by David Drake
"Those are women?" asked the bird. "And if they are women, how can they be islands as well?"
"In the mind of the painter, they were both," Sharina said. That wasn't an explanation, but it was the truth. "And to the people seeing it, too, even if they couldn't read."
"But who would have been meant to see it, mistress?" Dalar asked. "There was no way in."
A slab gave a high-pitched squeal as ghouls slid it across several of its fellows. The sound cut off abruptly with a clack of stone against stone. A further sliver of light crept in from above.
"I think it was meant to warn people who broke in," Sharina said as she examined the next range of frescoes. "Looking for treasure, perhaps."
The ghouls had much simpler desires, and the paintings would mean as little to them as they did to Dalar.
"The wizard was beheaded on a pier in the harbor so that as many people as possible could watch," Sharina said. "His body was quartered, put in a weighted chest, and then dumped in the sea. One--this is a moon, but I don't know if it means one night or one month--one something later, the wizard walked back up from the harbor. His body parts had rejoined, but... not the way they should have been together."
She moved to the next column. The light didn't fall as clearly on this wall as on the first, but it was more than clear enough. "He killed the people he met and absorbed them, merged with them. Soldiers attacked him, attacked the creature it was by now. Their weapons tore its body, but the body flowed back together and kept growing as the thing absorbed the soldiers also."
The next wall was very badly water damaged. Sharina paused, trying to make out the meaning of the remnant.
A ghoul reached through an opening directly above her. Its clawed fist clenched, nowhere close to its would-be victim. Dalar's arm shot out, curving a weight up in an arc that just cleared the back wall. It smashed the ghoul's wrist with a quick crunch. The creature's scream echoed painfully in the tomb as it jerked its flopping hand away.
"The thing grew much bigger," Sharina said. "A hundred feet tall, unless this is just a convention for great size. It looked like a jellyfish with tentacles around its upper mantle to grasp with. Everyone fled the city. The thing didn't follow them far; it stayed and pulled down the buildings."
More blocks shifted above them. Quite a lot of sky was visible, but the tomb's interior was getting darker because the sun was so low on the horizon. "Perhaps we should leave now, mistress," Dalar said.
"We'll leave soon!" said Sharina, lost in the description of an ancient tragedy. In a calmer voice she continued, "The thing stayed in the ruins. There wasn't anyone for it to eat, to absorb, any more. It shrank, but it didn't die. Finally a band of men caught it in nets and dropped it into a well--no, a natural hole in the limestone. And they built this building, this tomb, over it so that it could never eat enough to grow and escape again."
The ghouls gave a howl. A block bounced away on the outside. Two more sagged into the tomb, then jammed one another by the corners. The whole corbeled roof was in danger of collapse.
"Mistress!" Dalar cried. "We must go!"
Sharina ran the fingers of her left hand through her hair, combing out debris from the room. "I'll lead," she said to Dalar. She wormed into the snake's tunnel with her arms outstretched before her. The knife was in her right hand.
The stones scraped Sharina's shoulders on her way past them, but the compacted earth beyond was smooth and damp enough to feel slick. She kicked out, getting her hips through the opening, and used her elbows to squirm forward.
Sharina couldn't breathe. She thought she was panicking at the tight space and twisted, pushing up from the edge of the tomb wall with her toes.
She couldn't breathe. Neither will nor intelligence could override a terror squeezing her brain at the level of the first creatures to develop spinal cords.
"Dalar!" Sharina said as she braced to elbow herself backward. Her voice was a muffled grunt. "The tunnel's blocked! This isn't a way out af--"
Something touched Sharina's hands. She jerked her head, thumping on the dirt ceiling hard enough to stun the scream that would have followed. A snake crawled on me!
But it wasn't a snake. It was the snake's tongue. The tomb's present inhabitant was coming home.
Sharina got her legs into the open air and kicked violently to help wring her body out of the opening. The darkening sky showed through a dozen places in the tomb roof; the whole structure was moments from collapse. Dalar had hopped to the other side when Sharina thrashed back into the enclosure.
"There's a snake," she gasped. "It's coming through!"
Sharina looked at the roof, trying to estimate whether the whole thing would fall in before the ghouls made a hole big enough for them to enter. Their huge figures capered. Perhaps if Dalar looped his chain around a stone roofbeam, he and she could pull themselves up before the ghouls reacted. A slim hope, but the best one on offer.
"Dalar--" she said.
The bird stood transfixed with terror, a stuffed caricature of the active, graceful, person Sharina had known. He was staring at the tunnel opening.
The snake's tongue flicked the air of the tomb; then the wedge-shaped head, as large as Sharina's chest, slid inside. Rosettes mottled the snake's skin, though Sharina couldn't tell what the colors were in this dim light.
The snake focused on Dalar. Six feet of neck and body followed in an S-curve that kept the head at the same point in the air. The snake was gathering to strike.
Sharina brought the Pewle knife down with the strength of both arms, severing the snake's spine and most of the musculature that supported the head. The lower jaw dropped open. The snake writhed into the tomb in a series of convulsions, threatening to fill the enclosure like a flood of water.
A touch slammed Sharina against a wall. She sat down hard in a cloud of plaster dust from the frescoes. Coils of the serpent's body rolled over her. The reptile was huge, over a hundred feet long in reality and seemingly endless as Sharina watched it thrash liquidly from the wall.
For a moment Sharina thought she would be crushed, suffocated by the snake she'd killed. She couldn't see Dalar; he'd probably been trapped in the corner opposite hers. She'd have laughed at the irony of the snake's revenge if she could have gotten her breath.
The mass of scaly flesh suddenly began to diminish. The snake's dangling head had flopped into the central pit; now the rest of the body followed. Gravity was doing what no human strength could have accomplished, dragging the serpent off Sharina.
The snake's tail--a surprisingly sharp termination for a body which was the same diameter for most of its massive length--waved for an instant, then vanished. Sharina still held the Pewle knife, but she was too weak to lift it. She couldn't get to her feet, and she wasn't even sure that she could crawl. The tunnel was clear, but it was too late....
Two blocks tumbled away from the roof; three more fell inward, one of them missing Sharina's sprawled leg by less than a finger's breadth. A ghoul howled and dropped through the opening.
Dalar had gotten one foot under him. He cocked his weights back for a quick, slashing blow--useless at this short distance.
A creature glowing with red wizardlight rose from the central pit. It sizzled like the ground near where lightning has just struck. Its translucent mantle pulsed out and back as if it were a jellyfish swimming.
The ghoul lashed the creature with the hand that had been reaching for Dalar. Its claws tore three deep wounds in the glowing flesh. Tentacles--or cilia--swept from beneath the mantle, enfolding the ghoul and drawing it inward.
The ghoul convulsed at the first touch, its muscles knotting. The beginning of a scream choked in its throat.
Another ghoul jumped down. Cilia caught it in the air. Again the ghoul twisted into a tetanic arc as the strong muscles of its back tried to pull its head and feet together. The first ghoul was melting into the flesh of the monster from the pit.
The creature rose further. Its mantle--the purplish lump on top couldn't
really be described as a head--touched the sagging remnants of the roof.
The central column on which it balanced swelled, flinging tons of rock aside the way toadstools lift paving stones after the autumn rains. Cilia swept out, snatching several more ghouls as the pack howled in surprise.
Sharina stood frozen; kitty-corner from her, Dalar knelt like a statue. Only his eyes moved; there was no fear in them now.
The creature braced its mantle on the tomb's walls and sucked the central tube up, climbing the rest of the way out of the pit. Its slug-like foot slid up the side of the wall, then down the tumble of stones that had been the tomb's roof.
Two of the ghouls had dissolved almost completely into the creature's shimmering flesh, and the others were melting like snow on an oven. Wobbling among the treetops like a cloud of distant fire, the creature disappeared into the forest.
Sharina let out her breath. She was trembling, but her strength was coming back.
"We can get away now," said Dalar. He was standing, but his voice wasn't as strong as it usually was. "I think we should."
The moon wasn't up and the sun had set an hour before. All the plaster had been rubbed from the wall across from Sharina. Instead of bare stone, she saw a faint bluish tremor.
"Wait...," she said to Dalar; at least her lips formed the words. She wasn't sure she'd managed to be audible.
The Dragon sat behind his table, watching Sharina with unblinking eyes. She thought of the snake and began to tremble again.
"You are well, Sharina?" he said. "You are able to go on at this time?"
"I'm alive," Sharina said. A natural smile found its way to her lips. "I don't think we'll be alive for long if we wait till the creature we shared this place with returns."
"Ah, yes, Ohmqat," the Dragon said. His jaws gaped in a lipless, reptilian equivalent of a smile. "It was not human, though it took on a human semblance when first it came to Valhocca. It will go to the ruins and stay there. In a few days the coastline will sink and take Ohmqat back to the seabottom where it belongs."
Sharina stood carefully. "I'd still like to get out of here as soon as possible," she said. "Although... Dalar, do you want to leave immediately?"
The bird's eyes moved back and forth from Sharina to what he obviously saw only as a patch of wall. He shrugged his thin shoulders. "I will go when and where my master requires," he said. "But if I had an opinion--"
He clucked merrily.
"--I would leave this place as soon as possible. Or sooner."
The Dragon's laughter trilled in Sharina's mind. "The way out," he said, "is at the bottom of the cenote; the pit, that is, where Ohmqat was confined. His captors placed a stone on him to hold him in place. That was vain, but the depth of the cenote was enough. You will tilt up the stone and go through the hole you find beneath it."
"How deep is the pit?" Sharina asked. She felt surprisingly good, though she supposed she might just be getting light-headed from the stress of the past however-long.
"Thirty feet and a half foot," the Dragon said. His form and the alcove in which he sat were fading. With a last whisper he added, "The moon will give you light if you wait a few minutes."
"It'll take longer than that to get ready," Sharina said, as much to herself as to the vanished phantasm.
To her companion she said, "Dalar, we need thirty feet of vine to reach down into the pit. That's the way we'll be going out. And I guess enough more to tie around one of these blocks to anchor us. I don't trust myself to climb to the bottom without a line to help."
"Nor do I, Sharina," the bird said. "Though if it were jump straight down or stay, I would jump."
He laughed again. "My distaste for a place where my life was unexpectedly saved is most unfair," he said. "No doubt it will cost me a long journey of penance in the afterlife."
The moon, waxing beyond its first quarter, had risen above the treetops. Dalar found a thumb-thick strand of trumpet vine attached to a cedar at the edge of the former clearing. Sharina cut it off at the base but it was barely within her strength and that of Dalar combined to rip the vine loose above.
"The Dragon says that the thing from the tomb here won't come back," she muttered as they strode back to the building, now in ruins. "I'll still be glad to be away."
"I too," Dalar agreed. "The creature seemed as unlikely to appreciate my death lay as the ghouls were."
Sharina tied the vine around a block that greatly outweighed the two of them together. The makeshift rope was too stiff for trustworthy knots, but the two half-hitches wouldn't unravel easily.
"I will lead," said Dalar as she turned from her task. He was already stepping into the pit, holding the vine with one hand and the weights dangling on short lengths of chain in the other.
Sharina waited as the vine swayed, chafing on the limestone but not to a dangerous extent. Only when Dalar called, "I've reached the bottom!" in a booming, ghostly voice, did she start down hand over hand. The vine would probably have held both their weights together, but she didn't want to take a needless risk when the necessary ones were so terrible.
Midway down the hole narrowed to a throat half the size of the opening at the top. Sharina brushed the coarse stone uncomfortably. There was almost no light in the shaft. Dalar would have said something if there wasn't room for both of us at the bottom.
Sharina slipped free, turning as the vine straightened under her weight. Water rich in acids from decaying vegetation had eaten a hollow deep in the stone, like an abcess at the base of a tooth. Her outstretched legs touched nothing till Dalar caught her ankle and guided her the last few feet down. His fingers were noticeably warmer than a man's.
There was still no light. Bones, old bones, scrunched beneath her bare feet.
"They are human," Dalar said quietly. "The skull is on the other side of the chamber. There is no sign of the serpent."
He clucked. "Not that I was looking forward to meeting it again," he added.
"Nor what the snake's body fed," Sharina said. "But it saved us by coming when it did. Ohmqat saved us."
No light at all... but there could be no doubt about the stone slab in the center of the chamber. Sharina's fingers explored it. The block had been smoothed on five of its six faces, but the last was jaggedly diagonal. It had been broken off a larger slab--
"The seat of the throne!" Sharina said. "Dalar, this is the other half of the stone that we pulled out of the wall in Valhocca. Not that it matters."
"If I were sure what mattered in this business," the bird said, "I would be much wiser than I am today."
"I think if we pull it toward ourselves...," Sharina said. She gripped the long edge of the block with both hands but waited for Dalar to position himself before she shifted her weight against it.
They tugged together. Nothing happened till Sharina was almost ready to call a gasping halt; then the block slid and continued sliding until it was completely clear of the spot where it had lain for a millennium.
Sharina felt the uncovered space. Instead of rock, there was a hole of uncertain depth. The granite cap had acted to concentrate water seeping through the walls of the pit, and acid erosion had resumed under its shelter.
"I'll lead," Sharina said, gathering herself on the edge of the opening. It was barely big enough for her to squeeze into, and she was taking it on faith that this really was a portal. If it was merely a deep crevice in the limestone, she was going to die in a very unpleasant way.
"Dalar?" she said before she stepped in feet-first. "Do you wish you'd been wise enough to turn me down when I came to you in Valhocca?"
"No, Sharina," the bird said. "That is the only thing in my existence since the storm that I do not regret."
Grinning, Sharina let herself through the opening.
"I hope Elfin is all right," Cashel said as he ambled through the forest. "I guess we don't hear him just because the leaves are so thick; but, you know, I wish he'd come with us."
The trees here didn't have bark, just slick green skins
. The leaves were any number of different kinds, but they were all big--none smaller than Cashel's hand with the fingers spread, and some the size of towels. There were blossoms, too: dangling blue and yellow things the size of a grain measure, and towering cones of white fluffiness.
Everything dripped. Cashel wasn't sure if it was raining somewhere above the forest or if water was just wringing out of the air. Duzi! There were drops falling off the end of his nose and the ferrules of his staff!
"You're worried about Elfin?" Krias crowed. "Don't worry about the changeling, sheep-boy, worry about yourself! You have no idea of how dangerous the Underworld is!"
Cashel thought about that for a moment. "I wouldn't want to be somebody who worried about himself, Master Krias," he said. "There's plenty of folk who do, but they aren't folks I like to be around; and I'm around myself, well, all the time."
Krias sniffed. "If ever Elfin does come near enough," he said, "knock his head in with that stick of yours. Or tell me to deal with him. He's not human after living down here all his life--and I don't mean living with the People made him as stupid as a sheep, either!"
"I don't much care for the place myself," Cashel admitted. "But there're parts of the world I came from that I wouldn't choose to go back to either."
He chuckled. "I don't remember ever being this wet before that I wasn't trying to swim, though."
"The Sun rules in your waking world," the ring demon said. "Oh, not everywhere, and not all the time... and not anywhere completely. But the Sun rules there, and here Malkar rules to the same degree."
Two birds launched themselves from oddly green branches and beat away through the soggy air. They must dislike this weather as much as Cashel did. One was an owl, the other an eagle or a really big hawk. They carried strips of dark flesh in their beaks.
Cashel thought a while about what Krias had said. "So Master Landure is fighting Malkar here in the Underworld?" he asked at last.