A Fortune for Kregen Read online

  Lacking a suitable container, I stated that fact, and picked up a handy little vial from within my own opening in the fire-crystal wall. Whatever power was operating here would, I judged, not provide anyone with something they did not lack. But the parameters were wide. So, with a vial of poison ichor as well as the stones, I marched off along the corridor seeking a way out.

  As I marched along in the brave old scarlet a refrain of that favorite drinking song of the swods kept going around and around in my skull. “Sogandar the Upright and the Sylvie,” that notorious song is called, and the refrain goes, “No idea at all, at all, no idea at all...” And as the swods sing they fairly bust their guts laughing at the incongruous notions their lewd imaginations provide.

  Well, the song fitted me, now.

  I had no idea what I was getting into, no idea at all, at all, no idea at all...

  Chapter Thirteen

  How an Undead Chulik Kept Vigil

  Just as Tarkshur’s Kataki expedition had become separated from the main body, so other expeditions had gone their own ways. There were a few monsters I met, prowling about — for loose monsters seemed to prowl about the corridors the deeper we went — and there were two or three lively encounters before I was able to clear them away from the path.

  I did not enter any of the rooms which lay invitingly open along the route, for I was attempting to find my way out.

  Shouts ahead of me along a corridor fitfully illuminated by torches indicated I had come up with a part, at the least, of the expedition which had entered with me. Perhaps. Perhaps this place was crawling with travelers lost and desperate to find their way out.

  A thing shaped like a chavonth stalked ahead. It was moving away from me and seemed unaware of my presence. Its low slung head snouted away from me; but I knew what it looked like well enough.

  Chavonths are feral six-legged hunting cats, and this one’s head would be a mask of ferocious cunning, blazing eyes, and splinter-sharp teeth. Normal chavonths are covered in a hide patterned in fur hexagonals of blue, gray and black. This one looked dusty...

  From a side door where he had evidently been looting, for his arms were filled with gold goblets and bracelets and strings of gems, a man sprang out. He was a Rapa. He saw the chavonth even as the big cat leaped.

  The Rapa was quick. He evaded the first lithe spring. But his leg was struck by a sweep of the chavonth’s front paw.

  I blinked.

  Instead of that Rapa leg being ripped by sharp talons, the limb was abruptly coated in dust. Then I saw the horror, as the Rapa screamed shrilly in shocked fear.

  His leg was not covered in dust. His leg was dust.

  He collapsed and the dust-chavonth sprang on him.

  Instantly, Rapa, gold, gems, all were mere heaps of dust.

  The dust-chavonth heard me then, and swiveled his head, snarling.

  He leaped.

  The steel with which an honest man defends himself against mortal perils would be unavailing here.

  I turned to run, dodging across the corridor in jagged leaps. Dusty padding followed me in bounds.

  The image of that Rapa collapsing and turning to dust hung before my eyes. And I saw... If memory did not play tricks...

  Turning, I swung the Krozair brand up and with a quick prayer slashed at his hate-filled mask.

  The cold steel bit.

  Instantly, the dust-chavonth shrieked a high shrilling vibration of agony. He changed. The dust vanished.

  I was facing a real chavonth, and under those hexagons of black, gray and blue his hearts beat savagely.

  But a real chavonth, savage and powerful though he might be, is not the same adversary as a dust-chavonth.

  The longsword slashed and backed and the chavonth limped away, yowling, leaving a trail of blood spots, vanished into the gloom beyond the reach of the torches.

  Men shouted down and I shouted back. They came up bearing torches and I saw the twin Pachaks.

  They looked as fierce as the chavonth.

  “You are unharmed, notor?”

  “Aye. The beast has gone.”

  “It was a dust-chavonth — you are lucky—”

  “I saw that a poor Rapa it slew and turned to dust lost his life and his gold and gems — but his sword remained true to itself.”

  “A chance, notor.”

  They called me notor, Havilfarese for lord, without thought. Truly, I had changed from the beaten and chained slave who had entered here. I did not think anyone would recognize me.

  We did not touch the heap of dust as we passed. Somehow, I did not think it would ward off a dust-chavonth. It might in all probability turn all who touched it to dust.

  The lady these twin hyr-paktuns served still wore her white gown. But it was streaked with grime and was torn. Her slippers were gone. She wore a pair of white fur boots. Her rose-red face and her yellow hair looked still out of place here.

  “Llahal, notor. You are most welcome — I have not seen you before?”

  “Llahal, lady. I am Jak — no, that is sooth.” Then I thought to convince them I had come into the Moder with another party. “You are an expedition new to these places?”

  “Yes. I am Ariane nal Amklana.”

  She said Ariane nal Amklana. Amklana was a proud and beautiful city in Hyrklana, and because she used the word “nal” for “of” I knew she was the chief lady of that city.

  “Llahal, my lady. Shall we join forces?”

  The two Pachaks nodded as she turned to them. They had seen the little affray with the dust chavonth.

  “The notor will be a useful addition,” said one.

  “Useful,” agreed his twin.

  “Is there anyone else with you?” I said.

  “Longweill, a flying man. He is farther up the corridor.”

  I nodded. So these two had become separated from the others. The lady Ariane looked in nowise afraid, rather, she stared on every new thing with the rapt absorption of a child, delighted at the splendors, terrified by the horrors. I felt I could come to like her, given time.

  “We must try to find our way back to the others,” she explained to me as we walked on up the corridor.

  “I am going into no more rooms of horror. I did not come here for gold.”

  I forbore to ask why she had come. Again the feeling struck me that only the most dire of reasons could have forced her to come at all, given that she must have understood far more of the dangers than ever we slaves had.

  Longweill, the flying man, made the pappattu in a spatter of Llahals, and then, together and with a crowd of retainers and slaves, we continued this nightmare journey.

  A mere catalog of the monsters we encountered and the dangers we passed would, I feel, weary.

  Suffice it that as we penetrated farther into the Moder and discovered more of the maze of corridors and rooms and chambers, and riddled riddles, and fought monsters, we battled against the forces of sorcery and of death.

  The flying man, Longweill, was a Thief.

  He made no bones about it. There are thieves and Thieves. After all, those ruffianly Blue Mountain Boys who owe allegiance to Delia of the Blue Mountains are as bonny a bunch of reivers as you will find on Kregen.

  “By Diproo the Nimble-fingered!” he said, as we gazed up at the blank ending of the corridor we had been traversing. “Now how do we get through here?”

  As a Thief he was first-class, I daresay. But I had up to now not been impressed by his powers of survival in a place like this. He took good care of his own skin, and his slaves were loaded with loot.

  Like us all, now he wanted out.

  And getting out was far more difficult than getting in.

  The sensation was distinctly odd, considering what had gone before, when I was consulted as to our best course.

  “If we cannot go straight on, then we must of necessity go up or down.”

  So we looked for a trapdoor, in floor or ceiling.

  When one of the Pachaks, the indomitable twin called Log
u Fre-Da, curling his tail-hand high over his head, pointing, indicated a trapdoor in the ceiling we all crowded over.

  Logu Fre-Da’s twin, Modo Fre-Da, looked up and shook his head. His straw-yellow hair swirled. He lifted his upper left hand and made a gesture of negation.

  “We have been trending down, to escape at the bottom of this pestiferous ants nest, have we not, brother?”

  “You are right, brother.” Logu Fre-Da turned to his lady. “Lady — we must search for another opening.”

  Longweill pushed through. His wings clashed together and then parted and blew our hair streaming in the downdraught as he flew up to take a closer look at the trapdoor. “No,” he called down. “Who is to say there is any way out? This whole business stinks of traps, and I am expert in those. Up is the way out, the way we came in.”

  “By Papachak the All Powerful,” quoth Modo. “He could be right, brother.”

  “I do not think so, brother.”

  “Hai, tikshim!” called down the flying man. “Remember your place among us notors.”

  Now tikshim, which equates with “my man” — only in an even more condescending and insulting way

  — is intensely annoying to whomever it is addressed. Logu Fre-Da turned away sharply from under the trapdoor in the ceiling. Modo went with him, and they began to speak in fierce whispers, one to the other.

  Longweill, the flying man, pushed the trapdoor up.

  He should not have done so — of course.

  The jelly-like substance that poured out in a glutinous blob enveloped him. Only his wings protruded through the transparent mass. We saw him. The blob of gluey substance fell to the floor. Longweill was consumed. The blob sucked him into its substance. His wings fell and rustled slackly on the floor.

  We all crowded back.

  The blob started to roll after us.

  Glistening brown and umber streaks writhed within the blob as it rolled, and the oily texture of the mass picked up dust and the scattered detritus of the floor. This rubbish was ingested as the blob rolled, infolding and slipping away, to be left as a trail on the floor where the blob had passed. The blob glistened.

  Well, man kept back the darkness and the creatures of darkness with his ally, fire — a chancy and often untrustworthy ally, admitted by all — and the rolling glistening blob looked oily to me.

  Snatching a torch from the hand of a faltering Gon I turned and hurled the blazing brand at the rolling glistening blob.

  It was oily.

  It burned.

  Waiting, I wondered what fresh deviltry would spew forth from this monster, as we had seen other monsters rise from their destroyed predecessors.

  Smoke, in this den of deviltry, was always a menace...

  The smoke from the burning glister-blob rose in a black and pungent cloud. It writhed up, coiling and twisting, and in the brilliance of the flames beneath we stood back, shielding our faces, fearfully watching and waiting for the smoke to assume a more awful form.

  In a black flat ribbon the smoke poured toward us, writhing some five feet off the ground. Many of the slaves started to run in deadly earnest. Steel, against insubstantial smoke, would avail us nothing. About five paces from us — and the two Pachaks stood with me together with a numim whose lion-face bore an iron-hearted resolve — the smoke abruptly switched sideways as though caught by a powerful wind.

  We could hear no wind. Yet the smoke thrust a long tongue against the side of the corridor wall, and split into many probing fingers, streaming, and so passed it seemed through the wall and was gone.

  Naghan the Doom, the numim, said, “A grating.” He crossed to the wall and called for torches. In the glow we looked. The grating was there, right enough, man height and wide enough for even my broad shoulders; but the bars confined holes no larger than bean shoots. No amount of peering in the flung light of the torches revealed what lay beyond.

  The conference was brief. Picks and sledgehammers were produced and the slaves went at the grating with a smash.

  “Poor Longweill,” said the lady Ariane. “He was so hot-tempered. He would never listen.”

  “You knew him before?”

  “Oh, no. We met when Tyr Ungovich organized the expedition. In Astrashum. Expeditions from all over Havilfar are constantly arriving and departing.” She laughed, more nervously than I liked. “Departing from the city to come here, I mean.”

  “Aye.”

  “And we must find the others. Prince Nedfar has already two parts of the key.” This statement made her pause, and color stained up into those rosy cheeks. She turned her eyes on me, gray-green eyes, fathomless. “Notor Jak — do you have any part of the key?”

  “No, my lady. Not a single part.”

  “Oh!” she said, and bit her lip.

  The picks and sledges were smashing away the stone grating.

  It occurred to me to say, “And you, my lady. Do you?”

  “Why, no — more’s the pity. We must find the nine parts of the key before we can unlock the door at the exit and so win free from this terrible place.”

  “With,” I pointed out, “or without what we came for.”

  She searched my face, seriously, and the tip of her tongue crept out to lick her lips until she remembered, and instead of licking her lips, said briskly: “Oh, but I must have what I came for. It is vital.”

  Still I forbore to question her. That was her business. Mine was getting out of here with a whole skin —

  as I then thought.

  The lion-man, Naghan the Doom, shouted across, “The way is open, my lady.”

  “Very good, Naghan. I will follow.”

  And, at that, what was revealed beyond the smashed-open grating was not particularly promising. But everyone in the Moder, I am sure, felt the desire to push on. To retrace our steps would be failure and would lead to disaster.

  Narrow steps led downward, wide enough for one person at a time. The walls and roof were stained with moisture and far far away, echoing with a hollowness of enfolding distance, the sound of dripping water reached up.

  The steps were slippery. Men fell, and others fell with them; but there was always one stout fellow to hold and to give the others a chance to pick themselves up each time. So we penetrated down.

  “We are going from one zone to another, that is certain,” said Modo Fre-Da. He half turned his head to speak to me as I followed him. The two Pachaks and the numim surrounded the lady, and my help was relegated to the rear. That suited me.

  “Zone?”

  “Aye—” Then there was a slipping at our backs, and we had to brace ourselves to hold the mass of men pressing down.

  My thoughtless question was thus forgotten. But, all the same, it was relatively easy to guess what Modo meant by a zone. Other considerations weighed on our minds as we came out onto a graveled floor and cast the light of the torches into a vast and hollow space, filled with the sound of running water, to see what fresh terrors confronted us.

  Now there are torches and there are torches on Kregen. If you can get hold of the wood of certain of the trees, and use pitch and wax prepared in certain ways, you may build yourself a torch that is a king among torches, or you may wind up with a piece of burning wood that casts its light no more than half a dozen paces. The wizards and sorcerers have means of creating lights, magical lanterns, you might call them, that cast a mellow radiance for a considerable distance. Yagno would have one of those for sure

  — I wondered if old Quienyin also had one in his meager belongings.

  Our torches were reasonably bright, varying in quality, and shed their lights over some seventeen or eighteen paces. Light-colored objects and movement could be picked out beyond that.

  So we saw the glinting shimmering waterfall erratically revealed. We walked closer over the gravel.

  The water fell from somewhere out of sight, curving to fall into a stone-faced pool in which a stone island supported a shrine. In the shrine the marble idol leered at us. I, for one, was having nothing
whatsoever to do with his ruby eyeballs.

  “Spread out,” ordered the lady Ariane. “And see what there is to see.”

  We found ourselves in a cavern rather than a stone-faced corridor or hall. The water ran out an arched opening at the far end bordered by a stone-flagged path. Near a jut of rock that stretched into the stream lay the figure of a man clad in full armor, his arm outstretched. His mailed glove almost touched a small balass box, bound with gold, sitting on the ledge of rock. The water did not touch man or box.

  “That box looks interesting,” quoth the lady.

  “Mayhap, my lady,” offered Naghan the numim, “it contains the part of the key to be found in this zone.”

  “That we will not discover until—”

  “Let me,” said Logu Fre-Da, and he moved forward. He stretched out his tail-hand.

  My attention had been occupied by the dead man. The armor was of the kind favored in Loh, a fashion I knew although not at that time having visited Walfarg in Loh, that mysterious continent of walled gardens and veiled women. The old Empire of Walfarg, that men called the Empire of Loh, had long since crumbled and only traces of a proud past were to be discerned in once-subject nations. This man had traveled far from the west, over the ocean to reach his end here. He was a Chulik, and his savage upthrust tusks were gilded. His skin appeared mummified, a pebbly green in configuration and color. In his left hand he gripped a weapon with a wooden haft some six feet long, and whose head of blue steel shaped like a holly leaf was by two inches short of a foot.

  That cunning holly-leaf shape, with the nine sharp spikes each side set alternately forward and backward, and the lowest pair extended downward into hooks, told me the weapon was the feared strangdja of Chem.

  Logu was a hyr-paktun, a man of immense experience in warfare and battle. He seized up the balass box in his tail hand and, even as that tail swished up and threw the box to his brother, his thraxter was out and just parrying in time the savage blow from the strangdja.

  The dead man came to life the instant the box was moved.

  He sprang up, ferocious, his Chulik-yellow face restored to its natural color, his tusks thrusting aggressively. He simply charged maniacally straight for Modo, who held the box, swinging the deadly strangdja in lethal arcs.