M A R Barker - [Tekumel- The Empire of the Petal Throne 01]

by Flamesong (v0. 9) (epub)

  Trinesh hated to say so, but the veteran Tirrikamu was right. He gave the necessary orders.

  There were still options; the easiest would be tried first. He leaned cautiously over the coping. “Ohe, down there,” he called. “Any of you speak Tsolyani? Surrender and we’ll see that you’re not slain.” He glanced up to see Chekkuru’s heavy-lidded eyes watching him from across the parapet. It would be hard to keep any promises of clemency with the priest around. Cha! Let him go down there if he was so eager to be skewered!

  There was silence.

  “Go up to the shed in the bailey,” he ordered loudly. “Get me a load of that damp straw—whatever else will make smoke. Lord,Vimuhla may prefer roasted meat, but tonight we’ll offer Him smoked sand-worm for dinner.”

  There was no reply from the well.

  Trinesh sighed. The priest would get his flame-sacrifice—or at least a smoke-sacrifice. He snapped a command to Chosun, and the captives were led out of their storeroom and taken up above to one of the tower rooms in the bailey. Their Skeins of Destiny were still likely to be unpleasantly short; he could not just let them go, and Chekkuru would surely demand their unwilling participation in the Ritual of the Dawn of Flame in the morning.

  Trinesh spent the rest of the night in the main hall, alternately dozing and staring at the floor. The fire below took a long time to bum itself out. Steam arose from cracks between the flagstones, and some of the shallower puddles actually bubbled. The flames must be drawing air through ventilation slots in the cellar walls, and the straw—drier underneath than it looked—burned merrily enough. If the gods willed, the ancient flooring would not collapse into the cellar! He was no architect to know about such things, but at least he had made sure that there were no wooden beams or posts supporting the cellar ceiling.

  When Chekkuru came at dawn to demand the planking from a collapsed floor in one of the crumbling bailey towers, Trinesh could offer no logical objection. He pleaded exhaustion, however, and did not attend the sacrifice himself. Let the pious have their way. He also made no criticism when Chosun reported that the scrawny Milumanayani women and all of the children had squeezed out through a tower loophole and escaped in the night. Like himself, Chosun was somewhat of a moderate, although neither of them had ever discussed it with the other.

  Bu’uresh brought him breakfast: Dna-porridge and wine liberally mixed with water, the best they had. The bailey shed contained several of the six-legged little Hmelu-beasts that everybody used for meat—and also for wool, along with the better stuff produced by their larger cousins, the Hma—only two were females and could give milk. It seemed best to save their animals until they really needed them.

  “Fire’s out, Hereksa," Horusel said. This time Trinesh was already on his feet. He had heard him coming.

  The well-chamber was a blackened, smoke-stinking ruin. The place was silent except for the crackle of the dying fire. Three bodies lay crumpled amidst the embers, their charred garments marking them as Milumanayani warriors. They had doused their leather desert-cloaks with water and tried unsuccessfully to break through the heavy cellar door. Trinesh sent for the rope, and Jalugan, the youth from Chosun’s Semeti, swung down into the shaft. He soon called up to say that a tunnel indeed led off horizontally from the well. It was empty. They passed a torch down to him, and he reported that as far back as he could see, perhaps ten or fifteen paces, there was no sign of the foe.

  They made a rope sling, and two more troopers descended, then Trinesh himself. A Hereksa had a duty to his men, after all. His eyelids felt like ground glass.

  The passage was less than a long pace wide and barely high enough to stand erect. It slanted down in a series of concave steps cut into the solid rock. Trinesh was no scholar, but he did recognize volcanic stone: black and bubbled, filled with pockets of tuff and ash and all of the detritus vomited up from Lord Vimuhla’s secret infernos below the earth. The enemy had attempted to put up a barricade some twenty paces farther on into the tunnel, but they had not found enough loose stone, nor had they been able to hang their desert-cloaks from the smooth ceiling. It took perhaps a Kiren—half an hour—to clear it all aside and move on. By this time most of the crossbowmen in Chosun’s Semetl were with them, ready to deal with any Yan Koryani ambush.

  They encountered no one.

  Thirty paces beyond the barricade they came to a pit, an irregular, ov#l fissure in the slagged, ash-hued floor. The tunnel ended there, and Trinesh sent back for more rope, lanterns, and what trenching tools Fressa’s Semetl had brought along. He need not have bothered. Their torches revealed a slope-sided, jagged crater about two man-heights deep. The irregular floor of this opened straight down into a vertical shaft, along one side of which rungs descended on into the darkness below, a ladder into .the unknown. Both the walls and the rungs gleamed darkly silver, the color of age-stained steel.

  Chosun held up a hand to prevent anybody from descending. “That’s no water-well,” he panted. The Tirrikamu was a big man, heavy-set and slow, not at all suited to explorations in caves. “A place of the Ancients, Sire. That’s what it is.”

  “You are right,” Trinesh replied. “We’re already below the level of the well-water. I think we’ve left the softer rock, and now we’re inside a sort of subterranean peak or dome of Lord Vimuhla’s frozen flame-stone. It pushes up through the gravel and sand of the desert like a mountain in the midst of a lake. The epics say that Lord Vimuhla covered many of the cities of the Ancients with a blanket of fire when they defied Him before the Battle of the Gods at Dormoron Plain—” “This flame-stone must then be very old indeed,” Jalugan said from beside them. “At home in Bey Sii our epic-singers tell of the sinking of the south—the Isle of Ganga and the end of the Engsvanyali Priestkings—and the rising of the north, where Yan Kor is now. They call it the Plain of the Risen Sea. To be older than that—as old as Dormoron Plain, if you are right. Sire—is ancient beyond measuring!”

  The boy spoke truly. Trinesh decided to overlook his interruption, which under other circumstances would have been a breach of military etiquette. He turned to Chosun. “What do you think?”

  “We ought to send for the priest, Sire,” the Tirrikamu grunted. “He should know.’” He fingered the stained silvery walls of the shaft and shook his head.

  The idea was eminently distasteful, but it made sense. A trooper was sent scrambling back up the tunnel to find Chekkuru hiVriddi.

  Chekkuru came, pursed his lips, put a bony finger beside his nose, and cocked his head this way and that like a Kiini-bxA. “You have come upon a holy thing, Hereksa," he opined. “An entrance to Lord Vimuhla’s fiery paradise beneath the world! To violate it is to call down demons and the anger of the Flame-Lord—”

  “Oh, Chlen-shit, man,” Trinesh sighed. “Even I have heard of the metal places of the old ones, those who ruled Tekumel before the Time of Darkness. The epics are full of such marvels!”

  “If you are so learned, why summon me?”

  “Because I thought you’d know more. You’ve read enough to stuff the gut of a 7j/’i/-beast.”

  Chekkuru was not mollified. “Fa, I have given you the benefit of my learning, but you choose not to believe. Do as you will; it is your throw with the dice!”

  “If I send men down there and they die—either from demons or from Yan Koryani swords—yours will be the responsibility. The clans of the slain will come to you to demand Shamtla-compensation, and the Emperor’s courts will gladly award it! You’ll go to debtor’s prison, thence to slavery—and how will you like kneeling at the feet of a fat clan-matron, a worshipper of bucolic Lady Avanthe, mayhap, or virginal Dilinala?” The others laughed, and some of the tension went out of them. Chekkuru did have his uses.

  “I say no more,” Chekkuru sniffed loftily.

  Trinesh peered down into the shaft again. His previous solution ought to work here as well. “Send for more straw— boards, beams. Drop all of it down this Flame-accursed hole and toss a torch in afterward. Then cover the pit wi
th water-soaked blankets. Any Yan Koryani at the bottom will smother as did their friends above.” He cast a sly glance over at Chekkuru. “And if the place is inhabited by demons, why, then they must be Lord Vimuhla’s Hre-Niriu, who are like sheets of living, raging flame; to them a little smoke will smell as sweet as temple incense!”

  Jalugan left to carry out Trinesh’s orders. The rest followed, Chekkuru in offended silence, carefully holding up the skirts of his pleated kilt to avoid the sooty walls. He resembled an old lady wading a mud-puddle.

  The daylight above was another world. The skies still glowered, gray and misty as the robes of Lord Thumis, the Sage of the Gods. The rain had stopped, however, and from the flat roof of the keep Trinesh could see a dozen or so of his crossbowmen squatting here and there along the battlements of the bailey. Beyond Fortress Ninu’ur the desert was slate-gray and brown, an artist’s charcoal sketch before the colors are applied. All appeared to be in order: no one had seen any Milumanayani scouts, and certainly no advancing columns of Yan Koryani.

  Chekkuru’s combined funeral and sacrificial pyre still smoldered in the courtyard. It reminded Trinesh of the stifling passage below and of the silent, deadly smoke that must already have done its work in the darkness. Suffocation was not a noble way to perish, nor was employing it a noble deed on Trinesh’s part; yet how else to clear the fortress of the enemy? It was necessary. During a war, the Weaver of Skeins sometimes created very shoddy tapestries of fate for those involved.

  Trinesh went to bed. —And awoke hours later to find Saina from Chosun’s Semetl sitting crosslegged in his room, sorting through the captured Yan Koryani documents. Bu’uresh hovered behind her to assist.

  Saina was a pleasantly pretty woman, round of face, and reasonably curved, though by no means young. A scar slashed down from one ear almost to her chin, and her nose was broad and concave rather than the straight, high-bridged paragon of beauty beloved of the Tsolyani poets, or the downward-hooked beak of the old aristocratic clans. Still, she was not ugly. It was said that Saina occasionally joined her comrades upon their sleeping-mats in return for lighter duties and even for coin, but Trinesh had never summoned her, nor was it really his affair. Like all of Tsolyanu’s female soldiers, Saina was Aridani'. a woman who declared before the jurists of the Palace of the Realm that she was independent of the strictures (as well as the all-enveloping, smothering protection) of clan and family. An Aridani was the legal equal of a male; she could be sued in the courts, hold Imperial posts, serve in the army—everything a male could do. Those who were not minded to declare Aridani status remained “good clan-girls,” married at the behest of their elders, and enjoyed the security of a sheltered and dignified life in the clanhouse. Saina thus could do what she pleased as long as she kept up with her companions.

  At the moment her immediate value lay in the fact that she hailed from the northern city of Mrelu and could speak and read Yan Koryani, though indifferently well. Fortunately, this was the language of the captured documents; had they been in Saa Allaqiyani, they would have been as illegible as lizard-tracks in the mud! Tsolyani and Yan Koryani were related to one another, though distantly, as was Milumanayani, the language of the damned sand-worms, but Saa Allaqiyani belonged to another family of tongues and was as alien to them all as fur to a fish!

  “A visitor was coming, Sire,” Saina said. “They were expecting somebody high.” She held up a tom and slightly charred parchment. “Can’t tell who because the end’s gone.” Trinesh cast a prickly glance at Bu’uresh, who managed to appear both innocent and sheepish at the same time. “Very high—the escort was a—a Tokhn, a commander of one thousand, an officer of about the same status as a Molkar in our army. Some other people are mentioned, but I can’t riddle it all out.”

  “Nothing!to say that the visitor left again later?”

  Saina bent her dark head over the remaining papers. “Naught more, Sire.”

  The late morning light shone through the room’s one loophole to transform her hair into a glinting, blue-black coronet of oiled steel. She had braided it and wound it round her head, both to get it out of the way and also to provide additional cushioning for her helmet. Trinesh had a sudden memory of his clan-sisters in Tumissa: Dlara and Shyal kneeling together upon a mat to sort out replies to some feast, Ebunan looking over their shoulders, giggling, hopeful that one missive would be from her current swain. It seemed like a different lifetime.

  He dragged himself forcibly back to the present. “Ohe, and the metal tunnel in the cellar? Anything about that?”

  “Maybe this; a copy of an old letter—it’s dated last year before the Battle of Mar—to someone in their headquarters at Sunraya, about an important thing . . . Damn it all—” she swore jocularly and obscenely “—‘See the enclosed attachment.’ And that’s not here.” She saw Trinesh’s eyes shift to Bu’uresh, who quailed. She hurried on. “More, I don’t think a copy was ever kept—here’s their symbol for ‘secret dispatch.’ ”

  He got up and began putting on his clothing. He felt her looking at him and wondered to himself whether one night he should indeed call Saina to his quarters. That would have to be left for later, however.

  “Wait for me,” he told her. “As soon as I’ve had a wash and some food we will go down to the cellar. There may be somebody there with whom you can practice your Yan Koryani.”

  Chosun and some of his troopers were already waiting for them at the end of the slanting tunnel. Trinesh bent and peered over into the metal shaft. The fire he had had lit there was nearly out—he must have slept half the day away. His eyes watered and he coughed. The place stank abysmally of smoke, and a few coals still glowed darkly red amidst the ashes. He pointed, and the soldiers began to climb down the metal rungs. They reached bottom—and had to dance a pretty step to get across the remaining embers without burning their boots. One man raised an arm to signal a further side-passage leading off from the shaft. Then he and his comrades disappeared into it, out of sight.

  They waited, but no one returned to report. At last Trinesh descended to see for himself.

  A short, metal-walled corridor led off horizontally from the base of the shaft. There was a double-leaved door there, also of metal, but it hung ajar on shattered hinges—not his men’s work, Trinesh guessed, but Yan Koryani. The passage was featureless and empty, save for the remains of their fire: no bodies, nothing.

  The chamber beyond was large: perhaps ten man-heights in length, seven or eight across, and three high. Chosun’s men stood there, crouched in an awed huddle just inside the door.

  They were staring not at the metal walls—nor at any enemy bodies, for there were none—but at what filled the center of the room.

  A great silvery globe hung in the air before them. Perhaps a third of its bulk extended down into a black-mouthed shaft below it, a shaft that looked just big enough for the globe to fit inside, as a boy fits a kernel of D«a-grain into a reed blowgun.

  The globe was gigantic. It must have been four or five man-heights in diameter, completely smooth, and as brightly polished as an egg laid only yesterday by. some gargantuan metal bird. An oval outline, perhaps a man-height tall and half as wide, indicated some kind of door in the side facing them. Beside this, at waist-height, was a small, round indentation. Trinesh went closer to look. His eyes had not lied: the sphere—big as it was—actually hung in the air inside the mouth of the pit. He stared down into the hole and was rewarded b; a dizzy view of metal walls that came together far beyond the reach of their light in the darkness below. This was a thing of the Ancients indeed!

  Chekkuru arrived, looked, examined, mumbled a prayer, and then bustled over to them, eyes ashine with joyous zeal. “Hereksa," he crowed in an almost friendly tone, “we have come upon it! We have found it! Oh, we have a treasure here! The thing for which the wizard Subadim sought all his life, the goal of all the sages, the mystery revealed, the sublime and ultimate destination of all seekers ...”

  He stopped, spread his long arms wide
so that his flame-orange robe swirled out dramatically about him, and intoned, “It is the Egg of the World!”

  Even Trinesh could not find it in his heart to say, "Chlen-shit.”

  It was Chosun who broke the ensuing silence. “But—but was not the Egg of the World shattered when the gods fought amongst themselves at the Battle of Dormoron Plain? And did not Subadim the Sorcerer spend aeons seeking it thereafter on Thenu Thendraya Peak? And did he not later bargain a fragment of its shell to the Demon Tkel? And did not the wizard Metallja discover another piece and take it away with him to the Place of the Unstraightened City? So say the epics. . . .” Chekkuru frowned. “There are other epics, man, and secret wisdom of which you know less than a Dn'-ant does of the gods! There are the Scrolls of the Path of Burning kept in our temple in the forests of Do Chaka, the Stela of the Emperor Kanmi’yel Nikuma HI, whose title is ‘the Scourge of Vimuhla,’ the Book of the Blazing Diagrams of Forever, the—the ...” He ran out of dire citations and finished lamely, “In any case, there are many sources that say that the Egg of the World was not broken, that it was hidden by demons—that—”

  “—That its yolk was made into an omelette within the skull of a certain priest!” someone snickered from the back of the room. Trinesh thought it was Saina.

  “Enough of sacrilege! I shall make my report to Lord Huso hiChirengmai, the Preceptor of our Society of the Incandescent Blaze, himself!”

  This had gone too far. “Respect the priest!” Trinesh commanded. “Show yourselves to be soldiers! Search this Flame-accursed hole! You, Jalugan, watch the door in that egg-thing! Let nothing come forth!”

  Saina said, “Sire, come look here.”

  She stood in the center of the room, squarely in front of the closed hatch of the globe. She scuffed a foot in the dust. “Three squares of glass set in the floor side by side, Hereksa: this one’s red, then a sort of yellow, then blue. You can see a little light down inside the blue one, flickering on and off like a lamp that’s low on oil.”