The stairs creaked as the host descended. He held a bung-starter in one heavy fist. “Didn’t they tell you to go by the side?” he rasped. “D’ye think I want the name of running a devil’s brothel?” He took another step. “By Ils and his sisters, you’ll remember the next time!”
Samlor’s fingers moved on his knife hilt. He still held the point away from the innkeeper. “We don’t have a quarrel,” he said.
“Let’s leave it at that.”
The host spat as he reached the bottom of the stairs. “Sure, I know you hot pants folderols. Well, when I’m done with you, you take my greetings to your pandering psalm-singers and tell them there’ll be no more customers through here!”
“The priests share their privileges for a price?” Samlor said in sudden enlightenment. “But I don’t come for sex, friend.”
Whatever the tavern-keeper thought he understood, it frightened him as sight of the dagger had not. He paused with the bung-starter half raised. First he swallowed. Then, with a guttural sound of pure terror he flung the mallet into the shadows and fled back up the stairs. Samlor frowned, shrugged, and turned again to the fooder.
There was a catch disguised as a knot, obvious enough if one knew something of the sort had to be there. Pressed, the side of the cask swung out to reveal a dry, dark tunnel sloping gently downward. Samlor’s tongue touched his lips. It was, after all, what he had been looking for. He picked up the lamp, now burned well down. He stepped into the tunnel, closing the door behind him.
The passage twisted but did not branch. It was carven through dense, yellow clay, shored at intervals with timbers too blackened for Samlor to identify the wood. There were tiny skitterings which seemed to come from just beyond the light. Samlor walked slowly enough not to lose the lampflame, steadily enough not to lose his nerve. Despite the disgrace of his vocation, Samlor was a noble of Cirdon; and there was no one else in his family to whom he could entrust this responsibility.
There was a sound behind him. Without turning, Samlor lashed out with a boot. His hobnails ground into something warm and squealing where his eyes saw nothing at all. He paused for a moment to finger his medallion of Heqt, then continued. The skittering preceded him at a greater distance.
When the tunnel entered a shelf of rock it broadened suddenly into a low ceilinged, circular room. Samlor paused. He held his lamp out at arm’s length and a little back of his line of sight so that the glare would not blind him. The room was huge and empty, pierced by a score of doorways. Each but the one at which Samlor stood and one other was closed by an iron grate.
Samlor touched but did not draw his double-edged dagger. “I’ll play your silly game,” he whispered. Taking short steps, he walked around the circumference of the room and out the other open door. Another empty passage stretched beyond it. Licking his lips again, Samlor followed the new tunnel.
The double clang of gratings behind him was not really unexpected. Samlor waited, poised behind his knife point, but no one came down the stone boring from either direction. No one and no thing. Samlor resumed walking, the tunnel curving and perhaps descending slightly with each step. The stone was beginning to vibrate, a tremor that was too faint to be music.
The passage broadened again. This time the room so formed was not empty. Samlor spun to face what first seemed a man standing beside the doorway. The figure’s only movement was the flicker of the lampflame over its metallic lustre. The Cirdonian moved closer and prodded the empty torso. It was a racked suit of mail, topped by a slot-fronted helmet.
Samlor scratched at a link of the armour, urged by a suspicion that he did not consciously credit even as he attempted to prove it. The tightly-woven rings appeared to be of verdigrised copper, but the edge of Samlor’s knife could not even mar the apparent corrosion. “Blood and balls,” the caravan-master swore under his breath.
He was touching one of the two famed suits of armour forged by the sorcerer Hast-ra-kodi in the fire of a burning diamond. Forged with the help of two demons, legend had it; and if that was open to doubt by a modern rationalist, there could be no doubt at all that the indestructible armour had clothed heroes for three of the five ages of the world.
Then, twelve hundred years ago, the twin brothers Harash and Hakkad had donned the mail and marched against the wizard-prince Sterl. A storm overtook the expedition in the mountains; and in the clear light of dawn, all had disappeared—armour, brothers, and the three thousand men of their armament. Some said the earth had gaped; others, that everything had been swallowed by the still-wider jaws of airy monsters whose teeth flashed in the lightning and whose backs arched high as the thunderheads. Whatever the cause, the armour had vanished in that night. The reappearance of one of the suits in this underground room gave Samlor his first tangible proof of the power that slunk through the skittering passages.
From the opening across the room came the sound of metal scraping stone, scraping and jingling. Samlor backed against the wall, sucking his cheeks hollow.
Into the chamber of living rock stepped the other suit of Hast-ra-kodi’s armour. This one fitted snugly about a man whom it utterly covered, creating a figure which had nothing human in it but its shape. The unknown metal glowed green, and the sword the figure bore free in one gauntleted hand blazed like a green torch.
“Do you come to worship Dyareela?” the figure asked in a voice rusty with disuse.
Samlor set his lamp carefully on the flooring and sidled a pace away from it. “I worship Heqt,” he said, fingering his medallion with his left hand. “And some others, perhaps. But not Dyareela.”
The figure laughed as it took a step forwards. “I worshipped Heqt, too. I was her priest—until I came down into the tunnels to purge them of the evil they held.” The tittering laughter ricocheted about the stone walls like the sound caged weasels make. “Dyareela put a penance on me in return for my life, my life, my life … I wear this armour. That will be your penance too, Cirdonian: put on the other suit.”
“Let me pass, priest,” Samlor said. His hands were trembling. He clutched them together on his bosom. His fighting knife was sheathed.
“No priest,” the figure rasped, advancing.
“Man! Let me pass!”
“No man, not man,” said the thing, its blade rising and a flame that dimmed the oil lamp. “They say you keep your knife sharp, suppliant—but did gods forge it? Can it shear the mesh of Hast-ra-kodi?”
Samlor palmed the bodkin-pointed push dagger from his wrist sheath and lunged, his left foot thrusting against the wall of the chamber. Armour or no armour, the priest was not a man of war. Samlor’s left hand blocked the sword arm while his right slammed the edgeless dagger into the figure’s chest. The bodkin slipped through the rings like thread through a needle’s eye. The figure’s mailed fist caught the Cirdonian and tore the skin over his cheek. Samlor had already twisted his steel clear. He punched it home again through armour, ribs, and the spongy lungs within.
The figure staggered back. The sword clanged to the stone flooring. “What—?” it began. Something slopped and gurgled within the indestructible helmet. The dagger hilt was a dark tumour against the glowing mail. The figure groped vainly at the knob hilt with both hands. “What are you?” it asked in a whisper. “You’re not a man, not…” Muscles and sinews loosened as the brain controlling them starved for lack of oxygen. One knee buckled and the figure sprawled headlong on the stone. The green glow seeped out of it like blood from a rag, staining the flooring and dripping through it in turn.
“If you’d been a man in your time,” Samlor said harshly, “I wouldn’t have had to be here now.”
He rolled the figure over to retrieve his bodkin from the bone in which it had lodged. Haemorrhages from mouth and nose had smeared the front of the helmet. To Samlor’s surprise, the suit of mail now gaped open down the front. It was ready to be stripped off and worn by another. The body within was shrivelled, its skin as white as that of the grubs which burrow beneath tree bark.
Samlo
r wiped his edgeless blade with thumb and forefinger. A tiny streak of blood was the only sign that it had slipped between metal lines to do murder. The Cirdonian left both suits of armour in the room. They had not preserved other wearers. Wizard mail and its tricks were for those who could control it, and Samlor was all too conscious of his own humanity.
The passageway bent, then formed a tee with a narrow corridor a hundred paces long. The corridor was closed at either end by living rock. Its far wall was, by contrast, artificial—basalt hexagons a little more than a foot in diameter across the flats. There was no sign of a doorway. Samlor remembered the iron grates clanging behind him what seemed a lifetime ago. He wiped his right palm absently on his thigh.
The caravan-master walked slowly down and back the length of the corridor, from end to end. The basalt plaques were indistinguishable one from another. They rose ten feet to a bare ceiling which still bore the tool-marks of its cutting. Samlor stared at the basalt from the head of the tee, aware that the oil in his lamp was low and that he had no way of replenishing it.
After a moment he looked down at the floor. Struck by a sudden notion, he opened his fly and urinated at the base of the wall. The stream splashed, then rolled steadily to the right down the invisible trench worn by decades of footsteps. Thirty feet down the corridor the liquid stopped and pooled, slimed with patches of dust that broke up the reflected lamplight.
Samlor examined with particular care the plaques just beyond the pool of urine. The seeming music was louder here. He set his knife-point against one of the hexagons and touched his forehead to the butt-cap. Clearly and triumphantly rolled the notes of a hydraulic organ, played somewhere in the complex of tunnels. Samlor sheathed the knife again and sighted along the stones themselves, holding the light above his head. The polished surface of one waist high plaque had been dulled by sweat and wear. Samlor pressed it and the next hexagon over hinged out of the wall.
The plaque which had lifted was only a hand’s breadth thick, but what the lamp showed beyond it was a tunnel rather than a room: the remainder of the wall was of natural basalt columns, twenty feet long and lying on their sides. To go further, Samlor would have to crawl along a hole barely wide enough to pass his shoulders; and the other end was capped as well.
Samlor had spent his working life under an open sky. He had thus far borne the realization of the tons of rock above his head only by resolutely not thinking about it. This rat-hole left him no choice … but he would go through it anyway. A man had to be able to control his mind, or he wasn’t a man …
The Cirdonian set the lamp on the floor. It would gutter out in a few minutes anyway. If he had tried to take it into the tunnel with him, it would almost immediately have sucked all the life from the narrow column of air among the hexagons. He drew his fighting knife and, holding both arms out in front of him, wormed through the opening. His body blocked all but the least glimmer of the light behind him, and the black basalt drank even that.
Progress was a matter of groping with boot toes and left palm, fighting the friction of his shoulders and pelvis scraping the rock. Samlor took shallow breaths, but even so before he had crawled his own length the air became stale. It hugged him like a flabby blanket as he inched forwards in the darkness. The music of the water organ was all about him.
The knife-point clinked on the far capstone. Samlor squirmed a little nearer, prayed to Heqt, and thrust outwards with his left hand. The stone swung aside. Breathable air flooded the Cirdonian with the rush of organ music.
Too relieved to be concerned at what besides air might wait beyond the opening, Samlor struggled out. He caught himself on his knuckles and left palm, then scrabbled to get his legs back under him. He had crawled through the straight side of a semicircular room. Panels in the arched ceiling fifty feet above his head lighted the room ochre. It was surely not dawn yet. Samlor realized he had no idea of what might be the ultimate source of the clear, rich light.
The hydraulic organ must still be at a distance from this vaulted chamber, but the music made the walls vibrate with its intensity. There was erotic love in the higher notes, and from the lower register came fear as deep and black as that which had settled in Samlor’s belly hours before. Lust and mindless hatred lilted, rippling and bubbling through the sanctuary. Samlor’s fist squeezed his dagger hilt in frustration. He was only the thickness of the edge short of running amok in this empty room. Then he caught himself, breathed deeply, and sheathed the weapon until he had a use for it.
An archway in the far wall suggested a door. Samlor began walking towards it, aware of the scrapes the basalt had given him and the groin muscle he had pulled while wrestling with the figure in armour. I’m not as young as I was, he thought. Then he smiled in a way that meshed all too well with the pattern of the music: after all, he was likely through with the problems of ageing very soon.
The sanctuary was strewn with pillows and thick brocades. There was more substantial furniture also. Its patterns were unusual but their function was obvious in context. Samlor had crossed enough of the world to have seen most things, but his personal tastes remained simple. He thought of Samlane; fury lashed him again. This time instead of gripping the knife, he touched the medallion of Heqt. He kicked at a rack of switches. They clattered into a construct of ebony with silken tie-downs. Its three hollow levels could be adjusted towards one another by the pulleys and levers at one end of it.
Well, it wasn’t for her, Samlor thought savagely. It was for the house, the honour of the Lords Kodrix of Cirdon. And perhaps—perhaps for Heqt. He’d never been a religious man, always figured it’d be best if the gods settled things among themselves … but there were some things that any man—Well, that was a lie. Not any man, just Samlor hil Samt for sure and probably no other fool so damned on the whole continent. Well, so be it then; he was a fool and a fanatic, and before the night finished he’d have spilled the blood of a so-called demon or died trying.
Because the illumination was from above, Samlor had noticed the bas reliefs only as patterns of shadows along the walls. The detail struck him as he approached the archway. He stopped and looked carefully.
The carvings formed a series of panels running in bands across the polished stone. The faces in each tableau were modelled with a precise detail that made it likely they were portraits, though none of the personages were recognizable to Samlor. He peered up the curving walls and saw the bands continuing to the roof vaults. How and when they had been carved was beyond estimation; the caravan-master was not even sure he could identify the stone, creamy and mottled but seemingly much harder than marble.
Time was of indeterminable importance. Knowing that he might have only minutes to live, Samlor began following some of the series of reliefs. One group of carvings made clear the unguessed unity between the “sorcerer” Hast-ra-kodi and the “goddess” Dyareela. Samlor stared at the conclusion of the pattern, swallowing hard but not speaking. He was unutterably glad he had not donned either suit of mail when he might have done so.
The panels reeked of bloodshed and repression. Kings and priests had stamped out the worship of Dyareela a hundred times in a hundred places. The rites had festered in the darkness, then burst out again—cancers metastasizing from the black lump here in the vaults beneath Sanctuary. A shrine in the wasteland before it was a city; and even as a city, a brawling, stinking, leaderless hive where no one looked too hard for Evil’s heart since Evil’s limbs enveloped all.
Alar hil Aspar—a brash outsider, a reformer flushed with his triumph over brigandage—had at last razed the fane of Dyareela here. Instead of salt, he had sown the ruins with a temple to Heqt, the goddess of his upbringing. Fool that he was. Alar had thought that ended it.
Just above the archway, set off from the courses around it by a border of ivy leaves, was a cameo that caught Samlor’s eye as he returned sick and exhausted by what he had been looking at. A file of women led by a piper cavorted through the halls of a palace. The women carried small animals and ico
ns of obviously more than symbolic significance, but it was to the piper’s features that Samlor’s gaze was drawn. The Cirdonian swore mildly and reached up to touch the stone. It was smooth and cold to his fingertips.
So much fit. Enough, perhaps.
Samlor stepped through the double-hung doors closing the archway. The crossbowman waiting beyond with his eyes on the staircase screamed and spun around. The patterned screen that would have concealed the ambush from someone descending the stairs was open to the archway—but judging from the bowman’s panic, the mere sight of something approaching from the sanctuary would probably have flushed him anyway.
Samlor had survived too many attacks ever to be wholly unprepared for another. He lunged forwards, shouting to further disconcert the bowman. The screen was toppling as the bowman jerked back from the fingers of Samlor’s left hand thrusting for his eyes. The bowstring slapped and the quarrel spalled chips from the archway before ricocheting sideways through a swinging door-panel. Samlor, sprawled across his attacker’s lower legs, slashed at the other’s face with the knife he had finally cleared. The bowman cried out again and parried with the stock of his own weapon. Samlor’s edge thudded into the wood like an axe in a firelog. Three of the bowman’s fingers flew out into the room.
Unaware of his maiming, the bowman tried to club Samlor with his weapon. It slipped away from him. He saw the blood-spouting stumps of his left hand, the index finger itself half severed. Fright had made the bowman scream; mutilation now choked his voice with a rush of vomit.
Samlor squirmed forwards, pinning his attacker’s torso with his own. He wrestled the crossbow out of the unresisting right hand. There was a pouch of iron quarrels at the bowman’s belt, but Samlor ignored them: they were on the left side and no longer a threat. The gagging man wore the scarlet and gold livery of Regli’s household.
Tales From The Vulgar Unicorn Page 9
