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

by Flamesong (v0. 9) (epub)

  Others sprang in to strike: Kambe, Te’os, Zaklen, and the other bodyguards from outside the door. Some she slew, and others she left charred upon the smoldering carpets. Trinesh saw Dineva fall, clutching an arm that was blackened and blistering. Chosun swung the heavy candelabrum, a giant mace near as heavy as a man, only to see it touch her skin and explode in a shower of liquid bronze.

  Kadarsha still hesitated. The girl’s eyes had not left his. It was as though he were transfixed, ensorceled. The Prince, behind him, .moved to thrust him aside.

  Trinesh still held Tse’e’s sword. At his feet, the boy, Ridek, batted at a drop of molten metal that sizzled upon his ragged green tunic. The Mihalli had rolled over and was struggling with his bonds; there was no time to see, but Trinesh thought that someone else knelt there beside the creature.

  The Lady Deq Dimani caught his attention. She was awake, sitting up, her hands clawing at her cheeks as though she would pry her swollen eyelids open by sheer physical force.

  “No, Jai!” the woman shrieked. “That is not Mirusiya! Kadarsha—I know him! I have seen him before!” She repeated her words in guttural Yan Koryani.

  For the first time the girl faltered. She slowed, swerved to look, and opened her lips. Her eyes were blank ovals of fire, her mouth the ravening maw of some flame-belching furnace.

  Trinesh pressed the stud of Prince Tenggutla Dayyar’s “Eye.”

  She staggered. He could feel the blaze within her dim, then leap high again; it was as though a door had momentarily closed upon an oven.

  “No, Jai! Not Kadarsha!”

  Trinesh fired his “Eye” a second time. The room swayed, darkened as does a new-poured ingot when water is splashed upon it, and righted itself again. The “Eye” grew hot in his fingers, and he almost let it fall. The Lady Jai turned to stare straight at him. There was death in that gaze. She swung back to Kadarsha, then twisted to her left, toward Prince Mirusiya.

  “Yes! Yes, he!” It took no knowledge of Yan Koryani to interpret the Lady Deq Dimani’s cry.

  Kadarsha took two paces forward.

  He embraced the girl.

  If he screamed it was lost in the white-hot shriek of steam and flame that poured up from where he stood. The choking stench of roasted flesh and burning entrails filled the room and was just as quickly gone as all that had been Kadarsha hiTlekolmii became first a contorted, blackened shell, then a cinder, then a storm of pale ashes.

  It was over within a single heartbeat. A dusting of white floated down over the flaming carpets.

  Something smashed against Trinesh’s thigh, and he stumbled back. The boy! No, it was another, the dark-furred nonhuman. How had he freed himself?

  Now he saw that there were two such aliens. One was still bound, but the second seized the Yan Koryani princeling and thrust him headlong into the colorless mirror-oval of a Nexus Point portal that flickered upon the wall beside the Flame Lord’s altar. The creature picked up the Lady Deq Dimani and wrestled her into the opening, then returned to drag the remaining Mihalli after himself as well.

  “Jai! —Flamesong!” the woman called shrilly, “Follow us! Now!”

  Of those still unharmed, Trinesh was the closest to the Nexus Point. He yelled something and stabbed blindly at the second Mihalli’s retreating back. He heard a cracking, rattling crunch, and wood splintered under his blow. The harp! The blind nomad had been a Mihalli, his red-glowing eyes disguised in the only possible way, beneath the hideous scar-tissue of Alungtisa

  Trinesh turned and cast about for help. Other figures were visible in the choking smoke and Flamesong’s incandescent glare, but he could not see who or how many. He hesitated, but the heat was too great to bear. He coughed, screwed his streaming eyes shut, and hurled himself after the four Yan Koryani. He did remember to shout, “After me!”

  24

  The heat—battle-madness, divine passion, or the very real agony of burning—dissipated almost as quickly as it had come. Trinesh found himself on his knees upon a paving of black-flecked gray stone. A corridor descended in front of him in gradual stages to be lost in the murky gloom ahead, its neatly mortared masonry walls lit at intervals by torches in cressets. The ceiling was vaulted, and moisture plashed in puddles upon the flagging.

  Was this Ninue again? It was certainly not the Ochuna. Nor, praise to the Flame Lord, was it one of those Demon Planes where poisonous vegetation vied with more mobile inhabitants to discommode the traveler. More than one epic described such mordant events!

  If the second Mihalli were a Yan Koryani agent, then he could hazard an excellent guess as to his present whereabouts. This gave him small comfort.

  He looked around. Two paces behind him, up the shallow staircase of the passage, the Nexus Point hung upon the right-hand wall, an alien and colorless doorway to Other-Space. Ten more paces beyond the portal, a verdigris-stained portcullis of thick metal bars blocked the tunnel completely.

  That direction was closed, then.

  Yet where was the boy? The Mihalli and his living burdens? Trinesh turned back to squint down the corridor but could see no sign of them. They had preceded him by no more than two minutes at most. Yet that would probably suffice to travel far enough down the dimly lit stairstep-passage to be lost to view, if one knew where one was going.

  And now that he was here, just what, exactly, had he planned to do?

  Escape did come to mind.

  He inspected himself. Aside from a few bruises and a white blister upon his left thigh between his tasses and his knee where a drop of molten slag had landed, he was unhurt, saved by his Engsvanyali armor. He’d be damned if he’d meekly surrender it to General Kutume after this! He rose, leaned on Tse’e’s steel sword as an old woman does her cane, and stumbled up to put his head cautiously through the Nexus doorway.

  Flames. An inferno. Smoke, fire, leaping figures. Shouting. He could distinguish nothing. Nor could he see Flamesong in the midst of the conflagration.

  He wrenched himself back as two—three—blackened shapes came tumbling through the Nexus door. He was too late; they knocked him flat, sending the breath rattling, from his lungs. The first was Chosun, the second Arjasu, and the third, who leaped over the others like a nimble Atlun-spider, was Tse’e.

  Trinesh crawled out from beneath the tangle, grimly contemplated a new roster of abrasions, and examined the newcomers. Chosun’s armor was starred with golden sun-blaze spatters of what had recently been the bronze candelabrum. He had no helmet, and his round, neckless head was scorched and blistered, yet he seemed to feel no pain. Arjasu was unharmed; he had not attacked Flamesong. His crossbow had

  once more been left outside with the Prince’s guards, and the short dagger he still wore at his belt would have been as feeble as a Hruchan-reed—as were all their weapons! Tse’e’s desert-cloak was burned through in a dozen places, but the leather had protected every scrawny part of him save for his balding skull. Several angry bums there would require attention later.

  “The others?” Trinesh panted.

  “The Prince got out through some secret door in back,” Arjasu reported smoothly. “Karin Missum and his priest fled through the front entrance—Dineva too. I saw somebody helping her, Kambe maybe. At least one of the thrice-damned, useless Vriddi bravos escaped as well. The rest—?” He sketched the Flame Lord’s sign in the air with three soot-smeared fingers. “They’re probably sipping molten fire-stone in one of mighty Vimuhla’s ecstatic, white-hot paradises by now!”

  “The Senior General’s dead,” Chosun added unnecessarily. All of them had seen him die.

  “General Kutume returned just after the fire started,” Arjasu continued with military precision. “He was howling for buckets and water, but those of us on your side of the room couldn’t get across to him.” The crossbowman fingered a seared spot on one cheek. “Aside from General Kadarsha, we may not have lost much.”

  “He was enough,” Trinesh sighed gloomily. He did not want to think now of the political and military ramification
s of the Senior General’s brave self-sacrifice. More, the most urgent question still remained:

  “The Lady Jai—Flamesong?”

  The others exchanged uneasy glances. “The room was a furnace, Hereksa," Chosun muttered.

  Trinesh came to a decision. “Time we got ourselves away—I heard the Lady Deq Dimani calling the Lady Jai to follow. If we stay here or try to go back now, we may run headlong into her Flamesong—more morsels for her feast!” He set the example himself by striding off down the passage.

  They had not gone more than a hundred paces when a flare of crackling yellow-white light behind them announced the advent of Lord Vimuhla’s mighty weapon herself.

  Tse’e halted to look. “She’s not human any more,” he marveled. “More like the ‘column of candent Flame, a funeral pyre upon which all foes are consumed,’ as the poet says in ‘The Lament to the Wheel of Black.’ Thus was Lord Vimuhla’s weapon at Dormoron Plain—” Trinesh seized the collar of his desert-cloak and dragged him away. There was a fascination for all ages and sexes in Flamesong, it seemed.

  A larger darkness appeared ahead. The corridor opened out into a chamber before them, and Trinesh slowed to take stock. His little band was mostly unarmed. He still had Tse’e’s steel blade, but he counted himself their best swordsman and hence did not offer to return it to the old man. Both he and Arjasu had daggers—useless as feathers, probably, against whatever inhabited this hole: monsters, soldiers, demons, or the gods themselves! Chosun and Tse’e had no weapons at all.

  Arjasu was the most skilled with missiles, and Trinesh handed him Prince Tenggutla Dayyar’s “Eye.” As he instructed the crossbowman, it had done something to Flamesong back in Kankara and possibly to the Mihalli in Ninue, but he still had not fathomed precisely what.

  He explained his plan. “We watch for the Lady Deq Dimani, her two Mihalli, and the boy. We can’t fight them, not if they have sorcery. Instead we hide or run, stay out of the Lady Jai’s—Flamesong’s—way, and wait for a chance to run back up the passage. Pray that the Nexus Point doorway lasts until we reach it. By that time the fire in the Prince’s chamber should be extinguished, and we can slip back through.”

  “If we catch the Lady Deq Dimani off guard—” Chosun suggested optimistically.

  “Recapture her? Slay her? Small chance of that!” His hopes for gold and promotion had long since gone a-glimmering. The Baron’s son, the Lady Deq Dimani—even Okkuru’s gold, now doubtless confiscated by an amazed and joyous General Kutume—all were shadows, dreams, fantasies as far-fetched as those of a gambler who has already lost his last Kaitar to the Kevuk-dice!

  An obscenity rose to his tongue, but that, too, was futile.

  They came to another gate, a threaded, circular tunnel of bronze barely a man-height high and almost five paces in length. A plug of great size hung upon massive hinges beside the aperture, ready to be swung into place and screwed shut with a wheel. An identical wheel was visible on the inside of the door-plug; once within, one could at least emerge again. Both hinges and wheels gleamed bright gold with recent usage.

  Someone came this way. Often.

  Whoever it was, he or she—or it—had built to last. And to keep some other very powerful thing either out or in.

  The chamber beyond the entrance-tunnel was cool and shadowy, lit from above by a wavering green phosphorescence. Colossal pilasters marched away into obscurity, but they did not support the roof. These columns were stumps: old, worn, pocked, corroded, and coated with vermilion and indigo encrustations that hid whatever inscriptions or designs they might once have held. The floor crunched underfoot. Washed in the undulating, citrine glow, it resembled the floor of the sea.

  Which it was. A scalloped Faru-sheU protruded like a miniature pink pyramid from the sea-wrack by Trinesh’s boot.

  He raised his eyes. The luminous emerald ceiling could well be water. That shadow which glided over their heads was no bird, no winged Src-dragon! Circles of pallid luminescence spotted the beast’s flanks like the portholes of a foundered ghost-ship, and its ribbed flukes raised roiling eddies of smaller, silvery fish with their passing.

  He swallowed hard and gave Tse’e a sidelong glance. This place resembled Na Ngore, but the look the old man sent back told him that he, too, had divined the nature of their surroundings. It seemed expedient not to mention it to Chosun or Aijasu. This was no habitat for humankind!

  Now he could make out other constructions farther on within the gloomy chamber: broken, blue-gray walls whose angular carvings were blotched with corals and the empty skeletons of pallid sea-growths; rows of pedestals from which disfigured statues gazed sadly down, heroes wounded not by war but by time, the Ultimate Victor; trapezoidal doorways that did not use the arch; titanic blocks of porous stone half-sunk beneath the sand; and friezes blurred and rubbed soft by the relentless caress of the sea.

  There was air here; his lungs told him that he still breathed. He had not become a fish! The sorcerous energies needed to keep this place secure against the pressures of the ocean must be potent beyond imagining!

  Yet they were not really very deep: a shimmer of sunlight filtered down to them through the layers of green water, and back in the direction of the way they had come, he perceived a tenebrous mass, a looming wall, that must be a headland rising up out of the ocean into the world above.

  Glitter caught his eye. He waved the others down behind a hedge of lacy, biittle, alabaster-hued limbs. There was a clearly defined path through the ruins straight ahead, but that was the likeliest spot for guards. He signaled Arjasu and Chosun to scout to the left, while he and Tse’e went to the right.

  They skirted two pylons of ocher-mottled stone, then took shelter again behind an enormous lump of greyish coral the size of a vintner’s wine-cask. Just ahead, three broad tables stood before a forest of spiky, sky-blue branches: trees from some drowned and forlorn landscape, or the up-jutting ribs of a sea-monster. These tables, however, belonged not to the deeps but to the upper world of light and air: they were carved of sorrel-hued wood, dark-varnished and scarred with use, as prosaic as any of the furnishings in Trinesh’s clanhouse. Objects were heaped in disarray upon them, a Mnor's-nest of shapes, hues, and materials.

  Trinesh surveyed the nearest table, that on the right. Its contents looked like weapons: he made out a sword-hilt, another complex blade with many points and barbs, a big round object that could be the head of a mace, a gauntlet, a heap of rusted links—a mail hauberk? —and a score of other military oddments. Loot from these sunken ruins? Plunder from ships cast away at sea?

  The objects on the central table were different: a farrago of metal parts and pieces, whorls, strands, devices, tubes, enigmatic boxes like those they had found in the tubeway car they had taken from the Ssu, and shiny tools. In a cleared space at the front of the bench he saw six small ovoids the size of Dlel-fruit pits.

  He blinked.

  Those were “Eyes,” identical to Trinesh’s own, though doubtless built to perform different functions! Two had been separated into hemispheres, and these were surrounded by a fuzz of silvery filaments. Other tiny parts lay ready to hand beside them.

  Excitedly, Trinesh pointed out the devices to Tse’e.

  “A few scholars can repair ‘Eyes,’ ” the old man whispered. “But no one knows how to construct them. That skill was lost after the Latter Times.”

  Trinesh had heard only vague mention of that fabulously ancient period, and it showed in his face.

  Tse’e glanced around but saw no imminent danger; neither Flamesong nor the Lady Deq Dimani’s party was in view. He dug himself a hollow in the dry sand. “Listen, then. The Latter Times followed the Time of Darkness as twilight succeeds a storm before the night. It was during the Time of

  Darkness that the lamps in the sky were blown out—have you heard that at least? It is mentioned in the ‘Hymn to Na-Iverge,” the recension of the twenty-third Engsvanyali dynasty. In any event, Tekumel was sent into an eon-long convulsion of upheaval and cata
clysm—no epic says how or why—and so ended all alone, save for its sun, its four sister-planets, and its two moons.”

  “Company enough, one might think.”

  “But not what had been before. Once, in Avanthar, I saw a book inscribed upon leaves of imperishable metal such as the Ancients made. It had been translated into the tongue of Llyan of Tsamra, thence into Engsvanyali, and so into Classical Tsolyani, which all of us Imperial children were taught to read. That text detailed the paroxysms of the earth and the sea, the cyclones and torrents, the fall of cities, and the termination of the world as the Ancients knew it. It spoke of the decay of knowledge, the enclaves of artisans who grew ever fewer and could obtain neither materials nor power for their machines, the fossilization of learning and its transformation into cant and ritual, and the dissolution of the ties that bound Tekumel’s peoples—human and nonhuman—together. The indigenous races, ‘the Foes of Man,’ the Hliiss and the Ssu, poured forth from the reservations where they had been contained, and they wrought vengeance upon those who had wrested their world from them. As that book said, ‘Once the wan, slow afternoon of the Latter Times had begun, it endured for millennia without counting, until the final sunset brought the shadows and the end of the day.’ ”

  Trinesh grew restive. “But those ‘Eyes’?”

  “Ai, they appear to be under repair by some artificer who knows his craft. The Temples of Lords Thumis and Ksarul are best at such gimcrackery.” Tse’e paused to .consider. “Yet this is certainly no jack-priest’s magic-shop!”

  “Cha! Why build such mechanisms when spells are available?”

  “Why, indeed? Once the technique of drawing energy from the boundless stores of the Planes Beyond was discovered, it profits little to fuss with metals and glass and mechanical tricks. An ‘Eye’ is stronger than a spell, but each must be individually constructed for its purpose, and that requires more art—and scarce materials—than does a spell learned by rote. If one has the psychic ability, the training, and the Pedhetl—” He noted the pained look on Trinesh’s face and took pity. “The Pedhetl is a mental reservoir found within each animate being; the energies of the Planes Beyond seep through the ‘skin of reality’ to fill this basin, and one whose Pedhetl is capacious can then utilize that power to trigger spells drawing still greater forces from outside this Plane. Why labor to create an explosion with alchemical powders—I have seen it done—when any temple adept can make a much louder bang with the force of his mind alone?” “Then? Why ‘Eyes’ at all?”