The Man of Gold

by M. A. R. Barker

  “We must leave,” Hele’a grated. “If my eyes served me aright, priestling, then I know what you have done with the other gewgaws. You shall suffer the more for that! Take them along!”

  They were dragged out into the corridor and up the stairs. Near the top the body of the other guard, Reshmu, crouched in a shrivelled mass against the wall. Water still dripped from his gaping mouth. Hele’a hurried them on into one of the branching passageways that Harsan had never entered. They passed musty boxes of temple vestments, the wreck of an ancient palanquin, tall standards from which the Kheshchal-plumes had rotted away. At last they stopped before a broken section of wall. A black tunnel mouth yawned there, and fragments of stone lay all about, half dissolved in puddles of water as though melted into sand by the washing of the sea.

  The ghastly water-creature stood there, looming almost manlike in the shadows.

  Behind them came voices, racing footsteps, wildly dancing torchlight. Harsan had a glimpse of an ebon whirlwind of arms and legs: Chtik p’Qwe, closely followed by the priest Siyun and two of the guardsmen from the upper chamber.

  Harsan cried out, and Eyil screamed too. The Pe Choi drew up short, facing the two brown-mailed soldiers. The monstrous Thunru’u did not pause but gathered Harsan up effortlessly and plunged forward into the dank, dripping tunnel. Hele’a followed with Eyil. The two armoured men scrambled into the hole as well, the last holding his short, barb-edged sword back to menace the Pe Choi.

  It profited him nothing. Chtik p’Qwe knocked the blade aside with one of his upper limbs, jerked it out of the man’s grip with his lower pair of hands, and reached in with his other upper arm to drive chitinous claws into the warrior’s face. Red splashed down over the brown armour.

  Something glinted burnished gold in Hele’a’s hand. He called, “Oh Nshe, One of Water! Flow into the stones and bring down the roof upon those who follow!”

  There was a damp, sucking sound, and the water on the floor seemed to flow backward toward the tunnel entrance as the tide ebbs from a sandy shore.

  Harsan still struggled in the Thunru’u’s grasp and thus saw what happened next. Moist earth came slithering down into the tunnel. For a moment Chtik p’Qwe’s arms waved wildly, and then the whole ceiling sagged. A torrent of mud and water and stones hid the Pe Choi from view, and all was dark.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jutting teeth of sharp stone bit at Harsan’s back and shoulders as the Thunru’u wrestled him through the narrow tunnel. After a dozen paces the way opened out, and he sensed that they had entered a larger cavern. Their footsteps went echoing and racketing off into invisible distances, and the shrill tinkle of dripping water came back to them from velvety silences.

  Hele’a of Ghaton ordered a halt, gave Eyil into the remaining soldier’s keeping, and struck flint to tinder. Soon he had a length of waxed tow alight, and with this he lit a torch from a pile seemingly placed there for just this purpose. The crackling orange blaze revealed an immense hall. Ornately carved, monolithic columns rose above their heads to support the unseen ceiling and marched away into black vastnesses. The near wall, through which Hele’a’s tunnel had been hacked, flowed and danced with graven gods, kings, and vertical blocks of twisting Engsvanyali script. These inscriptions likely proclaimed the eternal power and glory of the long-dead lords of Engsvan hla Ganga, the Golden Age that had succeeded the Priest Pavar and antedated the present Second Imperium of the Tlakotani Emperors by fifteen thousand years or more.

  Harsan jerked and wriggled in a sudden effort to escape, but the flabby paws of the Thunru’u held him as easily as a smith holds a piece of rare iron in his tongs. Eyil was conscious but dazed, limp in the soldier’s arms.

  Hele’a raised his torch and looked about. “Where is Shuk-kaino?”

  The other man shrugged. “Dead, master, I guess. The Pe Choi slew him, and then the two of them were buried together when the Nshe brought down the roof. ’ ’

  “What of the bag?”

  “I have it here. Shukkaino carried nothing.”

  “Let us see ...” Hele'a rummaged through the cloth bag, making only a halfhearted attempt to avoid damaging the fragile manuscript leaves. He brought forth the rolled parchment that Harsan had taken from the dead hand of Kurrune the Messenger.

  “What is this, priest Harsan?” he chuckled. “Another summons from the Emperor? Alas, no, just a clever couplet—this time taken from the Epic of Thaunii of Sokatis! One must be a literary critic to keep up with this Kurrune. But then he could not very well commit all his warnings to paper, could he? I would guess that he was coming to give you more detailed admonitions himself when Lord Sarku’s Worms of Death dropped upon him.” He broke off and chortled. “Splendid! A warning indeed, but not against us! Rather a caution against certain others!” (Did the man’s glance shift to Eyil?) “How suitable! We’ll leave this here for your grey-robes to find when they break through the wall. Then will they go galloping off in pursuit of the wrong prey!” He dropped the parchment to the floor and scuffed at it with his foot.

  “Now,” he continued, “if you are reasonable, young man, we shall have the other relics—and well I know where you have put them. Then we shall leave you and your naked lady to await the coming of the industrious priests of Thumis, who are doubtless burrowing even now to find our trail.”

  Harsan knew better. Those who had not feared to violate the Temple of Eternal Knowing, breach the Concordat, and slaughter Imperial soldiers would hardly stick at two more lives.

  He tried to temporise. “At least you can tell me why you have done this, Hele’a. Why the attempt upon me before, on the road—I was meant to die there, was I not?—and what does all this profit you tonight?”

  Thin fingers came up to brush back sparse, greying hair and tug at an earlobe. “Alas, poor Metlunish! Had you used my ‘Unimpeachable Shield’ upon him, your bones would now be decorating some peasant’s field. But you fought well, young priest, and then that accursed merchant spitted him like a haunch of Tsi'il with his crossbow bolt. You see, you should never have reached Bey Sii. I would then have had time to arrange for a different, more compatible scholar to study your Llyani pothooks.” “But anyone could have access to the relics—any temple—?” “One, there are those who must own what they desire! My master is no simpleton to stand gawking and yearning for the fine tunics in the tailor-shop! He is a Zrne who charges straight upon his prey—if you will pardon a poor foreigner his mixed metaphors, which are such a sin in your Tsolyani elocution...” He peered back into the tunnel. “Come, we cannot tarry here. Give me what you have concealed, and you shall have quit of us.—I can even sweeten your loss with a purse of gold heavy enough to buy three doxies as comely as this one here. Then you can return to your monastery and die an old man with a hundred grandchildren singing elegies to your sainted memory.”

  “I—I cannot. Slay me if you will.” Harsan realised that he really did not desire this latter event and cast about for some means of staying alive, something the Ghatoni would believe. “I do not know how to bring the relics back from—from ‘around the comer’ where I sent them. They are too big, bigger than anything I ever magicked before.”

  The other pursed his lips in disgust. “Cha! Leave it to an untried bowstring to fire the war-arrow! I sense that you speak at least a part of the truth. There is nothing for it, then, but to take you along. My master’ll have sorcerers who’ll make you cough up those relics as easy as a baby pukes up its lunch.” He turned to the warrior. “Give the girl over to me, Tluome, and do you bind him neat and tight!”

  The Thunru’u held Harsan while the soldier produced a length of braided leather cord and secured his wrists tightly behind his back.

  “The girl, master? Shall I do her off here?”

  Hele’a flashed a swift glance at Harsan’s stricken face. “I think not. She must go with us. If you slay her now our poor priest would grieve, and this would distract him from our purpose.” The man took Eyil, wrapped her street-cloak tightly abou
t her, and then wound more of the cord about her upper body so that her arms were pinioned to her sides. She made no protest but only averted her face.

  Hele’a turned for a last look into the tunnel. He held up a gold-glinting disc, an amulet. “Oh Nshe,” he called, “One of Water, return to your lair! My master will be grateful.”

  Was that the gurgling flow of the Nshe that Harsan heard, or was it the sound of distant digging in the tunnel? He tried again to delay. “At least tell me the why of this, Hele’a,” he pleaded. “Let me understand!”

  “So, the pawn must know why the game is played?” The Ghatoni struck off at a rapid pace across the murky, echoing hall, the Thunru’u and the soldier propelling their captives along behind him. “Too high for you, too high! Do you play Den-den? If you do, then know that you are only a white counter who has for the moment been promoted to a blue. Now greens and blacks appear on every side, each thrice as mighty as you!” He made a slashing gesture in the air. “Your player casts his throw—and loses! Cha! You are taken!—Now if you would give up those Llyani relics, you return to being a simple white counter, and the proud greens and blacks pass you by. But no, you are all puffed up with your puny importance! So must you pay the score—or rather your player pays the wager, while you, poor pawn,, are dashed from the board.”

  “My superiors laid a command upon me, and I cannot go against that.” He knew this would mean nothing to Hele’a. “Now, even if I would, I cannot retrieve the accursed things!” This sounded convincing. Intuitively he realised that as long as the relics were beyond the Ghatoni’s reach, he and Eyil would continue to live.

  The little man pursed his lips. “We shall see.”

  The great hall ended at last, and they entered a labyrinth of smaller rooms, galleries, passageways, staircases up and then down again, and wandering corridors. Some were embellished with the bas-reliefs and frescoes of the Golden Age, others were unadorned, and still others seemed hacked out of the living rock.

  Hele’a raised his torch to consult a scrap of parchment. They clambered down a steep circular stair into a new series of vaults. Here the walls were incised with the dagger-sharp symbols of the Bednalljan monumental script, floor to ceiling, in endless horizontal bands. This part of the labyrinth was half a score millennia older than that above!

  The little Ghatoni noted Harsan’s involuntary interest and said sardonically, “If it be ancient things you would have, young scholar, you must join the Lords of Change. Only such as we have access here.”

  “I have read of such places.”

  “Then you will have read of Ditlana, the ritual of the ‘Renewal of the Land Before the Faces of the Gods.’ Every five hundred years or so, the ancients razed their cities, tore them down to the foundations, filled in the lower rooms, and built anew upon the old. There are layers and layers beneath the older cities of the Five Empires. Some parts are open; others are lost and sealed. Did your grey-robes never tell you why so many cities sit upon such high mounds?”

  “I know of Ditlana—the last Seal Emperor to order it done in Bey Sii was Hejjeka IV, ‘The Restorer of Dignities,’ about eight hundred years ago. But I never guessed—”

  The little man warmed to his topic. Harsan tried to push the horrors of the previous hour into some comer of his brain and lock them there. Any means of keeping Hele’a occupied would allow them to live a while longer.

  “Some of the most sacred shrines of the Inner Circles of the temples are down here,” the Ghatoni continued. “Age adds to sanctity. Many areas are filled with stones and rubble, of course; otherwise the new cities above would come tumbling down. And if you can find your way down to the lowest regions, you’ll see whole sections that are tilted, tom asunder by earth-shakings, filled with ooze or black water, or are brimful of hardened flowing-stone, sent up by Vimuhla, Lord of Fire, from his incandescent hells beneath the world.”

  They turned a comer, and a muddy, wet smell assailed them. The torch guttered in a current of moist air. Hele’a sent the Thunru’u lumbering ahead, and metal squealed. The captives were prodded forward again, and the party emerged through a barred grating of bronze onto a rickety quay, beyond which the velvet waters-of the Missuma River glimmered before them in Kashi’s reddish light. The place was deserted.

  The Thunru’u took charge of Harsan and Eyil, cuffing him lightly when he would have spoken to her. The other two dragged a small skiff out of the shadows and slid it over into the water.

  Harsan again contemplated escape. His legs were free, even though his hands were bound behind him. If he could attract the attention of the River Watch, he could come back for Eyil... The monstrous Thunru’u seemed to divine his intentions and took that very moment to encircle his neck with its clammy fingers.

  Someone returned from the boat. A black, fish-smelling cloak was thrown over Harsan’s head, and a smart push sent him stumbling forward to tumble down into the little craft. Eyil sprawled on top of him with a muffled cry. A foot found the small of his back and stayed there, pinning him flat. He heard the rattle of oars being run out. Thole-pins thumped home. Water gurgled and lapped up through the oily planking, and the boat heaved as a second person came aboard. There was a further exchange of muttered words, apparently Hele’a ordering the Thunru’u back to its lair in the labyrinth.

  For a time there was only the rhythmic thump-swash of the oars, mingled with a litany of muttered grunts and curses. The soldier was no boatman.

  At last the hull grated against stone. Hele’a called out, and hands lifted Eyil away. Others plucked Harsan up and carried him like a bale of cloth over echoing cobblestones. More conversation, and then a hollow metallic boom as a heavy gate-bar shot back into its socket. Harsan was set roughly on his feet and half dragged, half pushed onward through what he sensed were hallways, down a stair, along another passage, into a room. He ended banging his shins upon a sharp-edged something.

  The hands turned him about, raised him, and threw him down upon a hard, seamed surface. Wood? The cloak was jerked away, and his wrists were twisted painfully up to be affixed to a clanking metal link.

  He lay on his side in semi-darkness. All he could see were the black silhouettes of men above him and chinks of red light from a lamp or a torch dancing upon armour. Booted feet shuffled away, and the shadows merged with the deeper blackness. “Eyil,” he called, “Eyil!”

  But he was all alone.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Harsan squirmed about to make himself more comfortable. He found that he lay upon an ancient, rutted table or bed-frame of wooden beams. One torch guttered high up in a bracket on the wall to his left, and he made out the dim outline of a tunnel-like doorway there. The walls were of well-mortared masonry, the stones cut precisely and small in the style of the Emperors of a millennium ago. Above him the ceiling rose in a series of vaults and groinings into the smoky darkness. He caught the glint of metal up there, some sort of hoist, pulleys, chains...

  A shiver went up his spine as he began to realise what sort of place this was.

  He rolled over and saw another door to his right, studded with bronze bolt-heads, and closed now. By lifting his head and straining his arms, which were beginning to ache, he could see a third wall some three or four man-heights beyond his feet. An arched alcove had been let into the wall there, raised about two paces above the level of the chamber, and reached by a little stair. The alcove was perhaps a man-height tall and four or five paces in width. He craned his head around for a look at the wall behind him and succeeded in glimpsing something that almost turned his bowels to water: great beams, the glitter of metal, sharp implements ranged upon a shelf.

  He thought furiously. On the eastern bank of the Missuma river there were few buildings: the vast complex of the Temple of Avanthe, that of Ketengku, a famous and ancient shrine to Sarku, Lord of Worms, and a few other, minor temples. There were no suburbs or palaces on that side of the River, for most of the area was reserved for the City of the Dead, where the Emperors of the past slept
beneath their squat pyramids or the rounded, crumbling domes of the Bednalljan Dynasty. All around these crowded the myriad little mausoleums of the nobility and the shapeless mounds that hid the naked corpses of the poor. The only dwellings were the tenements of the embalmers, professional mourners, ferrymen, amulet-carvers, wreath-makers, prayer-

  writers, and the other clans connected with the necropolis and the world of the dead.

  There were also the Tolek Kana Pits.

  He had seen their blind, cold, fortress walls from a parapet of the Temple of Eternal Knowing: the dreaded Imperial prison, founded before the Empire had been united by the first Seal Emperor. These dungeons were built upon the site of ancient, swampy pits into which the criminals of old had been thrown to suffer the bites of noxious insects and vermin. In their fastnesses were housed those whom the Imperium decreed should be removed from society, but who were condemned to live—after a fashion—rather than to die upon the impaler’s stake. There were filthy halls in which debtors prayed for some clan-relative to rescue them from the squalor and the disgrace; there were the barracks of the Legion of Ketl, those men in brown armour whose task it was to see that the will of the Imperium was done according to the laws of Tsolyanu; there, too, were pleasant apartments in which noble prisoners and political rivals dwelt until they were needed—or executed. There were also chambers such as that in which Harsan now found himself, buried beneath the earth where none might see, forever secret and silent concerning the fates of those whose Skeins of Destiny had been so tragically woven.

  But why?

  Why?

  Whom did Hele’a serve? In this lay the answer.

  Many knew of the accursed Llyani relics: the Imperium, the temples, some of the clans, possibly certain foreign lands... Not only were there spies upon spies and factions within factions, he supposed, but every temple had its library and its archives, and these likely contained more knowledge about these matters than Harsan had himself. Hele’a’s master could be no mere high priest or aristocratic intriguer, however, to be able to violate temples and command the use of one of the Empire’s most dreaded prisons! All he coujd say with certainty was that his present captors were allied with the Lords of Change and that they made use of the half-legendary creatures of the underworld below Bey Sii as easily as a peasant drives his Chlen-beast.