A Fortune for Kregen Read online

  Tyfar and I sprang together. His axe whirled. The Krozair longsword bit.

  The Giant Hypnotic Spider burst apart like a paper bag filled with water and dropped from a great height. The squelching stink gagged us all. The spidery arms scuttled away, singly, hairs bristling, and the gross body drooped into a flaccid puddle. The Fristle still stood, petrified.

  “If that is the best they can do...” said Ariane, shaking herself. She laughed, a shrill tinny sound.

  They were all laughing. The reaction after the black thoughts of a moment ago shuddered through them.

  But the Fristle still stood, unmoving.

  “Here,” said Deb-Lu-Quienyin. He shuffled up to stand before the Fristle. He did not touch him. “Jak,”

  he said in his casual conversational voice. “Just Take a Look up through the trapdoor. There May Be More Up There...”

  If I were a man who laughed easily, I would have laughed then. Obediently, I climbed up a pyramid of men and stuck a torch through the opening. The trapdoor hung down. A fetid odor broke about my head and I spat. The space beyond looked empty, full of ghosts and bones and stink.

  “It appears clear, although—”

  “Quite!”

  Now we took greater cognizance of the configuration of the roof. The dome was broken here and there by bulging cornices, grotesquely carved. From one of these the spider had dropped, and the height, reachable by my pyramid of men, was not too great. We began to study the other bulging protuberances in the roof. The decorations particularly intrigued Prince Tyfar.

  “As Hanitcha the Harrower is my witness! I do not discern any pattern! What do you see, Notor Jak?”

  Before I answered I killed my automatic wince at his use of the name Hanitcha the Harrower. Ah, Hamal, Hamal, that empire had done great damage to my beloved Vallia!

  “If there is a pattern, prince, we must find it.”

  “True, by Krun!”

  “And,” said his Brokelsh slinger, Barkindrar the Bullet, “My prince — beware, in the name of Kaerlan the Merciful! There may be more giant spiders...”

  We all hopped back a few paces out from under the direct drop-zone in case there might be more Giant Hypnotic Spiders.

  “Catch him!” suddenly shouted Quienyin’s voice, and we whirled to see the Fristle who had been petrified running, head down, racing madly and with demoniac screams, racing away down past the ranked biers of corpses.

  “By Krun!” exclaimed Tyfar. “It’s enough to give a fellow a bad heart!”

  A group of the mercenaries chased after him and brought him back, calmed him down. He still shook like the leaves of the letha tree. What he had seen in the eyes of the spider no one cared to inquire.

  “And have you riddled the riddle yet?” demanded Quienyin.

  “No.” Ariane was short with the old Wizard of Loh.

  “Well, we must see what an Old Fellow Can Do.”

  “Your permission, my prince,” said Barkindrar. “There are nine bulges — whatever you call ’em.”

  The great apim bear of a man, the renowned archer from Ruathytu, craned his thick neck back, stared up. “And only one, my prince, has dropped a stinking spider, by Kuerden the Merciless!”

  Quienyin smiled. “You are well served, prince.”

  “Yes, yes,” exclaimed Ariane. “But which way do we count?”

  I said, “Widdershins would seem appropriate in this place.”

  We all moved to the bulge to the left of the one from which the spider had dropped, and stared up, at a loss.

  “This is becoming impossible!” Ariane tapped her fur boot against the floor impatiently. “Are all you famous Jikais fools?”

  “I do not pretend to be a Jikai, lady,” said Quienyin. He spoke quite mildly; but I, at least, caught the undercurrent in his patient voice. And, I knew, his patience was forced on him by the loss of his powers as a Wizard of Loh. I glanced across at the lady Ariane nal Amklana. She was not wearing well, of a sudden, and I could not find it in my heart to fault her for that.

  She was a girl on her own with us. She had left her four handmaids and their bodyguards with the main party. No doubt she missed their loving ministration. Her rosy face stared up, deeply flushed, and her bright yellow hair tangled in disarray, uncombed, with bits of dust and detritus still matting the fine strands. Her dress was in a woeful state.

  Yes, I felt sorry for her, the lady of Amklana.

  As yet I had not learned her rank; but I felt absolutely certain she was a kovneva. Nothing less would explain her manner and carriage. And, she had been gracious to me.

  “It seems to me” I said, and I spoke deliberately loudly, “if these Moder-lords want their fun out of us they won’t have much more if we cannot get on.”

  This was not strictly true. But my words made no difference. Nothing happened as a result of them, unlike the occurrences in that fire-crystal-lit corridor where I had fought Tarkshur and had summoned the key to unlock my chains. Different orders of illusion were clearly operative in the Moder. And I wondered just how the damned Moder-lord watched us — as a Wizard of Loh might do, by going into lupu and observing events at a distance?

  Logu Fre-Da and his twin, Modo Fre-Da, were casting worried looks at their lady. The big numim, Naghan the Doom, was looking at the two hyr-paktuns, and his mane indicated his own concern.

  The twins, I had observed with some pleasure, each had the same number of trophy rings from defeated paktuns dangling on their pakais. When a paktun defeats another noted mercenary he takes the ring with which either the pakmort or the pakzhan is affixed to the silken cords at the throat. I had once been betrayed by just such a dangling pakai. But I saw the twins fingering their pakais and I realized they were reassuring themselves, seeking sustenance from their own prowess, the pakais giving them fresh confidence in their nikobi. I have a great deal of time for Pachaks, and these two, it seemed to me, were fine representatives of their fine race.

  The intriguing thought occurred to me to wonder how much swag they had concealed about their persons.

  An acrimonious discussion began — at least, it was acrimonious from the lady Ariane, although Quienyin and Tyfar remained exquisitely polite. We seemed to have reached a dead end, an impasse, and no one could with any equanimity contemplate going back the way we had come.

  For lack of anything better we tramped off around the Nine Halls again, passing Loriman and his men still hard at work. We encountered a few prowling monsters, and lost a Rapa, and so returned to the Hall of Ghouls and stared up at the roof once more.

  The answer to the riddle was either so complicated we could not solve it — and with Quienyin with us, despite that he had lost his sorcerous powers, I did not think that likely — or was of an imbecilic simplicity.

  Many folk on Kregen are fond of calling me an onker, a get onker, a prince of fools...

  “Make me a pyramid of men again,” I said and, I own, my voice rasped out as the Emperor of Vallia’s voice rasped — or the First Lieutenant of a seventy-four.

  At the top of the pyramid I lifted the Krozair longsword and I smote against the roof, savage blows, eight of them, eight intemperate smashes against the prominent knob of polished jet over my head.

  The echoes of those vicious blows rang and rattled away along the stone biers.

  And the corpses all rose up.

  Every corpse rose, and from those ghastly mouths a shrill and ghoulish screaming shattered against our nerves. Every corpse rose up, screaming, and rushed away, ran blindly from the Hall of Ghouls.

  They poured in a blasphemous rout through the two side openings to the Hall. We were all gathered in the inner end of the arm, that between the two side passages and the center of the mausoleum complex.

  The floor moved.

  The floor revolved.

  The ends of the side passages and the anteroom at our backs slid swiftly sideways — going widdershins! — and the floor on which we stood, petrified, turned and carried us around to face into the mysterious
heart of the mausoleum.

  A few of the mercenaries at last broke. They were not paktuns. With shrieks of fear they raced madly for the narrowing slot of yellow light, leaping off the revolving floor, screaming, tearing desperately away, rushing madly anywhere to escape the horrors of this place.

  We who were left revolved with the Hall of Ghouls, swinging in to face whatever it was that had caused the Undead to rise in panic and flee.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Out from the Jaws of Death

  We never again saw any of those mercenaries who had fled — not one, ever.

  What we expected to see, Opaz alone knows. I do not.

  What we did see was a solid wall of darkness. The floor revolved one hundred and eighty degrees, and halted with a shuddering lurch, as though we were suspended by chains over a fathomless gulf. The blackness smote our eyes. The yellow light within the Hall of Ghouls continued; but it remained thin and pale. The stone slabs lay empty of corpses. The detritus on the floor crackled underfoot as we moved.

  Cautiously, we advanced toward that ebon wall, and it resisted, and we could make no impression on its immaterial substance.

  The tall rows of empty biers frowned down. The light smoked somber upon us, and the silence stunned us.

  Quienyin said, “The walls. The stone slabs. I think—”

  “You are right, Master Quienyin!” Tyfar rushed to the nearest wall and put his foot against the bottom slab. With a slow remorseless pressure his foot was pushed along the floor.

  “The walls!” shrieked Ariane. “They are closing in upon us!”

  Steadily, with small screeching sounds as of trapped animals, the walls closed one upon the other. The wall of blackness ahead narrowed.

  Now we could see that there was a finger-wide gap between wall and floor. And then the full diabolical nature of these stone jaws was borne in on us.

  “The stone slabs!” shouted Ariane, and she tore her hair wildly, staggering. “See — they are not opposite!”

  It was true. The stone slabs in one wall were set at a higher level than in the opposite wall. When they met, the stone juttings would pass between one another. Useless to jump up and cower in a stone slot so recently vacated by a corpse. The opposite stone slab would crush into that slot and...

  We looked about frenziedly for a way out. “These are the Kaochun,” Quienyin informed us, although few of us were in a condition to appreciate the knowledge. “The Jaws of Death.”

  These Kaochun, these Death Jaws, were going to squash us flatter than an ant under a boot heel if we did not quickly discover the answer. I saw the rock chippings fallen from the stones.

  Without shouting, trusting to the others to see what I was up to and follow my lead, I picked up and discarded the chunks until I found a solid wedge-shaped piece. This I pushed point first under that finger-wide slot between wall and floor. I kicked it in savagely. The two hyr-paktun twins were the first to see and copy. Soon we were all ramming wedges under the walls as hard as we could. Some ground to powder, others slipped. But some held.

  The chittering noise as of trapped animals faltered, and strengthened as wedges crumbled, and then dwindled again as we went ruthlessly along ramming wedges in as fast and as hard as we could.

  The walls shuddered. A thin high whine began.

  The walls trembled.

  Dust blew suddenly in a cloud from the discarded corpse wrappings. We flailed our arms, heads and shoulders smothered in the gritty dust. We choked and coughed. But the walls did not move in. The tremble shuddered to a stillness, the dust fell away, and the walls stopped.

  That high shrilling whine passed away above the audible threshold. We shook, suddenly, each one feeling the pain drilling into his ears.

  Slowly, as an iris parts, the wall of blackness opened before us.

  When the harsh actinic white light rushed in I saw that we stood in a slot between the stilled walls. There was space left for us only to walk out in single file, so narrow had been our confinement and so narrow our separation from death.

  Prince Tyfar was the first to march out.

  Head up, sword in his fist, he stomped out onto a black marble floor and into the white light. He stopped. As we crowded out he gasped: “By all the Names!”

  Difficult to describe this Mausoleum of the Moder, so many impressions crowded in like a kaleidoscope.

  A place of wonder, of awe, and of horror...

  The chamber stretched about us, full four hundred paces in diameter. The roof rippled oddly, hung with black insubstantiality, ever-shifting so that it was impossible to estimate the height. And that height appeared to waver and alter and to press up and down.

  Positioned some fifty paces in from the walls around the chamber stood fire-crystal tanks, each with a girth of at least twenty paces. In each tank coiled and writhed a monster from nightmare, tentacled octopus-like shapes that slimed and hissed and beckoned obscenely. They would have put the shudders up the toughest of backbones.

  Deb-Lu- Quienyin started to talk at once, and I guessed he sought to hold our tattered nerves together.

  “We are clearly below ground level here, and I imagine this to be the heart of the Moder—”

  “You said there were nine zones and this is the eighth—”

  “True. But the ninth zone is not for normal men.”

  We walked slowly forward between two of the tanks. We did not look again at the gruesome denizens.

  We all sensed that Quienyin spoke the truth and here was what we had come for — all of us, that is, except the Wizard of Loh... And myself.

  Ranged in a circle within the circle of tanks, and crammed close together, stood cabinet and chest, box and trunk, glassed and bound with bronze. Small alleyways led through this circle. The treasures contained within this mass of cabinets defied the imagination. We halted, greedy eyes surveying the wealth displayed there.

  Quienyin looked back.

  “There will be time to sample these wares — after.”

  No one had the hardihood to inquire of him, “After what?”

  What lay in the next circle drew some of us on.

  We could not look over toward the center of the chamber, because of the brilliance of the light that poured up in a wide shaft from the central floor, lifting and flooding up to be consumed in that shifting darkness of the ceiling.

  Around that shaft of pure white light stood a fence, a wall, an insubstantial-seeming yet iron-hard barrier.

  Passing through alleyways in the circles of displayed wealth and magical equipment we stood before the iron barrier. A silver gate showed immediately ahead, and a golden gate showed to the right. To the left a bronze gate shut off ingress beyond the barrier. Somehow, we all knew there would be nine gates leading onto the shaft of fire.

  “I think, my friends,” quoth Quienyin, “that is our way out — after.”

  “Through—” squeaked Ariane. “Through the fire?”

  “Yes, lady.”

  “Well, how do we pass the gates?”

  “Climb the fence,” offered Tyfar.

  “No, prince.” Quienyin spoke quickly. “That way lies a sure and ghastly death.”

  We took his word for it.

  The mercenaries were jostling before the cabinets. In there lay unimaginable wealth. I saw a trunk the size of a horse trough filled to bursting with diamonds. At its side stood another, similarly filled with rubies. The glitter of gold paled to insignificance in the luster of gems.

  “Touch nothing until we are sure!” commanded Tyfar.

  The paktuns growled — but even their greed was tempered by our experiences. And, do not forget, these were the hardiest and the toughest of those who had entered, for they had survived.

  One quickly showed us a simple way to die.

  The black marble of the floor that ringed the chamber gave way to white marble and then to yellow.

  Where we stood before the flame the floor was broken into patterns, intricate lozenges and heart shapes, circles and
half-moons of inlaid stone. This paktun, he was a Rapa, stood upon a crescent of green, without thinking anything of it.

  The green crescent swallowed him.

  One instant he was standing there, rubbing his wattled neck, the next he was gone, and the green crescent reappeared.

  Ariane screamed.

  “Test every part of the pattern before you trust it!” called Tyfar. From then on, every one of us cat-footed about like ghosts.

  Remembering Quienyin’s ominous words, I looked into the recesses of the chamber, alcoves past the tanks and their hideous denizens. Shadows shifted there, eye-wateringly.

  Tyfar was talking, quickly and softly, to the lady Ariane.

  The Wizard of Loh said, “Jak, my friend. These things are real. There is no illusion here. Your weapons...?”

  Displayed in glassed cabinets stood ranked many swords, many daggers, many different weapons of quality.

  “I do not think, San, I will find a longsword like this. Until it vanishes from my fists, I will keep it.”

  All the same, I did decide to replace the rapier and main gauche once we had the cabinets open.

  But — opening the cabinets was the nub of the question.

  We all knew that horror would burst upon us as we burst open this treasure.

  “My prince,” said the slinger, Barkindrar the Bullet. “Let us all stand well away and let me smash a cabinet.”

  Barkindrar had proved himself on this expedition down a Moder. Tyfar nodded. Quienyin pulled his lower lip and looked at me. I made a small gesture which meant “What else?”

  A distant tapping noise that had irritated my ears for a short time now grew loud enough for me to turn, puzzled. The others heard it now. The banging echoed hollowly and sounded like devil-tinkers at work on a yellow skull.

  Quickly we ascertained that the knocking noise came from a wall away to our left and we moved back, positioning ourselves, wondering what fresh horror would burst upon us.

  Chips of stone facing the wall flaked off. Then a larger piece fell. The noise redoubled. Whatever was forcing its way through the wall was large and powerful. The banging bashed and boomed and rock fell and the wall split. In a jagged wedge-shaped gap the wall split from the floor to a point ten feet above and yellow light poured through with a spray of dust and rock chippings, glinting.