M A R Barker - [Tekumel- The Empire of the Petal Throne 01]

by Flamesong (v0. 9) (epub)

  They spent the next hour or so listening to Balar and Mejjai retching in the rear compartment. Arjasu had tasted none. The pair eventually appeared, much chagrined, their lips red and blistered, to squat miserably on the floor at the rear of the cahin. They seemed undamaged otherwise, for which Trinesh was grateful.

  He dozed, then awoke to find Saina’s hand upon his arm. “We’re somewhere, Hereksa. We’ve stopped.”

  The scene outside was one of great beauty, though forlorn and dolorous. Their vehicle stood upon the lip of a precipice overlooking the ruins of a city. The forward view-portrayer showed a floor that ended abruptly in a jagged crevasse. Beyond this, separated by a deep, purple-shadowed canyon, rows of empty windows, eroded walls, and shattered casements climbed up a hill in tiers like the gray battlements of some time-besieged fortress. The roofless buildings and black tunnel-mouths resembled a nest of Dr(-ants—but a nest that contained no life. All was dead, decayed, and tumbled into chaos. Sparse undergrowth clawed up to drag the mighty towers down; silt and rubble choked the thoroughfares; and only brambles and sad, black-leaved A/faz-plants used the esplanades and filled the fountains now.

  The side-portrayers displayed the same scene but from an angle that held more promise: they showed the cavern behind the crevasse, a huge; pillared chamber that ran off into darkness. The place was artificial, made by humankind—or by some other sapient species—and it contained machines, housings, walkways, ladders, and enigmatic devices. Most important, one of the panes depicted a second egg-vehicle, identical to their own, hanging above a circular shaft no more than ten paces away! Its door-hatch was open, and fat, gray canisters lay piled neatly in the foreground. There were no signs of living beings. The car and its surroundings appeared as deserted and melancholy as the city across the way.

  They waited, but nothing changed. The cavern remained as still as an artist’s picture.

  Trinesh had just laid his hand upon the door-stud when there came a thudding upon the car’s roof. He jerked around to peer into the view-portrayers. All three still showed the same scene. Yet there was a difference: their pictures were now sliced into griddings of small, neat squares.

  It took him a moment to recognize those squares for what they were: the interwoven mesh of a net, a huge snare that must have dropped upon their vehicle from above!

  He managed to shout a warning; then their car tipped, rolled, and deposited them all in a heap upon what had just been the ceiling.

  They yelled, struggled, and fought back up to their feet only to slide down the walls again as the car slowly righted itself. It seemed to possess an internal equilibrium of its own. The netting spread and strained but held fast. The scene outside tilted back from shattered stone roof and sapphire sky to the mined city and the cavern.

  There was no sign of the fishers who had netted them.

  “We are taken, Tsolyani!” The Lady Deq Dimani pulled herself up against Trinesh’s chest. At any other time this might have been pleasurable.

  “Brace yourselves!” he called. “Whoever has us will either open the door or roll us on over the cliff.” In the latter event they were all lost, but he saw no reason to mention it. The neighboring car was nearer now, as though their own vehicle hung from a crane that slowly bore them away from their entrance tunnel.

  Thu’n clawed his way to the destination buttons, pushed one, then another. He was rewarded by a stink of burning and wisps of smoke from beneath the cabin deck.

  The situation demanded urgent measure. “Here!” Trinesh ordered. “Chosun, open the floor-hatch you found! You— Balar—find a cylinder of that stuff you tried to eat! We may be able to restore power to our car!”

  They scurried to obey. The enigmatic tubes and containers beneath the sliding hatch-cover were as before, but smoke drifted up from them, and the smell of fire was stronger. Trinesh saw a small door, like that of a miniature baker’s oven, in the top of one of the housings. This he pried up, burning his fingers as he did so, to reveal a popping, fizzing, sparkling mess of flat, black plates upon which complex diagrams and runes were engraved in silver. Here were the sorcerous tablets that powered the car! He knew enough about magic not to touch them. Tiny arcs of crackling light dazzled his eyes.

  Aijasu slapped a dull-gleaming cylinder into his outstretched palm. Trinesh dug out a dollop of its brownish contents and dropped it down amid the little plaques inside the compartment. If the machine required fuel, he would offer it some!

  Dense vapors emerged, and more lightnings flashed.

  “Push another button, Thu’n!” Trinesh shouted. He slammed the little door shut and backed away.

  The smoke became worse, and they coughed. “Thu’n! Damn it!”

  “I pushed everything,” the little nininyal wailed. “Look!” A dozen red lights glittered now upon the control panels. The disembodied voices of ancient spirits began to howl, lecture, and preach from everywhere at once.

  The Lady Jai sank to her knees to gasp for breath.

  “We have no choice.” The fumes gagged Trinesh, too, and he felt dizzy. “We leave the car—fight whatever awaits outside—ready yourselves—!” He plunged over to the door and pressed the stud. Nothing happened. A bright red light below it caught his eye: another button there. He jabbed at that, and the door swung wide.

  The netting blocked the opening, but Trinesh slashed the rough, elastic stuff apart with his sword. It groaned and tore away to reveal gray beings swarming about the base of their car a man-height below the threshold. More were emerging from hiding places behind the machines and housings in the distance, and others swung down from the walkways that crisscrossed the ceiling. The air smelled of musty cinnamon, and a high, sweet chiming, like many sets of wind-bells tinkling all at once, met his ears.

  “Ssu!” The Lady Deq Dimani screamed. “Ssu!”

  Trinesh hardly heard her; the cables of a gigantic block and tackle hung within his reach, and he seized one of these to swing down over the mob toward a clear space beyond. There were no Ssu near Trinesh’s home in the western regions of the Tsolyani Empire, and the storytellers’ tales had been less than accurate about the “Enemies of Man.”

  This was fortunate for his morale.

  He faced one of the squat gray beings perhaps three paces in front of him. The creature lunged to slash at him with a jag-edged sword as he regained his feet. The blow missed by a finger’s breadth. He scrambled to get his balance and assessed his opponent.

  The Ssu was a head shorter than he. Four wide-spraddled legs extended out from the twisted column of the torso, and its two upper arms ended in hands that had two long fingers and a shorter thumb. The head was oval, the face only vaguely human: there were two eyes, round and black-gleaming, and nostril slits but no nose. The mouth consisted of a vertical ellipse. It was the thing’s skin that was the most repellent: it resembled mottled gray parchment peeling from a roll, the ends loose and ragged, very much like the winding sheet of a corpse long in the grave. The musty cinnamon smell was overpowering.

  The creature emitted an arpeggio of fluting, chiming sounds and struck again. Trinesh parried automatically, advanced, made another parry, and found himself back underneath the spherical shell of their car hanging in the net above his head. He saw an opening and riposted. The Ssu recoiled, a bit of its cinnamon-fragrant skin tearing off to float down between them like a wisp of gauze. To his right, a second human form came leaping down into the fray, then another and another. He heard Chosun’s cry of “The Flame!” and Horusel’s deep, answering “Hai!”

  A ring of gray-mottled faces confronted him. He ducked, parried, and cut. One of the Ssu went down, its hands scrabbling at a flood of dark ichor spurting from amid the rags of loose skin hanging from its breast.

  “The other car!” Trinesh shouted. “Over there!” He swung at a new adversary, and the shock ran up his arm as his blade bit home. It felt as though he had chopped into a dead tree-limb.

  Something slowed him, prevented him from recovering for yet another
blow. The ebon eyes of the Ssu before him loomed larger and larger. By Lord Vimuhla’s Three Tongues of Fire! He watched in surprise as his hand turned of its own accord to lower the sword it held. His jaw went back to make his throat an easy target above his iron gorget.

  He had no control over his body!

  There was a twang from the car door above, and pallid, white lids slid down to shroud the glaring black orbs before him. The Ssu crumpled, the feathered butt of a crossbow quarrel protruding from its abdomen.

  “Let them not look you in the eye!” the Nininyal shrilled from behind the crossbowmen in the open door.

  The marketplace storytellers had been particularly remiss in omitting any mention of the hypnotic powers possessed by the “Enemies of Man.”

  He recovered to find four others by his side: Chosun, Dineva, Horusel, and the Lady Deq Dimani herself. He could not see the rest, but he heard the intermittent snap-twang of crossbows from above him. The press before them was so congested that their foes had little room to strike. He yelled the command to form his party into a wedge. They must traverse the few paces that separated them from the other car quickly; else they would be overrun and buried!

  “Get down here!” he bawled. “Get the girl—everybody!” There was no time to look back. He snarled the order to advance and sensed that his comrades heard him. Someone behind him screamed and fell against his leg. He reached down with his free hand to clutch at a human arm, but it was dragged out of his grasp, and a horde of chiming, cinnamonsmelling monstrosities surged over the body. Who it was he had no way of knowing.

  He brought his blade down upon one of the peeling gray skulls. The Ssu threw up its arms, and Trinesh snatched the creature’s sword as it fell. He tossed it blindly behind him. Some of his people had no weapons for close combat, and they would make good use of it. More Ssu went down before the sweep of Horusel’s axe. An opening appeared, and they pushed into it. Another two paces and they would be at the second vehicle’s door.

  A higher, ringing bell-note sounded. The Ssu facing them began to retreat.

  “They summon sorcerers!” a voice panted in his ear. He glimpsed the Lady Deq Dimani there, her scale corselet splattered with dark liquid.

  “On, then!” he howled in reply. “Now!”

  They moved forward, smashed aside those foes still in their path, and clambered up into the second car. There were Ssu there, too, but Horusel and Dineva slew them almost before they had had a chance to react. A hatch similar to that of their own vehicle was open in the floor, and odd-shaped instruments lay scattered about beside it.

  “If they have ruined the controls—!” Thu’n squatted down to see. “1 cannot be sure—it looks as though they attempted to change the destination settings. Thus did Qurtul do—”

  “Shut the door and push the Flame-accursed button!” Trinesh did not wait but himself dived for the control-board. Someone—Dineva, he thought—-slammed the hatch.

  The silence was sudden and astonishing.

  The car lights came up. Trinesh fumbled with the knobs beneath the forward view-portrayer and saw their first vehicle, smoke belching from its doorway, a patch of sky with ruins beyond, and a cavernous hall that now seethed with gray Ssu. No living human forms were visible in the swirling mob outside. Three-fingered hands clawed and pounded at the hull, and he prayed that those at the door would not be too clever about pushing the stud in the depression beside it.

  He poked a thumb at the leftmost stud on the control console.

  Their foes seemed to rise with the swiftness of birds, while they themselves fell downward into darkness. Bodies plummeted past the view-portrayers, apparently those unfortunates who had been on the roof or close enough to the lip of the tubeway tunnel to tumble into it.

  Trinesh looked around. Chekkuru hiVriddi was there, and he suppressed a momentary pang of some emotion akin to regret. Dineva knelt beside Saina while Chosun applied a bandage. The Tirrikamu grinned and signed that the wound was minor. Thu’n stood at the controls, the Lady Deq Dimani with him. Both strove to console the Lady Jai; she did not seem to be hurt, but she was trembling and terrified. The girl was no warrior. Balar and Arjasu squatted on their haunches at the back of the little cabin. They were good soldiers, already inspecting their crossbows, counting quarrels, and murmuring in matter-of-fact tones to Tse’e—Prince Nalukkan.

  Horusel and Mejjai emerged from the rear storage compartment, blood and blackish ichor streaking their harnesses.

  Jalugan was missing.

  They would grieve later, when there was time.

  “I think,” said Balar, “that we have seen Ssuyal. In Hekellu we have tales of great human cities there, deserted places occupied now by the ‘Enemies of Man.’ ”

  Trinesh’s attention was elsewhere. He gazed down at the forward console. An inscription had been painted above each destination button, doubtless the terminal to which that stud would send the car. Sadly, these labels were in the tongue of the Ssu: dots, whorls, and circles, as illegible as a spattering of raindrops upon a pavement!

  Once more their journeying lay solely in the hands of mighty Lord Vimuhla. Trinesh sighed and looked to his own bruises and scratches.

  Their vehicle was already far away in the lightless tunnel when the forward view-portrayer suddenly bloomed with a flower of incandescent brilliance. Back in the city of the Ssu their original car seemed to fly into pieces. Its dying was as dazzling as the heart of the sun. The glass immediately went dark, leaving them to blink and rub their eyes in astonishment.

  Whatever had caused the explosion, it struck them ail as a pleasing and proper offering to the Lord of Flame.

  9

  Leave it alone,” Trinesh said. “All of it. We open I nothing, eat nothing, drink nothing. Whatever cargo the Ssu stored here, it cannot be friendly to us.” Horusel and Dineva had ransacked their car, and a jumble of canisters, tubes, and other bric-a-brac lay now beside the implements and devices left by the Ssu. The tools were of human manufacture, but their controls and knobs had been modified to fit Ssu hands. Not even Thu’n knew what they did, nor did they dare test them now. Trinesh almost had to fight Horusel all over again when the man pointed a tube-like instrument at the wall and would have pulled the lever protruding from its handle. Experimentation could come later when there was less danger.

  Trinesh caught a signal from Chosun and put down the lensed box he was inspecting. The Tirrikamu sidled over and whispered, “Sire, the girl slipped something to the Yan Koryani woman. She hid it in her tunic.”

  The view-portrayers were useful for more than the displaying of pictures. Trinesh followed the big soldier’s eyes and saw the two women mirrored in one of the dark glass squares on the side wall. They sat with their heads together, apparently resting. He made a silent gesture to Chosun.

  He waited until the Tirrikamu was in position, leaning against the rear bulkhead behind the Lady Deq Dimani. Then he moved to stand in front of her.

  “May I see what the Lady Jai gave you?”

  She frowned. “What does she have left to give, Hereksal Only her own body—and that you almost took in Na Ngore.” As though in echo of her mistress’s words, the girl extended an alluringly curved thigh from beneath her desert-cloak. Trinesh refused to let himself be distracted.

  “Must I search you, Lady?”

  “I gave her nothing!” the Lady Jai said. She sat up so that his eyes traveled down the column of her throat and into the open collar of the desert-cloak she wore.

  “My Lady, please. I want no—”

  The Lady beq Dimani raised her left hand, fist closed, as though she were about to give him something. Her other hand slid out from inside her tunic like an Alash-snake's striking; it held a small object, dark and round, the size of a £)/e/-fruit pit.

  Trinesh yelled, dodged automatically, and batted at her wrist. Then Chosun’s great weight dropped upon the woman from behind. Whatever the object was, it flew free to strike the bulkhead and ricochet into Saina’s lap. The Lady Deq
Dimani struggled, kicked, and cursed in her crackling northern tongue until Chosun captured her flailing arms. Tse’e—it was hard to think of him as Prince Nalukkan—pinioned the Lady Jai similarly, though the girl made no resistance. He was not gentle; it was clear that he had no love either for the Lady Deq Dimani, who had betrayed his identity, or for any who served her.

  “Hold, man! No harm to them!” Trinesh was more shaken than he cared to admit. He knew full well what the object had been: an “Eye,” a common type of sorcerous tool employed by the Ancients. He had seen real ones in the temple school in Tumissa, and the markets were full of hawkers who peddled fakes to the credulous.

  There were many “Eyes”: some fired beams of energy that could kill, others performed tasks, and a few did things that no modem scholar could comprehend. What today’s sorcerers achieved with spells, the Ancients before the Time of Darkness had done with machines. Both drew power from the Planes Beyond, moulded it, and formed it into energies, substances, and even such complex manufactures as food and drink. A spell was subtle and could be modified by a skilled sorcerer; an “Eye” produced only the one effect its maker had built into it.

  “You found it in one of the compartments!” Trinesh accused the Lady Jai. “Your mistress here would have seen me dead—perhaps all of us—rather than share it for our common good!”

  The Lady Deq Dimani glared into Trinesh’ eyes from no more than a hand’s breadth away. Her lips were drawn back from sharp white teeth, and her breasts heaved with fury. “I could have used it on you before, Tsolyani, as you and your ruffian stood at the console! I did not. I swore peace with you until we reach some destination where we can go our separate ways. That oath I kept. Yet nothing in my vow prevents me from acquiring weapons or acting otherwise as I see fit. 1 am not under your command, Hereksa. I am a general in my own right, a ruler, a matriarch, a. . . .” She ran out of breath.