Beyond the Pool of Stars

by Howard Andrew Jones

  “Rendak’s the only one of you I’ve got complete faith in. Sorry, but I’ve known him far longer. So he stays here to keep you out of trouble.” She held up a hand to silence Rendak’s protest and considered the younger man waiting eagerly nearby. Was he ever not excited?

  Alderra’s look was sharp. “Sargava needs these gems, Mirian. Take my son. And if you must leave Rendak, take his haversack. Fill it with gems. That’s what I bought it for.”

  Acting general or no, Mirian knew when she heard an order, one that ultimately came down from the Baron of Sargava. “Very well. Ivrian, leave your blade and take a spear. Empty all else. We’ll take any shoulder bags with us. Heltan?”

  “Yes?” The lizard man turned away from the row of black cones he’d been running a finger along.

  “Is there anything from this chamber your people want? You said it’s full of beautiful things. Do you want any of them?”

  Heltan’s head tilted to the left, and he tasted the air with a minute flick of his tongue. “Salvager Mirian, I would that I could bring it all. I would that I could look upon the place with my own eyes. But I have enough sorrow lying before me already.”

  17

  Faces in the Stone

  Ivrian

  Our imaginations peopled the place with a hundred dangers even as they raced ahead in contemplation of the wonders that awaited us in the Chamber of Ancestors. I did not speak to Mirian of it, but I worried that someone might have learned the Karshnaar code and plundered the tomb, almost as much as I worried that we might misremember that code and be cut in half or crushed to paste beneath some ancient trap.

  —From The Daughter of the Mist

  The corridor was in slightly better condition than the first ones, complete with short runs of shining little fungi. Certainly the green light was eerie, but it was better than nothing. Because it grew in long trenches at both head and foot level, Ivrian could easily see there weren’t any monstrous spiders or centipedes waiting to drop on him. What webs he saw were of the typical variety. He still gave them a wide berth.

  With his pole shifted to its spear end and pointed before him, Jekka sounded almost friendly as he spoke with Mirian.

  “It is wise,” he said, “to leave more warriors to guard a larger space.”

  “Yes,” Mirian said.

  They neared an intersection. “You are not more worried that we will be encumbered while carrying the treasures?”

  “Not with these magical backpacks.”

  He’d grown a lot friendlier today, and Ivrian wondered whether that was just the natural result of his spending time with Mirian. Perhaps seeing her artwork last night had something to do with it. Whatever the cause, a calmer, less irritable Jekka was a more reassuring companion.

  They advanced into the next segment of hallway. A long swath of its ceiling was cracked. Mirian flashed her light over its surface and revealed tree roots that had fought their way through the rock.

  Jekka continued to prove uncharacteristically talkative. “I begin to see that a contract is a pledge that guarantees honor between humans. I suppose such contracts are necessary when there are so many different clans.”

  “Yes,” Mirian agreed.

  “Unfortunately,” Ivrian added, “many humans don’t honor their contracts anyway.”

  Jekka glanced back at him and stopped to consider Mirian, who halted and cocked an eyebrow at him.

  “But you do,” Jekka said.

  “My clan prides itself on honoring its contracts,” Mirian said. “My father risked his life to honor his.”

  “All for the riches?” the lizard man asked.

  Mirian’s smile was a little sad. “Not really. For the thrill. To go places no one had ever seen. To find secrets, to solve puzzles.”

  “He was a hunter, then.”

  “Of a kind.”

  “And you are like him.”

  “I suppose I am.”

  They reached another intersection, surveyed the dark corridors, moved on. What else lay down these silent halls, he wondered? How many lizardfolk had lived and died here and raised families? And how many artisans must it have taken to chisel the carvings into every surface? It was, he thought, a little too much. Like the homes of the extraordinarily rich, where everything was gilded, even the bathing chambers.

  Jekka was talking once more. “I think you are more interested in the hunt than the riches.”

  “What about you?” she asked quietly. “What are you interested in?”

  Jekka was suddenly brusque. “I am here to help my brother and my cousin.”

  “But not yourself?”

  Jekka paused, just a few yards shy of the glistening pool at the center of the next intersection. His voice became solemn. “The mark of doom is upon my people, Mirian. Do you truly think there is some lost land where my clan still lives?” He didn’t leave time for her to answer. “We are finished. It doesn’t matter if the final blow comes from your kind, or the boggards, or even others of our own folk. All are instruments of Gozreh. He does not want us here. My mate said he must have great need for the Karshnaar in the spirit world, for he had taken so many. But I think he does not care.”

  “I don’t know about gods,” Mirian said. “But I can hope, Jekka. You and your people are brave and determined. Sometimes that’s enough.”

  He studied her.

  “Enough talk. It’s time for a dive.” Mirian turned to Ivrian. “Do you have the hang of this now?”

  “I do.”

  “All right. Jekka, he can’t swim as fast, so you and I will have to slow down. I don’t want us spread out too far.”

  “Understood.”

  Jekka and Mirian consulted the map a final time. As Ivrian completed a second scan of the hallway behind them, he understood the depth of the change that had occurred between the two. He couldn’t imagine seeing the tall woman and the slim lizard man standing so easily side by side in that seemingly long-ago age when they’d boarded the ship together.

  Apparently satisfied, Mirian slipped the map into her haversack, one of two she now carried, like Ivrian, each on a shoulder. “Let’s be on with it.”

  She pulled free her sword, stood with feet planted wide as she blew out all her air, then dropped into the water. Jekka slipped in a moment later, facing the opposite direction. Ivrian waited a moment for the waves to cease their rocking, then watched as his companions got out of the way. Mirian waved him on with one dimly glowing, fin-coated hand. He could tell from her pained expression that she was still transitioning to gill breaths.

  Soon he was cold and wet along with them, sucking in the water through his own set of glowing gills. He would have thought whoever had dreamed up the kind of magic that made it possible to breathe underwater could have worked a little harder and made it comfortable.

  Before he’d adjusted, both Mirian and Jekka were kicking down through a circular passage to the lower level of water tunnels and turning south. Using the fins that appeared on arms and feet wasn’t as simple as Mirian made it seem. He couldn’t imagine he looked as graceful as she did.

  Underwater fronds were mixed in with the fungus in the lower transit hall, casting strange shadows.

  Here and there he was startled to see the silvery flash of tiny fish. He hoped these weren’t piranha—he’d neglected to ask what those looked like. The creatures seemed wary, which was probably a reasonable indicator they weren’t inclined to eat him.

  He thought he’d paid attention to Heltan’s directions, so he was surprised by a couple of turns Mirian and Jekka made. Most alarming of all was a deep thrumming noise that scattered a school of those tiny fish. It sounded as though someone were beating a great underwater drum.

  It was so startling that once again he forgot to empty his lungs before he surfaced, and he spent a long minute coughing water as Mirian and Jekka climbed free. He decided he’d leave that out of any account he wrote—assuming he could acquire permission to write it.

  He studied the hall as he recove
red. It was different from the others he’d seen. First, it was on the same level as the upper water passages, but it was filled with air. Second, the floor was covered in an inch of water. Third, there was nothing at all within the short corridor but clear red tiles. Only at the hall’s far end, thirty paces on, was there any ornamentation whatsoever. Hundreds upon hundreds of small Karshnaar faces looked out on him, arranged in parallel rows from floor to ceiling.

  “This,” he managed weakly, “is going to be trickier than I thought.”

  As if placed merely to add to his apprehension, a series of bones were strewn near that decorative wall. His bare feet splashed little waves as he followed Mirian and Jekka. Seven skulls. Lizardfolk or boggards, he guessed, though he wasn’t practiced enough to tell the difference. “They must not have known the pattern,” he said.

  Neither Mirian nor Jekka answered.

  “Hey, did either of you hear that strange noise while we were underwater?”

  “Yes,” Jekka answered.

  “Do you have any idea what it is?”

  “No,” the lizard man said without turning. “But I do not like it.”

  “What about you, Mirian?” Calling her by her first name felt unnatural, but she showed no sign that she objected.

  “I’m not sure what to think, but we need to be cautious. Now stand guard behind us. Jekka and I have to concentrate.”

  Right, he thought. He turned, holding his spear ready. He felt a little ridiculous poised there with a shortspear, standing with legs naked to the knee, two backpacks crossing his shoulders. If I survive to describe this, he thought, I’ll downplay the absurdity of my appearance.

  His eyes widened involuntarily.

  “I’m definitely going to survive this,” he muttered to himself. “Definitely.”

  18

  Prayers of the Karshnaar

  Mirian

  “It is just a matter of counting,” Jekka said. It was the first time Mirian had heard him try to reassure anybody.

  “So you’re just as surprised as I am by the number of faces?”

  “Yes.”

  Maybe, she thought, he was trying to reassure himself. The decoration, door, or deadly trap—whatever it was, exactly—was twenty lizard faces high and twenty across, offering them a field of four hundred visages to choose from.

  “It strikes me that your brother could have been clearer.”

  “I am thinking the same thing. He might not have known their number.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Mirian studied the display for a moment more. “All right, here’s a thought. Let’s use these.” She brushed fingers through a patch of the soft, shell-shaped green fungus that supplied light for the complex and came away with dully glowing fingertips. “Let’s both count, and then I’ll mark the ones we need. Carefully. Before we start pressing.”

  “Cunning,” he said. “But what if a touch is enough to activate the defenses?”

  “These look like they’re designed to slide,” Mirian said. “And your brother said to push them in. They’re not going to go off if they’re touched lightly.” She paused. “Probably.”

  She glanced again at the nearest bone pile. That skull, she thought, looked as though it had been crushed, and she was distracted momentarily as she searched for where there might be a trap release hidden in the red tile. Unfortunately, the grouting was well concealed by the damnably useful fungus.

  “I count seven over, three down from the right, here.” Jekka pointed at a snout with a tiny horn.

  Mirian counted once, twice, then nodded. With exquisite care she touched that face with one glowing finger, leaving it with a tiny stripe. It looked like war paint.

  She and Jekka then spent a laborious quarter hour counting the rest of the faces. Only twice did they disagree over carved faces deep in the mix. Both times it was Jekka whose counting had been off. The first time he seemed flustered. The second time he bobbed his head low.

  “I apologize,” he said, frill flaring.

  Mirian wasn’t sure what to make of the physical movement of the frill, which was at odds with his embarrassed tone. “It’s all right. The mistakes won’t hurt us until we start pressing faces.”

  Jekka gave a short, coughing laugh and his frill dropped. It would be nice, she thought, if someone had a handbook for what lizardfolk social cues were. And even though she was in the midst of life-and-death calculations, she realized that such a write-up would be of tremendous use to other Pathfinders. She resolved to draft that paper herself.

  Providing she survived what they were about to do.

  “Are you ready for this, Jekka? Let’s rehearse it once before we start pressing.”

  “Given my errors, perhaps we should rehearse twice.”

  She chuckled. “Among my father’s people, there’s a saying: third time’s the charm.”

  Jekka tilted his head to one side. “I understand this phrase. Every action improves with practice.”

  “It’s supposed to be about luck,” Ivrian added from behind them. He had been so quiet that Mirian had almost forgotten he was there.

  “I no longer believe in luck,” Jekka said, “but I practice careful preparation. Let’s rehearse three times. For charm.”

  And so they did, counting down, resting a hand in front of each of the nine marked lizard faces but not touching them. The first face to press was in the high middle, then down to waist-high on the right, then very low on the left, and so on.

  It really seemed to her that they had the matter down after the first rehearsal, but they did it twice more. Afterward, Mirian stepped back, hands on hips. Something still bothered her. “You’re sure that your brother has the combination right?”

  Jekka seemed puzzled by the question. “My brother thinks he has it right.”

  “If your people entered the vault all the time, wouldn’t the places where they touched the sculptures be worn down?”

  “Oh, that’s good thinking,” Ivrian said behind them.

  After a moment, Jekka said: “I agree with Ivrian.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  Jekka stared at the wall for a long time. “I do not see any areas worn more than others. I imagine two possibles.”

  “Yes?” Mirian asked.

  “One. The vault was rarely opened, so there’s little wear. Two. The material is somehow resistant.”

  “Three,” Ivrian suggested, “they’ve been deteriorating at the same rate down here for so long you can’t tell anymore.”

  Mirian thought that over. “No, you’d still be able to see something that had been rubbed a lot. I’m going to hope you’re right, Jekka, and it’s option one. Because there’s always possibility four.”

  “And what is that?” the lizard man asked her.

  “That Heltan’s wrong, and the moment we press any of them we’ll be killed.”

  Jekka’s long dark tongue darted out in a hiss. “Then Gozreh would have played another joke upon my people. And two humans.”

  “If I hear anything going wrong,” Ivrian said, “I’m diving right into this water here. I like you both and all, but—”

  “Wisely reasoned,” Jekka said. “The only bodies lie near the faces. Presumably someone standing back by the pool would be safe.”

  “You’re right.” Mirian nodded at the lizard man. “Get back there.”

  Jekka turned his head to stare at her. “What?”

  “This is my risk. You don’t even want the material that’s in here. You contracted to guide me, and you have.”

  Jekka’s mouth parted, and she thought to see him taste the air again, but it closed, opened, then closed once more. “I am still unclear on the boundaries of our contract, Mirian,” he said, “but since you shared danger with me, I must share danger with you.”

  She shook her head. “No. You were just telling me that there are only three of you left. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you risk yourself to get some gems you don’t care about for some people you hate
. Go back by the pool.”

  He blinked at her a moment, fingered his staff. Once more he opened his mouth as if to speak but hesitated.

  “Well, go on,” she said crossly. She wanted to get this over with. “The longer we delay, the longer we’re away from the others.”

  “You are right again. But there is a battle prayer of my people I would share.”

  “I thought you didn’t pray.”

  “Then think of it as luck, because I think the gods pay attention to humans.”

  “Very well.” She hoped her impatience wasn’t obvious.

  The lizard man fell silent.

  More than anything else Mirian wished to start the process so she’d know whether she was going to live or die—hopefully the former. But if the latter happened, she hoped to be killed in one fast bludgeon or a good slice. If there were some sort of blade involved, could a healing potion save her?

  “Are you still carrying that healing potion, Ivrian?”

  “Yes.”

  “So if there’s a trap and I get cut, you’ll pour it down my throat, right?”

  The youth drew himself up solemnly and bowed. “You have my word, Mirian.”

  Was she growing soft? She realized she had become fond of both the murderous lizard man and the self-involved writer.

  “Well?” she asked Jekka.

  “Your pardon. It took me a moment to think of a good translation.” He stood tall, raised his staff, and addressed the ceiling. “‘Gozreh, let it be that my comrade slides past the blows of her enemy and brings death to those who oppose her. Grant her the speed of her youth, the cunning of the k’rang, the wisdom of maturity, the luck of heroes.’”

  Jekka passed one hand over her in a cryptic gesture.

  She was strangely moved. “I thank you,” she told him formally.

  He bowed his head. “I do not believe that a Karshnaar god-speaker has ever whispered a prayer for a human before.”

  “What’s a k’rang?” Ivrian asked.

  “A swift hunting lizard that stalks on two legs. Very deadly. I don’t know your human name.”

  “I think Kalina was talking about those a few days ago,” Ivrian said.