by Heide Goody
“So, you’d be far happier if I was coming at you with a sword in my hand?” spat Pagnell sarcastically.
Cope nodded slowly. “Could we do that?”
“What?”
“I would really feel a lot better about it.” She reached behind her and pulled out a long knife from a sheath on the small of her back. “Here.”
Pagnell stared at the knife. “This is your idea of fair? You’ve got a really big sword and that – it’s a kitchen knife at best.”
“More like a fruit knife, I’d say,” ventured Bez
Cope made a small head jiggle of agreement. She drew her longsword, spun it in a circle, rolling it over the back of her hand, and offered it to the wizard. Pagnell looked like he’d been given a poisonous snake for his birthday. He took the blade in his manacled hands. The tip of the blade clanged heavily on the ground and he clutched at his bent wrist.
“Are you all right?” asked Cope.
“Apart from being barely able to lift it?”
“Yes. Apart from that.”
“No.”
“Swap?”
Pagnell spluttered. “Why am I trying to make this easier for you? It’s my head on the block. Literally. And, if you’re going to take my head, that’s where you can damn well do it.”
“Very well. Let’s get this over with.” She held out her hand to receive the sword.
Bez could see a battle waging on Pagnell’s face, a tension in his hands as he contemplated trying to give Cope the sword pointy end first (Bez’s inner voice screamed, Do it! Do it!). Reports from Pagnell’s arm muscles about the general heftiness of the big blade reached his face and the battle died quickly.
“Fine!” said the wizard and, with effort, pivoted the sword back over into Cope’s hand. “But I warn you, the death curse of a wizard is a terrible thing.”
“I’ve not heard of such a thing,” said Cope.
“Oh, it’s real all right,” affirmed the wizard.
“Absolutely. And it applies to friends of wizards too,” said Bez, placing himself next to the wizard. Pagnell sneered down at him for muscling in on his last ditch gambit, but what could he do?
“I think I will risk it,” said Cope. “On your knees.”
Pagnell hesitated. Cope took hold of his shoulder and forced him down.
“Right. Wait. Listen,” said Pagnell. “This really shouldn’t be happening…”
“Head on the barrel, wizard.”
“This is a bad idea. You’re making a terrible mistake!”
She bounced his nose forcibly off the roughly coppered container and stepped back to take her swing.
“A curse on you!” yelled the wizard. “Gods’ vengeance from on high! Fire! Lightning! Plague!”
A lemon bounced off the ground barely a foot from the wizard’s head.
“And fruit!” Bez added.
A pair of plums smacked into the earth and exploded on impact. A bronze candlestick rebounded off nearby stonework with a ba-doing and landed at Cope’s feet. A mango struck Bez a glancing blow off the forehead, sliming him with juice.
Cope looked up. In the darkness above, someone was shouting. “Is this your doing?” she asked the wizard.
“No,” he said turning over to look up. “Or possibly yes. Who can say?”
Bez’s keen eyesight saw a figure high up, waving from a window and shouting.
“Who is that?” said Cope.
The thief Lorrika dropped from the shadows, slid down a wall and rolled to the ground. “It’s Merken. He wants you to stop.”
“Are you sure?”
“The fruit has spoken,” said Pagnell, a little giddily. “Trust the fruit. Here.” He held out a white tablecloth to Bez.
“Where did you get this?” asked Bez, as he wiped mango pulp off his face.
Pagnell shrugged. “It was just lying on the floor.”
Five minutes later, with the dread of imminent death still hanging over them (maybe Merken just wanted to pop down and give them a good kicking before putting them to the sword) the old soldier emerged in the lesser courtyard with red cheeks and a piece of parchment clutched in his hand. He uncrumpled the paper and shoved it in Pagnell’s face.
“What does this say?”
Bez looked at the page and saw only arcane squiggles.
“Kavda’s Vice of the Infidels,” read Pagnell. “Only a true shepherd can guide the faithful through. Maximum capacity sixteen persons.”
Merken looked simultaneously relieved and deflated.
“You need a wizard, don’t you?” said Pagnell.
Merken nodded wearily. “You’re coming into the tomb with us.”
“I’m what?” squeaked Pagnell. “I don’t think so! That place is a death-trap!”
“Come now, boy. Don’t exaggerate.”
“I’m not exaggerating. Foesen’s tomb is the very definition of death-trap. It is several death-traps. Whatever the collective noun is for death-traps, Foesen’s tomb is it!”
“You’d rather lose your head?”
Pagnell looked from Merken’s face to Cope’s sword and back. “It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”
“Have him brought inside,” Merken instructed a soldier.
“And this one?” Cope said, with a prod of her sword at Bez.
Bez could have wept at the disinterested look Merken gave him.
“Kill him,” said the old soldier.
“Wait!” Bez shouted as the wizard was taken away, leaving him to face execution alone. “You need me too! It’s bad luck to take the sorcerer without his apprentice.”
“Apprentice? I don’t think so, bard,” said Merken.
“But I have vital information critical to the success of your mission. Vital information, yeah?”
“And what is that?”
Bez glanced momentarily at Pagnell before beckoning Merken over. The soldier wavered. The gods smiled: he approached.
“What is it?”
Bez leaned in close and whispered a single word.
4
“Right,” said Merken to Bez, “you’ve got one damned minute to prove to me you’re not a useless idiot and actually have something of worth for me.”
“Seems to me you have an unhealthy obsession with things only taking one minute, sire.”
“What is Spirry?”
Bez dug around inside his embroidered jacket for the right sketching pad. “It’s not a what, it’s a who.” He pulled out two pads of paper. Casting aside the pad of Instant Pictures he began flicking through the other.
“What’s that?” said Merken.
“My little Book of Faces.”
“You do portraits.”
Bez pulled a face and made a not quite but nearly noise. “Just faces. I mean, faces rendered with some considerable expertise, obviously. A lot of selfies but also sketches of whoever I’m with, people I see. I sometimes do a little impromptu show in the Ramsgate tavern, pop ’em up on the wall and see if people like them.”
Merken was still listening, which meant Bez was still alive, so he continued.
“You’d be surprised how much people want to just look at pictures of themselves, even doing the most tedious or ridiculous of things. Course, if people have irritated me, then maybe I’ll give the picture a tweak. Give them trolls ears or—”
“There is a particular picture you wish to show me?” said Merken impatiently.
“Right, yes.” Bez had his finger in the page. “One of my best. Really captured the authentic innocence; the wide-eyed wonder.”
Merken peered down at the sketch. “Spirry? I’ve seen that girl before.”
“She travels with Pagnell. Arrived in Ludens only a couple of days ago. Generally kept themselves to themselves, but the comings and goings of the city are my business, so…”
“So?”
“So,” said Bez, “you require a wizard to see you through Foesen’s tomb, someone who is wholly committed to the job in hand. And such commitment requires leverage.”<
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Merken ran his tongue around the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. “You are a piece of work, bard.”
“Self-made, And still, not a bard.”
“But all you’ve told me is the wizard has loved ones. Hardly enough to save your neck.”
Bez closed the Book of Faces. “What about the name of the place where they are staying? Would that be enough?”
“Is it nearby?” said Merken.
“Five minutes’ walk from here.”
Merken nodded and looked down at the velvet bag on his belt as though the answers might be found in there. “Very well. You will tell me the name of the place. And you will be coming into the tomb with us.”
“What? Why?”
Merken smiled. “As our official artist. To immortalise the night’s work in oils.”
“But … you said you had no interest in being immortalized!”
“What can I say…?”
Bez felt fury, a wild and impotent fury rise within him. “No. You can’t do that. It’s not what we agreed!”
“We agreed nothing,” said Merken. “You’ll do what I say, at sword point if need be. And I want to keep you close in case I need to kill you.”
In an instant of fury, Bez resolved if there was to be a death, it would be Merken’s.
5
In the small dark hours, they passed into the tomb, through the arch shaped like an eagle’s head. Bez could not help but feel they were entering the belly of a dry, dusty beast and towards their doom. His guts roiled with fear and lack of ale; automatically, his hands went to his sketching pad. He dashed off a sketch of the group as they moved through the crypts lined with the bodies of priests of old. Artistry was in the details and, with just a certain line here and a shaded portion there, he transformed the figure of Rantallion Merken into something twisted and ancient and sinister as though he was one of the desiccated priests who’d just got up for a moment to have a bit of a wander.
When they reached the first threshold, Bez held back, sitting down to draw a picture of the genuinely horrible carvings and arcane symbols before it on the floor. He realised the carvings – the hands and the faces – were not entirely still. They twitched, they yearned. Bez suspected what they wanted, but said nothing. If that idiot thug Cope – his jaw still ached from where she’d clocked him – or that vile Merken wanted to feed themselves to the door then so be it. Bez kept his thoughts to himself and made a note of all their suggested answers to the riddle, throwing in a handful of random phrases himself to show willing.
Within the hour, Bez was sitting beside a pitiful fire, feeling wretchedly sorry for himself; a state of being both unnatural and unwelcome. The fall into the Surprising Pit had soaked and ruined most of his work. His pad of Instant Pictures and his Book of Faces had come wetly apart and he attempted to salvage what he could by drying individual leaves by the side of the fire.
The wizard Pagnell looked scornfully at Bez’s sketch of jaffled cake. “You drew a picture of … food?”
“My muse was hungry,” said Bez and explained. The wizard failed to appreciate genuine art and couldn’t see the wistful sorrow suffusing the picture, nor, hopefully, the faint map of their progress through the tomb Bez had hidden within it.
Pagnell put it aside and touched the soggy Book of Faces. It was open to the picture of Pagnell’s girl, Spirry. Bez’s throat constricted. Why had he left it open at that page? Idiot! Bez hoped his panic didn’t show. Pagnell couldn’t know Bez had told Merken about the girl, that he had provided the means of blackmailing the wizard. It was just a picture; an image of a child seen in the corn market, the day before yesterday.
“You drew this?” asked Pagnell.
“Uh. Yeah.”
“It’s very good.”
And Bez knew. He knew the wizard knew.
Bez had hoped for Pagnell as an ally, an accomplice if they needed to make a bid for freedom. Now, that seemed increasingly unlikely.
The road of trials through the tomb continued. The darkness compounded the oppressive horror in Bez’s breast, the feeling this was an unending hell, that time and reality had lost all meaning, that he was doomed to spend forever in this horrid dark, that his blessed, sun-kissed existence before Foesen’s tomb was only a dream, and one to which he would never return. Bez cursed himself for hanging around with Stentor for too long; blessed sun-kissed existence? doomed to spend forever? There may have been a sun-kissed existence once, long ago, but his memory of it had faded with every embellishment he had been required to make to his works in order to ensnare the paying populace.
In the grimlock cavern, Bez stood painting with a makeshift easel, while gibbering muppets capered around, waving their weapons in his face and mocking his work. Yeah, this was a hell, one he had visited in his nightmares before. Next to him, two upstart grimlocks were attempting to ape his style on picture boards of their own. Their chosen medium had shifted from paint to blood. Bez might have found some amusement in that metaphor, but he didn’t have the time for reflection. Bez had a commission to execute: Queen Susan upon her majestic throne, with her consort and soon-to-be prince at her side. As Bez worked on the image, he could not stop the truth coming through in his brushstrokes: that of the two of them, Rantallion Merken was the more disgustingly repugnant and worthy of death. The horrible old soldier was fretting and fussing over the velvet purse sitting on the top of the grimlock’s treasure pile which he had not let far from his sight or touch all the time they had been down here.
Interesting though that was, Bez’s eye was drawn time and again to the high walls of the cavern and the small chimney-like fissure at the top, leading to the open air. He sucked his belly and thought. Yeah, a nimble fellow could squeeze through there; maybe, probably, it only looked too narrow because it was so far away.
On the floor next to him, the two grimlock artists were taking shell-knives to each other’s bellies, apparently in search of new painting materials. It seemed all creative types had to suffer for their art.
Bez studied Lorrika as she crossed the tiled floor of death traps.
Despite the arrow injury to her arm along with her other scrapes and knocks, she still moved with the easy grace of a cat. Bez sketched, primarily intent on noting down the shapes and colours of the tiles she trod, but he also had time enough to dash off a couple of cartoons of Lorrika herself, poised, reaching, stepping. Yeah, he was becoming more and more convinced Chainmail Bikini Woman would soon be retired from the city’s evening News reports and replaced by Ripped Leather Bikini Woman (or Cat Girl; he still hadn’t decided).
“Do you never give it a rest?” said Merken, disdainfully.
“It’s called suffering for your art,” said Bez, “Suffering is the fuel of great art and right now I’m totally on fire.”
“That might be arranged.”
“You could just leave me here.”
“Pretty sure I threatened to kill you if you suggested turning back again.”
“Not suggesting turning back. You could just leave me, collect me on the way out. I’m sure I’m just holding you up.”
The old fart said something Bez didn’t quite catch and then, without warning, shoved him out onto the tiled floor.
Bez tried to stop himself but not before coming down on a green oval tile. He felt it give slightly beneath his feet. Bez froze upon that moment, waiting for the click or the crunch which would precede his death. Nothing occurred.
“Lucky first step,” laughed Merken, laughing all the harder as Bez swore and wept. “The bard and I are coming next!”
As the ale ebbed from his system over the hours, Bez filled up the space with passionate hatred for Merken. Now he had nothing else and was awash with a reckless rage. It spilled over and onto others. Bez hated the giant swordswoman, Cope: she was a mindless lackey of the bloody invaders and the first one to bring him to Merken’s attention. Bez hated Pagnell: he should have been a confederate and confidant to Bez. Together they could have dispatched Merken before escap
ing this well of tortures; but he’d turned out to be nothing of the sort. And Bez hated Lorrika: she was a proper stooge like Cope, with nothing to gain from serving the Amanni now her master Abington was dead. If she didn’t make it out of this place alive then it was no-one’s fault but her own. It seemed Ripped Leather Bikini Woman would outlive her inspiration. It would be a posthumous tribute to a girl Bez had once had a soft spot for. Ripped Leather Bikini Woman, the Ghost Who Walks. Oh, that was actually rather good. Bez warmed to the idea and felt a keen, sweet grief for the poor girl already.
When finally, after heart-pounding terror and dangers unnumbered, Bez found himself lying on the steps on the far side of the hall, the side of his face aching keenly from a burn, his belly growling, and a numbness in his hand where something had savagely raked him, the rage had not subsided.
Merken towered over him and scoffed. “Damned fools. Time to go. Pipsqueak, lead the way.”
The soldier looked away, oblivious to the torment he had inflicted on others, giving instructions for them to all move on. The damned old goat didn’t even care.
Cope and Lorrika led the way out. Pagnell in his freshly ripped coat followed closely behind. Merken paused to look back at the frenetic efforts of the grimlock tribe to close the gap on them. Why was he looking? What did he care?
Bez slipped out the knife he had hidden in his trousers when fleeing the grimlock cavern. As Merken turned to leave, Bez held it out. There was no effort needed. The man practically impaled himself. The old bugger blinked in incomprehension. Bez pulled at the strings on the velvet purse and tugged it away as Merken staggered back, looking down at the tile he had trodden on.
Merken sighed. The damned man just sighed as if this was a petty inconvenience, nothing more. And then the trap took him. In that final instant, Bez caught the briefest expression of world weary regret and bitter disappointment in Merken’s face. An ordinary person would have missed it, but the gaze of the artist was all-encompassing. Bez saw that bitterness and regret, committing it to memory. He’d revive it for a little portrait he’d hang on the tavern wall once he was out. He’d share it with the world and make sure everyone saw Rantallion Merken for what he was.
