The Man of Gold

by M. A. R. Barker

  “How much longer can you sustain that light?” Harsan asked the Heheganu.

  “A few more hours. It draws only a little power from the Planes Beyond.” The creature held out the dancing globe of colourless radiance upon his palm. The greyish, almost noseless face already showed lines of strain, belying his words. “Then I must rest for a time.”

  “An exit?” Taluvaz Arrio panted. “You spoke of an exit.” “My elders told me of a passage near the Mouth of the World, one that leads beyond the city walls. We should reach it soon.” Itk t’Sa turned her long, bone-white snout to look at Morkudz. “This Mouth of the World: what.is it?”

  “A place from whence all of these subterranean chambers receive air.” The Heheganu pointed vaguely down the tunnel with his free hand.

  “An opening into the swamps, perhaps?” Taluvaz muttered to Harsan. The glassblower nodded hopefully.

  Tlayesha came to lean herself into the crook of Harsan’s arm for warmth. “You say you have never come here before,” she said to the Heheganu. “Can we not miss the exit and wander these catacombs forever? The lessons of one’s elders are not always well remembered.” She tore yet another strip from the tatters of her kilt to tie back her long hair.

  Morkudz did not deign to reply.

  Taluvaz Arrio fingered the cyclopean stones of the wall, great rough-hewn boulders fitted so closely together that even a Dri-ant would find it hard to squeeze between them. “I wonder who built this place,” he murmured to no one in particular. “The masons of the First Imperium were capable of such work, but this is different from their style. The Dragon Warriors? Even the Llyani?” He seemed genuinely interested.

  “We had best move on,” Harsan rubbed his own and Tlayesha’s limbs for warmth. “There may be other entrances into this place. Such tunnels are the favoured dwellings of Lord Sarku’s servants.”

  Taluvaz raised his head sharply, struck by an idea. “Tell me, priest, do you recognise where you are? Have you any sense of the nearness of your artifact—the Man of Gold? Can you find it from here?”

  Harsan had not even thought of this. Now he felt about carefully within his mind, looked up and down the tunnel. “No. There is nothing. I am as lost as you. Perhaps as I become more familiar—”

  “Possibly. But perhaps this area was built after the concealing of the Man of Gold and the placing of instructions into the teaching device you found. You would not recognise any passages added later.”

  It crossed Harsan’s mind to ask how the Livyani knew of the Globe of Instruction, but that could wait. As an experiment he opened his mouth to tell the man something of what the thing had taught him, but he found his lips still sealed by the ancients’ spell. He shut his eyes and struggled in silence for a moment. Apparently the inner core of his being did not entirely trust this urt)ane, tattooed stranger. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.

  Did the Livyani truly serve Prince Eselne and the Military Party? And if so, did he, Harsan, really want to give the Man of Gold over to that Prince’s faction: the generals, the lords of the high clans, and the hawk-eyed soldiers who preached war and expansion and the glory of the Imperium? He had heard talk of Prince Eselne in the monastery—who had not? The reports were good, as far as they went: a brave warrior, a ruler who admired noble action, if not always brilliant. But there were others with—or behind—the Prince who did not fit so well with Lord Thumis’ more peaceable philosophy. Still, better Eselne than Dhich’une—or Mridobu, or any of the rest...

  The suggestion of a clan was something else. Taluvaz could not guess how deeply he had struck when he had mentioned that.

  A clan! To be something more than “Harsan of Slave Lineage,” as the Master of the Tolek Kana Pits had named him!

  He could never gain a lineage—to be “Hi-Somebody”—since his ancestry was not known. But if only he could look to one of the great clans of the Imperium and say, “These are my people!” To him, as to most citizens of the Five Empires, this was more precious than gold and gems and slaves and palaces"... But would Eselne do this thing? The promises of princes were notorious: “written upon the surface of the stream,” people said.

  Yet... Harsan had yearned for this ever since he had been brought to the Monastery of the Sapient Eye. If only it were possible... !

  His head was beginning to ache, either with the cold or with all of this thinking. He wished, deeply and urgently, that these dangers and political manoeuvrings could be further postponed, pushed away, avoided yet for a time. Or ignored entirely! Forever!

  No, that was wishful fancy.

  Something told him, too, that further hesitation was no longer a useful option. Whether he liked it or not, he must take action. “Only a fool sits to admire the beauty of the forest fire,” as his Pe Choi foster-parents used to say.

  He suddenly felt a strange sensation of freedom, a realisation of something that had lain unrecognised behind the gates Of his consciousness all along. It was as though he stood in a prison and turned to see the cell door standing open!

  He was free—really free—to choose for himself whether he wanted to lead Taluvaz Arrio to the treasure or not!

  To be sure, he could not speak of the Man of Gold to those who were his foes, or to those whom he instinctively mistrusted; but a conviction grew in him that he could seek the thing for himself! And if he found it, he could dispose of it as he alone saw fit: he, Harsan—not as certain mighty Princes decreed, not as he was bid by any temple hierarchy, not according to the dictates of some vast and cryptic game of power played for distant—and debatable—goals! His Skein of Destiny belonged solely to him. “Back away from any problem and prune off all that is not essential,” Zaren had told him in the Monastery of the Sapient Eye. “Then trust yourself first and the Gods second.”

  Now he had the chance to find the Man of Gold. Once it was in his grasp, then all of the rest of the players of this game would have to wait for him to make his move! Taluvaz Arrio was wrong: if the thing were this valuable to the game, then he, Harsan, had a black counter to move, and he was only one step from the Sun Circle in the centre of the Den-den board! He might die for his decision; one of the great players might surround him with blacks and blues and contemptuously toss him off into the counter-box; but for a moment, at least, he, Harsan hi-Nobody, would be a power unto himself, a player with his own Skein to display to the Gods!

  This newfound sense of independence was a heady one indeed!

  He embraced Tlayesha quickly and got to his feet. “Come,” he said, “we have farther to go.” If he could get her out to safety, he would chance re-entering the labyrinth to search for the Man of Gold. He thought that he could convince Itk t’Sa and quite probably Simanuya to take Tlayesha—by force, if need be—on to some secure hiding place to await him. Should Taluvaz and his woman—or even the Heheganu—decide to join him in the search, then their fates were their own to endure.

  They turned back into the larger passage to face the wind. Another few dozen paces and the tunnel slanted off to the left; fifty steps farther and it turned in the opposite direction; then it doubled back again and yet again in a series of zig-zags. A door-sized aperture appeared in the wall to their right, opening into a narrow gallery that ran parallel to the main tunnel, out of the moaning blast. This they entered. At intervals there were smaller embrasures in the left wall of this smaller passageway, like windows, oval and waist-high; these looked into the circular wind tunnel beyond. Harsan muttered a question to Taluvaz, but the other returned only a grimace of puzzlement. The purpose of this arrangement was a mystery.

  They came at last to the Mouth of the World.

  Their little side gallery ended in a circular chamber, no more than a man-height in diametre, and barely high enough to stand erect. A loophole, angled to shield it from the blast, opened out into the wind tunnel. Across this latter, perhaps five long paces away, an identical aperture was visible in the opposite wall. The Heheganu gingerly extended his hand into the wind, a roaring hurricane here, and with th
e aid of his ball of light Harsan glimpsed the dull shine of a metal ladder through the corresponding narrow window facing them.

  The promised way up! Yet it might as well be as far away as one of the moons; no one could squeeze out into the main tunnel, cross against the buffeting tempest, and enter the hole in the other wall!

  There must be a matching gallery on the opposite side that led to the room visible there. The last left-hand corridor they had seen was the one in which they had paused to rest. They would have to retrace their steps.

  Simanuya was examining the far front wall of the room. Now he summoned Harsan. “Look, priest,” he shouted into Harsan’s ear, “another window here, but filled with glass.” His tone held a tinge of professional jealousy. “It is excellent work, flat, without bubbles or waves, undistorted.”

  Harsan looked. The neatly glazed little window gave a view of a tumbled landscape of high mountain crags and streaming dun-hued clouds. The sky was an ominous reddish orange, brighter below and darkening almost to black above. What time of day was it then?—More, how could there be peaks and jagged ranges of hills out there at all? Purdimal sat in the midst of a swamp, too far for Thenu Thendraya Peak to be seen—and too low, certainly, for it to be visible as they were seeing it now!

  Above, in the strangely ebon sky, myraids of tiny points of light glittered. Tekumel had none such; aside from the two moons and four sister planets, the skies Harsan knew were empty.

  He went to the other aperture, humped his body up into the embrasure, shielded his face with one arm, and thrust his head out into the screaming torrent of air. Through slitted eyes he looked to the right, toward the source of the gale. The corridor ended there. The strange landscape was visible beyond. All around the opening he saw a faint, greyish muzziness, a shifting, sparkling boundary line of something that was not something. It was no substance at all. His eyes hurt to gaze upon it.

  The bitter stench of an alien atmosphere was overpowering.

  He pulled back, gestured to the others, and began moving back up the side passage, the way they had come. Only when they had passed the last of the baffle-walls and were again within the left-hand side corridor did he stop and seek out Taluvaz Arrio.

  “In the epics heroes sometimes discover doors to other worlds. Is it not so? Have you seen or heard of such in reality?”

  The Livyani eyed him warily, not sure how much to reveal. “I have. Sorcerers call them ‘nexus points,’ places where the lines of force converge from one bubble of reality into the next. Some can find them, even summon or create them, open them, pass through into other Planes ...”

  “A—a friend told me that one can put objects ‘around the comer,’ into other-space. But a door—!” Briefly Harsan related what he had seen.

  Taluvaz nodded. “A door. A permanent source of air for these catacombs, a door that must have been opened and set here long ago—not by any civilisation now surviving but by the wise ones of the Latter Times, the sages of old who still understood the mysteries of the Many Planes. After the Time of Darkness, when the metal cities of the ancients were laid waste and brought down to ruin, there were still a few who could create such sorceries. Not even the mightiest of the scholars of my land could do as much today.”

  “The Time of Darkness? The Latter Times?” These were high matters. Harsan had only heard mention of them in the epics. This Livyani seemed to know more than did his teachers in the Monastery.

  “Once only the Foes of Man dwelt upon Tekumel: the Ssu, the Hliiss, and a few others. The epics tell us that men—such as ourselves—and certain other races came then from afar. They took aid from the Gods and made this world over into a home for themselves. Later there occurred a cataclysm, a sundering from all of the rest of their own Planes—for what reasons no one knows—and then there were great tempests, and movements in the earth and the seas, and the skies went dark—the little lights you saw were extinguished. Afterward when all was at rest again, there came a time when some of humankind still remembered: the Latter Times—”

  “And those who remembered slowly perished,” Itk t’Sa interrupted, her voice solemn, as though she chanted a litany. “The ages closed in, the metal things died and could not live again, their food and the substance of their bodies were exhausted— the metal iron, for one—and all became as we know it now. The world transformed, the skies no longer full of lights, the comings and goings of the Great Races ended, the doors of the cosmos shut upon Tekumel, all the glory gone.”

  “And after the long, slow afternoon of the Latter Times came the endless dark, the debasement of wisdom,” Taluvaz intoned. “Men and woman, Shen and Pe Choi, Ahoggya and Hlaka—all of those species who came with humankind—all turned to this world, the only one they now could know. Even the First Races, the Ssu and the Hliiss, became as they are, settling down as embers sink into ashes in a dying fire. Only after aeons did new peoples arise. Such was the ancestor of my nation. Llyan of Tsamra ...”

  “And in the Latter Times the Gods bestrode the lands. And fought amongest themselves for the power over all creatures. The Battle of Dormoron Plain, at which great Lord Ksarul stood against the Nine Gods—”

  “And the One Other,” Taluvaz whispered.

  “Yes. He too. And Lord Ksarul was defeated, and the Nine Gods and the One Other erected the Ten Walls around the Blue Room in which He is held asleep, forever, and the Ten Gates were made, and the Ten Keys and the Twenty Wards were scattered about the world for seekers to find ...” She stood silent, eyes closed.

  “And ‘She Who Must Not Be Named’ entered into this Plane, the Dread One; she who would end all things: all ‘being,’ even this veritable bubble of existance itself. ‘She Who Is the Enemy of All,’ the Goddess of the Pale Bone, mocked the Gods, weaker because of their war with Lord Ksarul and weaker still because of His absence, imprisoned for all eternity in the Blue Room. She and her He’esa, who served her from another of the Planes and who are called ‘The Seen Yet Unseen’ by the scholars of my temple, did battle with all of the Gods, and with humankind, and with those races who sided with the Gods. She was driven hence, indeed, but only for a time. Now it is said that she seeks to return ...” The Livyani’s sibilant, accented voice died down to a whisper.

  Harsan shivered, and Tlayesha pressed close against his side. Itk t’Sa looked away. Simanuya made the complex, curling sign of Lord Ksarul’s beetle and crescent moon in the air. Harsan had little sympathy for the Doomed Prince of the Blue Room, but he felt sorry for the poor glassblower now.

  The woman, Mirure, listened, mouth agape. If she understood their High Tsolyani at all, these were things that could awe her; the N’luss might be powerful warriors—and two handspans taller than the peoples of the south—but their abilities as sorcerers were the butt of jokes throughout the Five Empires.

  The Heheganu looked on, too, his lumpy grey features expressionless, his eyes like chips of black glass.

  At last Harsan said shakily, “If ever I would escape beyond the grasp of the Worm Prince I have only to hurl myself through that portal.”

  “And fall from the Gods know what height down into the chasms of an alien world,” Taluvaz breathed. “Yes, priest, that would indeed end it all for you.”

  “No!” Tlayesha cried. “We have not come to the ending of the Skein yet! I saw the metal ladder. We have only to follow this passage until we come to the one that leads thither.” She pulled away from Harsan, her face filled with exasperation, and began to feel her way into the blackness of the side gallery.

  At times his hesitations and ponderings must frustrate her, Harsan thought, but then somebody had to think before leaping! “The chick who flies before its wings are strong does not live to feel the sky,” he quoted to himself, one of the maxims he had copied out endlessly in the schoolrooms of the Monastery.

  Tlayesha did not stop but continued down the corridor. Harsan would have reached for the Heheganu’s ball of glimmering light but remembered in time that it could not exist apart from the cre
ature’s hand.

  “Wait—we are coming!” he called. “I do not speak yet of ripping the fabric of my Skein from the loom!” He urged the others to their feet and followed.'

  The passage slanted downward, then became a series of long, shallow steps. Water dripped from overhead. They must be under the swamps—possibly under the Crystal River itself. Masonry gave way to solid rock, the mighty island of basalt upon which Purdimal stood amidst its dismal bogs. Yet this was no cavern formed by nature. The marks of adzes were as fresh upon the walls as they had been when their wielders toiled to dig this place long ago in some forgotten age.

  They entered an irregular, oval, steeply sloping chamber. At the lower end the floor was submerged beneath a creased, undulating surface. Mirure poked at this cautiously with the butt of her torch, but it was solid: stone.

  “Liquid rock,” Taluvaz said, “turned hard and cold now, the leavings of some eruption from Lord Vimuhla’s flaming hells from under-earth. We have such fiery mountains in my land, and one can walk upon ashes and cinders for hundreds of Tsan around them.”

  “Three exits hence,” the Heheganu panted. The effort of maintaining his light showed ever more clearly upon his face. “One left, one right, one there in front.”

  They could see that the tunnel directly ahead of them sloped down into the frozen ripples of Lord Vimuhla’s blackened, stony sea. After a few paces the ceiling was too low to continue. Whatever lay below was sealed, now, forever.

  “The left-hand passage takes us back toward the cavern where we collapsed the roof,” Harsan said. “The right, then. That should lead toward the Mouth of the World.”

  There were steps here, too, however. They wound down, turned, twisted, went this way and then that, until all sense of direction was lost. The ancient adze-marks kept pace with them. The tunnel was barely wide enough to walk, not high enough for tall Mirure to stand erect.