The Man of Gold

by M. A. R. Barker

  “I have heard tell of this place,” Simanuya said. “Acquaintances of mine in the Splendid Paradise have returned with tales—”

  “Tomb-robbers!” Taluvaz sneered. “The mighty heroes of the Age of the First Imperium now lie helpless prey to petty thieves, burrowers in the earth, looters, eaters of carrion. . . !”

  “As may be, Lord,” the glassblower displayed offended innocence. “Yet what use fine grave-goods to these folk? Who’s to eat from their golden plates or drink from their crystal goblets?”

  Taluvaz turned away impatiently. Those who pillaged tombs in Livyanu were handed over to the cold mercies of the Vru’uneb, the intelligence arm of the Temples of the Shadow Gods. He himself had participated in the judgments meted out to such culprits, for Lord Qame'el honoured those who honoured their ancestors.

  He walked over for a closer look. Several of the domes showed openings in their smooth casings; someone—likely Simanuya’s friends—had indeed visited here. They had been most assiduous in their willingness to share the wealth of the dead.

  Morkudz returned. “No other exits,” he reported. “Either go back to those last intersections or find some hidden way out of here. Or join these notables in their final rest.”

  “Do the tombs connect to one another—or to further passages below?”

  “Ai, some do, Lord,” Simanuya said. “Some go down to a single guesting chamber where food and drink were left. Beneath the floor-ofttimes a single stone slab a handspan thick—are the crypts proper. Other shafts open out below into several rooms and storage places for the goods of the noble person—ah— honourably reposing there. A few are still larger and join to other sepulchres.”

  “An expert upon the burial customs of the ancients!” Morkudz commented acidly.

  “We all must live, masters. Never have I duped a rich traveller with a maze of mat walls and lost him beneath Old Town so that he could be caught and ransomed—or killed and plundered—as some I know have done.” He returned the Heheganu look for look.

  “Peace, the two of you.” Taluvaz wandered back towards Mirure. He saw that she had risen to her feet and was watching the entrance.

  “You hear something?” he asked her softly in Livyani.

  “I do,” she replied in the same tongue. Her slim sheath-knife hung ready in her hand. “Not the shape-changers, I think. Echoes! armor, clanking, quicker footsteps. Soldiers? They are distant yet, but they come.”

  “Yes, love,” Taluvaz sighed. “We must move quickly.” He stood close to brush a hand against one rounded breast just visible beneath the ruins of her tom and stained tunic. She gave him a hidden look of adoration, her face averted so that the others might not see.

  Mirure had been gifted to Taluvaz by his clan-fathers when the Hierophant ofTsamra had first pricked the glyph of the Tenth Circle of the Temple of Qame’el upon his right cheek. He had then been forty, she perhaps no more than fifteen summers. What lay between the towering N’luss girl and the diminutive, urbane, middle-aged Livyani was theirs alone to share.

  “Ohe, glassblower!” he called. “Naturally your bazaar storytellers will have mentioned which crypts are dead-end shafts and which lead to further labyrinths below?”

  “Great lord—”

  “Oh, spew it forth! Else we shall all be a repast for Sarku’s worms! Someone approaches.”

  Simanuya glanced anxiously around, counted domes. “That one, I have—ah—heard, master. The one with the triangular hole in it...”

  Together they got the priest and his woman on their feet, she still weeping, he with a face as waxen as an incense-candle.

  Harsan turned to Taluvaz. “We—I—must try to carry on Itk t’S’a’s mission. In her memory, as a Tii Petk—speak to the Underpeople—”

  “That water has not flowed down the river yet. Come, pursuit is near.” Taluvaz took Harsan by the hand. He noted with distaste that the young man’s fingers were cold and clammy. It felt odd to touch anyone but one’s beloved, one’s children, or the others of one’s sodality in the Mysteries of the Temple of Qame’el. To lay a hand upon another person was a ritual act of personal identification in Livyanu.

  Something would have to be done to bring this Harsan back to the reality of their predicament. Taluvaz paused to consider the alternatives: curse him, slap him, remonstrate with him—what else? He decided to continue kindness for the moment. “On, priest Harsan, this dome over here. There will be opportunities later. All things in their times.”

  The others had already crawled through the narrow aperture into the dome. The floor within was covered with shattered pottery, stone tablets engraved with the powerful virile script of the First Imperium, heaps of fallen plaster and rubble, and a heavy, circular slab of stone that had once hidden the opening of a shaft in the centre of the floor.

  Morkudz stooped nervously to hold his ball of radiance over this pit. “Those crevices—handholds?”

  Simanuya growled, “Hold the light. I’ll show you how to get down.”

  They descended, the glassblower first, then the Heheganu, Harsan, Tlayesha, and Taluvaz. Mirure came last, dagger clenched between her teeth.

  “No haste,” Taluvaz whispered. “Our light will not be visible to any outside this dome, and they’ll look for other exits before starting to search each tomb—if they believe us to be here at all.”

  The shaft was perhaps six or seven man-heights deep. At one point a tiny crawl-way led off to the side, but Simanuya forbade them to enter this, saying that it only became smaller and smaller until one could go no farther. Sharp ridges and projections of rock had been constructed around the circumference of this side-tunnel along its length at an inward-pointing angle, making it easy to move forward but difficult to go back. The bones of many previous violators of this place were heaped there, he added. Even Taluvaz forbore from inquiring how he knew.

  The bottom of the pit was littered with shards of stone, the remains of a plug that had once sealed a low, horizontal passage. Two or three paces along this, and they entered another chamber. This was filled with crumbled pottery, the desiccated remains of wooden chests and boxes, standard-poles from which wisps of dim red and gold banners still hung, cult symbols of beaten gold, tables that had collapsed beneath the weight of their marble and onyx inlaid tops, and a myriad other things too numerous to see all at once in Morkudz’ flickering illumination.

  Mirure gave a soft cry and bent to pick up a gold-hilted sword from the ruin. The blade showed black and pitted, but it was steel. In this dry, musty place it had corroded but little. Who knew how strong the metal was after the passage of so many centuries? Still, a sword was a sword.

  “Your acquaintances did not exhaust this place completely,” Taluvaz observed coldly.

  “Only the best jewellery and the finest artifacts are worth bearing forth,” said the glassblower. “That sword J'our warrior-girl found would have brought much money, had—ah, someone seen it.” He poked ruefully in a mouldering mass that might once have been a delicate casket of carven Ssar-wood and extracted a ring of massy gold and dark, somnolent peridots. This he pocketed with an apologetic smile. “It is a long and dangerous path back from here.”

  “It would seem that you may know that path.”

  “He is a veritable guidebook, Lord,” Morkudz put in.

  “And, like any book long unread, he would benefit from a little dusting and a shaking out of his pages,” Taluvaz looked over at Mirure.

  Simanuya qualed. “Well, it is true that I have been an industrious student of the past, Lord—of a practical nature, one must admit. Ah . .

  “Then you could lead us out of this catacomb if we can evade our foes long enough to send them haring off in some other direction?”

  “I—I think so, master. Not easily, of course, but ...” Morkudz made as though to spit. “My people know this Simanuya, Lord Taluvaz. He could lead us a dance around the innermost shrines of the ancient gods below Purdimal, and never a priest would see us! He is almost more native to this
place than we, as were his vile fathers before him!”

  It was Taluvaz’ turn to screw up his lips, but his mouth was dry and no spittle came. He addressed Simanuya. “And I suppose that you could lead us hence for some small but suitable recompense?” A thought struck him. “La, when we met the Sramuthu, were we not close upon the exit? Was that route not as familiar to you as your own greasy palm? How else do you—your ‘acquaintances’—find their way hither to relieve these poor corpses of their unused wealth?”

  The glassblower dug a sandalled toe into the rubbish, bent to retrieve a small coin and rubbed it on the stained front of his leather vest; he tossed it back when it showed only the green verdigris of copper. “As you say, Lord. I am somewhat travelled in this part of the labyrinth. We would have soon come to the exit, had it not been that the fool Pe Choi chose to dispute passage with the Sramuthul" He let out a windy sigh. “Let those who follow us go by, and then I’ll take us out of here— into the very cellars of the Livyani Legate’s house or into the palace of the High Governor, as you please.”

  “So you shall.” Taluvaz turned around. “What else is here, good Simanuya?”

  “Three exits. Lord. That one leads to another storage chamber, now pillaged, alas, by disrespectful persons. The second—the one behind that clan-banner—goes to a similar room, and from thence a crawl-hole has been dug into a neighbouring tomb chamber. The sarcophagus there is overturned and sadly despoiled, and there is no way up into the guesting room and its shaft above. The third is promising, as I—ah—recall hearing. It opens into another sepulchre: several rooms like these. One can easily clamber up the exit shaft there.”

  “We can stand in the passage between these two places?” Mirure asked. “My Lord, if our foes come down this shaft, we go up the second, and if instead they choose that one, we retreat up this one, the way we came.”

  The plan of their refuge proved to be as Simanuya had described, and Mirure’s idea was adopted for lack of any better. Taluvaz strove to bring Harsan and Tlayesha back into the discussion and was relieved to find both of them responding. The resiliency of the young! There were compartments in the mind, he knew, and the death of Itk t’Sa must be shut into one of these in order for life to go on. Grief, mourning, vengeance—and final acceptance— could come later.

  They explored the tombs quickly. All of the storage cubicles had been roughly looted; all were rubbish-filled, musty, and dry. In the floor of the guesting room of the adjacent tomb they discovered a hole. Of this, the glassblower disclaimed knowledge, saying that it was new to him, and that it must lead down into the sarcophagus chamber. He stood to admire the work; after all, as he remarked, it took real enterprise to hack a man-sized hole through a basalt slab a handspan and a half thick!

  Morkudz again allowed his light to fade, and they sat together in darkness so total that their eyes themselves created colours and phantasms, and the spirits of the ancient dead awoke to dance before them against the ebon curtain. The air grew close and bad, smelling of dryness and sweat and fear. Harsan allowed Itk t’Sa one last sad, mental farewell and found that his mind was already nibbling at the problem of breathable air here in this sepulchre. There ought to be cross-currents down the two open shafts from the great cavern above, should there not?

  Tlayesha dozed in his arms; from close by, on his other side, he heard the cadence of the Heheganu’s heartbeat, its rhythm strangely different from his own. Rustling noises announced that Simanuya was still grubbing about in the rubbish for coins, stones, and whatever else the Gods might disclose. No sound emanated from where the Livyani and his warrior woman leaned together against the wall.

  Only a Kiren or two could have passed; then something grated and slithered above. Colourless light, brighter than that of Morkudz’ spell, trickled down their original shaft to raise gleams and shadows amongst the wreckage of the funeral furniture.

  Harsan was on his feet, through the storage room and the narrow passage beyond, and into the neighbouring guesting chamber almost before he knew it. Taluvaz and the Heheganu still arrived before him, however, and a large but feminine hand upon his shoulder told him that Mirure followed.

  He guessed from the chaotic shadows that someone ahead had started to climb up into the second shaft: probably Taluvaz Arrio.

  Noise exploded there: rattling, scratching, banging, and then a sound like a sack of grain striking the planks of a wooden floor. A voice gave a choking cry—Taluvaz?—and Harsan fell jarringly against the wall as Morkudz tumbled back upon him.

  Something wet and unpleasantly familiar splashed Harsan’s legs. He struggled beneath the Heheganu’s weight and felt the nonhuman muscles stretch as the creature strove to rise. A foot, probably Tlayesha’s, stepped hard upon his thigh. He grunted involuntarily and rolled aside. Morkudz’ radiance, flaring and dimming like a lamp in the wind, brought the chamber to view as a painter unrolls a picture before an audience.

  The Livyani lay half-stunned beneath a short, robust-looking man in a leather tunic and grey Firya-cloth kilt. The fellow lay face down, long braided hair hiding his features.

  Mirure pushed past to deal with the intruder, but there was no need. At first Harsan thought that the man had been struck unconscious in his fall, but when the N’luss girl pulled him over, they saw that he lay in a spattered pool of scarlet. Whoever he was, he was dead, his tunic slashed across the breast by what must have been a terrible blow from a heavy weapon: a halberd or a two-handed axe. He was no one Harsan knew: thin-featured, wisp-bearded, perhaps ten years older than Harsan himself. He had the look of a hired mercenary.

  Tlayesha tended to Taluvaz while Mirure and Harsan examined the body. The man now bore no weapons. He wore a helmet, shoulder pauldrons, and arm-wrappings of scuffed, common Chlen-hide; his clothing told them nothing. From a pouch at his waist, however, the N’luss girl extracted a handful of copper and silver coins. Most of these she threw down, but one she handed to Harsan. It bore an inscription in square, jagged symbols and, on the other side, a portrait of a thick-set, balding man with a square-cut beard.

  The Baron Aid. Harsan had often seen Yan Koryani coins at the Monastery of the Sapient Eye.

  Taluvaz Arrio was sufficiently recovered to reach out for the coin. He had suffered no more than scrapes and bruises, but, as Harsan noted wryly, he would have to pay a call upon his tattooer for repairs! The man’s boot had caught Taluvaz just at his receding hairline, and a longish flap of tom skin there dribbled blood down over one ear.

  “Others have brought their own wine to the feast,” Harsan said fiercely. “The Yan Koryani appear to be quarreling with Lord Sarku’s folk. Did your sources tell you that it was the Baron’s servants who spirited me out of the Tolek Kana Pits— made me into a mind-sick idiot for a time?”

  “I—ah—have heard the tale. It seems to be so.” The Livyani brightened. “If one feaster arrives, then may there not be more?” “Who?”

  “The Gods know,” the older man probed his scalp, wincing as his fingers brought away redness. “Many sought you: your own people, the Omnipotent Azure Legion, Prince Eselne’s agents, the Yan Koryani. All have watchers, telepaths, sorcery... We can hope that there are more guests at the banquet!” Mirure returned from the base of the tomb-shaft. “Fighting above, Lord,” she said. “An explosion sound, a red light—” She looked as though she yearned to go and join in, but Taluvaz laid a restraining hand upon her wrist.

  “We have no choice but to wait and see whether the Zrne eats the Mnor, or the other way round.”

  They returned to the connecting passage. Mirure stood watch by the body near the second shaft, while Morkudz crouched at the base of their original entrance. Simanuya tried on the dead man’s helmet but found it too small. He preferred it first to Tlayesha, then to Harsan, but neither wanted to anger the spirit of one so recently deceased by wearing it.

  They waited.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “They come!” Harsan heard Mirure shout from the first tomb.

&nb
sp; Simultaneously cold, pale luminescence poured down the second shaft, the one nearest him. He took a chance, put his head in, glanced up, and narrowly missed being struck by something metallic: a dagger, perhaps, or a throwing axe that clanged and went spinning off into the rubbish. Whoever they were, there was no question of their hostility—and of their disinclination to parley!

  He backed out and looked around for the others. Mirure was visible at the door leading to the tomb through which they had first entered. Taluvaz, Tlayesha, and Simanuya were close by, just on the other side of the tomb robbers’ hole in the floor. Of the Heheganu there was no sign.

  “Down—into the sarcophagus chamber!” the glassblower bleated. “There may be further tunnels there.” He suited action to words and thrust his not inconsiderable bulk into the hole. What he would use for light did not seem to occur to him.

  The N’luss girl retreated further into the chamber, still fighting, the ancient sword (shorter by a handspan broken from its tip, Harsan saw) in her right hand, and her dagger in her left. Her opponents were more of the Undead: black and withered things animated by other-planar power and the fearful sorceries of Lord Sarku. Two were skull-faced: Mrur or Jajgi, as Morkudz had named them. Another just behind appeared mummified, greyish, wrinkled, and shrunken. The holes where the embalmers had inserted thongs into the lips to close the lich’s mouth still showed, and copper corpse-amulets swung like bridal necklaces from its raddled neck and arms. This must be one of the Shedra of legend: the Gods knew whether the tales of its hunger for living flesh were true! Harsan had no wish to find out.

  All of the foe bore thick, bronze-bladed halberds—axes, poleaxes—Harsan did not know the proper term. These they swung skilfully in the cramped space, and Mirure was hard put to get within a range where her shorter weapon could do its work. The Temple of Sarku had the permanent pick of the best of its warrior devotees, after all; dead, they were only somewhat slower and less clever than they had been in life, and quantity made up for quality...