by Dave Duncan
His Blade reached it first and stood before it, barring the way. “Sir! We’ve seen enough.”
He was absolutely right, of course. They had met with amazing luck and ought not to push it any further. How long had they been inside? The brethren must certainly rouse at dawn, if not before.
“I’m going on,” Durendal said miserably—knowing he was making a mistake, knowing his friend must come with him and share his fate. “Remember if we have to make a run for it, the way out is straight down that corridor.” But there was an unexplored branch in that corridor. They could be cut off.
Without wasting time on argument, Wolfbiter doused his light and tried the door. Perhaps a spirit of adventure was overcoming his caution at last.
9
The next room had been designed for jailers, for it contained ancient wooden benches and racks for weapons. Now it was merely used for junk; a heap of old swords and axes, baskets and boxes, piles of rotting clothes. It stank of rats and immemorial dust.
It did have another door at the far end. Wolfbiter eased it open in darkness, but there was a faint light beyond. For the first time, they had reached a place that might be inhabited. It might even be luxurious, for there was just enough brightness to show that the walls and floor were patterned or tiled. It was a squarish hallway with two more doors at this level and a white stone staircase winding upward. The light was coming from somewhere up there—perhaps only starlight, but probably the first stirring of dawn—and with it came unexpected odors of flowers and vegetation and a very faint sound of running water. What lay outside? The monastery was swathed in city houses all around, so a best guess was that it was hollow, a shell enclosing an open atrium.
One of the doors was ajar, showing blackness. Staying ahead of his ward, Wolfbiter padded over to it in silence and peered inside.
“Stinks,” he whispered. “Kitchens. Flies.” Then he crouched down and risked a single ray of light, running it around the floor to check for more open doors. He was worried about windows, although they were probably not quite up to ground level yet. Finally he rose and went in. Durendal followed.
It was not a kitchen, it was the meat locker, containing a single carcass, although there was space for more. It had been flayed and eviscerated and hung up by a metal hook through its hocks—upside down, of course, so that the fluids could drain from the gash in its throat. It buzzed with flies. Judging by its size, it had been Khiva son of Zambul.
Wolfbiter made a retching noise and put a hand over his mouth.
“Gold ore,” Durendal whispered. “Those…bastards!” He could not think of words anywhere near adequate. He poked the corpse. It was stiff with rigor mortis, but the way it swayed told him it was not heavy enough to have gold bones. It would probably have fallen apart if it did.
“But why skin him and gut him?” his Blade said. “Why leave him here to go bad?”
“Some meat improves with hanging.” Not in this climate, surely?
“Sir, let’s go now, please?”
“I want to look outside. Just a quick peek.”
Wolfbiter sighed and followed him as he started up the stairs.
Durendal knew he had given up all hope of locating Jaque Polydin and was now motivated by pure curiosity to see a little more of the monastery. Dungeons and cellars were not enough. Where was he, though? His sense of direction had failed him. Somewhere at the back, he thought, well away from the court. This stairwell was probably in one of the towers.
They reached another decorated hallway. More stairs went upward. There were two closed doors at this level and an archway open to a shadowed garden, with faint shapes of trees and bushes. Frustrated, he stood on the step and peered out at the darkness, sniffing lush odors of greenery, very unexpected in Samarinda. A few lights glimmered in windows, and above the encircling walls the stars were fading as dawn approached. Even as he watched, more windows brightened. He could see nothing of the garden itself, but its presence showed that the monastery must be a much finer place to live in than it seemed from the outside—a palace, in effect. Everman’s decision might not be quite as crazy as it had seemed.
“Beautiful!” Wolfbiter whispered. “Now can we go?”
“Yes, all right. Lead the—”
Hinges squeaked downstairs in the hall they had just left. Light flared. Wolfbiter spun around, drawing his sword. Grunts and shuffling footsteps, a door closing but the light remaining…Someone or something was coming up. Trapped!
Without a word, the two intruders dived out the archway, down two steps to a paved path. A tangle of shrubbery to the right of the door offered cover. Dropping to hands and knees, they squirmed underneath and lay prone. Wolfbiter mouthed some obscene words under his breath. Somewhere close, a steady tinkle of water did nothing to add to the comfort of the situation.
Light from the arch grew brighter, flickering like fire and illuminating elaborate colored tiles on the path. A monkey came shuffling out to stop abruptly not five feet from the cowering Chivians. She wore the usual garish trousers and held a flaming torch. There was a sword on her back. She snuffled suspiciously. Could she smell the intruders?
Durendal might not be able to jump to his feet and put Harvest through her heart fast enough to prevent her crying out, because animal reflexes were usually faster than human. He might trip over a branch and fall flat on his face. More light had appeared in a window overhead, meaning that more people or monkeys were coming down the stairs. Light brightened behind her. She stepped aside to make way.
Two more monkeys emerged, carrying Khiva’s flayed corpse like a rolled rug on their shoulders, its death-stiffened arms stretched rigidly ahead of it. A fourth shuffled along behind them, bearing another torch, and all four headed down the path. Wolfbiter started to move and then sank back with a sound of grinding teeth as he saw more light streaming from the arch.
Durendal leaned close to his ear. “I think we may have to relax here for a while. Someone has called a meeting.”
“Relax? Yes, sir. Wake me when it’s time to go.”
Next through the door was a torch-bearing monkey lighting the way for two tottering humans. They seemed to be two women, but they were so shrunken and bent that Durendal could not be sure. He could hear voices from the stairwell.
More torches had appeared in the far corner of the garden and begun moving slowly in their direction. Once or twice their flames reflected off water. The ground seemed to be lower at that end, so the tantalizing fountain nearby probably fed an ornamental stream and a series of ponds like the Queen’s Garden at Oldmart. More windows were brightening, others going dark. The entire population of the monastery must be awake, and it was a reasonable guess that they were all on their way here.
Why? The focus was just below him, a platform of white stone, probably marble. He slithered forward under the branches until he had a better view. The floor itself was irregular in shape, bounded by ornamental walls and flower beds close at hand, a lawn at the far side. Khiva’s corpse lay facedown in the center of an inlay of dark tiles that outlined an octogram. The two old women were sitting on the far edge, and now a monkey arrived carrying another, whom he set down gently beside them. No, it was a man, and the next three who came shuffling into the gathering were men also. They all stayed outside the octogram and well away from the stinking, buzzing load of bad meat that yesterday had been Khiva son of Zambul. Obviously someone was going to perform a conjuration.
Sunrise and sunset were very sudden affairs in Altain. The roofline and the towers’ silhouettes were clearly visible now against the sky. Even the shadowy atrium had brightened to reveal a tiny secret paradise of lawns, bushes, flowers, little gazebos, ornate bridges, tall trees.
Wolfbiter’s whisper in his ear: “Kromman will have gone by now. He was going to leave the trapdoor open.”
“Can’t be helped. Let’s just hope all the monkeys are here at the moment. Who do you think the senility cases are?”
His Blade’s eyes showed white all around
their irises. “You tell me.”
Durendal did not try. He could not convince even himself of what he suspected, let alone put it into words. But it had begun to make a horrible sort of sense. Some very potent conjurations could be performed only at certain specific times. Now it was dawn, the start of a new day. By next morning I was good as new, Everman had said.
There were twenty-three of those living corpses laid out around the platform now. Most of them were wrapped in some sort of sheet or robe, a few completely naked, all gray-skinned and either bald or white haired. Some mumbled aimlessly to their neighbors, others lay prone, as if near death. Three more were brought in and set down by their animal guardians, for a total of fifteen monkeys and twenty-six human beings, if that was a fair description of those repulsive bundles of stick limbs and sagging flesh. Most of the monkeys squatted down on the grass nearby. Two climbed into trees, but four went inside the octogram with the corpse and began to chant, first one, then another. Chivian conjurations were usually done by eight people, but other lands might know other rituals.
Wolfbiter squeezed his ward’s shoulder. “Now!”
“Wait!”
“Go! I’ll wait and see what happens if you want, but if you stay here any longer, I shall go out of my mind!” He was right, of course. The time to make a break was now, while the livestock was engrossed in watching the ceremony.
Durendal began to wriggle back, then paused. “Listen! They’re revoking time!” The ritual was unlike any he had ever heard of, a complicated sequence of invocations and revocations that seemed to leap in purely random fashion back and forth across the octogram. All the manifest elements were being invoked. He could have predicted that, because life sprang from all four in combination: air, fire, earth, and water, while to make gold must require massive amounts of fire and earth. It seemed that all the virtuals were being revoked, even love. The entire faculty of the Royal College of Conjurers would tear its collective hair out for a chance to witness this ritual, but it was making his skin prickle. The climax came as the first rays of the sun flashed on the top of the towers. The chant ended on a long note of triumph.
The corpse moved.
Impossible! The man had been dead for twenty-four hours. His guts had been removed and his blood drained; his flesh was already rotten—and yet Khiva’s limbs were stirring. He seemed to be trying to rise up.
Three of the shrunken mummies reeled to their feet and staggered across to him. Four or five more began to crawl forward. As they reached the body, they fell on it and fed, tearing at it like starving dogs. Some were rolled away by its spasmodic thrashing, but they scrambled back to try again. The monkeys lifted the weaker ones and carried them over to join the feast. Soon all twenty-six were ripping and sucking at their prey, the corpse buried beneath them. The monkeys stood back to watch, some of them hooting in amusement.
A naked woman struggled to her feet, clutching a lump of meat to her mouth with both hands. As she stood there and gorged, her body grew larger and straighter. Its color changed from the sickly pallor of the very old to vibrant youth. Her desiccated dugs filled in, rising to lush young breasts. Her hair darkened and thickened. She dropped the last fragments of her feed and screamed with laughter, showing bloody teeth.
“Durendal!” Wolfbiter said in a barely audible scream. “If we don’t go now, we’ll never get away!”
True. Durendal rose to his knees, still unable to tear his eyes from the bestial scene. Now men were emerging from the melee—strong young men, where moments before there had been only feeble geriatrics. He recognized one who had stood beside Herat in the alley the previous day, thick muscled and hairy chested now, yet not much more than a boy. He laughed and lunged with bloody hands for the woman. She jumped clear and pretended to run. He followed. They came up the path, and she let him catch her when they reached the arch. They embraced, bloody mouth to bloody mouth, hands smearing reddish stains on each other’s bodies in urgent passion. They were blocking the fugitives’ escape. Wolfbiter whimpered.
Sounds of laughter came from the octogram. The rest of the pack was opening out, youths and maidens sitting up, strong and comely, some of them still chewing on a bone here, an arm there. Gold glinted from those bones; the scratches Durendal had seen on the relics in the foundry had been made by teeth. More women jogged off with men in pursuit. Couples flopped to the grass to entwine and wrestle in the exuberance of newly regained youth.
The two by the arch disappeared inside.
“Now!” said Wolfbiter.
“Yes.”
They wriggled out from under the shrubbery until they reached the path.
“Ready?”
“Yes!”
“Now!”
They jumped to their feet and dived for the arch. Howls and roars from monkey throats told them they had been seen. The passionate lovers had progressed only to the hallway and lay writhing on the tiled floor—Wolfbiter went around them, Durendal jumped over. Together they went plunging down the stairs.
10
They stumbled across the junk-infested guardroom, the light from their rings barely visible in the brightness of daylight. Wolfbiter opened the door, stood aside for Durendal to pass, then closed it behind them as Durendal ran the length of the jail and threw open the next. Its hinges squeaked shrilly. He raced off along the gold-walled corridor, hearing his Blade shut that door also. He thought they could probably outrun the monkeys, although not necessarily outfight them. Thirteen young swordsmen were loose, too, and would know shortcuts. Swordplay, if it came, would not be a matter of honorable, man-to-man duels this time.
Then something roared or screamed ahead of him, the distorted sound echoing bizarrely along the corridor. Apparently he was going to have to fight his way to the trapdoor. He drew Harvest without breaking stride. Wolfbiter’s feet were slapping on the stone at his back. Then the jail door squealed and light blazed up behind them. Monkeys hooted.
He passed the turnoff to the foundry. He had almost reached the other branch when he saw a body in his path. No, it was a monkey playing tricks, scrabbling on the ground. It uttered the same discordant howl he had heard a moment earlier, apparently writhing in pain. There was blood on it, blood on the rock floor, even on the gold walls. That could hardly be a trick. Surely only Kromman could be responsible for that, so the inquisitor had not gone at first light.
“Look out for this!” he shouted, and hurdled over it. Just beyond it was a puddle of blood and some bloody footprints leading toward the trapdoor.
“With you!” Wolfbiter responded.
Then they were out of the gold-filled cellar, running along the tunnel.
“Kromman! We’re coming!” Durendal almost blundered into the wall at the end.
The trapdoor was closed.
He spun around, but Wolfbiter had turned already and was waiting for the attack with Fang at the ready. Wild hoots and bellows indicated that the pursuit had found the casualty.
“Put your boots on!” Durendal hurled Wolfbiter’s footwear to him, and put on his own. They were going to need those. He scrambled up the metal brackets. Balancing precariously, he freed both hands for the slab and strained. He could not budge it. Fire and death! He had seen a monkey open and close it with one arm.
Holding the top bracket with both hands, he turned around to put his back to the wall and then took hold of the metal ring dangling from the flap itself. The corridor was full of gibbering apes, flashing swords, flaming torches. Wolfbiter’s left-hand ring blazed, and that would be a small advantage, shining in his opponents’ eyes.
Meanwhile, Durendal had to get them both out of there and do so soon, or they would find Herat and his friends waiting for them above. He put his shoulders against the slab and brought his feet up as high as he could. If he slipped, he was going to fall headfirst to the floor. He heaved with all the power he could summon from legs and back. He heard joints creak. The slab quivered reluctantly.
Metal rang as the leading monkey swung at Wolfbiter.
Then rang again. Fencing in a narrow corridor would be a skill all its own. A triumphant shout from the Blade and a simultaneous animal howl proclaimed first blood.
The flap tilted and blinding daylight poured in around the edges. Durendal straightened with a convulsive heave. Clang, clang, clang…another yell of triumph, more animal howls. Now the angle was worse but the weight was less. The slab tilted past the vertical and settled there, erect, leaving him stretched at full length over the shaft. He scrambled out and spread himself prone on the flagstones, reaching down.
Wolfbiter came backing along the corridor into the light, clanging sword against sword. Only one monkey could get at him at a time, but a single careless stroke into a wall would ruin a parry and leave him open.
“Can you keep fighting while I lift you?”
“I’ll have to!” He raised his left arm.
Durendal grabbed his Blade’s wrist and levered himself up with his other hand. Fire! This was impossible. It had bloody well better be possible. Gritting teeth, he hauled, taking Wolfbiter’s weight to let him climb backward up the staples while still parrying thrusts from the gibbering monkey below. Gasping, Durendal forced himself up to one knee, then both knees. Below him, swords rang, the monkey shrieking furiously as her prey worked his way up the wall, step by step, defending his legs from her strokes. Durendal got one foot on the ground and prepared to snatch Wolfbiter out bodily in one tremendous heave. Just as he tried it, Herat kicked the trap shut.
11
Wolfbiter screamed once, although that was probably only air being expelled from his collapsing chest cavity. He must have died even before the scream emerged, when his heart was crushed.
A few early-bird challengers were watching over the wall, doubtless very puzzled by this break in routine. Half a dozen monks stood before the open door of the monastery, but they were making no move to come closer. Why bother when Herat was there already? He had a rag tied around his loins and a golden sword in his hand. His smile displayed lips and teeth still streaked with blood. Durendal drew Harvest in his right hand and his dagger in the left and leaped at him.