The Heretic Kings (24 page)

“How far do you think we have come?” Bardolin asked Hawkwood.

The mariner shrugged with one shoulder. He had taken bearings as often as he could—Kersik had been inordinately fascinated by the compass—and he’d had both Masudi and big Cortona pacing to check his own count, but in the day-to-day labour it was probable that major inaccuracies had crept in.

“We’re walking almost due north now,” he said. “Since we met the girl, I’d say we’ve come some sixty leagues, but we’ve changed course several times.”

They were far back in the file. Kersik was twenty yards in front, Murad striding beside her like her consort. Bardolin lowered his voice. Her hearing was better than a beast’s.

“She slips past questions like a snake. She knows everything, I’m sure of it—perhaps the whole history of this land, Captain. For it has a history, you can be sure of that. These ruins look as ancient as the crumbling Fimbrian watchtowers you can see up in the Hebros passes, and they are six centuries old and more.”

“Maybe we’ll find answers in this city she keeps talking about, though where it might be I’m sure I don’t know. The way she talks it must be on the slope of this damned mountain; but how could one build a city on slopes so steep?”

“I don’t know. It may be that if there is a city there somewhere we’ll find more answers in it than we bargained for.”

The file halted. Murad called for them at its head and the wizard and the mariner hurried past the line of soldiers.

The way was blocked by a trio of figures so fantastic that even Murad had momentarily lost his poise.

Two were inhumanly tall, eight feet perhaps. They were black-skinned, a black so dark that it made Masudi’s skin appear yellowish. Their limbs were bare and they wore simple loincloths, but where their heads should have been were incredible masks. One was of a leopard-like creature, only heavier and more muscular. The other had the head of a great mandrill, with bright blue patches of ridged flesh on either side of the flaring nose.

But the masks were not masks. The leopard-head licked its teeth and the eyes moved. The mandrill sniffed the air, its nostrils quivering. In their human hands, the two creatures carried bronze-bladed spears twice the height of a man, wickedly barbed.

The third figure was tiny by comparison, shorter even than Hawkwood. He seemed entirely human and his skin, though deeply tanned, was as pale as a Ramusian’s. He wore a shapeless bag of supple hide for a hat, and white linen robes which concealed his entire body except for small, broad-fingered hands. His face was pouchy and bejowled, eyes bright and black shining out of puffy sockets. Were it not for the strange garments, he might have passed for a well-to-do merchant of Abrusio with too many rich meals and too much good wine under his belt. His only ornament was a pendant of gold in the shape of a five-pointed star which enclosed a circle. It hung from his wattled neck on a gold chain whose links were as thick as a child’s finger.

“Gosa,” Kersik said, and she bowed. “I have brought the Oldworlders.”

The leopard head growled deeply.

“Well done,” the man in the linen robes said. “I thought I’d provide you with an escort into Undi. And my curiosity was consuming me. It’s been a long time.” His glance strayed to the members of the company who stood silent behind Kersik, even Murad at a loss for words.

“Greetings, brother,” Gosa said to Bardolin.

The mage blinked, but did not reply. His imp uttered a single little yelp which sounded almost interrogative. The leopard head growled again.

Murad stepped forward, clearly angered by being left out of the exchanges. Immediately mandrill head levelled the spear until it touched his chest, stalling him.

A series of clicks. Sergeant Mensurado, Cortona and the other soldiers had their arquebuses in the shoulder, the wheel-locks cocked back, the muzzles pointed squarely at the exotic trio in the middle of the track. Powder-smoke eddied about the company. Gosa sniffed at it, and smiled to show yellow teeth, canines from which the gums had retreated.

“Ah, the very essence of the Old World,” he said, not at all put out by the weapons pointed at his ample belly. “Put up your weapons, gentlemen; you will not need them here. Ilkwa—for shame—can’t you see the man is merely trying to introduce himself?”

The tall spear swung back to the vertical. Murad nodded at Mensurado and the arquebuses were uncocked, though the men kept their slow-match lit.

“Murad of Galiapeno at your service,” the nobleman said wryly.

“Gosa of Undi at yours,” the plump, berobed man said, bowing slightly. “Will you follow me into our humble city, Lord Murad? There are refreshments waiting, and those who wish to can bathe.”

Murad bowed in his turn. Gosa, Kersik and the two outlandish beast-men led off. The company fell in behind them, still hauling the two litters with the fever-ridden soldiers.

The world changed in a twinkling.

The jungle disappeared. One moment they were walking under the shadowed shelter of the forest, and the next it had vanished. Uninterrupted sunshine blinded them. The borderline between the riotous vegetation and barren emptiness was as clear-cut as if a giant razor had shaved the mountainside clean of all living things.

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 their joints 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 down 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 well-being which enfolded Bardolin, like a sudden draught in a sturdy house, a breath of winter.

“Who are you?”

Kersik! She has much to learn of herbalism yet. Rest easy, brother of mine. All will come to light in the end. I find you interesting. There has not been much to seize my interest this last century and more. Did you know that when I was an apprentice there were nine disciplines? But that was a long time ago. Common witchery and herbalism. They were amalgamated, I believe, in the fifth century and brought under that umbrella term “true theurgy,” to the profit of the Thaumaturgists’ Guild and the loss of the lesser Dweomer-folk. But such is the way of things. You interest me greatly, Bardolin son of Carnolan. There is a smell about you that I know. Something there is of the beast in you. I find it intriguing… We will speak again. Rejoin your friends. They worry about you, worthy fellows that they are.

H E opened his eyes. He was on the floor and they were clustered around him with alarm on their faces, even Murad. He felt an insane urge to giggle, like a schoolboy caught out in some misdeed, but fought down the impulse.

A wave of relief. He felt it as a tactile thing. The imp clung to his shoulder whimpering and smiling at the same time. Of course. If he had been drugged it would have been left bereft, lost, the guiding light of his mind gone from it. He stroked it soothingly. He had put too much into his familiar, too much of himself. The things were meant to be expendable. He felt a thrill of fear as he caressed it and it clung to him. Much of his own life force had gone into the imp, giving it an existence beyond him. That might not be to the good any more.

Drugged?
Where had that thought come from?

“What happened?” Hawkwood was asking. “Was it the food?”

It was an enormous effort to think, to speak with any sense.

“I—I don’t know. Perhaps. How long was I gone?”

“A few minutes,” Murad told him, frowning. “It happened to no one else.”

“They are playing with us, I think,” Bardolin said, getting to his feet rather unsteadily. Hawkwood supported him.

“Lock us up, drug one of us—what else do they have in store?” the mariner said.

The soldiers had retrieved their arms and lit their match; it stank out the room.

“We’ll have that door down, and shoot our way out of here if we have to,” Murad said grimly. “I’ll not meet my end caught like some fox in a trap.”

“No,” Bardolin said. “If they are expecting anything, they are expecting that. We must do it another way.”

“What? Await yonder wizard with a tercio of his beast-headed guards?”

“There is another way.” Bardolin felt his heart sink as he said the words. He knew now what he would do. “The imp will go for us. It can get out of the window and see what is happening outside. It may even be able to open the door for us.”

Murad appeared undecided for a moment; clearly, he had had his heart set on a fighting escape. He was still wound up too tightly; they all were. A spark would set them off and they would die here with the questions un-answered, and that was intolerable.

“All right, we’ll let the imp go,” Murad conceded at last.

Bardolin let out a sigh. He was utterly tired. He felt sometimes that this land had fastened on him like a succubus and would feed off him until there was nothing left but a withered husk that would blow away to ash in the wind. Soothsaying was not one of his Disciplines, and yet the presentiment had been upon him ever since they had made landfall that there was something deadly to the ship’s company and to the world they had left behind, and it resided here, on this continent. If they escaped they would take it back to the old world with them like a disease which clung to their clothing and nestled in their blood. Like the rats which scurried in the darkness of the ship’s hold.

He bent to the bewildered imp, stroking it.

“Time to go, my little friend.”
Can you see the way out, up there in the wall? Up you go. Yes! That’s it. Where the last of the daylight is coming through
.

The imp was peering through the narrow aperture in the wall. The entire company watched it in silence.

“I may leave you for some time,” Bardolin told them. “But don’t be alarmed. I am travelling with the imp. I will return. In the meantime, stand fast.”

Murad said something in reply, but he was already gone. The world had become a vaster place in the wink of an eye, and the very quality of Bardolin’s sight had changed. The imp’s eyes operated in a different spectrum of colours: to it the world was a multivaried blend of greens and golds, some so bright they hurt to look at. Stone walls were not merely a blank façade, but their warmth and thickness produced different shadows, glowing outlines.

The imp looked back once, down at the silent room full of men, and then it was through the high, narrow window. It was hungry and would have liked to share in the meats that had been laid out for the company, but its master’s will was working in it. It did as it was told.

Indeed, in some ways Bardolin
became
the imp. He felt its appetites and fears, he experienced the sensation of the rough tufa blocks under his hands and feet, he heard the noises of the city and the jungle with an enhanced clarity that was almost unbearable until he became used to it.

The rain had ended, and the city was a dripping, steam-shrouded place, fogged as a dawn riverbank. The light was dimmer than it should be; the crater sides would cut out much of the light in the later afternoon.

What to make of this hidden city? The volcanic stone of the buildings was dark and cold, but the lambent, upright figures of people were about—not many of them now—and a single crescent slice of sunshine glowed like molten silver way up on the side of the crater: the last of the departing sun. Soon night would settle. Best to wait a few minutes.

Something else, though. A… smell which seemed tantalizingly familiar.

The imp clambered down the side of the high wall like a fly, head-first. It reached the ground and scampered into a cooler place of deeper shadow, an alleyway it might have been called in Abrusio. There it crouched and breathed in the air of the dying day.

The daylight sank as though someone had slowly covered a great lamp somewhere beyond the horizon of the world. It was actually possible to see the growing of the night as a palpable thing. In minutes the city had sunk into darkness.

But not darkness to the imp. Its eyes began to glow in the murk of the alley and its vision grew sharper.

Still, that smell somewhere, hauntingly reminiscent of something from the past.

To our duty, my diminutive friend
, Bardolin’s mind gently prodded as the imp crouched puzzled and fascinated in the humid shadow.

It obeyed the urging of a mind that was moment by moment becoming one with it. Obediently it scuttled around the side of the house which imprisoned the company, looking for the front door, another window, any means of entry or egress.

There were things moving in the streets of the city. To the imp they were sudden dazzling brightnesses darting in and out of sight. It was the heat of their bodies that made them so luminous. The imp whimpered, wanted to hide. Bardolin had to sink more of his will into it in order to keep it under his command.

There—the door they had entered the place by. It was closed, but there was no sign of Kersik, Gosa or the beast-headed guards. The imp sidled over to it, listened and heard Murad’s voice within. It chuckled to itself with an amusement that was part Bardolin’s, and set one glowing eye to the crack at the door’s foot. No lights, no warmth of a waiting body.

Push at the door
, Bardolin told it, but before it could do as it was told it felt a growing heat behind it, the hot breath of some living thing. It spun around in alarm.

A man might have seen a tall, bulking shadow looming over him, with two yellow lights burning and blinking like eyes. But the imp saw a brightness like the sun, the effulgence of a huge, beating heart in the bony network of the chest. It saw the heat rising off the thing in shimmering waves of light. And as the mouth opened, it seemed to breathe fire, a smoking calefaction that scorched the imp’s clammy skin.

“Well met, Brother Mage,” a voice said, distorted, bestial but nonetheless recognizable. “You are ingenious, but predictable. I suppose you had no choice: that festering pustulence of a nobleman would have left you no other options.”

The thing was a massively built ape, a mandrill, but it spoke with the voice of Gosa.

“Come. We have kept you waiting long enough. Time to meet the master.”

A huge paw swept down and scooped up the imp even as it leapt for freedom. The were-ape that was Gosa laughed, a sound like the whooping beat of a monkey’s cry but with a rationality behind it that was horrible to hear. The imp was crushed to the thing’s shaggy breast, choking at the vile heat, the stench of the shifter which it had smelled but not quite recognized. It had been confused by memories of Griella, the girl who had been a werewolf and who had died before they had set foot on this continent. It had not recognized the peril close by.