Iced on Aran

by Brian Lumley

  Again Eldin dragged himself into a seated position; his chains wouldn’t allow more than that. “What of Una, the other sister?” he growled.

  Gan nodded. “Your woman, aye. I thought you’d ask for her. Well don’t worry, she’s safe enough. She’s aboard, if you’d like to see for yourself. But first things first. And remember, Wanderer, my patience is short and you’ve already stretched it far enough. I do need you, but not so much that I’ll take any more of your nonsense. Understood?”

  Again the vacant look—a shocked look, Gan thought, of immeasurable loss, weariness, pain—was back in Eldin’s eyes, but he gave a slow nod. “Oh, yes, I understand. What do you want of me?”

  “This for starters,” said Gan eagerly, waving Kuranes’ message. “Now, for the last time, will you or won’t you translate it for me?”

  Una was here, right now, on this boat. What would become of her if Eldin refused? Gan didn’t bluff, the Wanderer knew that now.

  Perhaps the Chief Regulator saw the question written in Eldin’s face. “I’ll give her to my colleagues,” he smiled thinly. “Myself, the flesh of women isn’t much to my taste. But those two …”

  “Dog!” said Eldin, but it came out the merest whisper. And: “Very well, I’m beaten. Only promise me you’ll bring her down here, where I can see for myself she’s safe.”

  Gan nodded. “As soon as I know the contents of this message.” He took down a lanthorn from where it swung on a hook above his head, thrust it close to Eldin’s face. “And the truth, Wanderer—the whole truth, mind—for be sure I’ll know it if you lie to me.”

  Still Eldin hesitated. “And when I’ve done this for you, what’s to stop you killing me and the girl out of hand?”

  “You broke into a great keep, found your way into its core,” said Gan. “I’m into Yath-Lhi’s maze, but the central treasure-chamber is giving me trouble. Quite apart from my promise, that in itself would keep you alive. There are more glyphs to be read than those on this scrap of paper, you see? And you seem to be the man for the job. You can prove me correct on that point right now. Or you can prove me wrong, and face the consequences. Now read—if you can.”

  Eldin’s eyes slowly left Gan’s face, focused once more upon Kuranes’ message. “I’ve told you it’s in Ancient Dreamlands?”

  “Yes, so you said,” Gan was impatient to the point of itching.

  “It can’t be translated word for word,” Eldin lied, “for it wasn’t that sort of tongue. It conveys ideas, impressions, that’s all.”

  “Wanderer,” Gan ground the words out, “what—does—it—say?”

  Eldin let his gaze shift from the message, which he knew now by heart, straight into Gan’s slitted eyes. “It says: ‘Hero, Eldin, ’ware Raffis Gan. He’s found Yath-Lhi‘s treasure-maze and would rob all the dreamlands of a priceless legacy.’”

  “Yes, yes!” said Gan when Eldin paused. “Nothing new in that, is there? Go on.” The Chief Regulator licked his lips. Not eagerly, Eldin noted; or at best, eager-anxious.

  “That’s it,” the Wanderer averted his eyes.

  “Liar!” Gan snapped. “What? This great long sheet of hieroglyphs, and that’s all it says?”

  Eldin made to cover up for his apparent error. “Oh, it’s not couched that simply, but in essence that’s the message. There is a bit more, however.” He squinted again at the sheet, his mind working furiously. “Yes, it also says: ‘The seer with invisible eyes can show you the way to Tyrhhia’s ruins. Go there—but go carefully—and bring me back irrefutable evidence of the Chief Regulator’s criminal activity.’”

  “Hah!” Gan snorted. “Well, no problem there, Wanderer, for we’re on our way even now. What else?”

  Inspiration came like a bright flash of light in Eldin’s mind. A man in a hurry makes mistakes. Panicked, an animal will fly straight into the trap. And Raffis Gan was an animal if ever Eldin saw one. “What else?” he repeated, and nodded. “A postscript, that’s all—and one you’ll not much care for.”

  Gan’s pinched face went narrower still and he frowned. “Go on.”

  “It says: ‘If I don’t hear from you by return, my next message goes straight to Baharna’s Council of Elders’!”

  “What?” the Chief Regulator whispered, his eyes darting from Eldin’s face to the glyph-inscribed tissue, and back to Eldin. “Where, Wanderer? Where does it say that?”

  “There,” Eldin nodded gravely. “The last three lines there, followed by Kuranes’ sigil.”

  Gan reeled for a moment, staggered until his shoulders came up against low beams. Then he seemed to draw strength from his sturdy vessel, straightened up a little. “So, it’s come at last. The Elders have had their suspicions for some time, I fancy, but word from Kuranes will clinch it. At least they’ll investigate—and I’m afraid I’m not up to much of an investigation. Then they’ll be after me full tilt. We’re into the afternoon already; Kuranes will be expecting your answer tonight, but he won’t get one—that’s when he’ll dispatch his damned accusations. The Council of Elders will know all by this time tomorrow at the latest. That gives me less than twenty-four hours to crack Yath-Lhi’s treasure-chamber …” He began to turn away, checked himself.

  “The girl,” Eldin reminded him, before Gan could say anything else. “You said you’d send her down to me.”

  Gan’s mind was now on other things. “One last question,” he said. “Did Kuranes mention … a curse?”

  “Eh?” said Eldin, trying to be—just Eldin. “Curse, Kuranes? Why, no. He’s not much for swearing, that one. Far too much a gentleman. Though I do seem to remember that on one occasion he—”

  “A curse, clown!” Gan hissed. “A malediction—a DOOM—a lurking evil connected with Yath-Lhi’s treasure.”

  “Oh, that sort of curse!” said Eldin. “No, not a word. D’you believe in such, then?”

  “These are the dreamlands, Wanderer,” said Gan darkly, “and of strange things dreamed by men in the waking world … there’s no end or limit to what might or might not be. Gugs, ghouls, gaunts, ghasts, dholes, Shantaks, zoogs, zombies and other monsters and mischiefs—their reality has to be acknowledged, because they are real. Encounters are numerous and well documented. But a curse, passed down dim centuries to the present day? No, you’re quite right: personally I’m not especially superstitious.” A worried look crossed his face; or rather, the one already there intensified. “But there have been an inordinately large number of accidental deaths among my slaves, and even a few Kledans have …” He paused, scowled. “There’s nothing, you say?”

  “Nothing at all,” replied the Wanderer blandly. “It seems to me old Kuranes is more interested in the theft or priceless antiquities and a certain Chief Regulator’s improper use of powers vested, than in any curse of some mummified princess dead since the dawn of dreams …”

  “Quite right,” said Gan, with a curt nod. And again, under his breath, “quite right.” He made his way to where a hatch stood open overhead, hauled himself up and out of sight. Moments later a short ladder came down, then Una followed, tearful as she threw herself into Eldin’s shackled arms.

  But between Gan’s going and Una’s coming, the Wanderer had lain there with a strange and savage grin on his scarred face. There was no pleasure in that grin, which was more the smile of a wolf, but there was a deal of satisfaction. And not a little of anticipation …

  “My father was right,” said Ula Gidduf, with a low moan. “I should have stayed home and looked after him. Oh, Hero—Hero, what is this place?”

  Hero gulped, opened his mouth, gulped again. Then he found his voice. “It’s the biggest damn catacomb in all the dreamlands,” he finally replied in little more than a whisper. “Lord, it has to be!”

  The flaring torch flickered lower as fragile rags went up in smoke; Hero looked about for longer lasting fuel. Some of the crumbling corpses that littered the floor of this huge circular room wore wooden yokes, which were now very nearly fossilized into a peaty coal. Hero had no
trouble wresting one of these from a skeletal neck, knocking loose its corroded metal hasps and chains against the wall. Then he gave the yoke a harder clout and it shattered, displaying a core of black, woody fibers. Tilted into the smolder of the foul-burning rags of the flambeau, the splinters of ancient timber very quickly caught fire. And as the flames leaped bright and yellow, so Hero and Ula could take in the full size of the chamber, and the full measure of the singular atrocity long since perpetrated here.

  The vault was perhaps one hundred feet across, roughly hacked from the raw rock, with a ceiling maybe fifteen feet high. With the exception of a spiraling stone stairway at its center, apparently passing up into and through the ceiling, and the evenly spaced flambeaux around the walls—and of course its contingent of grotesque mummies—the place was featureless. As for the antique corpses:

  There must be at least two hundred of them littered about, some in small piles, some singly, seated with their backs against the walls or lying in various crumpled positions. And it hardly took close inspection to tell what they had been or how they had died. Their yokes and corroded chains and ankle clamps spoke all too clearly, however dumbly, of their once-station, or lack of it, in life; hacked vertebrae, necks, crushed skulls and caved-in chests told the rest. They’d been slaves, and some long-dead master or mistress, for some long-dead reason or upon a similarly extinct whim, had decreed that they be incarcerated and slaughtered here.

  Mistress? Hero’s nostrils flared. Suddenly, an idea—a suspicion—had formed itself in his ever-bright mind. He put it aside at once; it now appeared there’d be time, after all, to examine it later. And turning to Ula:

  “Lass, you’re still shivering—from cold or sheer fright I’m not sure—but I reckon our first priority is to warm up our marrows a bit. So—d’you reckon you can help me gather up an armful of these yokes? It’s not hard work, but it’s not especially pleasant, either.”

  Ula was made of the right stuff: in a very little while she was naked, drying her clothes over a small bonfire of aeon-old hardwood. Hero left his jacket, shirt and boots with her, went off with a sputtering brand to explore the stairway. He would never be very far away, and he talked to her as he went—a running commentary on his discoveries—but still … she averted her eyes from the blind, almost accusing gaze of countless eyeless sockets and got on with drying herself.

  “I’m going up the stairway,” Hero called back, unnecessarily, for of course she could still see his flickering outline in the flare of his torch, but mainly to help her fight down her fear of the unknown, the darkness beyond the firelight. Not to mention his own.

  The stair wound about a central pillar; Hero climbed, passed out of view on the far side, reappeared and pressed on higher. Then:

  “Dead end,” came his voice, echoing down to Ula, its disappointment plain. “Literally! More corpses at the top, several of ’em chopped in half when the plug fell.”

  “What?” Ula didn’t understand. “Stairs going up to nothing? Plug? What are you talking about, Hero?”

  “Oh, these stairs went somewhere once upon a time,” he answered, holding his torch aloft and sending shadows leaping. “Up through the bedrock and into her palace, I should think. But she had this great stone plug prepared, you see, and at the end—”

  “Hero, you’re rambling,” she cut him off. “Explain yourself. She? Who, she?”

  He came winding his way back down the spiral of stone steps. “Yath-Lhi, I suppose. I mean, it all fits, doesn’t it? We were brought inland, on the tide, into this subterranean crypt. We doubtless passed under Yath the lake—named all that time ago for the princess herself, and the fact of it forgotten—and so found our way into this antechamber. Here it was she killed her slaves, before sealing it and proceeding to her last resting place.”

  “Eh?” said Ula, seeming to Hero to sound more like Eldin all the time. “She ‘proceeded’ somewhere from here? Where, pray?”

  “This staircase,” he answered across the radius of the vault, “not only goes up, but down!”

  He started down the winding stairwell.

  “Hero!” Ula cried out at once, starting across the corpse-littered floor toward him. “You’re not going anywhere without me!”

  He peered at her for a moment, managed a roguish grin, however contrived. “And you’re not coming anywhere with me—not dressed, or undressed, like that!”

  She glanced down at herself, said, “Oh!” returned to her fire.

  Hero joined her. “Very well,” he said, “we go together. Are our clothes dry?”

  “Mine are,” she began dressing. “Yours … not quite.”

  “They’ll have to do.” He dressed slowly, turning himself before the fire, left his boots till last. And finally: “Ula, I—”

  “No need to say it,” she cut in. “I know. Up, we’d have stood a chance. Down—we’re going nowhere.”

  Hero reluctantly nodded. “I thought I’d mention it,” he said. “Easier to face now we’re warm and half-dry. And of course, it’s not definite. It just wouldn’t do to get too deliriously happy, that’s all.” He tossed his brand into the fire, took up a fresh one. Ula did likewise.

  “Very well,” she said. “I’ll try not to get carried away. So let’s go and have a look at Yath-Lhi’s treasure-chamber, shall we?”

  “Why not?” Hero kissed her roughly. “Who knows? It might be the last treasure-chamber we ever see!”

  “What?” Eldin was astonished, almost shocked. “What!” he repeated, this time an exclamation. “A minute ago you were very sweetly crying your eyes out, and now you’re—Una!”

  “Shhh!” she shushed desperately.

  “But why are you groping me? I mean, this is hardly the time or the place for—”

  “Oaf!” she whispered, anything but sweetly. “I am not groping you! Wouldn’t that be like taking onyx to Inquanok? Or playing the dingaphon to impress the maestro Gaez Voorpin? Would I dream of groping the Grand Groper himself?”

  If anything, Eldin was a little disappointed. “Then what are you doing?”

  She sighed. “You haven’t noticed that your wrists are padlocked together behind your left thigh?”

  “Eh? Why, no, I hadn’t, actually.”

  “My tears were for Gan and his cronies,” she said, “so they’d see how helpless I was—while I snatched the key to these padlocks you’re wearing!”

  “Padlocks? More than one?”

  Una sighed again. “Your ankles are padlocked, too.”

  “So they are!” He clanked his chains a bit. “Don’t take any chances, these lads, do they?”

  “Oh, they do,” she answered grimly, “but with the wrong people! So I wailed and cried a lot to distract them, and in the end they were only too glad to send me down here.”

  Now her eyes were bright and glinting. “They killed my sister,” she said huskily. “Oh, yes, let them see my tears now—but later I’ll show them the cutting edge of a sword! Or a knife! Or an axe!”

  “I hope you’ll leave some for me,” Eldin growled. “See, my mind runs to mayhem, too—and if that doesn’t work out there’s something even nastier.”

  “The worse the better!” she said, giving him a hug.

  “Right,” said Eldin, “no time to waste. How many of ’em, up top?”

  “Gan and his two, that’s all. The rest of the Regulators probably don’t know their boss is a bad ’un.”

  “My feeling exactly,” the Wanderer agreed. “Now then, I know we’re sailing for Tyrhhia, but what’s our e.t.a.?”

  “We’re more than half-way across Yath now, I reckon,” she answered, and shrugged. “Ten to fifteen minutes at most. Maybe even less.”

  Eldin weighed chains, wrapped his great fists in them. “Just the three of ‘em, eh?” he scowled. “Can you whirl a chain, d’you think?” He handed her a very unladylike length.

  They crept soundlessly to the ladder, and Eldin stepped up it to try the hatch. Mercifully it wasn’t battened: with his head, he pushed
it open a fraction and peered out. He recognized the vessel at once: a Regulator patrol boat, small, with a fast, fancy sail. He pushed the hatch open more yet—and gasped.

  Una heard him, saw his bulk stiffen on the ladder, tugged at his trouser leg. “What’s up?” she whispered.

  “Your e.t.a. was a mite off,” he answered. “We’re already there!”

  At that moment the boat answered the helm, swung to port a little, lost impetus. And:

  “Ahoy there, Slave-Master Druff!” Gan’s sudden hail from for’ard caused Eldin to duck back. “How goes the work?”

  “Ahoy, Raffis Gan!” came back the answer, in guttural Kledan tones. “Slowly, I fear.”

  Eldin peered out again.

  One hundred yards away, the shore was thick with reeds, bulrushes, semi-tropical shrubs and small palms. Good cover there. The Regulator vessel was closing on a spindly, makeshift wooden jetty; beyond the jetty, a pair of huge Kledan sky-slavers rolled on a fresh-risen breeze, anchored fore and aft with their keels just clear of the water. Another, approaching from the north, was in the process of dropping down from the sky, her anchors about to dip into the lake. Swarthy Kledans galore were plainly visible on the decks of all three squat, ungainly vessels; they mended crude-seeming flotation bags and tended rigging and sails, fished from the gunnels, busied themselves with unloading. But it was what they unloaded that interested Eldin the most.

  Small lighters rowed by Pargans, overseen by their Kledan masters, wallowed to their gunnels as they bore piled gunpowder kegs ashore, sat light in the water when they came back empty. Eldin’s narrowed eyes went back to Yath’s shore. A shallow mist lapped the surface of the lake, but it failed to obscure his view.

  Long lines of Pargan slaves, each man carrying a keg atop his head, moved between the lighters and a spot where the shore of the lake sloped back and rose up sharply into a sort of barrow or small hill. Covered by rank green growth, the hill lay approximately centrally in an extensive area of ancient ruins which came right down to the water’s edge—the tumbled remains of primeval Tyrhhia, as Eldin was now well aware. The side of the hill facing the lake had been shorn of vegetation down to naked rock; the great black throat of a cave led back into darkness, where a long line of fixed torches receded, descending out of sight: the entrance to Yath-Lhi’s maze.