And so we turned northeast toward the Zun Gate, as the old woman had advised us.
The city's great central stairs, she had said, opened onto the boulevard only a quarter mile farther along. We passed bakeries, taverns and mess halls carved out of solid rock. The smells of hot bread, beer and roasted chicken mingled with the reek of sewage and the dung that the gong farmers hauled out of the city in wicker baskets.
Although it had been a long time since our last meal and we were fairly starving, we couldn't quite bring ourselves to stop and eat. But we must, as Maram pointed out, find something to drink. Atara had been carrying our water, and we had not the slightest drop to wet our parched throats.
'I'm thirsty,' Maram complained as we made our way against the jostling crowds in the street. He walked beside me, with Daj behind him and Kane and Liijana following protectively. 'I don't like to think that I'd drink the water in this filthy place, but i suppose I must.'
Although time was pressing us like a great boulder set rolling down a mountain, we decided to duck into a waterseller's shop and buy a few glasses of this precious liquid. But after we had drunk our fill of the greasy-seeming water, which tasted faintly of iron and blood, we found that we couldn't leave.
'Look,' Daj said to me, pointing out of the shop's doorway. I followed the line of his finger toward some men who were sitting around a table outside of the tavern next door. 'I know that man - he's one of Lord Morjin's spies.'
The man he had indicated, tall and blond like the Thalunes and dressed in a plain tunic and mail like many mercenaries, had his chair positioned facing the doorway to the waterseller's shop. His cruel blue eyes swept the street no doubt looking for a way that he could transmute his betrayal of others into gold. It would be impossible, I knew, for us to walk past him without him seeing us.
'What should we do?' Maram whispered to me.
'Wait,' I whispered back.
And so wait we did. We ordered more glasses of water and sat drinking them around a table at the rear of the shop. There was a chess set there, too, and Kane and I set up the pieces and began a game in the most desultory of ways. Maram chided mc for losing my knight in vain effort to forestall an attack upon my queen.
But I had no mind for a game at such a time, when my heart beat out like thunder at every round of laughter or curses that sounded from the tavern next door.
It took most of an hour for the spy and his friends to finish their ale and leave. We waited another quarter of an hour before daring to leave ourselves; the spy, we feared, might be skulking somewhere on the street nearby. Maram thanked the stars that we didn't see him anywhere in the crowds that streamed past us as we hurried along. But that didn't mean anything, as Kane pointed out. It was the essence of spying, he said, to seek out others without being seen.
But luck, I thought, had finally turned our way. We reached the central stairs without further incident. These great steps, a hundred feet wide, opened onto the boulevard exactly as the old woman had said. Streams of people poured down them on the left, while many others puffed laboriously up them on the right. We waited a few moments at the foot of them, hoping we might catch sight of Atara, Ymiru and Master Juwain in the throngs about us. But if they had kept to our plan, they had no doubt reached this spot before us and had gone on ahead.
And so with a final glance at the street, we began our climb up to Argattha's seventh level. With five levels to ascend and five hundred feet per level, we had to work our way up a distance of almost a half mile, straight up through the heart of the mountain. It took us a long time to make this climb. The stairs drove up toward the east until giving way to a great landing, before turning back west on their rise again.
And so it went, with many, many turnings as the seemingly endless stairs took us through the black rock past the openings to the third, fourth, fifth and sixth levels. At last, with Maram fairly wheezing and dripping sweat from his thick, brown beard, we came out onto one of the boulevards of the seventh level.
'Ah, here it is,' Maram said, puffing as we stepped out onto the huge street. 'Well, it doesn't look like much.'
Indeed, the street looked like every other tunnel in this unnatural city, save that it was even larger: it was a great, square-cut channel through black rock that was lit with foul-smelling oil lamps and pitted with doorways that were the openings to dank living spaces and shops. Although we were close to Morjin's throne room, as Daj told us, no vistas of magnificent domed buildings or soaring arches were to be seen, for Morjin's 'palace' was just another series of rat holes in a mountain gnawed with thousands of such dark places.
'The palace is that way,' he said, pointing almost due south at a wan of stone.
To the west of the palace, he said, was the great Gardens: a huge hall where flowering plants were bathed in the light of the thousands of glowstones on the walls.
To the east of the palace was a passage that only Morjin was permitted to use. This led past a series of private stairs to the lower levels, a mile and a half straight toward an opening cut onto Skartaru's east face. Daj called it Morjin's Porch, and there the Red Dragon liked to sit each morning to watch the rising of the sun. There, too, long ago, on the naked rock face, he had nailed the immortal Kalkamesh and tortured him for ten long years.
'I'd like to see this porch of his,' Maram said, looking about the dim street. 'I'd give anything to feel real light on my face again.'
'Don't be a fool!' Kane snapped at him. 'You won't be seeing it anytime soon unless Morjin puts you there.'
'He may put all of us there,' Maram said bravely. 'And it may be that someday the poets will sing of us and what we tried to do here. Do you think so, Val?'
'Perhaps,' I said to him. 'But it would please me more if Alphanderry were here to sing of the stars.'
The boulevard led us a quarter mile toward the east, where it intersected another running from north to south - directly toward the throne room of Morjin's Palace. In the great square where these two streets came together had been built a fountain.
Men and women sat around it in the spray of a great plume of water, red as rust, as if it had been forced through ancient iron pipes.
We sat there by this crimson pool, too, waiting for our friends. We watched carts full of silks and wine barrels roll past; one cart, stacked with glowstones that reminded me of the skulls in the dragon's hall, was clearly being taken outside of Argattha so that these gelstei could be refilled with the light of the sun. Hundreds of people from the boulevards poured in streams of living flesh around the fountain.
Many of these wore red robes embroidered with golden dragons: the vestments of the Red Priests of the Kallimun. These men - and they were almost all men - strode along with an air of rectitude and dominion, as if all things and peoples about them were their province. More than one of them cast us suspicious looks. And we were, I thought, a suspicious company: three men dressed like mercenaries, a noble-looking woman and a ragtag child. It was very good, I thought, that only we could see Flick.
After a while, it became clear that there were few mercenaries on this level of the city
- but many captains and lords of Morjin's armies. One of these, dressed in an ice-blue tunic with a broadsword buckled at the waist, swaggered up to us and demanded that we identify ourselves. Only the medallions that we had lifted off the dead knights kept us from being taken and bound in chains.
'That was close,' Maram said, after the captain had stalked off. We had hinted that we were spies, and that Morjin would be very displeased if the captain interfered with our mission. 'Too, too close.'
Liljana sat with her arms thrown protectively around Daj as might his mother. But there was something fierce and unyielding in her watchful gaze, as if she would reluctantly sacrifice him or any of us - or herself - in order to gain the Lightstone.
'We can't wait here much longer,' she whispered against the fountain's splatter.
I looked up and down the boulevards, praying that I might catch sight of Atara and
the others.
'With our delay at the waterseller's, likely they're already come,' Kane said. 'And likely they've already gone on to the throne room.'
He pointed down the boulevard toward the south. According to Daj, it gave out onto Morjin's Palace little more than a quarter mile from the fountain.
'Perhaps we should wait just a few minutes longer,' I said. I looked for Atara's flowing blond mane among the mostly darker-haired women who seemed to populate Argattha.
'We agreed not to wait,' Kane reminded me. 'Likely they're trying to find their way into the throne room even as we waste our time here. And likely they'll need our help with the guards.'
Here Liljana fingered her blue figurine while Kane rested his hand on the haft of his dagger.
It seemed a desperate business to try to fool or force our way into the throne room past Morjin's guards. Although fortune often favored such boldness, I was reluctant to attempt this frontal assault even so. And then Daj surprised me, and all of us, saying, 'There's another way into the throne room.'
He told us that three great gates, on the throne room's east, west and north sides, opened upon the streets of the city and were always guarded. But a door inside the throne room, on its west wall, opened upon an unguarded passage that led directly through the palace to Morjin's private quarters.
'Oh, excellent,' Maram said to Daj. 'And I suppose you know a way to get inside the Red Dragon's rooms without just knocking at his door?'
'I do,' Daj said, and our surprise turned to amazement. 'There's a secret passage from Lord Morjin's rooms into the city.'
He went on to tell us that Morjin often used this passage to leave his palace unnoticed; he would go about the city in disguise, Daj said, acting as his own most trusted spy to ferret out any plots or slanders made against him.
'But why didn't you tell us this?' I asked him.
'Because I was afraid,' he said, looking at Kane grip his dagger.
'Afraid of what?'
'Afraid that you've come to kill Lord Morjin.'
He went on to say that an ancient curse had been laid upon anyone who would dare to try to slay the Red Dragon. And so he had been afraid, he said, to lead us through his private chambers.
'But why are you telling us this now, then?' I asked him.
'Because I don't care anymore,' he said. His dark, youthful eyes suddenly filled with hate, like Kane's. 'About the curse, I mean. I hope you do kill him. I'll never sleep well again until he's dead.'
The hurt inside him cut me like a heated knife. And I said to him, 'But we haven't come here to kill anyone. We're not assassins, Daj.'
As Kane's eyes flared like coals, I went on to tell him that we meant to enter Morjin's throne room in order to recover something that had once been stolen from the king's palace in Tria.
'What is it then, treasure?' he asked. 'There's plenty of that in the throne room.'
'Yes, treasure,' I said. And then, to myself, I whispered: The greatest treasure in the world.
We decided that Daj should take us through the district outside Morjin's Palace to the secret passage that led into it. But first we must reconnoiter the streets around the gates to the throne room, in the hope that we might find Atara and the others seeking a way inside. Then we might rejoin them and tell of our new plan for gaining entrance.
When we reached the street facing the throne room's north gate, however, we found many people milling about the food stalls and fortune tellers there, but none of them were our friends. The gate itself - great iron doors twenty feet high and as wide - was guarded by four of Morjin's men. We might simply have rushed upon them and murdered them; it would then be easy to push open the doors and storm our way into the throne room and begin our search for the Lightstone. But even if we completed our quest within a few minutes, the alarm would have been given, and we would have to try to fight our way back out against perhaps a hundred hastily summoned guards.
'Does this street ever grow quiet?' I asked Daj. I looked at the silksellers hawking their wares from their carts and other merchants displaying golden bangles, silver brooches and jeweled rings.
'At night it does,' he said.
Maram pulled at his beard and muttered, 'But how can you tell when it's night in this accursed place?'
'Well, the criers come to call out the curfew.'
'So,' Kane said, 'if our friends have discovered that then perhaps they're waiting for night to clear the streets.
'Perhaps,' I said, as I watched a nearby vendor roasting a baby pig over a little fire.
The spit and hiss of its dripping fat sent a greasy, black smoke out onto the noisy street.
'Perhaps we should wait here, after all,' Maram said. 'If we're to steal through the Red Dragon's rooms, it would be better to do so at night when he's sleeping.'
'But he doesn't sleep/ Daj said. 'He stays up all night reading his books. Or playing chess with himself. Or . . other things.'
'And during the day?' I asked, looking for some ray of light driving down the airshafts that opened upon the street.
'During the day,' Daj said, 'he could be anywhere in the city.'
I pulled my cloak more tightly about myself as he said this. I felt the eyes of many people about the street watching us.
'Anywhere except the throne room,' Liljana said.
'Yes, that's right,' Daj said, nodding toward the iron gate. 'The doors are almost always open when Lord Morjin is holding court.'
'Almost always?' Liljana asked him.
Daj nodded his head. 'Yes, sometimes he holds ... private audi ences.'
I felt my heart beating like a hammer and sweat running beneath the padding of my armor. I said, 'All right, the throne room is likely empty, as we stand here talking.
And our friends, if they haven't been taken, are likely waiting somewhere for night to fight their way into it.'
'And if they have been taken?' Maram asked.
I tried not to look at the heated iron running through the sizzling pig or listen to the scream building inside me. I said, Then all the more reason that we should hasten to find this secret passage that Daj has told of And if our friends are safe, we'll no doubt find them outside one of the gates tonight after we've completed our quest'
Everyone agreed that it would be best if we attempted the secret passage now, before we were discovered or our courage foiled And so Daj led the way into the district to the northwest of the palace. Here the streets were narrow and twisted like tunnels that would have contused an ant. Nobles, mostly, lived here between the shops of the bakers, vintners and others who served their needs. The stares of these people as we quickly passed by disquieted all of us. But we moved along without any trouble until we came to another square, much smaller than that of the Red Fountain.
Here, on a great wooden cross caked with layers of old blood, a nearly naked man had been crucified for all to see. A crowd had gathered to watch his death throes, and for a moment we joined them. I couldn't take my eyes off the man's head, which was slumped down against his chest as if he were watching his heart's last flame about to be blown out.
Almost against my will, I found my hand sliding beneath my cloak and gripping the hilt of my sword. And then Kane's steely fingers gripped my arm as he shook his head and told me, 'You can't save everyone, Val.'
'But what was his crime?' I whispered to him.
No one around us seemed to know. One old woman, likely the wife of some great lord, gathered in her silks and told her attendant that she believed the condemned man had somehow insulted Morjin.
'Come, now,' Kane saillpulling at my arm. 'Let's take our revenge on Morjin by stealing from him what he covets most.'
I nodded my head, and we pushed our way out of the crowd. Daj led us onto a dim street that turned toward the north, in the direction of the great stairs. But then it turned again, west and south. We walked on a little way. Then Daj pointed at an open doorway next to a butchery where many fly-blown chickens and lambs were hung. It was an unusual door
way, the rock on either side of it being carved with standing dragons that framed it like pillars. It gave into a little chamber that was one of Argattha's many sanctuaries. Inside, as we found, was little more than a single glowstone hanging from the low ceiling. This one light, Daj said, symbolized the Light of the One. The meaning of our passage through the pillars was clear: that the way toward the One was through the way of the Dragon.
'People are supposed to come here and meditate,' Daj told us. We stood at the center of the deserted chamber, staring at a tapestry of various Elijin and Galadin on the far wall. 'But no one ever comes.'
'Why not?' Maram asked him.
'Because it's said that Lord Morjin seeks his sacrifices from the most faithful and finds them in the sanctuaries.'
Such tales, I thought, were an excellent way of keeping the sanc tuaries empty - so that Morjin could reserve them for his private
use.
With Maram standing watch in the doorway, we moved over to the tapestry, and Liljana held it away from the wall. Behind it was a door, barely perceptible as such: a crack ran horizontally through the black rock just above the level of our heads, while two others cut lengthwise framing a large basalt slab. If pushed against, I thought, it would revolve and open onto the secret passage.
I pushed against it now, but it was like pushing against a solid wall, and the door did'nt move. and Daj said to me, 'You have to know the password.'
'I presume you know what this is?' Kane said to him.
'Yes, there's a door like this at the other end of the passage - in Lord Morjin's rooms. One time, I hid there and watched him use it. And then followed him here.'
The Lightstone Page 96