranged the soft cloth as a nest atop the short pedestal. Into the nest they eased a plain glass orb.

None of these vizars had ever seen the sphere, but they’d heard its story. Hand blown by Cursrah’s finest glassblower, the orb was almost perfectly round, thick-walled, and unclouded save for a few tiny suspended bubbles. Years before, when the grand vizar’s powers were most potent, she and other clerics had journeyed far and high to a peak in the Dragons’ Wall. Waiting for a full moon, they had loudly offered the nearly perfect orb as a delicacy to Selune, goddess of the moon. At the same time, other vizars had under their breath invoked Bhaelros, god of storms, wind, and lightning, another inhabitant and lord of the sky. By a delicate balance of flattery, fast talk, and hedges, and despite teeth chattering with cold, the grand vizar had captured the favor of Selune, gentlest and most forgiving of goddesses, yet harnessed a small part of Bhaelros’s might, a god with wind to spare.

Before the magic could be tapped and drained, the orb was wrapped in black cloth and stuffed into the tin box. Fighting a howling wind, an alchemist coaxed a charcoal fire hot enough to braze the box shut, sealing out any chance of light.

Now the globe had been shut up again, this time in a chamber sealed by stone and sand. Reposing on its pedestal, the orb was a trigger waiting to be pulled. When the time was right, the sandy cover would wear thin. The first finger of Selune, the merest sliver of moonlight, that infiltrated the globe’s hiding place would set it aglow. The first touch of a human hand would unleash the fury of a hurricane stolen from Bhaelros, and Cursrah would be swept free of suffocating sand.

On some distant day in the future.

Removing the jute curtain, the vizar and two acolytes descended the short, improvised drop shaft. They turned down the spiral corridor toward the deep-sunken vizars’ workshops. As they went, they passed a cluster of men and women who laughed and joked and fairly skipped by.

These people had, moments ago, been palace slaves of the highest caste, fit to wait on the royal family. Along with a hundred other slaves they had just delivered the royal family and their possessions to safety. As a reward, the vizars had granted them their freedom. Each ex-slave also received a mug of celebratory wine, three small gold coins, and a tiny gem to begin their new lives. Split into groups of a dozen, the newly freed folk giggled and boasted of the many great things they’d accomplish as they traipsed up the seemingly endless ramps and sloping corridors toward sunshine and promise.

Their walk to freedom halted. First one then another of the elders stumbled. Hanging back, a woman of sixty, who’d served faithfully in the palace since she was six years old, suddenly caught her throat, moaned, and fainted. A middle-aged man sank to the cold tunnel floor. Younger folk ran to their sides, only to be stricken themselves in throat and gut. Before long, all the ex-slaves collapsed. Infirm folk died quickly. Strong ones hung on grimly, curled in agony, cursing the bakkal before they finally ceased breathing. In their final lucid moments, a few veterans of palace intrigue realized they’d been betrayed, that the celebratory wine had been poisoned.

As the last victims lay twisting in pain, bleeding from the nose and mouth, a vizar came along with a palm leaf, the symbol of service. Chanting slowly, he imposed upon the ex-slaves one final chore to fulfill even in death.

“Here you will abide. Here wait, patiently, as in life. Guard this corridor. Let no intruder pass, though time lose its meaning and the moon vanish from the sky. Stay, guard, protect, let no one pass… .”

Deeper within the tunnel complex, guards retreated backward on feather-light feet. Along the many tunnels they armed dozens of devilish death traps sure to cut down looters: falling blocks, hair-trigger crossbows, spring-set blades. Some guards frowned, knowing these traps had lives of their own, so would rot after a few decades or even centuries, but they kept any objections private. Working alongside them, whispering vizars enchanted stretches of gluefloor to snag unwary feet, spectral voices to haunt the mind, and beguiling eyes to hypnotize.

Farther down, where the walls were lined with brass, griffon-headed sconces, overseers barked as lower caste slaves packed treasure into shallow chambers along the corridor walls. Chests and boxes were stacked to the low ceilings. Baskets of jewelry were piled until they threatened to topple, and when sacks of coins and gems wouldn’t fit, they were upended and poured into cracks like acorns into a tree. Gifts given to generations of royalty were squirreled away along with common but costly household goods: candlesticks, a crown, an incense burner, a gilt screen of rosewood, a brass barometer, a tea tray, a toy wagon with jeweled wheels, a magical jar, a lacquered box of ivory hairpins, a decorated horse bridle, and much, much more.

When these slaves finished their labor, and the chambers were mostly full, guards drew their short bronze swords. Slaves and slave masters screamed, cried, begged, clawed the walls and climbed the golden hoard, to no avail. The bakkal’s bodyguards butchered them until the corridors were quiet again and even the echoes had died. The ravaged bodies were left to rot. Working slowly, the guards bricked up the entrances to the chambers and smoothed the mortar. The hard-faced guards felt no regrets. No slave would ever creep back to loot the bakkal’s treasure. The gold and gifts would stay hidden until their sovereign needed it.