“You parse logic admirably, my Lady. Now do you want to be bound again, or will you amend our compact to include cooperation—full and complete—until we mutually agree to end it?”
She clenched her fists and turned her face away. Dineva began methodically cutting thongs from the hem of one of the desert-cloaks.
“Very well,” the Lady conceded. “Perhaps you are not wrong. I agree.”
“And the Lady Jai? The NininyalT'
“They too.” She spoke briefly in Yan Koryani. Trinesh spared a glance for Saina, who nodded to indicate that nothing untoward had been said.
“So be it. Now what is this ‘Eye?’ ”
“1 know not,” she replied coolly. “There was no time to learn.”
Lord Vimuhla roast the woman! She could have blown out the wall of their car! He had heard enough tales of “Eyes” to know of their perils, and so, doubtless, had she. Fortunately she had not had the time to fire it. Perhaps she herself was not sure what she would do once she had drawn it out of her tunic.
He took the “Eye” from Saina and inspected it. The size and shape of a human eye, it had a round, black spot on one curved surfacp and a tiny stud on the other. A square indentation below the stud showed two symbols, unreadable and alien. The priests of the temple school had mentioned those, too: they were numerals indicating the charges remaining in the instrument. Sometimes later owners added inscriptions noting the function of an “Eye” as well, but this one was unmarked, smooth, grayish-blue in color, and as enigmatic as the visage of a god.
“Can anyone read these squiggles?” Trinesh asked. “You, Chekkuru? You, Thu’n?” Both shook their heads in negation.
“We must try it out on the next Ssu we meet,” Chosun observed genially. “Thus may we learn its purpose.”
Trinesh said no more but put the “Eye” away in his belt-pouch.
He returned to the forward console. Thu’n awaited him there, and he signaled to the creature to activate the view-portrayers. The one above the destination buttons, that which had shown the death of their first car in the city of the Ssu, still had no picture at all. Successive turns of its knob revealed more dark caverns, another dimly lit way-station filled with burned and ruined vehicles, a place of white crystal that the Lady Deq Dimani said was ice—cold and bitter ice, like that upon the summit of Thenu Thendraya Peak—and more blacknesses.
The three side-portrayers showed other scenes. There was a jungle, dripping and looped with vines, amid which a single monolith of mould-splotched stone towered like a venerable sentinel in the green-lit gloom. The city of the red-tiled roofs appeared again, followed by a vista of elegant gardens, neatly kept flowers, trees, and many-hued buildings of no recognizable nationality. Golden beings strolled to and fro in that landscape. They were humanoid but not human: more of the Ancients’ automatons, the Ru’un.
“Oh, let us go there, Hereksa,” Dineva said. Her homely features were wistful and almost pretty in the shifting play of reflected light. Trinesh smiled and touched her arm. She did not draw away, and he thought that she must be very close to the breaking point. Tough, veteran soldier-woman that she was, her endurance had to reach an end sometime! He suddenly realized that he himself was in no better condition. Another moment and they’d be in one another’s arms! Cha! He straightened up.
“Our journey is not in our hands,” he said. “If the Ssu managed to set the destination buttons, then we travel whither they will. If not, our fate lies in the hands of the ancient owner of this car. ”
“Or rather in the hands of Lord Vimuhla,” Chekkuru intoned.
Trinesh did not disagree. They could only wait.
Again the hours drifted by, uncountable in the never-changing light within the car. They rested, slept, and tended to their bruises. Thirst became a problem, as, to a lesser extent, did food: if Trinesh’s stomach were typical, they must soon find something more appetizing than the sand-worms’ tubers and stinking dried meat!
So familiar had their car’s soft humming become that they were disoriented when it stopped.
Thu’n played with the controls and miraculously managed to produce the same scene on all four view-portrayers of their new car at once: a hall of many columns, beyond which the hot blaze of sunlight shimmered upon stone flagging. The architecture was unfamiliar: truncated columns, like upside-down staircases, towered up from small, drum-shaped bases to ponderous capitals lost in the shadowy groining of the ceiling. Carvings swarmed over every visible surface: geometric patterns, arabesques, fantastic and baroque rosettes, an eye-wrenching labyrinth of intricate sculpture so elaborate that it seemed tasteless.
“Do we go out, Hereksa?' Horusel asked.
“No one awaits us—human or otherwise.” Thu’n peered from one view-portrayer to the others. “There, on the right, in the open court behind those columns, do you see that coping? Mayhap the rim of a tank or pool . . . ?”
Trinesh gave swift orders, formed up his party, and opened the door. No Ssu or any other horror could keep him from water now!
The hall was empty of life; only a tepid breeze wandered idly between the hulking pillars. There were no furnishings or tapestries, and their car hung in the air above its tunnel-entrance in the exact center of a stepped platform. Waist-high screens of pierced, pink marble, as dainty as the lacework of a clan-maiden’s bridal coronet, enclosed this platform. Past these they saw that the hall was an open portico, surrounded on all sides by a broad plaza paved with white, buff, and black stone in a complex mosaic design.
There were not one but four pools, each exactly three man-heights square, set with geometrical precision in the middle of the courtyard on the four sides of the central building. More to the point, these tanks contained cool, welcome, delicious water! Trinesh tried in vain to slow the exodus, but nothing availed; not shouts, not orders, not even physically collaring poor Mejjai, the last to emerge from the car.
He gave it up and joined his comrades. Let them all be eaten by monsters! He, too, needed first a drink, then a bath.
The plaza was empty, not a stick or a leaf anywhere, the intricate mosaic flagging as hot beneath their boots as a griddle-plate. The court was further enclosed all around with marble walls some three or four man-heights high: an open-topped, square box surrounding the portico in the middle. Every one of the four walls contained two doorways, one in each comer. Holes in the stone lintels and sills showed where door-leaves had once closed these apertures, but they were empty now.
More sculptured geometric patterns occupied every available space: the panels of the walls, the door-jambs, even the undersides of the lintels. There were no inscriptions, and not one of the carvings depicted a living being, not an animal, a bird, or a tree. To an inhabitant of the Five Empires used to murals, bas-reliefs, and friezes displaying all of the rich tapestry of religion and legend, this was unsettling if not actually ominous.
No one came, to disturb them, but Trinesh posted Aijasu as a sentry just in case. The rest drank, bathed, and rinsed out their filthy garments in the breast-deep, blue water. Only when they were finished and rested did he let them examine their surroundings.
The place was more than ornate; it was splendid, a palace, a marvel of the sculptor’s art, albeit graceless and vulgar. The columns of the colonnade were perhaps three man-heights tall. Above these were entablatures of overhanging architraves and cornices, all scalloped and crimped into a welter of garish, frilly, little designs. Still higher, the roof of the colonnade rose in a series of domes, cupolas, and flamboyant vaultings to culminate in a tall spire. The entire structure was blanketed, top to bottom, with dainty carvings. It reminded Trinesh of the ultimate masterpiece of some effete—and slightly mad—pastry-cook.
The parapets of the courtyard walls, too, were pierced with tiny holes in an exquisite geometric fretwork. Balar declared that, given a rope and some sort of hook, he could climb up and see what lay beyond before they ventured into the unknown darkness behind any of the courtyard doors. Saina suggested
knotting garments together and tying one end to Trinesh’s sword to serve as a grapple. He had no wish to lose the weapon, however, nor did Horusel or any of the others offer theirs. They did have the odd-shaped sword he had seized during the battle with the Ssu; Saina had caught it, and it now lay with their other possessions in the car. The thing was useless, its hilt too small and too alien for a human hand and its balance as awkward as a tree-branch. Still, he decided, such feats of mountaineering could wait until they had explored this level.
Trinesh spread his clothing and quilted arming jacket to dry upon the baking pavement. He found himself watching the Lady Deq Dimani as she bent to don her steaming tunic once more. It was enough to turn a man’s loins to Lord Vimuhla’s blazing fire-stone! She wriggled into the garment, and the view was lost—more the pity! She saw him looking and turned her back upon him self-consciously.
The Yan Koryani were said to be the most prudish of the peoples of the Five Empires. Yet, just beyond her mistress, the Lady Jai continued to sit upon her soggy desert-cloak, her long, damp tresses coiling down over her shoulders, as nude and lovely as a copper-gold statue of the Goddess Avanthe Herself. Perhaps Dilinala, Avanthe’s Cohort, was a more fitting comparison, Trinesh thought ruefully: Lady Dilinala had no interest in men either! The girl wrapped her arms around her knees and put her head down upon them as though to doze, her appearance of bored lassitude unchanged.
Dineva and Saina splashed and swam in the pool with Chosun while Mejjai, Balar, and Arjasu stood guard in turn. The Tsolyani cared little for male-female modesty, and, indeed, few would covet Dineva’s hard and leathery frame. But Saina now. . . .
He cursed himself silently. They had more urgent problems.
He squinted against the sun and saw Thu’n and Tse’e squatting in the shade of the portico. He tried to think of the wizened old exile as Prince Nalukkan hiTlakotani but gave it up; Tse’e was Tse’e. Beyond those two, Horusel was just donning the last piece of his armor, the only one of the party to do so. Chekkuru hi Vriddi was missing, but then Trinesh remembered that he had gone off to bathe separately in the pool on the far side of the colonnade. The priest still had his arrogance, his fine Tsolyani sense of dignity: a member of a high clan never bathed in the company of his social inferiors. Damn him—and all his hawk-faced Vriddi clan-brothers— anyway!
“Time we looked about,” Trinesh remarked to Horusel. He was having trouble with the soggy lining of his helmet again. He dropped it and picked up the Prince’s steel sword. Nothing suggested a need for armor here; they had seen no one. The place was as deserted as one of those lightless caves to which their egg-vehicle had carried them.
The Tirrikamu grunted assent, and they made a slow and cautious circuit of the walls. Trinesh peered into one of the doorways and discovered a short corridor. Three paces, and this gave into a long, narrow passage parallel to the courtyard wall outside. Arbitrarily, he turned to his right. Another rectangle of hot, yellow light was visible down there: the other door in from the courtyard. He walked along the passage to discover a single dark opening on his left, exactly in the middle between the two courtyard doors. Two paces beyond the latter, the corridor ended in a right-angled turn; he rounded this to see two more sunlit doorways on his right and an identical shadowy opening in the center of the left wall.
“Follow this corridor,” he ordered Horusel. “See if it runs completely around our plaza. I go to look into one of those left-hand doorways.”
Within the inner passage the light dimmed rapidly to darkness. His boots squelched in something gritty yet soft, and an acrid, acidic smell made him wrinkle his nose. He thought he heard a faint chittering above his head. He halted. Vwr-bats, or their larger cousins, the Hu-bats? Or something worse? Throughout his childhood his cian-brothers had stuffed his head with tales of the nighted creatures of the catacombs beneath the ancient cities of Tekumel. There were the Kayi who floated in the air like bags of gas to drop tentacles down upon the unwary; then came the Biridlu, creatures resembling velvet capes, who hung from the ceilings of tombs and swooped to crush their victims in their muscular folds. . . .
He made an unceremonious retreat. After ail, without a torch or a lamp, he might have plunged over into some idiotic pit or staircase!
Horusel met him as he emerged. “All the same, Hereksa. A square corridor all around the courtyard. I poked my head into one of those side tunnels, too: four paces, and you’re in a parallel passage that seems to ran all around the first one—a square surrounding a square—and full of Hu-bat shit. I need another bath.”
“We return to the others,” Trinesh directed. “Let’s see if Balar can get to the top of the wall or up onto the roof of that central confection.” He had no desire to go back into the darkness, not just yet—not until hunger got the better of him!
With the Ssu sword as a grappling hook and a rope cut from their desert-cloaks, the crossbowman scrambled up onto the enclosure wall. His head soon reappeared above the parapet.
“Sire, the roof is flat for ten paces or so,” he reported. “Then there’s another coping, and beyond it a second courtyard on three sides of this one. It’s walled, too—facing ours—and then more domes and turrets behind that.”
“People?”
“None in the courtyard or the buildings beyond, Sire. No sign of life.”
“Doors? Gates?”
“One directly below me, Sire: an archway. But I can’t see into it. Opposite in the far wall there’s a matching gat&— closed, I think.”
“What’s on the fourth side?” Trinesh asked. “Which direction is it?”
“Behind you, Hereksa.” Balar pointed over their heads. “You look straight down the wall and a cliff below it—” he paused, obviously pleased to save his most portentous tidings until last “—into a valley. There’s a river down there—a wide one with a shallow ford across it-—and beyond is a city: houses, roofs, temple towers, a big square filled with merchants’ awnings—woods and fields all around. There are little boats on the river. Sire—and people! Human beings!” Trinesh was the first up the rope. If only this were Tsolyanu and not Yan Kor! Doubtless the Lady Deq Dimani prayed for the exact opposite.
It was as Balar had said. The city was unknown to any of them, however, and they bickered over its identity. Chekkuru counted what he thought were twenty temples—the Gods and Cohorts of Pavar—and stated that it was surely a mediumsized town in eastern Tsolyanu. Horusel and Saina disputed him; they pointed to four sprawling, castle-like buildings of brick and dark wooden beams grouped about the main marketplace, and declared these to be “the Four Palaces of the Square” of some city in Mu’ugalavya: Tlar, possibly, or Khu. No one knew of any rivers near those places, particularly a stream that flowed east to west, and the range of blue-misted hills to the north was wrong for either. Chekkuru began a long, wrangling argument, and Trinesh had to step in as tactfully as possible to say that none of them had ever been in Mu’ugalavya and one theory was as good as another.
Aijasu and Tse’e proposed yet a third identification: one of the towns on the eastern shores of Lake Parunal, in Kilalammu, mayhap, or Jannu, or Mudallu beyond. This suggestion met with oppositon from Balar, who had grown up in Hekellu on the eastern frontier of the Imperium and had heard travelers’ tales of the squalid little states of the far northeast. Arjasu turned to Thu’n for confirmation, saying that the Pygmy Folk dwelt closer to those regions than Hekellu and ought to know, but the Nininyal only shrugged and denied any expertise in human urban architecture. Chosun simply shook his head, and Mejjai grunted phlegmatically and retreated into the shadows of the central portico to sleep.
Trinesh privately wanted to agree with the old exile but could not bring himself to say so. He spared a sidelong glance for the two Yan Koryani women; their expressions told him nothing. This might indeed be a smaller city in Yan Kor, or in one of its allies, Pijena, Chayakku, or Saa Allaqi. If so, their worries had only just begun.
He would have to warn his own party.
; They were too high and too far for their shouts to be heard in the city across the plain and the turgid, muddy river. A desert-cloak waved upon Saina’s spear-shaft might be seen, but then why alert the inhabitants to their presence? There must be some way down through the palace—temple, citadel, or whatever this building was—and it seemed better to meet their unknown hosts on their own terms. Trinesh left Atjasu upon the roof to observe and ordered the rest down to take counsel.
“We have water aplenty,” he said when they were assembled, “but little food. No one is seriously injured, and I see no reason to signal to the city-folk just yet.” He shot the three Yan Koryani a hard look. “I propose that we find some way over into those other sections of the citadel. We must also examine our car and its contents for anything useful.”
“Including the ‘Eye,’ ” the Lady Deq Dimani said sweetly.
“Ai, the ‘Eye,’ too.”
He left it at that. Later, as Kashi rose to wash the swarming carvings of the enclosure wall with ruby moonlight, he set forth a roster of sentries and watch-times. In this he included the Yan Koryani, but each would always be accompanied by two Tsolyani—oath or no oath! Chekkuru was put to devising suitable funeral rituals and an elegy for poor Jalugan, while Tse’e, Thu’n, and Trinesh himself inventoried their possessions.
10
The following morning Trinesh brought out the “Eye,” stood at what he hoped was a safe distance, and pointed its iris at a wall. He depressed the stud; Nothing resulted, and his audience laughed—a trifle nervously. One of the symbols on the “counter” changed, but that was all. The device was either out of order, or else its function was undetectable by human senses. He thought, half seriously, of trying it upon the Lady Deq Dimani herself, but then matters were not urgent enough to warrant a possible accidental execution!
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