The creatures that Quintal had called ushabti made no reply, but they sighed again when the first goblin was cast aside, the blood having been wrung from its body by the monster’s patient massage. Another was brought forward to supply a second dark fountain.
‘You have been bloodless far too long, my patient pets,’ Quintal went on. ‘We have all become thirsty while the desert was our bed, but the roads will soon be clear, and the traffic will come again, as warm and wet and foolish as ever. Nothing is ever lost, my cryptosaurian soldiers; every favourite that has been set aside becomes beautiful again. Periods of absence renew her lovely unfamiliarity.’
Again, the bipedal crocodile-men made no reply, but they sighed again when the goblin was replaced by an orc, which bled blackly with astonishing generosity. Its unusually powerful heart stubbornly refused to admit that it was dead.
Ashraf could not see what was happening to that portion of the orc’s blood that flowed into the shallow bowl. Not a drop spilled over the sides and when the used-up corpses were thrown aside, their clothes were by no means soaked. The Arabian could see well enough, however, that even though Luis Quintal had been liberally bathed in exceedingly dark blood, he did not seem to have been significantly stained. Only the red glow in his eyes had become more glaring.
If Quintal did not come here by the same route as the rest of us, Ashraf thought, there must be a passage of some kind connecting the bowels of the temple to the bottom of the well. If it is navigable in one direction, it must be navigable in the other. If the trees are infested with snakes, no matter how hesitant to strike they might be, there is probably no safe way back to the hole in the roof. But the dark doorway from which Quintal emerged would be easy enough to reach if there were fewer monsters in the way. What I need is a distraction that would give me time to make a run at it.
While the fourth victim was donating his blood to the thirsty altar, Ashraf took stock of his remaining equipment. He still had Quintal’s sabre, but there was little to be done with it. Apart from the sabre, his own dagger, quiver of arrows and the stolen water bottle, all that he had was Quintal’s pouch, whose exact contents he had not yet bothered to ascertain.
As the crocodiles sighed yet again, Ashraf took the pouch from his second belt and tipped out its contents to ascertain the sum of Luis Quintal’s worldly goods.
There was an embroidered handkerchief, the key to a lock that was presumably more than six hundred leagues away, a device for extracting stones from horses’ hooves, a mummified hare’s foot, a small pair of scissors, a tangled ball of thread but no accompanying needle, a spare belt-buckle, a screw of tobacco but no pipe, a whetstone, an ill-made flintlock with a wispy hank of kindling-wool, a short length of twine and three brass rings which could be used for the attachment of various items to bridle and harness.
Memet Ashraf was a simple man, who did not believe in carrying clutter, but he was suddenly glad that Luis Quintal took a different view of the accumulation of personal possessions.
‘If I get out of this alive,’ Ashraf muttered, ‘I’ll never laugh at another effete Estalian, no matter how many of them I might have to murder in the course of my piratical pursuits.’
So saying, he took up the flintlock and the kindling-wool, then moved sideways until he was in close proximity to a substantial aggregation of ancient branches, that had been dead and dry for hundreds of years. He struck a spark, which immediately set the kindling-wool alight - and when he set the kindling-wool among the branches, they caught fire with amazing alacrity. It was as if they had been as hungry for fire as the altar had for blood.
Ashraf retreated from the gathering blaze, making his way swiftly to an empty angle of the octagonal temple, which was almost as far from the cramped and twisted foliage of the ancient trees as the dark doorway was.
There were two possible routes to that doorway from where Ashraf now crouched, neither of them quite straight. He could go to the left of the altar or to the right. There was far more space to the right, but that area was crowded with emburdened ushabti. Behind the altar there was, for the moment, no one but Luis Quintal - who might well have moved by the time Ashraf made his dash, and might not be inclined to stop him even if he had not.
While Ashraf made ready to run, the fire made rapid headway.
Not one of the six trees that had taken root in the temple’s interior had been growing for less than a thousand years. Each one had fought long and hard for every drop of water its questing roots had dragged from the stony earth below. Their patterns of growth had been built into their seeds, and they had had no alternative but to put forth branches in every direction, even though those which could not find sunbeams to nourish them had withered and died in consequence.
Trees have no eyes with which to see, and no minds with which to plan, so they had continued putting out new branches wherever there was space, even if they would never find a ray of light to bring forth leaves from their living heart.
The fire leapt from one branch to another with an appetite that would have been incredible in a man or an orc, perhaps even in a god. White smoke billowed out in churning clouds, but could not choke the flames, which hurled themselves upwards and outwards: towards the roof-space filled with warm and moistureless air, and towards the gaps where more air could be sucked out of the desert sky.
The gaps were not easy to reach because of the living and leafy wood that clustered about them, but the fire was burning hotter with every second, and nothing could stand in its way.
The ushabti were dead and dry too. The stricken ones that were stretched out horizontally lay close enough to the woody litter on the floor beneath the trees to be caught in the sudden rush of fire that swept across the paving stones.
Blades had not hurt the creatures, but avid fire could. The recumbent ushabti burst into flames first, followed almost immediately by the ones still standing.
Unfortunately for the goblins and orcs, the animate torches were too stubborn to release their iron grip upon their scaly captives, even though they were on fire. The greenskins had been silent while they waited churlishly for the knife, but they could not be silent now. They began to scream. Ashraf had always thought humans were good screamers, but he had never weighed up the opposition. He wasted no time in privately conceding that orcs were very good screamers indeed.
Five greenskins had already died on the altar, but it was obvious that the remainder would not be donating their blood to the ambitious idol or its zealous new disciple. It was obvious, too, that Memet Ashraf could not remain where he was for a second longer, else there would be nothing left to breathe in the smoke-filled air.
Ashraf began his dash with a blade in each hand, hoping that Luis Quintal would have sense enough not to get in his way. He might even abandon his recently discovered vocation and revert to his former career as an honest thief and plunderer.
IN ALL HIS twenty-three years, Luis Quintal had never felt better than he did when he plunged his borrowed dagger into the flesh of the first sacrifice. The good feeling began before the first drop of arterial blood touched his skin, but there seemed nothing strange in that. Common men, as he knew only too well, found it easy to distinguish between anticipation and fulfilment, but he was no longer a common man. Gods, he presumed, had sufficient will power to alloy intention and reward into a perfect whole, and this facility must be one of the echoes that resonated in the souls of their favourite acolytes.
The Estalian did not feel the black blood raining upon his face even when the huge-hearted orc was offered to him. It was already a part of him. He did not thirst for it because he did not need to; it had already undergone whatever process of digestion had been necessary to convert it into the fabric of his own being. The tattered remnants of his shirt did not become soaked, for the sacrificial blood - no longer bound by the common laws of fluid dynamics - passed right through the material and into his breast.
Quintal felt wonderful, and knew that it was because he was full of wonders. He kne
w, of course, that they were evil wonders, but he had never made any conspicuous effort to be a good man and his only regret was that he had wasted his whole life trying to embrace evil as it needed to be embraced. He knew now how trivial the record of his petty thefts, murders and treasons had been. Now he knew the luxury of wholehearted self-indulgence.
One consequence of Quintal’s new-found inability to distinguish anticipation from fulfilment was that he had become incapable of surprise. Events could no longer astonish him, even when they were genuinely unexpected or inconvenient. He was above annoyance now, and beyond fear, so when the fire leapt up like a berserk giant to consume the paradoxical trees that were more dead than alive, the questions that sprang to his mind were utterly casual, though they did contain a measure of wonderment at the quirky ways of fate.
Did I request a holocaust, he asked, flippantly? Do I require an orgy of conflagration? Is this necessary to the renewal of my amusement?
Quintal watched, more bewildered than irritated, as the ushabti burst into flame. The excessive heat of their combustion caused the blood that was still confined in the intended sacrificial victims to boil, and then to degrade into odorous black tar.
The space behind the altar filled up with cloying smoke, but the clouds did not obscure Quintal’s new power of vision. His blood-fed lungs drank in the particles without difficulty, as if they were a mere spice lightly sprinkled on the healthful air.
Something came hurtling out of the shadows to the right of the altar: something blind and mad, impelled by panic and determination. The thing had two arms and two legs, but it was too long-limbed to be a crocodile and not green enough to be an orc. It carried a blade in each hand, one of which bore an uncanny resemblance to the sabre that had once been Quintal’s most prized possession. But neither hand made any attempt to cut him down. The racing form seemed quite content to knock him out of the way so that it could run past, heading into the shadows on the opposite side of the altar.
A human, obviously, Quintal thought, as he landed flat on his back, feeling neither jarred nor bruised, nor even unjustly insulted by the tumble. What else is human life but a blind flight from one shadow to another, impelled by helpless panic and mistaken determination, supported by borrowed weapons in whose use one is woefully inexpert?
But when Quintal rose to his feet again he remembered that even humans were not complete fools. Sometimes, there were good reasons to flee madly from shadow to shadow. There may be adequate intellectual justification for an insane hope that the shadows might contain a safer exit than those they had forsaken. Sometimes - for example, when a temple roof began to fall - there were good reasons why even an acolyte of a god of luxury might forsake the altar upon which he had been reborn. There might be a kind of safety to be found in mundane shadows.
Quintal had to suppose, as he looked up at the falling roof, that only a miracle of sorts had kept it from collapse. It must have been considerably weakened by the passage of the centuries - and it was, after all, an item of human manufacture, however divinely inspired. Nothing built by humans could last forever; the miracle was that it had lasted any time at all. The orcs had obviously brought the ancient roof to the very limit of its endurance - and the unexpected holocaust that had so rudely interrupted his sacrificial ritual had administered the coup-de-grace.
So now the roof was falling.
Perhaps, Quintal thought, I ought to get out of the way.
Ordinarily, it would not have been the kind of decision that warranted careful consideration or in-depth discussion, but the Estalian did not move immediately. He formed the intention to move, but intention was still strangely entwined in his consciousness with fulfilment. He felt - oddly enough - that he had already moved.
He also felt - perhaps even more oddly - that there was something else that had yet to happen before he moved.
So he waited, and watched the stony fabric of the roof disintegrate as it fell, like a thundercloud turning precipitately to rain and hail.
He watched modestly sized blocks descend upon the statues in the crumbling colonnade, smashing their ugly heads and misshapen bodies. And he saw other blocks, of an altogether more immoderate magnitude, descend upon the huge idol which loomed above him still, pulverising its head and breaking both its arms - including the one that held the gem-encrusted sceptre.
When the severed forearm hit the stone floor the hand shattered into thousand shards - but the jade sceptre rolled away, seemingly immune to all injury.
Luis Quintal walked calmly away from his station behind the altar, ignoring the lumps of stone that were bursting like bombs as they hit the unforgiving floor on every side. He picked up the sceptre, and rested the glowing head on his right shoulder. Then he marched, with military precision, into the dust-shrouded shadows which concealed the doorway to the underworld.
MEMET ASHRAF HAD fallen twice in the pitch-black corridors, and had rapped his knuckles a dozen times against invisible and unforgiving walls, but he had kept on relentlessly and he had refused to drop either of his blades in order to liberate his fingers.
Had it not been for the fire he might have become irredeemably lost. The fire was so fiercely avid for air that it sucked a considerable wind from the underworld beneath the temple, and all that the Arabian had to do was keep his face to that wind. That was not a hard thing to do, given that the wind was so cool, so clean and so moist.
In the end, the draught brought him to the flight of steps that Luis Quintal had climbed in the wake of his misadventure in the well. Ashraf might have stumbled on the steps, bruising himself badly as he tumbled into the water, but luck was with him. Although he could not see anything at all he was able to set his blades safely down beside him, within easy reach. He seated himself on a step with only his booted feet in the water, so that he could scoop up water in his cupped hands and pour it gratefully upon his head.
He drank a little, but only a little - he had no wish to make himself sick.
He lost track of time while he sat there, exhaustedly, but he was glad to do it. Time did not seem to have been on his side in the last few days, and he was pleased to have an opportunity to set it aside for a while. Perhaps it was kind of time to let him do that - or perhaps the concession was one more trap to catch and torment him. Either way, he did not look up again until his eyes were stimulated by light.
As soon as the red gleam appeared Ashraf was seized by the fear that he had lingered too long. He ought to have plunged himself into the subterranean river immediately, no matter how desperate a move it had seemed.
The red light showed him the bare space which he had crossed in order to get to where he was, but it also showed him the walls that slanted towards the aperture from which he had emerged.
The walls were covered in fungus and strange dark-blooming flowers, whose blossoms were nests for scorpions the size of his hand. The scorpions seemed to be prey, in their turn, to the kinds of leeches that preferred insectile ichor to vertebrate blood. No part of this revelation could or would have frightened him, had it not been for the eerie quality of the red radiation. There was something about that glow which invited terror. Ashraf felt the beat of his alarmed heart increase, and knew that he was in trouble.
The light came from the sceptre that had formerly been held by the idol in the temple: the sceptre that had been adequately protected from theft for thousands of years. Luis Quintal had it now.
The artefact must have been heavy, but Quintal seemed quite comfortable with it.
The Estalian was resting the glowing head of the device upon his shoulder, but Ashraf doubted that he was doing so to obtain relief from its weight. It seemed to the Arabian that Quintal simply wanted to keep the glow as close to his face as possible, to maintain the light in his own glowing eyes.
‘Memet Ashraf,’ Quintal said, in a perfectly level tone. ‘It’s good to see you again. Do you have my sword and pouch?’
‘Yes,’ Ashraf said, rising slowly to his feet as he spoke and adjusting
his stance so that he could face the newcomer squarely. ‘The blade is as sharp as it ever was, but the pouch is a little lighter. I fear that your supply of kindling-wool is quite exhausted.’
‘No matter,’ Quintal said. ‘We are partners in this enterprise, after all. We must pool our resources as well as our rewards.’
Ashraf was mildly surprised by this statement, but he was reluctant to take it at face value. He had a suspicion that Quintal was offering him more than a half-share in the gems that starred the sceptre’s head, and he was not sure that the treasure would be easily divisible.
The Arabian stooped to pick up Quintal’s sabre, taking hold of it by the blade so that he could extend it hilt-first to his companion.
Quintal accepted the offering, and waited for Ashraf to take off the belt, the sheath and the pouch as well. When Ashraf tried to pass them to him too the Estalian raised his elbows slightly to indicate that his hands were full. Then he turned slightly, using body-language to indicate that Ashraf might loop the belt around his waist and fasten it, so that the sabre would be safely sheathed.
Ashraf knew that this would be his last chance. If he intended to attack his former partner, the best thing would be to do it now; it would be far more difficult to do it later. There did not seem to be any urgent necessity to do so… but to what was he committing himself, if he accepted the resumption of their association?
The Arabian hesitated. ‘You have the black blood of an evil god within you,’ he observed, mildly. ‘I saw you sacrifice the greenskins.’
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