by Chris Turner
His jaw dropped in crestfallen silence. “Can it be?” He staggered back, squinting at what the dials and markers were telling him. “The time of Tiramon is upon us!” he cried, rubbing his eyes. “The Laughing Monkey besieges us! See how the claw points to the region of Zaporerian in the constellations of the Archer? Eighty years to the day have passed since I first lay in my liege hall as a stone man!—the ultimate offering to Pygra!”
“Incredible,” remarked Hafta cynically. “That must make you what—about a hundred and fifty?” He wiped sweat from his brow and swept the unruly yellow locks from his eyes.
“All very interesting but what is it to us?” demanded Draba with a cold disregard for the mountain king and his plight. No word had he spoken since traversing the dwarf’s great hall.
Fezoul ignored the remark. “’Tis as I feared. Eighty years! Alas,” he moaned in woe. “The spell of the witcher was laid on me for a hundred—which means you have awakened me twenty years too early. Now I must age with the threat of Pygra haunting my shadow.”
Draba gave a churlish laugh. “You are forgetting my blade. Fall on it, if you wish to end your misery.” The rogue clanked the tip in the ground and leaned on his sword, distrustfully eyeing the indecipherable symbols that were carved on the water wheel and those on the wall opposite where a brilliant, natural light fell.
Rusfaer jeered, adding little sympathy, “Poor you, little mountain monarch. And what of Pygra with no one to eat? Here, Pygra, come, Pygra, fresh meat!” he chanted derisively.
Draba laughed again.
Fezoul bit his lip, pushed down his despair. “You cretins understand nothing of tradition and philosophy. Notice here,” he went on furiously, choking back the hurt of their cynicism, “our scholars built a light gauge to accompany the time mechanism. A light funnel too.”
He pointed out an ornate slit carved in the smooth rock face. “See the broad vent cut angle-wise above the Time Wheel? Sunlight pours from there and shines on the wall face opposite.” He hooked a plump hand forth to illustrate. “’Tis but a few hours after noon—so the Claw of the Luminon says.”
“How do you know that?” demanded Amexi in disbelief.
“Look at where the light falls on the wall,” scoffed Fezoul. “Its band dips below the median marker, engraved on the stone here, thus and so. We are close to the northern face of the mountain at the moment and the sun is beginning its descent.”
“How can you—”
Fezoul resolved the warrior’s perplexity. “The vent above the wheel stretches back several dozen feet on a series of twists and turns. Our glass blowers constructed special reflective panes inserted ingeniously in the shafts to direct the light from one pane to another down the shaft, and facilitate our readings. Once these vents were eagle havens and shelters for other creatures, I reckon, before being weathered by centuries of rain and wind, thus steering the light down the shaft, which lands on this patch of wall.” He held up his hands once again in proud exhibition.
“’Tis said our architects designed ways of inserting mirrors in the vents and adjusting them over a period of time via pulleys and wires synced to the rhythms of the wheel. To permit more accurate readings—though how they accomplished this is beyond my understanding.”
Dereas’s brows arched in admiration. He stooped to peer over Fezoul’s shoulder who was studying the markings and projected bas reliefs in greater detail while making adjustments with a small lever that jutted out sharply from the stone.
Rusfaer pushed himself forward, fingering his gleaming sword. “We don’t have time to philosophize over your arcane inventions, old man! Which way? Time passes. With or without your magical wheel, we must win free of these foul tunnels! We are no closer to the end of this maze than when we quit your dead kingdom!”
Fezoul seemed disinterested in the warrior’s tirade. Draba seemed carried away by his chief’s words and clenched his hilt with ever more fervour.
Dereas, for a fact, had been squinting to where the mountain king gesticulated and recognized a patch of sunlight streaming down from the rectangular slit to land on the tunnel face opposite the wheel. His lips parted in amazement. Even the small amount of light was bright enough to hurt his eyes after being immersed in darkness for so long. “Balael!...” he whispered. “Ever since I stepped into this stifling burrow, I thought I would never see the light of the sun again.”
Rusfaer flourished a negligent hand. “Well, you got your wish, Beastslayer. We may not see any more of such light, so, I suggest you soak it up. We should leg it out of here before we run out of juice. We can’t live on black bitter cabbage forever.”
Dereas’s lip twitched. True, his brother had a point, but it didn’t undermine Fezoul’s machine in any way or the knowledge which might help them in times to come. The beastslayer gazed anew on the stone wheel and recalled certain calendar systems that graced temple ruins he had seen on his travels. He thought this one in comparison quite unique and advanced in its complexity. His mind drifted back to a network of carven crystals he had seen dangling on wire in the temple of Telagorim in the shattered hills of Pastorech. Tinkling in the wind, the crystals had cast dizzying beams of coloured light on a smoothly-polished wall marking out symbols at a certain hour. They were purported to tell a story of the fate of the ancient people who worshipped stone and the majesty of natural outcrops, according, at least, to the glazed-eyed oracle who dwelt there.
Moments passed. Despite the eeriness of the tunnel, Dereas found himself transported to a magical place, his reverie placing him gently before a quiet glade with a fair blue mist rising over a river. A figure approached on invite to the tryst. The sheen of hazel eyes, the flash of a bright smile, the expectant laugh of a lithesome maid like a tinkling brook...it was all a dream, and yet, the tangle of her shimmery hair as she alighted from her mount, was a balm to his spirit.
Fezoul’s brow clouded. “Wait, if I remember...No, let us advance. There is no other way, but forward.”
“What do you mean ‘but forward’?” called Rusfaer. “I thought we were already going ‘forward’,” he cried out with dismay.
Something in the aspect and configuration of the cryptic symbols and the inverted serpent lit up on the wall caused Fezoul to stare enigmatically. “The Time of the Snake has passed...” he murmured the words over and over, basking in a cryptic frown. Surprise and fear crept suddenly over his face like a black cloud.
His pale lips curled in horror and he looked about him in dismay, as if he would topple in a swoon, for it seemed he had never known a time without Pygra.
The mountain king shrugged off the vision with a sudden jerk of his shoulders. He stuttered something half intelligible, something about ‘foolish outlanders’ and ‘eerie reptiles’ and ‘forbidden magic in the tunnels of Yarim-Id’, before he became lost in a moody silence.
The tunnel yawned ahead and Fezoul gestured them on, an endless pathway with an unknown destination.
Back and forth, down twists and turns they trod while Dereas dimly recalled legends of Vharad and the labyrinth that weaved under her black mantle. A half-forgotten memory surfaced of the secret lore of the old world that the Witch Hadrneas had imparted to him, much unknown to his father.
The slow creaking of the wheel faded to a murmur, the sound replaced by the dull clopping of boots and the mesmeric purl of the stream flowing inexorably down the tunnel’s middle. The water level had lessened, Dereas noted, and seemed of slightly lighter hue after being siphoned off by the Time Wheel and funneled to various cross tunnels as they passed. A sort of monastic quiet pervaded the ghostly surroundings.
“Black Balael!” cursed Rusfaer. “Damn to Kizoi’s hell all this darkness! Why is this wretched water so green? Makes me sick. I want to retch.”
Hafta groaned. “I also feel like heaving.”
“’Tis the life-giving water of Xatu,” Fezoul said sternly. “It comes from the source of the mountaintop. A mantle of ice covers the dome of the skull mountain. The daytime s
un melts the ice and causes the water to seep down through the cracks and follow the secret ways. ’Tis said,” he confided not without a shiver, “that if anyone laid sword to Pygra and the blood of her victims mixed with her own, she would open her mouth and inject a fierce spray from her teeth to cast the colour of the stream a pure green.”
“A lurid lore,” mumbled Jhidik.
“Always Pygra,” Rusfaer snarled. “Why not Mazoma or Yutomay? Are you obsessed with this snake?”
Fezoul exclaimed vehemently, “Maybe that’s what makes you sick, bully. If the water were another colour, it would imply that the serpent was ill, or had consumed the blood of a creature other than what she was used to.”
Rusfaer snorted his disbelief at the concept. “Or maybe the ice is just naturally green?”
“A wives’ tale, I think,” scoffed Hafta.
“Do you believe all this mumbo jumbo about Pygra?” growled Rusfaer, nudging his brother none too gently.
The beastslayer’s face betrayed no hint of opinion.
“’Tis true! What need is there of belief?” asserted Fezoul, his features congested in agitation once again.
“Listen! What’s that?” cried Hafta.
A slithering and an ominous rustling echoed as of the stir of pebbles in a distant corridor. The loose rubble seemed to rattle under the press of an enormous weight.
Dereas swore. He saw a side tunnel yawning two yards to the right. Inside was a litter of yellow bones and large, broken eggshells, around which the dribbling water forked from the main tunnel to disappear in a black haze. Dereas scratched at his stubbled chin, frowning. Perhaps Pygra had been here? It was the first sign of eggs so deep into Vharad since they had entered the mountain king’s realm.
Rusfaer seemed not to notice. “I heard nothing—except maybe the scurry of certain rats. How about you, Draba? You are keen of ear and a good judge of spooks. Go on up the tunnel. See if you can spear us some rodents. Borrow Dereas’s spear if you must. This way we can have us some sustenance.” His quip earned him some laughs from the others. “Or maybe scoot down this bone and egg-littered corridor that has Dereas’s teeth chattering.”
Draba started to retort, then stiffened, jarred by the sudden sight of a large, sinister shape rattling down the side way he was closest too.
Dereas froze too. He was staring down the cross tunnel, eyes ablaze—at the place where Draba had seen the furtive movement.
“That was big.” Draba’s round mouth curved in an expression of shock.
“How big?” Rusfaer scoffed, not even bothering to look toward the tunnel.
“What do you mean, ‘big’?” demanded Amexi.
Fezoul’s voice shrilled out in hysterical terror. “He saw something!”
“Shut up, you lily-livered coward!” shouted Rusfaer.
Fezoul blinked. He looked about to keel over, his eyes white with fear. A small whine escaped his puckered lips. Almost as if the dwarf had become an oracle, another strange sound echoed in the cross tunnel, this time closer.
“I beg of you,” he whimpered, his voice choked with a sob, “let’s go back. Forget this hare-brained scheme of yours. It is insane! Take the road back to where you came in from the north. The Eakors are much less merciless than Pygra. I swear to you! It’s the better way. Yes, the better way!” He caught Dereas’s sleeve with a surprising strength and raked his fingers claw-like over his mail shirt.
“We go on!” Dereas bellowed, shaking off the cringing king’s fingers in disgusted impatience. “Snake or not.”
Fezoul cast a longing glance back toward the Time Wheel, now long receded in the folds of darkness. He gulped down his fear and bowed his head, ashen-faced.
In the inky shadows, Dereas perceived Rusfaer’s smugness as he twirled his blade.
There was no sign or sound of the terror. The tunnel proceeded on a slight downward cant through a series of twists and turns that had even the big man’s sense of direction beguiled.
By and by they came to a massive cavern, rich with hanging stalactites, tips pointed as icicles. The water’s flow ended in a glimmering oval pool. It was no ordinary pool, Dereas observed, black as midnight and long as evening shadows. At the far edges where the water was still, its mystical surface reflected the cavern’s richness with an unsettling likeness. The place was imbued with an ancient solemnity, he thought, eerie as a golem’s abode.
Despite his earlier fear, Fezoul’s interest peaked at the sight of the water. He hunched himself forward like a gnome with a new vigour, mumbling to himself.
The Vitrin stream split and trickled down to fan paths left and right across the near mirror-smooth face of the pool.
Dereas, much exhausted from recent events, stopped to splash cool water on his haggard face. The others followed, to wet their tongues. All seemed gripped with an odd apprehension and a silence too thick for understanding.
Ringed around the pool’s edges were small, ankle-high cairns of stones and gems—masses or collections of them. In the middle of the pool rose a forbidding fane, hulking like a grim misshapen totem out of a ghost king’s palace. It was built of bleached white bones—human skulls evidently and various other bones interlaced. Bone fragments poked out of the rude mass to form a hideous face—eyes, button nose, beastly ears, with femurs denoting tusks that jutted out from the forehead of the hoary skull. A ghastly horn rode below a ludicrous chin, likely some sort of blasphemous goatee.
Dereas instinctively recoiled and reached for his sword. He peered in the water to see tokens of random offerings there: bracelets, amulets, gemstones, shields, knives, tools, even a score of baleful skulls, dwarf-size, but these could have as easily toppled from the macabre fane. This was ruder construction than any he had ever seen, not in any way as refined as the desolate ruins of Fezoul’s people or those he had seen in faraway Lunra. This shrine heavily veered toward sorcerous in style whereas the others of hard stone and polished edges, were more commonplace.
A tunnel, gaping ominously behind the fane, twice as high as a man, loomed blackly on the other side of the pool. No water coursed in or out of this passage. To get to it, would mean wading through the eerie Vitrin pool, something he cared not to attempt.
Dereas felt his throat constrict. “Balael...”
The mountain king muttered his final reflections. “The pool then still exists.”
“What is this pool?” hissed Dereas.
“A mirror to the other side,” Fezoul murmured. “Many of our ancients said it was a confluence to the afterworld, a place of power, a soul-portal. They urged our citizens to provide offerings to the spirits on the other side for those who had died in Pygra’s coils.”
“Gibberish,” rasped Rusfaer.
“Others went mad,” went on Fezoul, “made it their own grisly shrine as you see.” He thrust a trembling finger out at the disturbing tower of bones. Shoulders drooping, he was beset by some nervous anxiety that was eating away at him. His throat worked as if swallowing phlegm. He squatted on his haunches, massaging his temples.
Dereas stirred restlessly, realizing the king’s behaviour was becoming infectious. His eyes travelled to the white-boned tower. Even in the ghostly glow emanating from the running water at their feet that met the pool, the water seemed to take on a duskier hue out there and he marvelled at how deep the fissure underneath the fane must run. His eyes caught a sudden ripple of movement—a ghost of motion farther out. He started, for it was a blur just at the edge of sight. Behind and to the right of the chilling fane, came another.
“Look! There!” he cried.
All eyes turned to the place where he gestured, but nothing materialized and Rusfaer gave a sardonic cry. “Probably some hungry minnows, brother. Why fret? We have all the time in the world to hallucinate. I see you are getting almost as good as our snivelling king here in spotting hobgoblins.”
Fezoul grimaced and shook his head in fitful anger. “It’s no goblin, warrior. Much has changed since the Time of the Snake—since I have slep
t.”
“Time of the Snake? And what in Kizoi’s three hells is that?”
Jhidik moved restlessly from leg to leg. “Let’s be gone from this cursed place.” He limped off back to the tunnel, giving the water wide berth.
Amexi voiced a grumbling curse. “I like this place no more than Jhidik. I suggest we move on.”
Draba, meanwhile, fascinated with the jewelled mounds gracing the water’s edge, had paused to idly single out a particularly tall and intricate pile. He seemed less interested in the movements in the water, or the ominous fane, or any creepy echoes that may have issued from the tunnel behind it.
Dereas looked back to see the rogue’s avaricious grin fill half his face. A sudden, strange blue fin surfaced on the water. Dereas jerked in surprise. A dark dome of shell emerged and two eyes on a wavering stalk peeked up quickly above the water and darted back down.
“There!” he gasped. The strangled yell froze in his throat. It was overshadowed by an unwholesome image of Draba, oblivious to the growing shape, picking up a shiny gem by the pool—then pocketing it.
“Did you see that?” Dereas hissed. He scrambled close to grab Jhidik by the shoulder. The Pirean’s jerky limp had ground to a frozen halt.
“What?” cried Jhidik. “The ripple, or that stupid thieving sod filching jewels that were obviously meant for the dead?”
The two friends looked at each other, but the thing was gone. Only a more disturbing ripple emerged on the pool’s surface.
Fezoul’s distinctive murmur broke over the lap of waves. “’Tis the guardian of the pool!”
“Would you cease your prattle?” berated Rusfaer. “Or must I haul your chicken-hearted hides away from this minnow pool, even wade out in the water myself to spear this imaginary marlin?” In a sudden fit of fury, he stomped over to the shore, probing the black water with his sword, swishing angrily. “Look. See? Nothing!”