And there, standing just five yards away from me, was one of these incorruptible, blind guards who couldn’t be killed. The Kaiyu seemed to be made of thousands of glittering sparks. It was impossible to look at the creature for long—the bright golden gleam made my eyes start to water, and the figure of the soulless guard blurred and trembled like a mirage at noon on a hot summer day. I could only make out the silhouette.
The creature was a head taller than me. Two arms, two legs, a head. No tails or horns or teeth. How could this creature have teeth? It didn’t even have a mouth! And where the eyes ought to have been there were two empty, gaping holes. The creature was completely blind.
Well now, blind or not, it seemed to have a very definite and accurate idea of where I was. At least, it came toward me, and without hurrying, as if it was quite confident that I couldn’t get away from it.
I panicked and shot a bolt at it. It flew through the creature’s body without causing any damage and clattered against the far wall in the darkness. The beast was suddenly only one pace away from me and it raised its hand. I roared in fright, realizing that this was the end, but the Kaiyu’s hand simply swept through the air beside my ear and the guard moved past me and stopped, giving me a good view of its back.
I don’t know which of us was more surprised. The Kaiyu stood there for a brief moment, obviously trying to figure out why I was still alive, and then it had another try. With the same result. As if some force had erected a barrier between us. The guard could see me (strange as that may sound), but he couldn’t harm me. Thanks to Egrassa and his bracelet.
Meanwhile the Kaiyu stepped on the nearest patch of light and the sparks making up his body showered down onto the floor in a golden rain. All the patches in the hall started moving again. What was I to make of that? Did it mean they had decided to let me go?
The bracelet was scorching my arm more and more painfully, and the moment was rapidly approaching when the pain would become so unbearable, I would have to take it off (if I wasn’t going to lose consciousness). I had to risk it and try to reach the way out before it was too late.
Taking no more notice of the patches of light, I set out toward the exit. As soon as my foot touched the first patch, another Kaiyu appeared. This time the golden sparks assembled into the body of the guard a lot faster. But the beast didn’t even try to attack me. I stepped on another patch, and then another.…
Not every patch threw up a Kaiyu; if that had happened, the entire hall would have been crowded with them. Five guards appeared, formed up into a semicircle, and followed me. A fantastically beautiful and at the same time terrifying sight.
The five golden creatures “looked” in my direction, then crumbled into a shower of sparks that were drawn into a patch of “sunlight,” disappeared for a fraction of a second, and then reappeared, but now outside the patch that I had just stepped on. And we walked across the hall like that.
Once I left the hall the Kaiyu stopped following me. The patches on the floor started moving about and waiting for their next visitor, who would arrive in darkness only knew how many hundreds of years. The pain in my arm gradually eased as the amulet protecting me relaxed and became a perfectly ordinary copper bracelet again.
I had passed through the Kaiyu Hall and lived. That was worth celebrating, which was exactly what I did straightaway. Of course, instead of wine I had to make do with ordinary water from a subterranean river, and instead of quail I had to chew on half a dry biscuit.
Forty paces farther on, the first side tunnel appeared, and I started counting the intersections to make sure I wouldn’t miss the turn I needed. At the eighteenth intersection I stopped and turned to the right, leaving the central vestibule.
Up ahead of me the vestibule led to a stairway down to the sixth level, and I was absolutely certain that was the way Lafresa and the rest of Balistan Pargaid’s men had gone. I was going to be more cunning and turn off the main highway. There were many routes leading to the sixth level, and the one mentioned in the verse riddle was a lot shorter than the route chosen by the Master’s woman servant.
I would reduce the distance by three quarters and go straight to the very heart of the sector I needed on the sixth level, while dearest Lafresa would have to tramp across the sixth level from its very beginning and lose almost two whole days. That would leave me well ahead of my rivals. And what if I managed to prepare for the encounter and take back the Key? Almost all (or perhaps all) of Lafresa’s companions had been killed in the Palaces of Bone, and my chances of victory had improved enormously. The important thing was to keep enough lights and food for the journey back.
I spotted the statues of the giants “whose gaze burns all to ash” immediately. They were standing facing each other, clutching stone hammers in their gnarled, knotty hands.
The giants had an air of antiquity and hidden menace. Whose chisel could have carved these huge colossi out of stone? How had they been brought down to this depth and what for? Instead of faces the statues had the smooth surfaces of closed helmets with tall crests and narrow eye-slits. Both of them were looking down at the ground in front of their feet. Between them there was something that looked like a pool or a basin, but from where I was I couldn’t see any water.
’Neath the gaze of Giants who burn all to ash,
To the graves of the Great Ones who died in battle …
Perhaps that “basin” was the way down to the Sector of Heroes on the sixth level? That was exactly where I needed to go, but that phrase about the apparent ease with which the giants’ gaze reduced anyone who came too close to ashes made me feel a bit cautious.
Once I was in the hall, I didn’t try to hurry; I leaned back against the wall and started looking for the answer. There had to be an answer, no fool would ever build an entrance especially so that no one could ever use it. So, if I was going to get to the basin, the giants had to close their eyes for a while.
But how could I make them do that? They were statues, after all. Some kind of mechanism? I couldn’t see anything of the kind. I must admit I thought long and hard over this puzzle. But no clever ideas came to mind. The statues looked monolithic and immovable.
Deciding to test their fiery gaze, I put my hand into my bag and took out the very smallest of the emeralds. It was the only thing I wouldn’t be sorry to part with. I put the stone on the smooth floor and gave it a smart kick. It slid along the surface, flashing in farewell to me like a little green star, moved into range of the giants’ gaze, and disappeared in a blinding flash.
“Oho!”
I had to go back to work on the essential problem of how to get down to the sixth level. I rummaged through all the papers I’d taken from the Forbidden Territory, paying especially close attention to the parts I’d thought were unnecessary. A heap of incomprehensible drawings, showing the architecture of several halls, a meaningless sequence of symbols, and some other obscure rubbish … Mmm, yes. Damn all in the papers. It was a rotten idea. But the answer had to be somewhere close! I could feel it in my gut.
I approached the giants cautiously, almost turning myself cross-eyed. With one eye I tried to watch the statues’ heads and draw the line limiting the effect of their fiery gaze across the floor. With the other I tried to spot some kind of clue to the answer. Eventually I had to stop or risk being roasted and then incinerated.
The giants were close now, and from where I was standing I could see quite clearly that the statues were not so very perfect and the craftsman’s chisel had worked the stone rather crudely. And I also noticed something else, something that made it worthwhile almost going cross-eyed. The giants were both standing on rather tall round plinths. Well, what was so special about that—a plinth’s a plinth, isn’t it? But I would have offered up an eyetooth if those plinths didn’t rotate (together with the giants, of course), if you just knew how to make them to do it. The seasoned eye of an experienced man will always spot a concealed mechanism. All I had to do now was find out how the mechanism was activated and the j
ob was as good as done.
The hall with the giants was subjected to another intense inspection. I was looking for something like a lever or a protruding block of stone, but there didn’t seem to be anything of the kind there. Then my gaze fell on the floor, slid over the smooth claret-colored slabs, and stopped on the signs of an alphabet that I didn’t know.
I’d seen squiggles like that somewhere before. Why, of course! In the “unnecessary” part of the papers! In among the drawings and incomprehensible sketches there was a piece of paper with a sequence of symbols like those. I took the bundle wrapped in drokr out of my bag again, opened it, and started rummaging through the manuscripts.
There it was! My memory hadn’t deceived me. There on the paper were the same symbols as on the floor. Some kind soul had noted down the key, but forgotten to mention when and where it should be used.
I leaned down, found the symbol that was shown first on the sheet of paper, and pressed the appropriate little slab. It moved an inch. Everything turned out to be outrageously simple (if you happened to have the answer on a piece of paper, that is). All I had to do was to press fourteen of the seventy or so symbols shown here in the right order. As soon as the last of the blocks slid in, the hall was filled with a quiet humming sound, as if counterweights and pulleys had started moving somewhere under the floor, and the giants started slowly turning their backs to me and their fiery gaze toward the far wall.
I gave a whoop of triumph, as if I’d found the entire treasure of the Stalkon dynasty under my bed.
The way was clear, the menacing giants were no longer looking at the basin, and I set out in the appropriate direction.
The humming started again, the plinths trembled and started slowly turning in the opposite direction. I broke into a run, trying to cover the distance to the basin before the giants’ gaze became a deadly threat again, and jumped into the black hole without thinking.
“Aaaaaaaaagh!” I howled in fright, realizing that my feet wouldn’t be touching the floor again in the immediate future.
The hole turned out to be very deep. I fell the first twenty yards like a stone, and I’d already said good-bye to life, but just then the air thickened, I started falling more slowly, and the descent became smooth and gentle.
I had enough wits and courage to stop yelling and light up one of my magical lamps. I was falling slowly down a narrow shaft. Its walls drifted past me and disappeared upward. If I’d wanted to, I could easily have reached out and touched them with my hand. It was only through some caprice of the gods that I hadn’t smashed my head against the wall when I first started falling. About two hundred yards farther down I slowed down even further and found myself in one of the halls on the sixth level, in the very heart of the Sector of Heroes.
8
Playing Tag With The Dead
The sixth level is the deepest limit for men. Even during the centuries when the evil of the ogres’ bones and the evil of the bird-bears had awoken and roamed freely around the Palaces of Bone, it was a rare human being who was bold enough to descend below the sixth level.
There were rumors of crazy men who wandered even as deep as the twelfth level, but no one had ever seen the lunatics alive afterward.
The Sector of Heroes, located on the sixth level, was the only proof of a human presence at this depth. For some reason, neither the elves nor the orcs had ever been in any hurry to bury anyone at this level, and men jumped in to exploit this oversight by the older races. When the Firstborn and the elves moved out of Hrad Spein, the Palaces of Bone were left entirely in the custody of men, and they immediately started “planting” the empty sector with their most prestigious corpses (prestigious during their lives, that is).
For five and a half centuries they put coffins and tombs in the Sector of Heroes. Only great and famous people were granted the honor of being buried in the sixth level: generals, warriors who had distinguished themselves in battle, the higher nobility, kings.
Then they started putting everybody down there indiscriminately and in the end the sector was so crammed full with bones that some people even started thinking they ought to clean out the old graves and put new corpses in instead of the old ones. But then they got too lazy to take the bodies down there, and the burials continued on the upper levels. There was only one human burial site below the sixth level—Grok’s grave, which was where I happened to be headed.
Men only realized why the elves and the orcs had not been in any hurry to bury their dead in the Sector of Heroes when the evil awoke in Hrad Spein. For some reason this was the level affected most palpably by the Breath of the Abyss—the ominous name given by the big brains of the Order to whatever it was that had risen up from the levels without names and was playing games with the dead.
For no obvious reason, old bones that had been lying in their coffins for centuries suddenly started growing new flesh and then wandering about. Eventually there were more living dead in the Sector of Heroes than cockroaches in a dirty kitchen.
At least they didn’t come out onto the surface, they just stayed in one place as if they were glued there, feeding on the emanations of evil rising up from the depths. But those in the Order used to say that what was happening on the sixth level was mere child’s play, and what was rising from the depths wasn’t the Breath of the Abyss at all, but merely its distant echo. Unlike a certain Hallas (who starts trembling in fury at the very mention of the word “Order”), I am inclined to trust the magicians of the Order, in the same way as I trust manuscripts in the Royal Library. And to judge from all of this, there could be some very, very nasty things waiting for me, problems I wouldn’t be able to solve that easily.
I started trembling nervously, and tried to reassure myself with the thought that I only had to tramp across the sixth level for a pitiful three hours, and that was nothing at all in comparison with the fourth level, where I’d lost heaps of time. And the idea that Lafresa and her group would have to walk through the entire sector from start to finish gave me hope and warmed my heart—I hoped my enemies would run into an entire regiment of dead men, so that they could learn for themselves how I felt when I was wandering around the Forbidden Territory.
I walked very carefully, almost as carefully as at the beginning of my visit to the Palaces of Bone. I kept stopping and listening to the oppressive silence. It was dark here, with twenty or thirty paces between every hissing magical torch, and the torches barely kept the darkness at bay. There was plenty of shadow and murk, places where I could hide (I knew how to do that) and where others could hide, too (I hoped that they didn’t know how). In any case, I darted through the lighted areas, shuddering at the prospect of falling into the tenacious embrace of a dead man.
Reddish granite walls, low ceilings (sometimes I almost had to double over as I walked along), narrow passages, an abundance of coffins that looked no different from the vaults on the first and second levels. After about forty minutes of nonstop walking, the narrow, barely lit corridors started alternating with gigantic (but also poorly lit) halls.
Sometimes the silence was broken by the sound of falling drops of water. There was a smell hovering in the air.… It wasn’t exactly unpleasant, let’s just say it wasn’t very encouraging. Mustiness, old sweat, and a very faint aroma of rotten meat.
I came across the first “bad” coffin after I’d just checked for the hundredth time to make sure I had the light crystals and vials of cat’s saliva in my bag. There was a jagged gaping hole in the stone lid, big enough for a man to climb through—whether he happened to be alive or dead.
I recoiled from the coffin and looked around. I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary—if the corpse had decided to take a stroll before his eternal rest, he must have gone quite a long way.
The farther I went, the worse things got. Soon in every hall I could count from one to a dozen smashed coffins alongside the intact tombs.
I ran into my first dead person quite unexpectedly. (Isn’t that always the way?) I simply failed to
notice her in the semidarkness of the hall—the corpse was a woman, and she was lying facedown, dressed in beautifully preserved, antique clothes.
The ash-colored skin of her hands was pocked with the ulcers of the earliest stages of decomposition, her long and once-beautiful hair was tangled and matted. This lady didn’t smell like a corpse at all. She had been buried here quite a long time ago, and there ought to have been nothing left of her but bones, and certainly not any flesh almost untouched by time. These were the kind of jokes that Kronk-a-Mor played.
She started coming toward me clumsily and I had time to gather my wits. First of all I jumped well out of reach of her hands, then I took a small glass pea with cat’s saliva in it out of my bag and tossed it at the dead woman’s feet. Everyone knows the dead who turn into zombies can’t tolerate sunlight or cat’s saliva.
The wheezing corpse collapsed on the floor. The saliva had destroyed the magic of the Kronk-a-Mor that was holding it in this world. Now the flesh came away from the bones in huge slabs and melted, giving off a horrifying stench. It broke down almost exactly the same way a lump of sugar melts when it’s thrown into hot water. The sight of instantaneous decomposition and the smell that filled the hall was sickening. I covered my nose and mouth with the sleeve of my jacket and turned away. When I recovered a bit and looked to see what had happened to the corpse, all I saw were separate fragments of bones and a clump of hair, floating in a puddle of what had once been a human being. The bones were gradually dissolving away, as if someone had poured an entire barrel of acid over the dead woman.
I walked out of the hall, upset that the stench had eaten deep into my clothes and I’d never be able to wash it out. I stopped in the next corridor and did something I should have done much sooner—I changed the ordinary bolts in my crossbow for one fire bolt and one ice bolt.
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