Aftermath, p.16
Aftermath, page 16
“No, I think I should lead,” said Khamwas. “I’ll—”
He met the caravan master’s eyes. “Master Samlor, I apologize. It’ll be safer for me to go first, and I’ll spend my efforts on making it safe.”
The multicolored jellyfish made the reception room look as if it were illuminated through stained glass. The sea urchin trundled its way forward to the opening in the middle of the floor, then continued downward at the same staccato pace as if the plane on which its spines rested lay in a universe in which sideways was up.
That might be the case.
The two men walked to the opening and looked down while Star hugged herself in silence.
The room beneath the floor was a cube or something near it, ten feet in each dimension. Mauve light filled the volume surprisingly well, though the simulated urchin did not itself seem bright enough to do so. The floor shone with a sullen lambency.
The furnishings were simple. A metal reading stand, high enough for use by a standing man and empty now, waited near the center of the room.
To its right stood an elaborate bronze firebox on four clawed legs, a censer rather than a heating device. The flat sides of the box were covered by columns of incised swirls, more likely a script unknown to the caravan master than mere decoration. The top was smooth except for a trio of depressions—an inch, three inches, and six inches in diameter. Aromatics could be placed there to be released by the heat of charcoal burning in the firebox beneath.
At each corner of the top was a decorative casting. They were miniature beasts of the sort which in larger scale could have modeled the censer’s terrible clawed legs. The creatures had catlike heads, the bodies of toads with triangular plates rising along the spine for protection, and the forelegs of birds of prey. Serpent tails curled up behind them, suggesting the creatures were intended as handles for the censer; but anyone who attempted to put them to that purpose would have his hands pierced by the hair-thin spikes with which the tails ended.
There was no other furniture in the room, but a pentacle several feet in diameter was painted or inlaid on the concrete floor to the reading stand’s left. It was empty. The floor and white-stuccoed walls were otherwise unmarked.
Khamwas’s lips pursed.
“Go ahead,” said Samlor with a shrug. “Maybe your stone’s on the ceiling where we can’t see it.”
“Yes,” said the Napatan, though there was doubt rather than hope in his tone.
Khamwas thrust his staff as far into the mauve light as it would go while his hand on the tip remained above floor level.
Nothing happened, but Samlor was not fool enough to think it had been a pointless exercise. His companion was doing what he had promised, concentrating his talents—better, his knowledge—on the task at hand.
Still holding the staff out in his direction of travel, Khamwas backed awkwardly down the ladder. The ferule banged accidentally on the censer as he turned. It made Khamwas jump back but did not concern Samlor, who saw what was about to happen.
But the crash and shattering glass from upstairs spun the caravan master, his teeth bared and his left hand groping for the throwing knife in his boot sheath.
“The wind,” murmured Star, the first words she had spoken since the three of them left the study upstairs. She wasn’t looking at her uncle or at anything in particular.
But she was right. A door banged shut, muting a further tinkle of glass. One of the window sashes had not been secured properly. A gust had slammed it fiercely enough to shatter the glass.
“Are you all right?” called Khamwas.
The question impressed Samlor, for it sounded sincere—and in similar circumstances, he himself would have been worried more about his own situation than that of his companions.
“We’re going to get drenched when we leave here,” the caravan master said. “Leaving’ll still feel good. Any luck yourself?”
The Napatan grimaced. “The room’s empty,” he said. “The brazier’s as clean as if it was never used. I’m not sure it’s here at all.”
“Do not ask advice of a god and then ignore what he says,” snapped Tjainufi, who was rubbing his tiny face on his shoulder like a bird preening.
“Step back,” said Samlor. “I’m coming down.”
He turned to his niece and said, “Star, dearest? Honey? Will you be all right for a minute?”
She nodded, though nothing in her face suggested that she was listening.
The quicker they found what Khamwas needed, the quicker they—Samlor—could sort out his niece’s problem. He jumped into the cubical room without touching the ladder.
Samlor landed in perfect balance, feet spread and his left hand extended slightly farther than the right so that leverage matched the weight of his long dagger. Despite Samlor’s care, his hobnails skidded and might have let him fall if Khamwas hadn’t clutched the Cirdonian’s shoulder. The floor was dusted with sparkly stuff, almost as slick as a coat of oil.
Jumping might not have been the brightest notion, but the caravan master hadn’t liked the idea of doing exactly what an intruder was expected to do.
The concealed room had an underwater ambiance which wasn’t wholly an effect of the glowing sea urchin trundling across an invisible bottom at waist height. The mauve light had ripples in it, but neither the furniture nor the two men cast distinct shadows on the walls.
“What does your—” Samlor said, making a lefthanded gesture to indicate either Khamwas’s staff or nothing at all—“your friend say about what you’re looking for?”
“That I’ve found it,” Khamwas replied, turning his head to view surroundings which were no less void on this perusal than on earlier ones.
Samlor stamped his foot. Sparkling dust quivered, but the concrete was as solid as the bedrock on which it was probably laid.
Then he kicked the nearest wall.
Stucco blasted away from the hobnails as they raked four short, parallel paths and squealed on the stone beneath.
“Well, I think we know where t’ look,” said the Cirdonian in satisfaction.
The stucco his boot had scraped was covering two distinct blocks of stone—a slab of polished red granite, and another of marble shadowed with faint streaks of gray. Both stones were inscribed, though on the softer marble the markings had been weathered and were further defaced by Samlor’s boot.
He brushed at the stucco with his left hand, flaking away a patch his kick had loosened. The writing on the granite slab was Rankan but of a form so old that the doubled consonants and variant orthography made all but a few words unintelligible to the caravan master.
“Why, this is wonderful, my friend,” said the Napatan with a smile brighter than the mauve glow as he bent over the cleared patch.
Tjainufi beamed and added, “There is no good deed save a good deed done for one who has need of it.”
“We’re not outta the woods yet,” said Samlor with a dour glance at the walls around them. If they had to clear all the stucco—or even half, if their luck were average—which it probably wouldn’t be—it was going to take a lot longer than the caravan master wanted to spend in this place.
“No, that’s all right,” explained the Napatan with the uneasy hint of mindreading which he had displayed before. “I’ll use a spell of release and the covering will come away at once. He must use the ancient writings because they focus the power with which the years have imbued them.”
Maybe that was what Setios used to do with them, Samlor thought as his companion knelt before his upright staff again, but he’d bet Setios hadn’t much use for them or anything else in the world just now.
Khamwas was whispering to himself and his gods. Samlor looked at him, looked at the dagger—saw that the watered steel blade was only that, only metal; probably all it ever was, except in his mind.
“Star?” he called toward the rectangular opening. “You all right, sweetest?”
He could barely hear the reply, “All right …,” but a couple of the pastel jellyfish were drifting over him in placid unconcern. She’d be fine, Star would.
If any of them were, she’d be fine.
Samlor squatted and squeezed up dust from the floor on the tip of his left index finger. It was colorless (save for the mauve light it reflected) and much too finely ground for him to be able to tell the shape of the individual crystals.
A caravan master has plenty of opportunity to examine decorative stones, jewels and bits of glass cut and stained to look like jewels in the dim light of a bazaar. The dust could be anything, powdered diamond even; but most likely quartz, spread in a smooth layer across all the flat surfaces in the room
Except for streaks—shadows, almost—stretching from the reading stand and the legs of the bronze censer. The dust seemed to have been sprayed violently from the direction of the pentacle in which Khamwas was almost standing.
“K—” Samlor began in sudden surprise.
The Napatan had been whispering, but now his voice rose in a crescendo. Khamwas’s eyes lifted also; they were wide open but obviously not fixed on anything in the room.
Stucco shattered away on all sides, raining over Khamwas and the caravan master who reached for the ladder with his left hand and swung his blade at anything which might have slipped behind him as he crouched.
Nothing had. The choking flood of sand and lime dust filling the air as the walls cleared themselves made Samlor pause where the attack he feared would only have driven him to swifter motion.
The slow tumble of the mauve light source continued, though the mineral-laden air absorbed the illumination. A ball a few feet in diameter glowed in place of the urchin’s sharply limned spines and carapace. As dust settled out, the glow spread and paled while the features of the source at its heart slowly regained definition.
“Khamwas,” said the caravan master. His eyes were slitted and a fold of his cloak covered his mouth and nose, a response made reflexive by years of dry storms whipping across his caravan routes. “Where did Setios keep his demon in a crystal bottle?”
“The gods preserve me from such knowledge, friend!” said the Napatan as his eyes swept the upper levels of the walls which could already be viewed with sufficient clarity. He filtered the air through his cape; a desert-dweller himself, Khamwas must have more experience with dust storms than Samlor did. “Believe me, Setios was mad to keep such a thing by him—and you and I would be even madder to carry it off ourselves.”
“That’s not what I mean,” the caravan master said. He raised his voice so that it could be heard through the muffling cloth and because he was at a desperate loss to know what he should do next. He would have climbed out of this place at once, except for his fear of what might follow him to where Star stood shivering.
No wonder the child had been terrified into a near coma. She must have known …
“Here it is!” cried Khamwas, brushing the reading stand as he swept closer to a wall. “Here it is!” he repeated, then sneezed.
The walls of the sunken room were formed entirely of inscribed stones, but the pieces had little commonality beyond that. Some were squared columns, set with one face flush and the other three hidden even now that the stucco had fallen away.
A few bore symbols which were not writing at all. One of them was a small block of peridotite, polished smooth before a single diagonal was cut across its coarse crystals. The block had marked the victim’s place in a temple of Dyareela. Samlor could not imagine anyone removing it from its original location—or being willing to have it close to him thereafter.
The Napatan was brushing his left palm across the face of a slab of gray granite, cleaning it of dust that had settled there after the spell of release. The stele was about three feet high and half that across. Figures—presumably gods—filled the upper portion, and there were about twenty vertical lines of script beneath them.
“—to the blessings of Harsaphes,” Kharnwas said, his index finger pausing midway down one of the later columns. “Harsaphes, not Somptu as I’d always assumed, and the ruins of the temple of Har—”
“Khamwas, listen to me!” Samlor shouted. He gripped the scholar with his left hand, though that meant dropping his cloak while there was still dust in the air. “You say something happened to magic a little bit ago. Would that have broken the crystal that held Setios’s demon?”
“The townsman,” said the manikin who was not in the least affected by the choking atmosphere, “is not the one who is eaten by the crocodile.”
And men who leave magic alone, translated Samlor as he whirled toward glimpsed motion, aren’t destroyed by its creatures.
A hand was emerging from a slab of limestone on the far wall. It was tenuous enough that the settling dust coexisted with the limb, which was so thin that it would have been skeletal were it not for the gleam of a scaly integument.
The three fingers each bore a claw an inch long and sharp as shattered glass.
“Get up the ladder!” Samlor shouted as he leaped for the apparition behind the watered steel blade of his dagger.
The hilt was adequate for his big hand when he slashed with it, though it was shaped wrong and would have been uncomfortably short had he chosen to thrust …
Which would have done as much good; as much, and no more.
The clawed hand twisted to grip the blade while an arm as wire-thin as the hand continued to extend from the wall. Steel parted the limb like smoke, and the claws slipped through the whisking dagger as if it in turn had no substance.
Another hand was reaching through the stone beside the first. The blur above and between them was growing into a narrow reptilian face.
“Get out!” the caravan master shouted again with a glance toward the ladder showed him that Kharnwas stood where he had. He had crossed the top of his staff with his left forearm.
“No, run!” Khamwas replied. He had been chanting under his breath, and his face spasmed with the effort of breaking back into normal speech. “I released it again, but I can hold it for long enough.”
The demon’s head and torso had emerged from the wall. One leg was striding forward in slow motion. The creature was half again as tall as Samlor, and it was thinner than anything could be and live.
One hand shot out and snatched the sea urchin which shattered beneath the claws into a cascade of mauve sparks As the demon’s arm withdrew, the sparks formed again into their original shape. The creature of light continued to pick its way through the air.
Samlor was quite sure that if the claws closed on his niece, their effect would be permanent.
“Run, Star!” he shouted, afraid to turn from the demon. It continued to pull itself from the stone.
Khamwas hadn’t moved, though his mouth resumed its unheard chanting. Maybe Samlor could jump for the ladder himself since the fool Napatan refused to do so. Slam the lid back over this hellish room—if the lid would close without a search for another mechanism. Run out the front door with Star in his arms, praying that he could work the bolts swiftly enough … praying that the doorkeeper would ignore them as they left, the way Khamwas had said it would …
Samlor stepped forward and swung at the demon again. He wasn’t going to abandon Khamwas to the creature unless there were no other choice.
He chopped for a wrist. Instead of slipping through like light in mist, the caravan master’s steel clanged as numbingly as if he had slashed an anvil. The demon seized the blade and began to chitter in high-pitched laughter.
All of the demon but its right leg had pulled free of the wall. That leg was still smokily insubstantial, but the claws of the left foot cut triple furrows in the concrete as they strained to drag the creature wholly out of the stone. The left hand—forepaw—was reaching for Samlor’s face while the right gripped his knife.
Samlor’s mouth had dropped open as he breathed through it, oblivious of the dust that would have made him cough another time. He jerked straight down on the dagger hilt, ducking from the swipe that started slowly as a boulder rolling, then completed its arc at blinding speed.
The blade screeched clear. If a man had held it, his fingers would have been on the floor or dangling from twists of skin.
The demon’s paw was uninjured, and its claws had streaked the flat of the blade against which they were set.
Samlor caught the throat-clasp of his cloak. He could throw the garment like a net over the creature and—
“—and watch the claws shred it as the demon, steel strong and more than iron hard, leaped free to dispose of the men before it. The creature’s eyes had no pupils and glowed orange, a color which owed nothing to the urchin which still tumbled innocently around the room.
“Khamwas!” the caravan master shouted, because the demon was already in the air and perhaps Khamwas could get up the ladder while the Cirdonian occupied the creature with the process of being slaughtered …
The demon halted in midair, its left foot above the concrete and its right leg, spindly and terrible as that of a giant spider, lifting to deliver a kick that would disembowel Samlor. Dust settled and the urchin of light rolled jerkily forward, one spine at a time, but the creature hung frozen like an idol of ravening destruction.
Its eyes were as bright as tunnels to hell.
Samlor started another cut at the demon. Light reflecting from the triple scratch on his blade reminded him how useless that would be, so he turned instead to Khamwas.
Who had not moved since last Samlor had the leisure to glance at him.
Khamwas hunched slightly forward, his left forearm crossing the top of his staff and his eyes fixed on the demon with a reptile’s intensity. Tjainufi still perched on his shoulder.
The Napatan’s lips had been moving soundlessly, but now he said in a cracked whisper, “Go on … quickly.”
The demon was not quite frozen. The movements the creature began before Khamwas’s spell took effect were still going on. The leg that stretched toward Samlor at a glacial pace quickened noticeably when the Napatan spoke, and the demon’s mouth gaped slowly to display arrays of interlocked teeth like needles in the upper and lower jaws.
