by Heide Goody
“Do me then,” she said and gave Wizard Neat-Beard a smile.
“Sorry? Oh, yes, indeed,” he said. “Open wide.” He peered in closely. “Fascinating.”
“Is id?” she said, mouth open.
“Yes … sorry, what’s your name?”
“Lorrigka.”
“Lorrika, eh? I’m Pagnell. Well, I must say you have very fine teeth.”
“’ank you.”
“A lot of fresh fruit and possibly even fish in your diet. Hardly any grinding down of the milling teeth. No chewing on tough breads and grains for you. And here—” he tapped a tooth in her lower jaw. “—Your name’s not Lorrika at all, is it?”
She drew back and gave him a sharp look. The wizard Pagnell spread his fingers wide to demonstrate he meant no harm. “It wasn’t the name you were born with, at least,” he said.
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Ignore him!” snorted Abington, scraping out his pipe with a short knife. “The man’s a charlatan!”
“You’re from Carius, Lorrika, or thereabouts,” said Pagnell. “Someone has tried to use beeswax to cure a rotten tooth. Failed, but tried.”
“I’m amazed,” said Lorrika.
“Then you’re a fool!” muttered Abington.
“As I said, we’re all fools until we work out how it’s done,” said Pagnell.
Pagnell began to pontificate on the differences between magic and trickery and such. Lorrika would have listened, but there was some sort of commotion in the corner, a crash of metal, the banging of furniture. She turned to look but there were too many people about and it was over too soon.
Pagnell had exasperated Abington to a point where his face was red and his great beard quivered with anger. Lorrika wasn’t surprised; all manner of people, even those who were just standing there, minding their own business, were capable of infuriating Abington. She was surprised he didn’t snap his pipe in half, the way he was violently stuffing it.
“So, what else can you tell about me?” said Lorrika. “What do my ears say? I’ve been told I’ve got ears like a fairy.”
“That I wouldn’t know.” Pagnell smiled at her. This wizard appeared to be master of the charming smile: that of a salesman who was confident of making a sale. “My experience of fairies is limited, and dentistry only extends to teeth, gums and the whole apparatus of the mouth. What would we be without our mouths and our voices, eh?”
“Quiet, perhaps!” snapped Abington and felt around for his matches.
“Show me another tooth and I will speak all manner of truths,” said Pagnell.
Cope leaned over and placed a tooth in the centre of the table. It was small, chipped and bloody.
“Well, I didn’t mean quite like that,” said Pagnell.
Cope Threemen had a face like a winter storm: dark, angry and full of threats. “We’re going now,” she said.
Lorrika looked around for any sign of Bez.
“Ah!” declared Abington, finding his fire-matches up his sleeve.
Pagnell picked up the tooth and leaned back to inspect it. “At a guess – and it is a guess – I’d say this is the tooth of an idiot.”
Abington harrumphed. “Toss a stone in this place and you’d hit a dozen brainless idiots.” And then his head exploded. One moment, he was a wizard with a head and the next he wasn’t. This came as a surprise to everyone, perhaps Abington most of all.
3
In the small dark hours, they entered Foesen’s Tomb, five of them in total: Rantallion Merken, Cope, the wizard Pagnell, “Pictures” Bez and Lorrika herself.
Merken was the leader of their expedition: General Handzame’s right hand man and a seasoned soldier. In fact, he was so seasoned a soldier, Lorrika suspected he was all seasoning and little else. Lorrika had nothing against the old. She had known Rabo Poon as an old man and he could unpick the universe with his mind alone. Abington had been a grey haired old geezer, and until a few hours earlier had not only enjoyed rude health but also being healthily rude. Rantallion Merken – ash blonde hair of handsome youth now turned bone white, a thick brush of a moustache dominating a face like beaten leather – looked as if he had gone through old age and out the other side, transformed into some sort of unkillable, post-old creature. Lorrika reckoned the wiry walnut of a warrior could not only take on an army but probably give Death a sound thrashing any time He had come to claim him.
There were stories. It was Rantallion Merken who turned the tides of battles with deception, brought the bandit king Lothwar to heel with a vastly outnumbered force, and had famously felled the island fortress of Abrelia with a mere handful of words painted on a banner. Merken was brains and brawn; or at least he had been.
By comparison, Cope was nothing but hired muscle. Handzame certainly hadn’t selected her for her intellect. She was a soldier like Merken, but she and Merken were as different as their blades. Cope’s was huge, obvious, lacking any subtlety, and could probably fell trees with a single swipe. Merken’s knives were small, whisper sharp and, Lorrika reckoned, only ever seen when it was far too late.
Bez, though. Lorrika wasn’t sure why Bez was there. He had a pack on his back, stuffed with Abington’s many books and notes, and a wad of sketching paper in his hand. He also had an expression of bitter indignation on his face.
Pagnell was a last minute stand-in for Lorrika’s former master. The wizard was supposed to be clever – he would need to be – yet Lorrika somehow doubted he was going to be clever enough.
She picked at the bandage on her left hand. “I wish Abington was here.”
“So do I,” said Pagnell with feeling, holding up his iron manacles.
“Oh, I’m sure he’s here in spirit,” said a sullen Bez.
Pagnell raked fingers through his hair and inspected a crumb of something. “Not just in spirit,” he said, casting the crumb aside in disgust. Lorrika had, in the madness of the moment, gathered up what she could, but the tavern staff would be sweeping up bits of Abington for weeks to come.
They stood in the great under hall of the temple. Millions of tons of fine stonework, statuary, altars and the gubbins of worship were above their heads. Below the hall lay the fabled tomb, perhaps equal in size. Behind them stood the tomb’s stone arch entrance, constructed to appear like the open mouth of an eagle. Its upper beak hung ominously over their heads. Before them was an honour guard of soldiers and General Handzame herself.
Handzame didn’t look much like a general. She didn’t really look much like a soldier at all. It was as though Cope’s giant frame and Merken’s battle-scarred experience had soaked up all the soldierliness in the room. If not for the dark Amanni plate Handzame wore, people might have looked upon the jowly woman of middling years and hazarded she was perhaps a greengrocer’s wife, or maybe some sort of nurse, or governess. In an effort to remedy the soft and inoffensive nature of her appearance, Handzame had had some extra spikes added to her exquisitely-tailored armour, and her helmet was decorated with a thick black crest of stiffened horse hair. The helmet was probably intended to give the general some additional height and gravitas. Unfortunately, it simply made her look like she could be flipped upside down and used as a broom. A very spiky broom.
Of the five tomb-raiders, only Cope was wearing her Amanni plate. Merken had discarded his in favour of lighter, more comfortable clothes. The five looked less like agents of a fanatical military horde than run-of-the-mill grave-robbers. Four grave-robbers and an artist. Three grave-robbers, an artist and a dentist.
Handzame fixed all five with a glittering gaze.
“Glory!” she shouted and looked to them all for their responses. Lorrika had no idea how she was expected to respond; from the looks on the faces of the others, she reckoned they had no idea either.
“Glory!” shouted Handzame again, in case they’d missed it the first time. She had a thin, weak voice and her shout carried little power. It occurred to Lorrika that Glory was Handzame’s dog and she was calling him to go on a n
ice walk. It was that kind of shout.
“Glory! Some are born to glory. Some seize glory. Some have glory poured upon them. You, my fine men! You shall wear glory from head to toe. I want you to lap it up. Down there!” She pointed viciously at the entrance to the tomb, nearly taking out her eye with the spikes on her arms. “Down there is glory! Can you taste it? Are you ready to lap it up?”
“Are these rhetorical questions?” Pagnell whispered. “I’ve very confused.”
“And down there is death! Horrible gruesome death! Unspeakably horrible and prolonged deaths!” Her glittering gaze had taken on a deranged edge. “The tomb is your enemy and would have you dead! But there can never be glory without a side-order of death!”
“I reckon she thinks glory is some kind of pudding,” whispered Bez.
“You will find the Quill of Truth. Bring it to me and your plate will overflow with glory!”
“Some sort of custard?” suggested Pagnell.
“Shush, you damned fools!” hissed Merken through yellow teeth. Aloud to Handzame he added: “Ma’am. I’m afraid we must be off. Time is against us. The most pessimistic assessment puts the Hierophant’s returning army at the gates of Ludens three days from now. We will need to have retrieved the Quill of Truth by then.”
“Indeed!” declared Handzame. “Time is the enemy!”
“I thought the tomb was the enemy,” said Bez.
General Handzame made no indication she had heard him. “Go now! To death or to glory! Or both!”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Merken. “Stirring speech. Inspiring.” He faced the rest of them. “You heard her, chaps. In we go. Success or death. Pipsqueak and Sparkles, lead the way. I’ll take rear guard.”
Pipsqueak and Sparkles apparently meant Lorrika and the wizard Pagnell. Lorrika picked up her lamp and stepped into the tomb; the wizard followed close behind. Soon enough they were beyond the torch light of the under hall and the two lamps they carried were their only illumination.
“I don’t get it,” said Bez facetiously. “Is the glory down here? Are we fetching it to bring it back so she can give it to us? Can’t we just get it and keep it?”
“I think glory is meant as an ineffable concept with no physical existence,” pointed out Cope.
“So, it’s a bit like exposure?” said Bez.
“Exposure?” asked Lorrika.
“Didn’t you know? We artists get paid in exposure all the time. ‘Can you paint a mural on the wall of my tavern? I can’t pay you but it will be great exposure.’ Apparently exposure’s great, but try buying a round of beers with it and you’ll end up with a slap in the chops. I’ve tried.” Bez took out a sketchpad and began drawing as they walked.
The chamber they passed through was longer than their lights could illuminate, maybe twenty or thirty feet in height and lined, top to bottom on both sides, with alcoves containing the mummifying bodies of priests, wrapped in their mouldy robes of office. The high spaces echoed with the sounds of footsteps and the charcoal scratchings of Bez sketching as they walked.
“I don’t understand,” said Lorrika, looking up.
“A natural state for most of us,” said Pagnell. “Always good to recognise it in oneself, though.”
“Why do they put all the bodies on these little shelves?”
“It’s a crypt.”
“I know what it is! I just don’t get why. You put cups on shelves. Ornaments.”
“Books.”
“Exactly.” Lorrika poked a grey and dusty priestly cuff as she passed. Her finger went straight through it, like it was cobweb. “You put things on shelves either because you want to use them later, or because they look nice.”
“Neither of which applies here, true. I think this is a sign of respect. It’s considered a great honour to be buried here.”
“I should think they would be glad for a damned lie down after a life of service,” said Merken gruffly. “I’m certain I would.”
“Serve Buqit all your life and get your own shelf?” mused Lorrika. “Think I’ll pass,”
Close behind them, Cope said, “These were great men. Holy men. You should be awed to be in their presence.”
“We’re working on it,” said Pagnell.
“When I was in Yelzun on the Aklan Plateau,” said Cope. “I was fortunate enough to visit a temple which held the skeleton of the High Shepherd Vos which the monks had preserved and protected for centuries. The skeleton was only tiny, but one could feel the mystical power in those bones.”
“Tiny?” said Pagnell. “Vos was said to be stronger than an ox and more imposing than any king. Why was it so small?”
“Ah,” said Cope. “This was his skeleton from when he was boy.”
There was a considerable pause before Pagnell murmured, “Right. Okay.”
“Hey,” called Bez from behind. “Shouldn’t you two be scouting for traps or something, not chinwagging like fishwives?”
“There aren’t none until we pass the first threshold,” Lorrika replied. She looked at Pagnell. “Right?”
“Er, yes,” said the wizard, thumbing through the smallest and most expensively bound of Abington’s journals. It was the easiest to hold, and filled with the most useful information. Abington’s handy guide to tomb raiding, in fact. “There are no traps or pits or anything until we enter the tomb proper. These are just the catacombs for the regular priests. Wouldn’t want the unwary spiked or diced in the middle of a funeral.”
“Spiked?” said Cope.
“Or diced, yes,” said Pagnell, flicking through the book. “According to this there are at least five levels to the tomb complex. Mazes, the Mouth of Torments – whatever that is – the Pathways of the Righteous, the Surprising Pit, magical traps, terrible monsters, spikes and—” he tried to do hand gestures “—dicey things. Hierophant Foesen was buried here over a thousand years ago, and his followers immediately built a series of dead ends and traps to deter tomb-raiders. And then, of course, along comes Kavda the Builder – this was about four centuries later – who laid the framework for the tomb we have now. He devoted his life to the rebuilding of the temple above and the tomb below. It took thirty years alone for the builders to excavate the—”
“That’s fascinating,” said Bez, decidedly bored. “Great background detail. Thanks muchly.”
“I thought you might be interested in a little bit of the tomb’s history.”
“Yeah?” said Bez. “No. The problem with history is it tends to be long. And that’s fine for some people. You know: boring people.”
“I thought you were a painter of historical events,” said Pagnell.
“Sure, but I’m more interested in the history of the now. Yesterday? That’s gone. Last year? Who cares? History? Pah. If I paint something from ancient times, I don’t want to get bogged down in unhelpful details. History is totally impressionistic, yah?”
“What does that mean?” asked Cope.
“It means what I think historical events looked like is more important than what they actually looked like.”
“Lies then,” said Cope.
“Artistic truth. People romanticise the past,” said Bez. “You think the good old days were actually good?”
“Better than today, boy,” called Merken from the rear. “Where is this first threshold?”
“Through, down, along,” said Pagnell. “The catacombs are big.”
They passed through an archway and down a dozen steps or more to another, essentially identical chamber. The indefinable sense of depth, of being far below ground, started to weigh on Lorrika. Not in a fearful way: more like being tucked tight into bed under a heavy blanket by an overzealous grandmother. Lorrika never had a grandmother but she was aware of the concept.
She wasn’t afraid of depths or the dark or the horrible traps ahead but, nonetheless, put her hand inside her tunic and touched – next to the nectarine stone from her own personal nectarine tree (or possibly grove) – the comforting mass of soft hair she had bundled there. She
felt strangely guilty about having it.
For reasons she couldn’t fully explain to herself, she took it out to show Pagnell. “Is it okay for me to have this?”
The wizard looked. “What is it?”
“I was confused and shocked and I was scratting on the floor. I don’t know what I hoped to do. But I found this and it was all singed at one end but I picked it up anyway and…”
“That’s Abington’s beard?” said Pagnell.
“Yes. Is it weird?”
“As beards go, I’ve seen weirder.”
“I mean me taking it.”
Pagnell had the decency to give it some thought. “Were you planning on wearing it?”
“No.”
“Then it’s not weird,” he said, gently. “He was dear to you?”
Lorrika shrugged. “He was better than some I’ve known. Okay, there was that thing with the plague in Dalarra.”
“I heard he saved hundreds of lives.”
“You could say that. Anyway, I’ve served him for over a year. Met him in Aumeria.”
“Was your name Lorrika back then?”
She looked at him suspiciously. “We’re not friends, you and I. You know that?”
Pagnell licked his lips and glanced over his shoulder. “I’m not sure many of us are friends, here.”
Lorrika grunted. “I was Aisel,” she said.
“Aisel in Aumeria. Lorrika in Ludens. Is that how it goes?”
“I find life easier that way.”
“And what will you be in Trezdigar?”
Lorrika chewed her lip. “Is Trumpet a name?”
“Not really,” said Pagnell. “Best think on it.”
Cope tapped her on the shoulder as they walked. “They say an earthworm, if split, can regrow from the tiniest fragment,” said the warrior woman.
“Um—” said Lorrika.
Pagnell’s lips twitched as he thought. “Are you perhaps suggesting we can regrow Abington from his beard?”
Cope made a meaningful expression, which was quite a sight on a face which was mostly devoid of meaning and expression. “And the great wyrms are said to heal themselves no matter how many pieces they are cut into.”
