A Fortune for Kregen

by Alan Burt Akers

  A single blow from that holly-leaf-blade might easily sunder through the Pachak’s shield, a second rip his head clean off.

  “He seeks to slay the man who holds the box!” yelled Naghan. The lion-man’s own halberd slashed at the Chulik as the Undead passed, and was caught on the strangdja. For a single instant the two staved weapons clung and clashed, and then with a supple quarter-staff trick, the halberd was flung off. Naghan staggered back, raging with anger, to fling himself on again.

  “Throw the box!” called Ariane in her clear voice.

  The box arched up, and was caught by Logu, who waited until the Chulik advanced, madly, insensately, and then the box sailed over to me. I caught it and prepared to use the Krozair blade one-handed.

  Stories of the Undead circulate as freely on Kregen as on Earth — more freely, seeing that they exist there. They are often called Kaotim, for kao is one of the many words for death, and they are to be avoided. Whether or not this example could be slain by steel I did not know, although I suspected he might well be, seeing that he had resumed his living appearance when recalled to life.

  “Throw the box, Jak!” called Ariane.

  I threw it — to her.

  “You rast!” screeched Naghan at me, and fairly flung himself forward. But the Krozair brand flamed before him. The superb Krozair longsword is not to be bested by a polearm no matter how redoubtable its reputation or deadly its execution.

  So the Chulik Kaotim sought to get past me, aiming a blow at Ariane, and I chopped him. Could one feel sorry for slaying a man who was already dead?

  When the Kaotim’s second leg was chopped he had to fall, for the Undead had been hopping and fighting on one. He hit the stone coping to the stream, and struggled to rise, and his stumps of legs bathed in the water and no blood gushed from their severed ends.

  Finally, Naghan, with a cry of: “In the name of Numi-Hyrjiv the Golden Splendor!” brought his halberd down. The Kaotim’s Chulik head rolled. No blood splashed. The gilt tusks shone in the light of the torches. The armored body lay still.

  For a moment there existed a silence in which the roar of the waterfall sounded thin and distant.

  I said, “If the key part is so important, as, indeed, it is, it would not have been entrusted to so feeble a charge.” I turned away. “Whatever is in the box — it will not be the key.”

  I do not know who opened the box.

  All they found was a coil of hair, and a blue silk ribbon, and a tiny pearl and silver brooch.

  The lady Ariane said, “Put the things back in the box. Place it back on the ledge from whence it came.”

  This was done.

  We stood back.

  The Chulik head rolled. The legs walked. As Osiris was joined together, so that nameless Chulik adventurer resumed his full stature, legs and head once more attached to his body. Painfully, he crawled to the stone ledge and stretched out his hand toward the box — and so once more died.

  His yellow skin marbled over and granulated to that death-green color. He remained, fast locked in the undying flesh, his ib forever barred from the Ice Floes of Sicce and the sunny uplands beyond.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kov Loriman Mentions the Hunting Sword

  The torches threw grotesque arabesques of light and shadow on the ripple-reflecting roof of the tunnel.

  The stream ran wide and deep at our side. We pressed on along the stone path and we took it in turns to lead, for we encountered many of the more ordinary water monsters of Kregen. Always, the two Pachaks and the numim clustered close to their lady. There were in her retinue other powerful fighting men, and between them and me we kept the way ahead clear.

  “Water runs downhill,” said a Brukaj, his bulldog face savage as he drew back from slashing a lizard-form back into the water from which it had writhed, hissing. “So, at least we go in the right direction.”

  “May your Bruk-en-im smile on us, and prove you right,” I said. “For, by Makki-Grodno’s disgusting diseased tripes! I am much in need of fresh air and the sight of the suns.”

  After a time in which more scaly horrors were slashed and smashed back into the water, it was my turn to yield the point position. Pressing back to the very water’s edge, I scanned the dark, swiftly-running stream as the people passed along.

  A soft voice as Ariane passed said: “I think you fight well, Jak. You are a paktun, I think.”

  “Of a kind, lady.” I did not turn my head. The Pachaks and the numim passed along and I stepped back from the edge to bring up the rear.

  Light blossomed ahead, glowing orange and lurid through the darkness. I was still in rear as we debouched into a cavern vaster than any we had yet encountered. Here the water ran into a lake that stretched out of sight, beyond the fire-crystal walls streaming their angry orange light, past the weird structures that broke the surface of the water with promises of diabolism.

  “Well, by all the Ibs of the Lily City!” said Ariane. “We will not meddle with them !”

  Fastened by rusty chains and rusty rings at the stone-faced jetty lay seven ships, sunken, their superstructures alone rising above the waters. They were carved and decorated grotesquely. Many skeletons were chained to the oars. In the clear water hundreds of darting shapes sped dizzyingly. They were not fish. Their jaws gaped with needle-teeth, and their eyes blazed. We drew back from the edge with a shudder.

  The gravel expanse began where the stone ended, and then more stone flags started again, some twenty paces farther on.

  No one offered to step upon the gravel.

  Tarkshur, Strom Phrutius, Kov Loriman and, even, Prince Nedfar, would simply have told a slave to attempt to cross. I looked at the lady Ariane nal Amklana and wondered what she would do.

  “Naghan!” She spoke briskly. ‘Tell some of the slaves to break a piece away from the nearest boat.

  Throw it on the gravel.”

  “Quidang, my lady!”[2]

  No slaves fell in the water as a piece of the rotten wood, the gilding peeling, was broken off. It was thrown out onto the gravel. It sank out of sight, slowly but inevitably, and a nauseating stench puffed up in black bubbles around it.

  “We cannot cross there, then!”

  “And we do not go back—”

  “We cannot swim—”

  “The boats!”

  But each piece of wood we tried sank, for the stuff was heavy as lead, and rotten, and putrid with decay.

  “Examine the wall for a secret door,” commanded the lady.

  As the slaves and retainers complied, she turned to me and bent a quizzical gaze on my harsh features.

  “You say you are a paktun of a kind, Jak. And you are Jak, merely Jak and nothing else?”

  Now the paktuns had called me notor, lord, without thought, and no man who is not a slave upon Kregen goes about the world with only one name. Unless he has something to hide. And anyone with an ounce of sense in his skull will invent a suitable name. I would not say I was Jak the Drang, for in Havilfar no less than Hamal, that name would be linked with the Emperor of Vallia. So, without a smile, but as graciously as I could, I said, “If it please you, my lady, I am sometimes called Jak the Sturr.”

  Now sturr means a fellow who is mostly silent, and a trifle boorish, and, not to put too fine a point upon it, not particularly favored by the gods in handsomeness. I picked the name out of the air, for, by Krun! I was building up a pretty head of boorish anger and resentment at the tricks and traps of this Moder. By Makki-Grodno’s leprous left earlobe! Yes!

  She laughed, a tinkle of silver in that gloomy torch-lit cavern.

  “Then you are misnamed, I declare, by Huvon the Lightning.”

  I did not smile. Huvon is a popular deity in Hyrklana, and I was not going to pretend to this woman that I came from that island. If she asked where I hailed from...

  “And, Jak the Unsturr — where in Kregen are you from?”

  “Djanduin, my lady.”

  “Djanduin! But you are not a Djang!”
r />   “No. But I have my home there. The Djangs and I get along.”

  “Yes.” She wrinkled up her nose, considering. “Yes. I think you and they would — Obdjang and Dwadjang both.”

  What, I wondered, as shouts rang out along the rocky wall, would she say if I told her I was the King of Djanduin? For a start she would not believe me. And who would blame her?

  We walked over the wall and Naghan the Doom indicated an opening in the wall. I would have preferred to have found a boat and gone gliding down the stream to the outside world. But as no craft were available we were in for another confounded corridor. Anyway, there were probably more waterfalls, and things with jaws that were not fish, and all kinds of blood-sucking leeches and lampreys and Opaz-alone knew what down the river...

  The room into which we pressed at the end of the corridor presented us with another puzzle. I let them get on with it.

  Whatever it was Ariane had come here for, the scent was growing cold as far as I was concerned. Yet every step we took could bring a horrible death, and therefore this Moder had to be taken seriously, very seriously indeed, by Vox!

  The room was some hundred paces wide and broad with a fire-crystal roof from which light poured. We had entered by a square-cut opening which was the right-hand one of three. Across the room towered a throne draped in somber purple. The throne itself was fashioned from gold, and surrounded by a frieze of human skulls. Bones and skulls formed the decorations around the walls. On the throne sat the wizened body of an old woman. She had, we all judged, died of chivrel, that wasting disease that makes of Kregans old folk before their time.

  Her robes were magnificent, cloth of gold and silver, studded with gems and laced with gold wire. Her skeletal fingers were smothered in jeweled rings. Her crown blazed.

  A series of nine white-marble steps led up to the throne. Each side, and tethered by iron links, crouched two leems, motionless, their yellow eyes in their fierce wedge-shaped heads fastened upon us. The fangs were exposed.

  On the third step up to the throne lay the armored body of a Kataki. He had been a famous warrior, one judged, a slave master, powerful, in his prime. Now he moldered away and he had not been dead for as long as most of the Undead in this fearsome place. The silence hung as an intense weight upon us.

  “He is not, I judge, a Kaotim,” observed Ariane. She was remarkably composed. “He was an adventurer, who failed the test.”

  We all nodded solemnly.

  On seven tables spread with white linen down the left hand side of the chamber a feast lay spread out.

  The viands looked succulent, the wines superb. Not one of us was foolish enough to touch a scrap of food or a drop of drink.

  Going as near as I felt sensible to the dead Kataki I saw that his face was black and his eye sockets were empty.

  A small spindly-legged table to the right of the lowest step contained on its mosaic surface a golden handbell.

  The lady Ariane paused before this little table, and looked down. She mused within her own thoughts before she said lightly, “To ring or not to ring?”

  “To touch, or not to touch — anything,” I said.

  “True, Jak the Unsturr.”

  Mulishly, I said, “It is Jak the Sturr, my lady.”

  She frowned. “I do not choose to be crossed.”

  Well, it was a petty matter and not worth arguing about. Not here, where a ghastly death might leap upon us at any moment.

  Faintly at first, and then growing steadily louder, the sounds of voices; the shuffle of feet and the clink of weapons sounded at our backs. We looked around as the noises strengthened.

  “From the center door,” said Naghan. “Best, my lady, we keep out of sight.”

  Silently, all of us, slaves fearful and retainers not much happier, we crowded behind the seven tables and crouched down. It was a jostle and we were cramped; but the fighting men positioned themselves ready to leap out if the occasion warranted.

  The noises spurted into the chamber and then a voice broke out, hard, high and yet lighthearted.

  “Thank Havil! There is real light ahead. Courage, my friend.”

  “Courage?” came a wheezing voice. “It is more a pair of strong legs, like yours, I am in dire need of at this moment.”

  Out into the light from the central opening stepped Deb-Lu-Quienyin and, with him and leading a small bunch of warriors and slaves, came Prince Tyfar. They stared about, much as we had done when we first entered.

  The lady Ariane stood up, and smoothed her white gown.

  “Lahal, prince!”

  The shock was profound. Ariane laughed mischievously.

  I frowned. She had risked an arrow through that pretty head of hers — the warriors with Prince Tyfar lowered their bows reluctantly. The prince smiled and walked forward, his hands outstretched.

  “My lady Ariane! Lahal and Lahal. What a pleasant sight in this infernal prison!”

  We all stood up from where we had hidden behind the tables and we all felt foolish, I daresay. After a space for mutual greetings, our stories were told. Very similar they were, too. As Ariane and the flying man had been separated, so the Wizard of Loh and the young prince of Hamal had been cut off from the main party by a falling block of stone. Now, together, we studied our present predicament.

  Deb-Lu-Quienyin walked across to peer at the dead Kataki, and I observed how these people, like ours, had learned to do nothing foolish until everything that could be worked out had been worked out.

  He saw me. His face expressed surprise; but no great surprise, no shock. He smiled his old smile.

  “Why, Lahal, Jak. How nice to see you again — you have had success, I trust?”

  I greeted him in turn and then Ariane broke in to say, “So you two know each other? How nice!”

  Prince Tyfar and I made the pappattu, and he gave me a hard look. “A lone adventurer, down here?”

  “There are few people with you, prince.”

  “Yes, true — your party?”

  I pointed up, down, and around. “Havil alone knows.”

  “You are welcome to join our party—”

  I looked at him. He was a fine, sprightly, well-set-up young man, and the axe that dangled at his belt looked freshly cleaned. He was a prince of Hamal.

  I said, “And you are at liberty to join me.”

  His eyebrows went up. His right hand dropped betrayingly toward his axe. Then his face creased. He threw his head back. He laughed. “By Krun! You are a jokester — and that is good, down here.”

  “If you two have finished?” Ariane looked cross. This was man’s business and she felt a little left out —

  or so I judged the situation. “How do we go on?” She motioned to the three doors. “The left-hand one?”

  Quienyin sighed. “That will probably take us back again where we do not wish to go. And the way is hard.”

  In the pause that followed we all heard the noises from the third door. There was about them a familiar ring.

  Quienyin nodded. “We have all been working our way through these places and have, by different routes, converged on this chamber. That, I judge, is the rest of the party.”

  We all agreed and did not shelter behind the tables.

  The Wizard of Loh was both right and wrong. When the newcomers walked out into the chamber we saw that they were the people belonging to Kov Loriman the Hunter. He strode ahead, swinging his sword about, enraged, looking for quarry. He had only two slaves and many of his fighting men carried bundles of loot.

  The pappattu was made and he gave me a queasy look for which I did not blame him. After all, I could easily be a monster waiting the opportunity to rend him into pieces. But Quienyin’s word sufficed.

  “These passages writhe like a boloth’s guts,” Loriman said, and his full fleshy face exhibited passion.

  “When do we get to the real treasure house? By Spikatur Hunting Sword! I need to get my hands on—”

  He checked himself and then blustered on— “Gold an
d gems! Aye, by Sasco! That is what I came for and that is what I will have!”

  So, I said to myself, this fine fleshy bucko was down the Moder for something other than gold or gems...

  While the slaves and retainers wandered about the chamber seeking to read its riddles, I got hold of Quienyin and steered him to the center where we might talk. From our fascinating conversations under the stars as we rested in that caravan in which we traveled to Jikaida City, I knew him to be a pleasant old buffer — for a Wizard of Loh! — who felt the loss of his sorcerous powers most keenly. Yet I had sensed in him a groping for comradeship passing strange in a thaumaturge and not to be simply explained away merely because he had lost his arts of sorcery.

  “Spikatur Hunting Sword,” he said and puffed out his cheeks. “The kov let slip more — well, little enough is known of that secret order—”

  “I heard rumors it was a new religion out of Pandahem—”

  “You see? Stories, rumors, nothing known for certain. Whatever the truth, its members are Dedicated to Hunting. That, at least, is sure.” He pushed at his turban. “And it is the least — nothing vital is known.”

  “I am most happy to see you alive and well, San. You seek your powers here—”

  The intelligent inquisitiveness he had exhibited over this matter of Kov Loriman’s secret allegiances shriveled at my words. He rode the tragedy extremely well, and showed a brave and proud face to the world. He was a Wizard of Loh. Instant obedience from ordinary mortals had been habitual to him.

  Sucking up, to find no easier way of saying it, from simple men who feared him had been his lot in life.

  But this loss had changed him greatly. He was troubled. He and I had come to an understanding out there on the Desolate Waste.

  “Thank you, Jak. But, I crave your indulgence, do not tell these people I am a Wizard of Loh.” His old eyes shifted to peer suspiciously at a massive Chulik, one of Loriman’s bully boys, who prowled past bashing his spear against the floor. “I have told them I am a Magician of the humbler sort, whose tricks are mere sleight of hand. I do not think it would go well if they knew—”