A Fortune for Kregen Read online

  The Chulik pulled his hand back sharply. He could not break that skeletal grip.

  “Here, Chekumte—” said a compatriot.

  “Hurry,” said Chekumte. “It grips hard.”

  The second Chulik brought his sword down in a sweeping cunning blow against the yellowed wrist bones of that skeletal arm. The sword did not shear through. The bones sheared through the sword. The point fell onto the floor with a mocking clang.

  “By Hlo-Hli!” yelled Chekumte. “Bring a blade! Strike hard!”

  We sheared through four swords before I thought that, in all decency, I should try the Krozair brand.

  Quienyin saw my movement as I made to unsheathe the longsword.

  He shook his head. “I fear not, Notor Jak. That is a form of the Snatchban. The rope at the cabinet of the silver key was another. I believe they are also found in whip forms, liana forms, tentacle forms.

  Mortal steel will not cut them. We do not have the blade that will.”

  Loriman glared along the corridor. “We must push on.”

  The Chulik Chekumte struggled against the bony fingers. The pakmort shone a silver glint at his throat and his pakai of many rings shook. He was a paktun from Loh. “Do not leave me, comrades! I am a man, a mortal man!”

  He was a Yellow Tusker, almost as lacking in humanity as a Whip-Tail. Loriman gestured to his Chulik comrade. “Do what you have to.”

  “Yes, yes, by Likshu the Treacherous!” cried Chekumte. He writhed again, his yellow skin sheened with the sweat of terror. “Do it !”

  Prince Tyfar drew Ariane away, bending his head to her, gently.

  The Chulik brand slashed down.

  Chekumte from Loh staggered back, his severed wrist spouting Chulik blood.

  I thought of Duhrra of the Days...

  My vial of yellow poison sealed the wound but did not restore the hand. Chekumte held his stump aloft.

  “See, doms!” he cried. “Now you may call me Chekumte the Obhanded!”

  “No,” said his comrade. “Better Chekumte the Skohanded.”[3]

  The skeleton moved again. It lifted its mottled brown fingers gripping the freshly severed fleshy hand, the thick blood dripping. Its hideous jaws opened. Blood spattered. The jagged teeth crunched down. The skeleton’s jaws closed with a snap. The hand vanished — forever.

  We shuddered and pressed on down that skeleton-guarded corridor.

  Through apparitions, through fire, through poison, we battled our way on and we realized we were —

  we must be! — approaching a crisis. The horrors multiplied, shrieking and clawing — and then, suddenly, fell away. In a hushed expectant silence we passed through an ebon portal. Somber drapes opened with the fetid odor of death.

  A series of dusty anterooms which we treated with the utmost caution led us at length into a macabre chamber of considerable extent.

  This wide and lofty hall extended about us bathed in yellow light. Quienyin perked up. We had passed through horrors and now although the threat of terrors to come existed here, plainly, we felt we had gained an important objective.

  “Ah!” he said, pleased. “We must be in the penultimate hall to what San Orien called the heart and reason for being of the Moders.”

  The ceiling bulged low in some places, festooned with carvings of a grotesque and repulsive character.

  Bats swooped about high, and peered down with red eyes. A faint incense stink hung on the air and slicked flat and unpleasant on the tongue. Sounds echoed.

  The opening through which we had entered remained in being and did not close on us. Directly ahead at the far end of the hall the wall rose, tiered into many shelves. In each side wall openings almost as high as the ceiling led onto short passageways. Every wall was honeycombed with slots of stone. They jutted into the hall here and there forming oddly angled aisles. Above the main doorway and inscribed deeply into the marble an inscription glittered with gold.

  THE HALL OF SPECTERS

  “San Orien knew of the Nine Halls surrounding the mausoleum,” said Quienyin. He was peering every which way, quivering with attention, seeming to shed years from his age. “This is the Hall of Specters.

  There is a confusing complex of halls and corridors cradled here. And the whole place is a single vast mausoleum.”

  Dead bodies lay everywhere.

  The walls were honeycombed with the dead.

  Mummified as though in life, mere heaps of dusty rag, skeletons, masses of dried corruption, the bodies lay silently upon their biers of stone. Relaxed in the sleep of eternity, the corpses lay in rank on rank, niche on niche, tomb on tomb.

  In every direction nothing but corpses.

  But — were they dead?

  Chapter Sixteen

  In the Hall of Specters

  Uneasily, we stared about. The lady Ariane said, flatly, that she could not go on any farther. So we made a camp in a corner where two walls joined at not quite a right angle and where the serried ranks of crypts were empty of corpses. It was a case of cold tack until some foraging Chuliks returned with smashed coffins. These burned with an eerie blue light; but on them were cooked up a meal and brewed Kregan tea.

  Just then a Specter of Mutual Loathing walked in.

  He looked just like a young and lissome youth, naked, long of hair, smooth of skin. He was smiling in friendly fashion.

  “Leave him alone!” called the Wizard of Loh.

  But one of the Chulik mercenaries — he was not a hyr-paktun — could not resist. With a grunt of contempt and loathing he slashed his thraxter at the smiling youth. Everything down here that was not a known friend was a monster.

  The sword struck against the youth’s side. He went on smiling that wide zany smile.

  The Chulik yelped and went smashing backwards.

  “Jak!” shouted Quienyin. “Face the youth and strike yourself!”

  For a single heartbeat I did not understand what he meant — and then I saw. I whipped out the drexer and gave myself a resounding blow over the head, swinging the blade fiercely. I felt nothing. But the Specter of Mutual Loathing lost his smile. He staggered back. And purple blood sprouted from a deep wound in his head. With a wailing cry of despair he ran away, ran off, shrieking and shedding spots of purple blood that smoked as they spattered the floor.

  “By Huvon!” whispered Ariane.

  “A devil’s trick!” shouted Loriman.

  “You are to be congratulated, Notor Jak,” said Tyfar.

  I sheathed the unbloodied sword. “Rather, prince, thank Quienyin here, who saw through the devil’s trick.”

  The Chulik paktun came forward. His kax was deeply marked by the blow he had struck at the Specter of Mutual Loathing.

  “By Likshu the Treacherous!” he panted. “I struck only with sufficient force to slice a naked man — had I struck full force...” His powerful fingers traced the ugly mark in his cuirass.

  “He was but a simple monster,” said Quienyin. “He must have prowled down here and lost himself.”

  “You do not reassure us, Master Quienyin.” Tyfar drew his eyebrows down. Then he gave a small gesture with a hand that seemed to imply that what Krun brought, Krun brought. “But we are much dependent on your wisdom.”

  “There are much worse monsters here?” demanded Ariane.

  Tyfar gave Quienyin no time to answer. “If there are,” he said firmly, smiling at Ariane, “then we will meet them, aye, and best them, too!”

  We set sentries and took turns to sleep. We lords — and I relished in a distant muffled way the irony of being numbered among the notors — each took a watch, acting as Guard-Hiks.[4]

  The Hall of Specters formed one arm of a nine-armed complex of chambers, and each of these halls possessed its own resounding and macabre name. At the center, so Quienyin informed us, lay the mystery of this zone. There, we anticipated, also, we would find the eighth part of the key to get us out of here.

  His quota of sleep being short, Quienyin joined me as I stood my watch. We talked q
uietly. He told me that San Orien’s explanation for the existence of the Moders seemed reasonable and to be given a due meed of credulity. Originally the mounds — low then and simple — were used as places of burial. The habit of the living to bury costly treasures with the dead brought the inevitable train of grave-robbers. So the structures grew more complex and the traps more hideous. The Undead stirred at disturbances.

  Illusion prevailed, for the Moders were controlled by a people who, although sadly shrunken in numbers in these latter days, retained awesome powers.

  “There is more to it than that,” I said.

  “Assuredly. The Moder-lords — to give them a euphemistic title — discovered much about their own natures as they watched the dying struggles of would-be robbers. They discovered that not only did they enjoy the intellectual stimulation of providing ever more elaborate puzzles and traps, they found also, and to their undisguised joy, that they could feed from fear.”

  I nodded. “Other people have discovered that — think of the rasts who infest the Jikhorkdun and squeal at the blood in the arena. Or,” I added darkly, “think of Kazz-Jikaida...”

  “No, no, young man. The Moder-lords feed directly from the psyches of the frightened.”

  “That is possible?”

  His comical turban slipped and he pushed it back; but the gesture was not the usual irritated push. “I Must Confess that many a famous Wizard of Loh shares that dark desire.”

  He looked not at all proud of that.

  He went on after a space in which I let him gather his thoughts: “San Orien believed there was but one Moder-lord to each dark labyrinth, sitting in his battlemented towers on high and giggling and chuckling to himself as he ran the poor demented creatures below.”

  “They all came here of their own free will.”

  “You wound sorely, Jak — but it is sooth.”

  A guard stirred at the other side of the fire and stalked across. The firelight glinted from his armor and weapons. The smoke wafted away and was lost. We kept a sharp eye out for smoke, down here.

  “So these rasts up aloft can survey our progress?”

  “It would seem so — although I begin to doubt the fact.”

  “And there’s only one of ’em to each Moder?”

  “In all probability.”

  “Well, I just want to get out of here. I have much set to my hand in Kregen. Time wastes.”

  “There is, also, Much to be Won Down Here.”

  “As?”

  “You know what I seek. The lady Ariane seeks ways to topple her fat Queen Fahia. Loriman seeks ways to enhance his standing with and the glory of Spikatur Hunting Sword.”

  “And Tyfar?”

  “He adventures with his father—”

  “And what does Prince Nedfar seek in this dolorous place?”

  “I am not sure. Mayhap it is pure adventure. He is a great Jikaida player, and will respond to any challenge.”

  “And Yagno, the Sorcerer of the Cult of Almuensis?”

  Quienyin smiled and stretched. “It is obvious, that one. He must read his spells from a book, a hyr-lif.

  They are difficult to master. But they are effective. Yagno seeks ways to enhance his own sorcerous powers.”

  “Could he learn enough to make himself a Wizard of Loh?”

  “No. By the Seven Arcades — no — I hope not!”

  “Yet — you—?”

  “I but seek to regain what I have lost, not to gain what I never had.”

  “Illusion and reality.”

  “Aye.”

  I found a stoppered jar containing a little wine and we drank companionably together. Quienyin lowered the jar and spoke reflectively. “San Orien says they go in for magical objects down here. Things that, when possessed, confer special powers.”

  “My jar of yellow poison—”

  “Precisely, Jak.”

  The yellow light filled the close air with radiance and the fire burned with its eerie blue flames. The sentries prowled, alert, and our gazes kept flickering all about this mausoleum, surveying and noting the shadows in the corners, the corpses on their stone shelves.

  “And Strom Phrutius,” I said. “What of him?”

  “Gold and gems, I think. Treasure of the worldly sort.”

  “Maybe he has more sense than I credited him with.”

  “There is a well-known spell which will cause an armband to chain the wearer to the will of the giver.

  When I say well-known I mean in the sense of its existence being well known. The spell itself is arcane and difficult. With its knowledge a man could spell hundreds of armbands and thus ensure the willing and total obedience of all who wore them.”

  “Tarkshur!” I said. “That’s what he’s after.”

  “It is very likely.”

  “He’ll turn up again, at the exit, you’ll see.” I clenched a fist. “Katakis are devils at survival.”

  “So will your two friends, Nodgen and Hunch.” Quienyin offered me the wine. I shook my head. He went on, “It is Tyr Ungovich who provokes my curiosity. He is indeed an enigma.”

  “What he wants,” I said, guessing, “will likewise be found on the ninth zone.” Then, quickly, I said, “You are confident Hunch and Nodgen will reappear? They went right merrily into their paradises.”

  “Illusion, as the weapons you bear. They will appear.”

  I touched the Krozair longsword. The metal was warm — and hard and solid to my fingers. I shook my head. Illusion...

  “It is a great pity,” Quienyin said, “that Longweill the Fluttrhim[5]was killed. His gifts would have been useful.”

  “He’s down skating about on the Ice Floes of Sicce now,” I said. “May Opaz have him in his keeping, poor Thief though he was.”

  Shortly after that there was a general alarm as a procession of Green-Glowing Ghoul Vampires wandered past and we had a merry set-to. They were amenable to the kiss of steel, and were driven off.

  Again I noticed the fine free way Prince Tyfar fought, and, foolishly, I thought of Barty Vessler, and sighed.

  When all had rested we set off to explore the nooks and crannies of the various halls containing the corpses. Prowling monsters were encountered and dealt with, each to its own peculiar fashion, and we lost a few more men.

  If this was the Necromantic zone, as we believed, the key we sought — the part of the key — lay somewhere hidden. Finding it would take us a long time. And, as we explored, so we drew ever nearer the central chamber and the horrors it would most certainly contain.

  There would be a dozen or more cassettes to be filled with my record of the things we encountered in that nine-armed complex before we walked along and reached the place where we had camped. So we had come full circle, had found no way in or out, and must most carefully put our heads together to discover a method of forcing ingress to the center and its mystery.

  “To the right, as ever,” quoth Kov Loriman. “I will smash a way through the wall, by Lem, and then we will get through!”

  He seized a corpse by its arm and pulled and the corpse snapped at once into hideous life and leaped for Loriman’s throat. The Hunting Kov was not one whit dismayed. His sword whirled, the corpse’s head flew off, and one of his Chuliks swept a broad-bladed axe around and chopped the corpse’s legs away.

  They kicked the bits of mummified remains of the Kaotim aside and bringing up picks and sledgehammers started smashing into the wall.

  “One has,” observed Tyfar, “to admire their enthusiasm.”

  Quienyin touched my arm and we drew a little apart.

  “Have you noticed, Jak, that while the vast majority of the corpses are apim, like you and me, there are every now and then a few diffs?”

  “Yes.”

  “There is, I think, a Pattern to be Observed.”

  So, leaving Loriman and his henchmen to go on smashing the wall down, the rest of us started to inspect the arrangements of the Undead.

  In the end, and inevitably, it was Quienyin who spo
tted the significance. He smiled and pushed his turban straight.

  Now, I must of necessity spell the words in English but the final result was the same as the original Kregish. The corpses lay in pattern, as Quienyin had indicated, and their order was thus: Gon. Hoboling.

  Och. Undurker. Lamnia. Och. Rapa. Djang.

  Be very sure I looked long and with choked feelings at the Djangs — most of them were Obdjangs, those clever, gerbil-faced people who so efficiently run Djanduin, and whom the ferocious four-armed Dwadjangs respect with reason.

  “It seems,” said Quienyin, “we are to find what we seek in the Hall of Ghoul. And it will be the ord[6]

  something.”

  We went carefully through the Hall of Vampires and the Hall of Banshees to the Hall of Ghouls. The yellow light showed us the ranked shelves of corpses. We all expected the Kaotim to stir and sit up and then leap upon us, uttering wraith-like wails.

  In this Hall of Ghouls, somewhere, there were seven somethings, and the eighth something would give us the answer.

  The sense of oppression enclosed us. We were entombed. Surrounding us lay mile upon mile of corridors and secret rooms, prowling monsters, darkness, and light more hideous than darkness.

  The feeling that the domed ceiling would fall upon us choked us with primeval terrors we would not admit. The idea of clean fresh air, and the radiance of the suns, and the feel of an ocean breeze — all these things were gone and lost and buried in the grave. The oppression held us in iron bands. The feeling of hollowness, of dusty silence, of the abandonment of years, choked like skeletal fingers at our throats.

  “I — I do not like this place,” whispered Ariane.

  Tyfar took her hand, and held it, and did not speak.

  The tough mercenary warriors looked about with uneasy eyes, drawing together, fingering their weapons.

  And then a silly Hypnotic Spider as big as a carthorse fell on his thread through a trapdoor.

  “Do not look into his eyes!” yelled Quienyin.

  One Fristle, shocked, was too late. The cat-man stood, petrified, ridged gristle and fur, and the gigantic spider, dripping venom, swung to take the poor fellow’s head into its jaws.