Warhammer Anthology 07

by Way of the Dead

  The other side of the door was dry, so Quintal assumed that the air beyond it must be contiguous with the desert air through which he had been riding for days. The prospect of dry warmth suddenly seemed welcoming, so he set off with a will into the darkness, hoping for a glimpse of starlight.

  The wall he was following took him right, then left, then right again, eventually delivering him into yet another open space. Here at last, he saw chinks of light far above him, let in by narrow horizontal slits unlike any window he had ever seen before.

  In here the still air was much warmer, and so dry that the water began evaporating from his clothing.

  Quintal might have felt less disappointed by the fact that the floor was still lost in darkness if his ears had not become active again. It was not the flutter of lazy wings that disturbed him, even though they probably belonged to roosting vultures; it was the sound of serpentine scales slithering on stone, and the click of insectile feet that might belong to scorpions. They seemed to be heading towards him, but when he froze and pressed himself against the wall he realised that they were just passing by. It was not the scent of his sluggishly flowing blood that had attracted them but the draught of cool moist air that had followed him from the broken door.

  When he moved on, Quintal eventually came to a raised stone platform. Its slightly concave surface was as broad and long as a princely bed, and it seemed quite clean. It was a welcome discovery, for it seemed quite safe from snakes and scorpions alike, as they had no way to climb its smooth sides.

  Desperately tired and weakened by the loss of blood from his hands and arms, Quintal hauled himself up on to the slab and stretched himself out. Utterly exhausted, but no longer wringing wet or frozen half to death, he fell unconscious almost immediately.

  MEANWHILE, A FRUSTRATED and annoyed Memet Ashraf pulled the broken rope back up. It was only a couple of feet shorter now than it had been before, but there was no obvious place to secure the free end. He knew that if Quintal were alive and unhurt, the Estalian’s curses ought to be clearly audible, but there was nothing. He must have been knocked unconscious, and possibly drowned.

  It was a dire, uncomfortable thought. The chances of two men outwitting and outfighting six orcs and six goblins were not good. The odds against one alone were tremendous - and they would be astronomical if he could not bring up water for himself and the two horses.

  Ashraf knew that he had to extend the length of the rope far enough to be able to dangle a bottle in the water. Eventually, he contrived a considerable extension by using his own belt, the sword-belt that Quintal had prudently taken off and the reins of both the horses. He found, then, that by leaning over the edge of the hole, with his arm at full stretch, he could get a bottle down to the surface of the water. But filling it up was a different matter. The only bottles he had were made of stiff leather, and they were not heavy enough to sink beneath the surface - and there did not seem to be anyone down there who could push them under for him.

  In the end, the best Ashraf could contrive was to send down his shirt and bring it back wet. He was glad, though slightly puzzled, to find that the water was not at all foul or bloodied. But he did not have time to waste in wondering what could possibly have become of Luis Quintal. He wrung enough water out of the garment to fill his mouth twice over and moisten his head after only one immersion, but satisfying the thirst of the two horses was a task of a very different order. Having no alternative, he set to it with a will, as glad of the cloak of darkness as he was of the light of Morrslieb and the stars, which made it less than absolute.

  When he finally felt that he and the two animals were capable of moving on, the Arabian carefully replaced the capstone on the well and concealed it as best he could. He buckled both belts about his waist, making sure that Quintal’s sheathed sword and pouch were quite secure. Then he killed the boar. He dragged its body some distance away before butchering it. He loaded up the best of the meat, and left the rest for the vultures.

  Ashraf did what he could to obscure the fact that he had lingered so long, but he knew that his pursuers would need to be unusually stupid not to realise the fact. If the orcs and goblins found the well, they could afford to occupy the spot indefinitely, and leave it guarded while they sent search-parties after him. He, alas, could not risk staying nearby. But there was a well here as well as a road, he thought, so there must once have been a village, or a town… or even a city like the one the crazy Estalian had heard rumour of. The dunes must have covered the ruins of its buildings hereabouts, but if it had been a big place there might be walls still standing only a little further on.

  He was glad to have a reason to proceed, and a reason to hope that he might still evade his pursuers. Even a city fallen into ruin thousands of years ago might offer useful hiding-places. With luck, it might be a place where traps could be set, and a war of attrition waged with a chance of success, even by one clever warrior pitted against a dozen.

  Ashraf found that there were walls a little further on. The sand had covered most of them, but the stumps of hundreds of fallen columns still projected from the rubble. What must once have been an arterial road was littered now with all manner of stony debris, but it was easy enough to pick a moonlit course towards the few distant buildings that seemed more-or-less intact.

  There were far more signs of life here than there had been among the dunes, but the creepers that overgrew a few of the columns and the thick-boled trees beside the ancient highway were understandably parsimonious in the matter of putting forth foliage or fruit. The moon was not quite full, but its face seemed unusually large, clear and ominous as it sank towards its setting-place. Memet Ashraf was glad that he was heading south-east and did not have to look at it. The silence was oppressive. Any nocturnal hunters prowling among the ruins would take care to be discreet. But Ashraf doubted that there was vegetation enough to support a great many rats and lizards, which would in their turn support precious few snakes and jackals.

  He headed towards the buildings because they offered the best chance of a hiding-place where he might safely sleep, but the closer he came to them the less welcoming they seemed. Their sand-scoured walls seemed uncannily bright and baleful by the light of the setting moon, and when the moon actually went down their dark bulk seemed even more ominous.

  The Arabian reined in and looked back. For the last thirty paces or so the horses had been walking on smooth bare rock, leaving little or no sign of their passage, and there was more bare rock ahead. If the orcs and goblins followed him to this point, they would assume that he had gone straight on towards the buildings in search of shelter. Perhaps, he thought, it was time to make a detour.

  He set off at right angles to his former course, sticking to the smoothest and hardest ground he could find until he had put a good distance between himself and the ancient roadway. Then he cast about until he found a convenient covert between two fallen columns, where even a man with two horses would be invisible to anyone more than twenty paces away.

  Satisfied that he could not be found except by the most monstrous stroke of ill-fortune, Memet Ashraf unburdened the two horses and threw himself down on the ground to sleep.

  LUIS QUINTAL WOKE with a start as a spider ran across his face. He could feel the warmth of a gentle ray of sunlight on his face, but when he sat up he lost the sensation. His eyes were glued shut and he had to rub them before he could begin to force them open. The knuckles he rubbed them with were covered in something glutinous, and when he finally got one eye open he saw that they were caked with a horrid mixture of blood and dried slime.

  The light that filtered through a dozen high-set cracks was bright, but the space in which Quintal found himself was so vast and so cluttered that most of the rays seemed to be soaked up and nullified, so he paid it scant attention at first.

  He inspected his hands and forearms more closely, then his clothing. He was a sorry sight. His shirt and trousers hung in tatters, and the bare flesh was scraped and cut wherever it showed th
rough. The panic he felt when he saw that he did not have his sword-belt was only partly assuaged when he remembered that he had taken it off in order to make his brave descent into the well. He remembered that he had taken off his pouch, too, and that all his worldly possessions - such as they were - had been entrusted to the care of an Arabian pirate. He sighed, but he was not too dismayed - the Arabian in question was, after all, his friend.

  He forced the other eye open at last, and then looked around.

  Quintal realised immediately that he was in some sort of temple. Two rows of fluted columns extended before him to either side of what must have been the area in which the faithful made their devotions. The floor had been covered in tiles; all but a few had been displaced - some, apparently, by violence, the rest by the upthrust of sprawling roots. The open space had been colonised by six gigantic thick-waisted trees of incalculable antiquity, their crowns remarkable for their patchiness. Wherever a beam of light shone through the broken walls there were leaves gathered to receive it. They formed arcs that mirrored the sun’s path across the sky, but where no sunlight shone through, the branches were bare and shrivelled.

  Quintal knew that trees needed water as well as light. If it was astonishing that these sprawling excrescences had grown so massive with such a meagre supply of light, how much more astonishing was it that their roots must extend deep into the ground to the underground river that had carried him here? He had opened a passageway by breaking a door, but these trees had enjoyed no such luxury: they obtained their nourishment the hard way, by burrowing through stony foundations and the rock beneath.

  Between the pillars there were statues. They were almost totally obscured by the trees that grew around them, hugging them lovingly with their branches. They were certainly idols of some sort. It was almost impossible to make out their shapes, but Quintal got the impression that some resembled squatting toads with heads and horns like cattle, while others were like seated apes with the ugly heads of pigs, and horns on either side of their snouts. All of them, however, had a disturbing look of humanity about them, as if they were chimerical hybrids of human and animal elements.

  Quintal took particular note of anything that resembled a horn, however faintly, because his cousin Elisio had mentioned horns in connection with gems. Unfortunately, there was no trace of a gem in any of the places where the foreheads of these creatures might have been. All that Quintal’s inquisitive eyes could discern among the labyrinthine branches was that each of these figures appeared to have a single huge breast. It was as if they were female on one side of the body only.

  It would have been difficult to confirm this hypothesis even if he had been able to see the groins of the statues, and he did not try. Instead, he scanned the trees for signs of edible fruit, but he found none. Then he peered at the distant walls, his anxious gaze scanning for a doorway or low window. The temple appeared to be octagonal, although it was difficult to be certain with so much dead vegetation shielding the walls.

  He could just make out the place where the main doors of the temple must have been, but it appeared to be blocked. It was easier to see where the windows had once been, but they seemed to be blocked off too, at least in their lower reaches. The shafts of daylight he could see were entering through gaps just under the eaves or actually in the fabric of the roof, at least three times his height from the floor.

  He was not overly worried by this discovery, because the trees were extending their sturdiest branches to all those points of ingress. There were several that would be easily accessible to an agile and determined man, and there would be time later to consider the problem of getting down on the outside.

  It was only after a while that Luis Quintal looked down at the shallow bowl in which he had curled up to spend the night. He guessed that it must have been an altar: a sacrificial altar, in which far more blood must once have been spilled than the few clotted droplets he had recently shed… He studied the mess he had made, and concluded those dried-up libations seemed a far from trivial loss.

  Having realised that the platform was an altar, he turned around to look at the previously unseen figure that loomed above it - and this time, the panic raised was not so easily quelled.

  Unlike the smaller figures in the colonnade, this vast idol was not overgrown, nor had its shape been eroded by the ages. The representation was of a clothed figure rather than a naked one, and it was more like a human in other ways. The outline of a single huge breast could be seen on the right side of its body. It was only partly hidden by an open-necked jacket intended to resemble a knitted garment, or perhaps chainmail armour. The left half of the torso was, however, unmistakably masculine in its musculature. Residual flecks of colour suggested that the carved clothing might once have been painted in vivid pinks and blues.

  Its face was strangely beautiful, in spite of its asymmetry; it was surrounded by a lush mane of hair. The forehead bore two pairs of horns, and again there was no jewel set between them. On the other hand, there was a cluster of red gems decorating the head of the sceptre set in the idol’s right hand. The shaft seemed to be made of green jade.

  Quintal was instantly avid to possess those gems, but he could see that the sceptre would not easily be snapped off, nor the individual gems easily prised loose. Nor could he help wondering why the sceptre had not been snapped off long ago, or the gems broken away if this temple had been here for thousands of years.

  There were, in any case, more urgent needs to be attended to before he could make plans to improvise a sledgehammer or a lever, and a platform from which to work. Most important of all, he needed something to drink. He knew that abundant water was not far away, and he had no alternative but to grope his way towards it in the dark. He could have made up a bundle of dead twigs easily enough, but he had no means of lighting it because his flint and kindling-wool were in his pouch.

  Quintal let himself down from the altar, and looked around for the entrance to the corridor that would take him - if he could remember the turns he had made - to the door that he had broken. He saw his footprints easily enough, limned in blood and slime, but one of the shafts of light that illuminated them winked out - and then another.

  He looked up at the holes and saw to his dismay that two of them were partly occluded by broad green heads with exceptionally ugly faces. Half-hidden though he was, the orcs saw him almost immediately, and began calling to one another in triumphant excitement.

  Quintal realised, to his horror, that the same branches that he could climb up might easily allow the orcs - or their leaner companions, at least - to climb down. Given that he had no weapon, and had been so badly bruised when he fell into the underground river, he could not possibly make a stand against them.

  For once, he could not rouse his previously-indomitable optimism to a new effort.

  It seemed that he was doomed.

  MEMET ASHRAF HAD left the horses hidden when he found the tracks along the highway at first light. He cursed, realising that the orcs and goblins must have travelled through the night, determined that their prey should not escape. What was worse, he could only find traces of four wolves and two boars; two wolves and four boars must have been left behind - almost certainly at the well.

  The discovery that the enemy forces were evenly divided would have been encouraging had Quintal been there, but the odds against him would need whittling down before any fight came to close quarters. It was the fact that those at the well would be on their guard that made Ashraf turn towards the buildings whose pink roofs were already catching the sunlight.

  His approach was a model of stealth, but he cursed when he found that the attention of the orcs and goblins was directed elsewhere. A great deal of sand had been piled up against the west-facing wall of a large building - an octagonal structure markedly different from the architectural styles of Araby. There was so much sand in fact, that Ashraf assumed there must have been a substantial amount of rubble there already, perhaps to seal doors and windows. One of the orcs and one
of the goblins had climbed to the top of this treacherous slope, where there were cracks that allowed them to peer through. They were calling excitedly down to their friends, and demanding tools with which to make the cracks wider.

  What can they see there, Ashraf wondered? What could distract them from their vengeful hunt of him?

  He remembered what the Estalian’s cousin had said about idols encrusted with gems, like eyes in their heads. It was the standard stuff of travellers’ tales - he had heard dozens of similar tales in the souks of his native land. But there were cities buried in the desert sands, even in Araby. The world was ancient; it had been inhabited long before the rise of human civilization, perhaps long before the rise of elvish civilization. The abandoned cities of Araby had been looted long ago. The Badlands however had long been the province of orcs - whose rise to civilisation had yet to begin. These goblin allies would know the market value of gems, as their ancestors had learned their value from humans, perhaps less than a dozen generations ago. It was just conceivable that this temple had been here for thousands of years, and that its existence was known only to uncaring orcs who had insufficient brains to make them efficient looters.

  This is foolish! he chided himself. There is only one reason why treasures remain unlooted, even by scavenging scum like the greenskins - and that is that they are well-guarded. But Elisio Azevedo had sworn - again, after the invariable fashion of tale-telling travellers - that although he had clearly seen the gems, he had been quite unable to reach them, for fear of venomous snakes and monsters like crocodiles that walked. The last, at least, had to be false - not so much because Ashraf had no reason to believe that there was any such thing as a crocodile that walked erect, but because there was every reason to believe that there was no water here to support such creatures even if they did exist.