The Lion of Senet

by Jennifer Fallon

  “I know,” he said sympathetically, then smiled. “Come on, let’s get down to the longhouse. Look at you, you’re shivering.”

  It wasn’t the weather that made her shiver. The gooseflesh that prickled her skin came from a much less tangible source. She glanced up at the blood-red sky again, unable to shake the feeling that this morning’s eruption really was some sort of dire omen. Somewhere on Ranadon, it was certain, someone would find a way to use this eruption to cause trouble.

  Then, silently berating herself for being a superstitious fool, she shook off the ridiculous feeling of impending doom and followed Reithan and Neris down to the village.

  Chapter 2

  It was just on dawn when Belagren heard the screams. They woke her from a deep sleep that had been filled with pleasant dreams. She was sitting on a vast golden throne, while every soul on Ranadon knelt before her, begging for her blessing . . .

  Annoyed at being woken from such an agreeable fantasy, the High Priestess opened her eyes and cursed softly. The red light of the night sun filtered through the cloth walls, filling the tent with dull crimson light.

  “Madalan!”

  When her aide did not reply, Belagren rose from her pallet and walked to the entrance of the elaborately embroidered silk tent, throwing back the flap. The camp was in an uproar, people were running to and fro, but most were heading toward the Labyrinth.

  “What in the name of the Goddess is going on?” she demanded of a young man dressed in a dark red robe running past her tent. “Who is making that ungodly noise?”

  The Shadowdancer skidded to a halt before her and bowed. He was young, perhaps twenty-three or -four, only just risen from the ranks of acolyte. Belagren knew his face, but couldn’t think of his name. He was very handsome. All her Shadowdancers were. She quite deliberately recruited these young men and women for their beauty. It set them apart.

  “I think it’s coming from the Labyrinth, my lady.”

  Any fool could tell that much, she thought impatiently.

  “Perhaps they’ve broken through?” he suggested, seeing the look of displeasure on the High Priestess’s face.

  Belagren had been wondering the same thing, although the screams sounded as if they were filled with pain, rather than triumph. Lifting the hem of her red robe out of the dust, she followed him through the campground set up amid the ancient ruins, toward the entrance to the Labyrinth. She was not particularly tall and had some difficulty in keeping up with the long-legged stride of her companion. The High Priestess glanced around at the tents as she hurried along. Some of them, she noted with displeasure, had been here so long they were taking on a disturbing air of permanence.

  But maybe . . . finally . . . after all this time . . .

  Belagren was almost afraid to finish the thought for fear of jinxing herself.

  Some long-extinct volcano had destroyed this place, raining deadly debris and ash on what must have once been a vast and beautiful city. It was impossible to tell how old the city was, or who had built it. Much of it was nothing more than strangely shaped pieces of masonry jutting out of the landscape like frozen sentinels watching over the dead. Even now, after nearly a century of excavation, they still found the occasional, mummified remains of the original inhabitants. Their bodies were tall and long limbed, their clothing strange, and their expressions were always fixed in terror, as if they had died in unspeakable agony.

  The entrance to the Labyrinth stood like a gaping mouth drilled into the side of a small mountain. There was something inscribed in the rock over the arched entrance, but nobody knew what language it was written in, or what it said. Scholars from the universities in Avacas and Nova had puzzled over its meaning for years. The more superstitious souls among her followers considered it a warning of some kind.

  Belagren had her own private translation. In her mind, the words over the entrance to the Labyrinth promised only one thing: Through here lies the path to ultimate power.

  All Belagren wanted—all she needed—to etch her name in history irrevocably, was access to the information hidden behind those damn traps that Neris Veran had set deliberately to keep her out.

  Fortunate for him that he’s dead, she thought, thinking of several rather gruesome things she would like to do to the architect of her dilemma.

  If he was dead.

  Belagren had her doubts about that, but even the Lion of Senet, with all the resources at his disposal, had never been able to find a trace of Neris. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, she had no choice but to accept that he was out of her reach and move on.

  Perhaps Neris really was dead. If that was the case, then Belagren had another problem—but one she really didn’t want to think about right now. Even if they finally got through the Labyrinth, even if she killed hundreds of her people breaking through the traps (and the Goddess alone knew how many were left to find), without a mind like Neris Veran’s she had no hope of deciphering the information she needed. Not unless the Goddess sent her a miracle—preferably in the form of another mind who could understand the incomprehensible mathematics of the ancients.

  The notion that the suns did not orbit Ranadon, but appeared and disappeared in their skies at the whim of the Goddess, was a fundamental belief among the people of this world, and had been for as long as anyone could remember. The Sundancers had nurtured those beliefs for countless generations, interpreting every volcanic eruption, every flood, every drought, every stillborn child as the will of a vengeful and capricious Goddess.

  But as time passed, as inquiring minds began to turn their thoughts to the heavens, faith had gradually been replaced by curiosity. Someone invented a telescope and, for the first time, people questioned the teachings of the Sundancers. Universities flourished. People stopped attending the temples and began to suggest that they could rule their own destinies. The steady supply of younger sons and daughters from noble families sent to serve the Goddess dwindled. The Lord of the Suns, the spiritual leader of Ranadon, became a powerless figurehead, good only for attending balls and openings, mouthing useless platitudes to a population who no longer cared what he said.

  And then the Age of Shadows came.

  The younger daughter of a proud and ancient Senetian noble house, one of the few who still clung to the tradition of sending their younger children to serve the Goddess, Belagren had just finished her novitiate when the second sun disappeared. Even now, almost three decades later, she still remembered the fear that had gripped the people of Ranadon. To experience true night; to wake to a world where the second sun no longer shone during the day, to a world gripped by cold and darkness, rattled by earthquakes, shrouded in ash from the volcanic eruptions... her stomach clenched just thinking about it.

  She had been part of the expedition sent north to the ruined city of Omaxin, as Paige Halyn, the Lord of the Suns, searched desperately for answers. It always struck Belagren as ironic that a man so useless and ineffectual could have been so astute. The city had contained the answers they sought, but only Neris Veran had been able to understand the hints left behind by the long-dead citizens of Omaxin.

  She still remembered sitting in the darkness, huddled around an inadequate fire in the midst of these haunting ruins with Madalan Tirov and Ella Geon, speculating on the power of such information, should it fall into the wrong hands. In the space of a few hours, their discussion had moved from idle speculation to a workable plan.

  The following morning, Belagren announced that she had been visited by the Goddess, who had revealed to her what must be done to return Ranadon to the Age of Light.

  Neris was easily taken care of, Ella saw to that. His silence and cooperation were ensured by his pathetic worship of Ella and his addiction to poppy-dust. While undoubtedly brilliant, he was a weak and easily corrupted man. The Lord of the Suns had proven a harder nut to crack. Although he didn’t deny her visions, neither did he embrace them willingly. But he hadn’t counted on the scope of Belagren’s plans, or her connections. With th
e help of the Lion of Senet, for the past seventeen years she had been able to remake the world to her liking.

  She had created the Shadowdancers and claimed that they were specially blessed by the Goddess, thereby bypassing the Lord of the Suns and his inconvenient morality. In theory, they were still subject to the Lord of the Suns’s authority, but in reality, Paige Halyn was powerless to stop her.

  That she had ordered Neris to seal the domed building, to prevent others from learning what she knew, was the only mistake she had made in her remarkable rise to power. He had sealed it with a vengeance, then thrown himself off a cliff in the southern port of Tolace, so that nobody else could learn the truth.

  The High Priestess was not a fool. She knew she could overrule logic with faith for only so long. She had done it once and it had worked spectacularly, but without continuing proof, without solid evidence that the Goddess truly had her ear, she was in danger of losing everything.

  And every day the problem grew more urgent. If the second sun orbited the first, then eventually it must go away again. If Belagren couldn’t predict it—if another unexpected Age of Shadows happened in her lifetime—she would be exposed.

  Her fate, should the unthinkable happen, did not bear thinking about.

  But maybe today, she prayed as she entered the Labyrinth. Maybe this is the last obstacle. Maybe ...

  The entrance to the Labyrinth was part of one of the few structures that had survived the ancient disaster. It wasn’t always the death trap it was now. Once it had been nothing more than a series of interconnecting tunnels leading into a large domed building that was all but obscured by the weight of the ash and debris that had buried the city thousands of years ago. The bodies had been cleared out some time ago, long before Belagren had come to Omaxin with Neris, Madalan and Ella, but she’d heard rumors that there had been thousands of skeletons found inside. Many of them were locked in embraces with their loved ones, the bones of their children clutched in their laps. The skeletons had crumbled to dust as soon as they were disturbed. In her more reflective moments, Belagren wondered what it must have been like, to flee inside the dome for safety, only to die much more slowly from starvation or asphyxiation.

  Her thoughts were dragged rudely back to the present as they entered the torch-lit tunnel. The screams were louder here, echoing off the smooth curved walls. There were traces of faded murals on the walls that Belagren had never had the time or the patience to examine.

  About thirty feet into the tunnel, she was forced to step over the remains of a twisted doorway. Neris’s first trap. It had killed three of her people when they broke through. She could almost hear him laughing at her from beyond the grave when they’d brought out the bodies, sliced to shreds by the deadly rain of shards he had loaded in his trap. That was the day that Belagren had truly begun to fear for her future. The lingering apprehension in the pit of her belly never truly let her rest.

  The screams grew louder as they approached the next obstacle, some fifty feet past the first trap. It was followed by several more gates that had proved to be nothing more than false traps. They’d wasted months, sometimes years, carefully studying and dismantling the next four gates, only to discover there was nothing sinister about them at all. She’d grown lax by the time they broke through the sixth gate. Fortunately it had only killed one man—Lester Somebody-or-other—and then only because of his arrogance. A nobleman by birth, he fancied himself equal to any problem set by a mere peasant. The peasant had proved him wrong. He was crushed under the weight of a large slab of masonry that fell from the ceiling right at the moment of his triumphant declaration of victory.

  Belagren climbed carefully over the huge granite slab and glanced down. As far as she knew, they had never been able to move the slab, and Lord Lester the Long Forgotten was still underneath it.

  As they neared the seventh of Neris’s deadly traps, the workers moved aside to let the High Priestess through, bowing as she passed, averting their eyes for fear of being singled out. She reached a narrow bridge that had been constructed over the gaping hole in the floor, caused when four more of her people had accidentally triggered the seventh trap.

  Belagren forced herself not to slow her pace as she crossed the rickety bridge in the wake of her young escort. This trap, of all Neris’s diabolical devices, was the one that had come closest to killing her. Expecting the traps to follow the same pattern as the first six gates, her people were confident that after the death at the previous gate, the next four gates should be more of the previous four—false traps that looked impressive but were little more than elaborate devices to slow down the workers trying to get through the labyrinth. A few minutes before the floor section had collapsed, she had been standing on it, studying the figures etched into the barricade, as the old scholar from Nova University on Grannon Rock, Kellor Highman, and his bright young assistants had explained the problem to her. The lock on this gate was simply a series of numbers, they assured her. All they had to do was discover the sequence and press the tiles in the right order, and the door would open for them.

  She had stood back to watch them work. She had watched them die instead.

  Once past the collapsed floor and the uncomfortable memories it evoked, Belagren hurried on past the next four gates, each of which had proved to be harmless. She was no longer prepared to make that assumption, however. They had treated each gate as if it were deadly. Belagren privately expected every gate to cause the whole mountain to come down on top of them, which actually concerned her more than the lives lost trying to break through. She could replace a few scholars and laborers. But if the Labyrinth was destroyed; if she was denied access to the cavern at the end of it...

  The results—for her—would be catastrophic.

  The screams were beginning to fade, thankfully. Whoever was making such an awful noise was either on the brink of exhaustion, or—and this was the more likely explanation, given where they were coming from—on the brink of death.

  As she rounded the curved hall, she stepped into chaos. The people who had been working on the twelfth trap, all of them red-robed Shadowdancers (she trusted nobody else down here now), were all shouting at once. The torches flickered in the darkness, making it hard to distinguish one panicked face from another. There were several bodies lying at the base of the wall where the tunnel ended, all of them burned beyond recognition. The screaming woman was lying farther from the wall, writhing in agony, her face and left shoulder melted away so deeply that the red muscle underneath was clearly visible. Several others held her down, while someone attempted to pour water over the burns. It was a useless exercise. Better to give the poor woman a large dose of poppy-dust and let her die in peace, than waste time treating such wounds.

  “What happened?” Belagren demanded of nobody in particular.

  “Acid,” a tall, gray-haired woman answered her from behind. “They accidentally triggered the trap. It rained acid over everyone standing near the wall.”

  Belagren turned to face Madalan. “You broke through, then?”

  She didn’t ask who the dead were or if anyone else had been injured. She didn’t care. All she cared about was getting through this damn Labyrinth and back into the building that a dead madman was so determined to prevent her from entering.

  “Not yet,” Madalan shrugged, “but now that we’ve sprung the trap, it should only be a matter of time.”

  Belagren nodded, but before she could answer, another young man came running through the tunnel, calling for her.

  “My lady!” he panted, sketching a hasty bow as he stopped in front of her. “You must come see! Quickly!”

  “See what?”

  “The sky, my lady!”

  With a puzzled glance at Madalan she quickly retraced her steps through the torch-lit Labyrinth on the heels of the messenger. Blinking as she stepped out into the light, the High Priestess squinted for a moment, then followed the pointing finger of the young man. Belagren bit back an involuntary gasp.

 
; A billowing cloud of ash, stained scarlet by the rapidly sinking first sun, blotted out the sky to the south. There had been an eruption, she realized immediately, perhaps on land, but so far south, it was more likely in the Tresna Sea.

  Belagren glanced around at the startled faces of her followers and quickly raised her arms, holding them wide.

  “It is a sign,” she cried. “The Goddess has spoken to us!”

  All around her, the Shadowdancers began falling to their knees, staring up at the sky. Her mind racing, the High Priestess looked around with relief at this obvious sign of their faith, then turned her attention south once more. “Our sacrifice has not been in vain. See for yourselves. The Goddess is with us, and the souls of those lost today will be welcomed into her loving arms. Let us pray.”

  As one, the people around her, Shadowdancers and servants alike, bowed their heads in prayer. Belagren glanced over her shoulder to find everyone but Madalan caught up in his or her devotions. The older woman smiled as she emerged from the entrance to the Labyrinth. The convenience of a sign from the Goddess at such a time was not lost on her old friend.

  “The Goddess is with us,” Madalan said blandly, as she stood beside the High Priestess.

  “This truly is a momentous day,” Belagren agreed, then added quietly in a voice meant only for Madalan, “We have to get back to Avacas.”

  Chapter 3

  The ground trembled from another aftershock and low clouds of volcanic ash blocked out the sun as Dirk Provin and his brother Rees scrambled up the steep incline of the levee wall to inspect the damage wrought by the tidal wave. Dirk could taste ash on the still air, and his eyes watered as he followed Rees and the rest of the townsfolk up the slope. The shale was slippery and sharp, but he paid no attention to the small cuts that sliced his hands. The first sun had set, and the second sun sat low on the horizon waiting its turn, but the world was still shadowed by the aftermath of the distant volcano.

  “Where do you think the eruption was?” somebody asked. Nearly everybody from the town had hurried to the levee to inspect the damage. They had felt the earthquake during the night and knew what it meant, but until the expected tidal wave had unleashed its fury, they had stayed well clear of the northern beaches.