Star of Cursrah (39 page)

Behind her a nomad suddenly let out a bloodcurdling scream that pierced Amber’s ears like needles. Another nomad warbled a battle cry. A dwarf hollered like an avalanche of rocks. A robed mongrelman howled like a wolf.

The bandits could move, Amber realized. They’d been released from the petrifying spell while the Memnonites were still frozen. Every desert-dweller caterwauled, cursed, or threatened as if battle-mad. They were mad, Amber realized. Their fear had been banished by a magically induced berserker rage.

Even the White Flame slashed the air with her scimitar and shrilled with her fire-seared throat, “Nobody will muster an army in this desert but I! No one!”

Amber flinched as the White Flame swept by, scimitar flashing. More raiders stampeded past with jambiyas and spears and crossbows outthrust, a rolling tide of black and silver. Screaming, all thirty fighters surged past Amber and her friends, and right past the unmoving mummy.

Still glued to the floor, Amber watched as the bandits swarmed upon the palace guards.

A reviving rhinaur stamped two feet, took a fresh grip on a lyre-shaped halberd, and shoved straight with the curved razor edge. The demihuman was as slow as a winter-chilled snake. Sidestepping the huge blade, a nomad rammed a spear under the rhinaur’s triple chins. Blood ran down the spear, cold and slow as molasses. Slowly the giant sank to four rhinoceros knees.

A nodding manscorpion had four crooked legs cut out from under him, and crumpled with its spear atilt the dead rhinaur. The other centaur-folk and the eight human guards were slaughtered as easily as sea turtles wallowing on a beach.

Brushing past bodies, the White Flame crashed open the double doors to the royal court. Green smoke made a thin haze, for inside the resurrection had barely begun. Over five hundred soldiers and dozens in a royal entourage waited to be revived.

Bewitched, the White Flame shrieked to her followers, “Kill them! Kill them all! Smash every one. I’ll brook no army interfering with my plans for revenge.”

Carnage reigned. Watching from the corridor, wincing inwardly, Amber saw bandits tear into the ranks of the dust-covered “statues.” In investing the bandits with berserker rage, the mummy must have imparted the secret that Amber also knew; that to break even one finger of a sleeper destroyed the enchantment and ruined any hope of reviving.

Spinning, hacking, charging everywhere at random, bandits slammed weapons against heads, arms, hands, legs, and faces. The outermost guards, half-revived, had died like frozen people, bleeding slowly because their hearts beat slowly. Inside the royal court, there was no blood. Scimitars struck sleepers with a solid chonk! like an axe splitting wood. Noses, fingers, and ears smashed like china. Upset, sleepers teetered and crashed into their companions, until stiff bodies lay in heaps like wind-tossed trees. With the spells broken, bodies sagged into fleshy heaps, but their spirits had departed.

Unable to move, Amber leaked tears as the White Flame ordered the royal family beheaded. Amber knew elders and children were among them, many no doubt innocent of any crime, but the sins of the father and mother were visited upon the family a thousandfold. The clang of scimitars, thud of clubs, and shattering of bodies against marble scorched Amber’s ears like fire.

The frantic destruction rang on and on as bandits repeatedly hacked bodies long dead. Gradually, like a passing thunderstorm, the savagery in the royal court slowed, then ceased. Silence grew.

Having stood unmoving all this time, the mummy now crooked a blighted finger. Amber and her friends stumbled headlong, free. The mummy turned with a dry, snaky rustle. Reiver and Hakiim hung back, wary and fearful. Laying down her capture staff, Amber took a deep breath and followed.

At the doorway to the royal court, the mummy halted. Inside, Amber got a glimpse of hell. Ancient Cursrahns were knocked into windrows like wheat from a killing frost. Arms, legs, and heads jutted at grotesque angles. Even the statues of the two brothers and Star’s own statue had stone limbs smashed off. Whimpering at the devastation, Amber could clearly see that none of the petrified sleepers would ever awaken, for all had been smashed or cut or chopped a dozen times. Around the big hall, the White Flame’s raiders slumped or lay prone, exhausted by their demonic fury.

So awesome were the mummy’s powers, that when it lifted a single stone-gray hand, the nomads, dwarves, and mongrelmen instantly struggled to their feet. A bandaged finger flicked, and the raiders’ emotions were tweaked again like the strings of a lute. This time, stark terror struck the White Flame’s minions to the heart.

Screaming in panic, thrashing and spitting, casting away headscarves and weapons to run the faster, the bandits fled. Amber jumped aside rather than be trampled in the human stampede. Last to run was the White Flame, robes flapping, veil billowing back from her ruined face.

Watching them go, Amber wondered how the raiders would remember this episode. Would the merest memory rekindle terror, or would the mummy grant them forgetfulness? Either way, the bandits had been paid for their work, for most lugged packs and pouches stuffed with treasure. Perhaps, miles away, they’d collapse and rest, and be content and reckon themselves lucky.

While Amber and the mummy stood framed in the doorway, Reiver and Hakiim crept close and peeked into the court.

“I don’t understand,” said Reiver.

“Nor I,” said Hakiim. “How could the mummy—Amenstar—bewitch the bandits into destroying her relations?”

Reiver added, “Wasn’t it—she—supposed to guard them? Compelled by a geas to protect?”

Only someone who’d communed mentally with the mummy and had seen her life in all its vibrant beauty and horror could explain. Time seemed suspended as Amber stared into shrouded black eye pits. The bandaged face was gray as a stone wall. The linen-pressed nose, she noticed, was exactly level with hers. The two women were the same height.

“You were cursed to guard your family, weren’t you? There was no way to resist. You initially drove us away with fear, yet not before you touched me, beseeching, asking my help. I understood that much. It’s why I returned. Now I see what you’ve done.

“You had to protect them as long as the family slept, but once the green smoke was released, and the resurrection began, your work was done, so the geas faded. You were free to act, free to charm the bandits into crushing your family. How many centuries have you lain imprisoned, hating your parents, wishing them dead, as you weren’t?”

Hunched, shriveled, small, the mummy stared at the court’s destruction. The creature seemed neither vindicated nor joyful, but only infinitely sad and pitiful.

The men looked puzzled. Reiver asked, “Isn’t she happy? She finally got her revenge.”

Amber shook her head of dark waves and said, “For good or evil, everything in Amenstar’s world was here, and now it’s gone forever. We could all wish there’d been some other way.”

Straightening, the mummy shuffled a slow circle to face the three Memnonites. Gesturing, she touched the blood-red girasol hung from the double chain at her breast. The jewel still imprisoned the souls of Star’s friends, Gheqet and Tafir, if Amber understood the story correctly. Bony fingers tapped the jewel once, twice, thrice.

“What does she want?” whispered Hakiim.

“I know.” Stooping, Amber picked up a fallen club with an iron head and said, “Goodbye, Star. I hope you find peace.”

Raising the club and taking aim, Amber smashed the iron club against the mummy’s rock-hard breast. The bloody jewel, the Star of Cursrah, shattered into a hundred glittering fragments, but the splinters that bounced on the marble tiles were no longer red, but milky white.

For a second, the mummy stood immobile, gazing blindly at Amber through slitted bandages. Then the head drooped and the chest slumped, until Amber realized the shell was crumbling inward. A dent creased the skull and caved in. The spine telescoped with a crackle. Fingers fell from the hands, one tiny bone at a time. The knees sagged, and the body keeled. Striking the floor was the last blow. The mummy shattered into dust, powder, rotten bandages, and a chain of tarnished silver, the whole pile no more than a finger’s width deep.

In the silence, Reiver observed, “A good breeze would scatter her to the four winds, poor thing.”

“That’s only her remains,” said Amber. “Somewhere, her soul walks free for the first time in ages—with Gheqet and Tafir, who are free too. Just like us, my good friends.”

She squeezed the men’s hands, smiled, and they smiled back. Backing, Amber pulled closed the heavy double doors of Cursrah’s last royal court.

“Looks like a storm brewing.”

Standing at a tunnel’s mouth, the adventurers watched sand whirl and sizzle by. Already a drift had piled ankle-high across the entrance.

“We better move quickly,” said Reiver. “If this keeps up, the whole valley could be buried.”

“Most likely.” Amber shifted her nearly-empty pack and bobbed her capture noose. “This storm isn’t natural, I think. The mummy—Amenstar—may have conjured it, or even Great Calim himself. It’s just as well. Cursrah belongs to another time, not ours.”

“Are you sure you don’t want some loot?” The men shifted sagging, clinking packs. As they’d spiraled up the tunnels, they’d passed the breached chamber previously stuffed with treasure. Most was gone. Whether the wind walker had whirled away the fabulous horde to some other plane, or the White Flame’s bandits had hidden it, they couldn’t tell. By gleaning corners and the wreck of the antique clepsydra, and picking up drabs along the way, Reiver and Hakiim had each netted a fat double handful of coins in gold, silver, and electrum, and a few gems and trinkets. Reiver had wanted to break down other walls and find more, but a sixth sense warned that time ran short, and indeed, they’d found the wind rising ominously. Amber had taken no treasure, and now shook her head.

“Money can’t give me anything I want,” she said. “It’s what your carry in your heart and head that’s important.”

“What about carrying that on your head?” pointed Hakiim.

“What? Oh.” Amber touched her forehead. She’d worn the moonstone tiara so long it felt like part of her. Tugging it off, she gazed at it for a moment then said, “I should have given this back to Amenstar.”

Stooping, Amber set the tiara gently on the pillow of sand at her feet and smiled.

“Ready?”

Hakiim tisked. “I think all that bewitching addled your brain.”

Amber smiled and said, “If you mean, will some part of my spirit always remain in Cursrah? You may be right. I’ve seen so much of its past… almost lived it….”

She stood so long, staring into the wind that howled and slobbered around the tunnel mouth, that Reiver finally nudged her shoulder.

Shaking her head, Amber tucked her kaffiyeh across her face. Together the three friends marched into the burgeoning sandstorm.