Iced on Aran

by Brian Lumley

  Again Gan’s shouting startled the Wanderer. “You haven’t found a way into the core? Not even a lead?”

  “Nothing!” came back the cry from the deck of the closest Kledan vessel. “The walls seem solid. Some are even suggesting that there is no chamber—just a core of solid rock.”

  “Fools!” Gan shouted. “I’ve a man here who can read the glyphs on those walls. We’ll be into that treasure before nightfall!”

  “Oops!” said Eldin. Catlike for a man his size, he slid out of the hatch and drew Una up after him. Under the mainsail’s boom, they could see the lower half of the legs of Gan and his two bullies. “Quickly,” Eldin whispered. “Over the side—without a splash, mind you—and make for the shore. Do it in stretches, underwater as best you can, and stick close to me. Go!”

  Masked by the sail and the cabin’s low superstructure, Una slipped overboard like an eel into the milky water; Eldin followed immediately after her, kicked hard for the bottom and chased Una’s lithe shape across the muddy, weedy bed of the lake. They surfaced when they had to, and looked back. The Regulator vessel was visible through a thin shroud of mist. But after diving again, swimming, surfacing a second time, only the outlines of the boat could still be seen. Moments later the lake shallowed out and they were able to half-swim, half-crawl ashore into the weed-draped bulrushes. Heads kept low, they made firmer ground, ran almost crouching through dank fern, bulrush and shrub, away from the cavern entrance and the moored ships.

  No one had seen their escape, but it would be discovered soon enough. Five minutes later they thought they heard a burst of angry shouting, wild cries of alert, but by then they were well away.

  A quarter-mile along the lake’s rim, the Wanderer spotted a tiny island only twenty-five or thirty yards out from the shore. Tall reeds grew in clumps there, and trees, whose knotty roots were bedded in several large boulders, and an outcrop that looked for all the world like a ruined wall. Maybe it was.

  “That’ll do for snow,” Eldin nodded. “The mist’s clearing. If we can get across there quick, we’ll catch the last of the sun and dry out before nightfall.” Una made no comment, but at once followed him into the water again.

  Ten minutes later they had their clothes spread out over domed boulders at the rear of the island—whose entire circumference was no more than two hundred feet at most—and made do with underclothes as they explored their refuge. There wasn’t a lot of it to look at: ruined stone walls crumbling away, bedrock thrusting up, a few boulders and an abundance of greenery. Difficult to believe that, two hundred yards beyond, Yath’s shore all was desert and dust.

  Totally impossible even to conceive that less than a mile away horizontally, and ninety feet vertically, Hero and Ula were even now exploring Yath-Lhi’s treasure-chamber …

  Raffis Gan prowled the deck of Manhunter, Zubda Druff’s slaver, and scowled his frustration into the twilight as the first stars cast their feeble light over Oriab, shining down on the still Lake of Yath. Heavily armed search parties had gone out; come back empty-handed, nothing to report. Eldin the Wanderer and Una Gidduf were off and running (so it appeared) and no hope of catching them now, and the job still to be finished. And Gan had to be out of here by noon tomorrow at latest.

  Now, head down and muttering, hands clenched behind his back, he stomped the planking to and fro, waiting impatiently for nightfall.

  “Another half-hour,” said lean, hard-muscled, ebony Druff from where he hunched on Manhunter’s rail and gnawed on a haunch of roasted goat. “That’s when the day-shift comes out, exhausted, with nothing to show for their work but blisters. Then we go in, with the night-shift, and—and what then, eh? You’ve made a lot of promises, Raffis Gan, and none of ’em come to pass as yet.”

  “Shut up, Druff!” Gan cried. He whirled on Egg-head and Narrow-eyes, who stood shuffling their feet, looking surly. “I blame you two! Morons! She must have taken that key from under your very eyes! If you hadn’t been doing so much slavering over her and wondering which of you was going to be first …”

  Druff the Kledan had tossed the remains of his repast overboard. “Gan,” he rumbled, slipping down off the rail and fingering the hilt of the curved sword stuck in his silk cummerbund, “we had a deal. We still do have one—at least until tomorrow—but don’t you start shutting me up aboard my own ship. You may be or have been, Chief Regulator in Bahama, but out here—”

  Gan gritted his teeth, held up his hands placatingly. “You’re right,” he said, “quite right. If we start fighting now we can kiss it all goodbye, and that won’t do.”

  Druff shrugged. “It would do for me,” he said, “for I can always go back to Kled. But can you go back to Bahama? My task was simply to bring you slaves, a workforce, which I’ve done and no grudge. For I don’t own the slaves you’ve wasted in that hole. But your backers in Kled do own them, and they’ll want paying. If you ran, they’d find you, Gan, no matter where. And I’d probably be the one they’d send after you. So from now on, watch who you’re telling to shut up, right?”

  “Right, right!” Gan snapped again, through clenched teeth. “It’s just that I hate it when things go wrong. And I’m sure that that man, Eldin the Wanderer, could have led us right in there. He looked a dolt, right enough, but he does have a reputation for this sort of thing.”

  “He didn’t look that much of a dolt to me,” said Egg-head ruefully, rubbing at his shoulder. “Not when he was trying to chew my arm off! Well, maybe a dangerous dolt!”

  Gan scowled at him, looked away in disgust.

  Druff picked his huge white teeth. “Well, he won’t be leading us in anywhere now. So it looks like we go back to the original plan, right?”

  “Yes,” Gan agreed, “we blast our way in! It was a last resort, but that was before there was a deadline.”

  “Deadline, aye,” Druff nodded his shiny black head. “And talking about death, didn’t you have certain reservations? About blasting, I mean?”

  “I still do,” said Gan. “In there, at the central keep where Yath-Lhi stored her treasure, there’s an awful lot of rock overhead—you can feel it weighing down on you. Reservations? Too true! So we’ll do it one keg at a time, step by step and steady as she goes, and so chew our way right through one of those walls. And like I said, we’ll have the stuff aboard your ships and airborne before sun-up.”

  Druff nodded, turned and strolled away with a rolling, sailor’s gait. “I hope so,” he growled over his shoulder. “I really do—and not least for your sake …”

  Gan watched him go, cursed under his breath. Then he turned to his men, said: “Leave me, but stay within calling distance. Get yourselves something to eat, beat up a slave or something. I want to think.” He went to the rail, leaned on it and stared out over the dim, gently lapping lake. And he thought back on how it all started …

  Gan had lived most of his life in the shadow of his father, holier-than-thou, bring-‘em-back-alive, go-get-’ em Tellis Gan. Tellis Gan the Fearless! And no one had thought of the young Gan as “Raffis” at all: he’d been simply “Tellis’ son,” and nothing more. “A pale, spotty sort—not a patch on his father.” Law and order had been Tellis’ life, and Raffis had had it up to here.

  Not fitted for any sort of skilled work, he’d early taken to solitary wanderings throughout the land, traveling the length and breadth of Oriab and studying the ancient island’s antiquities. His trips had been in large part simply a means of getting out of his father’s limelight; but when Raffis’ mother had died, he’d blamed his father that so much of his time had been spent in loneliness, away from home and the fragile mother who’d loved him.

  From then on Raffis was rarely home at all. To escape the present, he’d begun to explore the past to an ever deeper degree. And one day, in the desert beyond Yath’s green border … he’d discovered a sheet of beaten silver: a silver tile which, in the present day, he’d known would be made of lead or slate.

  And digging deeper in the sand and ruins, he’d found more
of them, a veritable cache of heavy, precious silver, then he’d guessed that this was Tyrhhia. For had not Yath-Lhi’s slave city been silver-spired? Yath the lake—Yath-Lhi—the ill-regarded ruins—silver galore—it all fitted, all added up. This had to be Tyrhhia. And here, buried deep somewhere under these desert sands, the Black Princess’s legendary treasure!

  Many the grand dreams within dreams Raffis Gan dreamed then, and many grand schemes schemed. But while he might scorn the laws of Baharna’s Elders, which his father supported and enforced so diligently, certainly he was aware of them. Particularly with regard to antiquities, and especially concerning the forbidden, forbidding ruins on Yath’s far shore.

  And so, working in strictest secrecy, he approached certain ex-slavers, Kledans passing through Baharna, and gave them a message—and an invitation, a proposal—to be delivered to certain offensively rich persons in the fabled, barbarously opulent cities of jungled Kled. In essence his offer was this: he held the key to a fabulous treasure and would share it fifty-fifty; the knowledge was available to whoever could supply as much labor as might be required. Slave labor, of course. And to support his claim that he knew the whereabouts of Tyrhhia, he sent along as a gift (or at least as part-payment in advance) his own weight in ancient silver.

  He’d had his answer by return, on the very next ship out of Kled: an introduction to Zubda Druff, who would finalize the arrangements and act as Gan’s partner (and his backers’ watchdog) until the conclusion of the project. Except … there was one major problem. A problem named Tellis Gan.

  Baharna’s Chief Regulator had a down on all Kledans, but particularly ex-slavers whom he knew, in other less discriminating parts and ports, to be anything but ex. He would not take it kindly if swarms of them suddenly appeared in the streets of Baharna, or even on the Isle of Oriab as a whole. At worst he’d harass them out of their wits, and the very least he’d do would be to investigate. The project simply would not stand up to investigation, not once the dig was under way.

  And so, with never a twinge of conscience, Raffis Gan had arranged that treacherous ambush which was directly responsible for Tellis Gan’s death. Elevated to the office of Chief Regulator in his father’s place, Gan had then subverted a pair of dubious Regulators, sworn them to secrecy, set them up as his thuggish lieutenants; and as soon as he was basically established in his new appointment, he’d finally dispatched an all-clear to his Kledan backers.

  Then had come the deep-hulled, wallowing sky-slavers with their miserable human cargoes—not to Bahama, no, but direct to the Lake of Yath itself—and then too the excavation of Tyrhhia had begun in earnest. And while all of this was going on, Gan’s Regulators had kept the law in Baharna, with Raffis himself most stringent in the application of those laws that prohibited fishing near Yath’s far shore, prospecting in the desert beyond Yath, or the seeking of relics in the (hitherto) unnamed ruins.

  As for grandiose dreams and schemes and such …

  The original deal with the Kledans had been modified. Gan would now take one third of the haul plus a ship, its crew and full complement of slaves. With these he could easily make himself a power in any one of Kled’s lush cities, and under an assumed name would doubtless live out his days in untold luxury.

  The first Baharna’s Council of Elders would ever know of the affair would be when Gan went missing and a Regulator vessel was found derelict upon the shore of Yath. Then they would read Gan’s logbook, which would tell a wholly fabulous (but irrefutable) story.

  The log would show how, suspicious of Kledan activity, Chief Regulator Gan had discovered slavers excavating the forbidden ruins. It would also record Gan’s “plan”: to use their own blasting powder to destroy the Kledans and sabotage their extensive diggings. There would be an element of risk in this, of course, but that was all in a day’s work … And that would be all, the final entry.

  Subsequent examination of Yath’s shore would show a channel blasted from the rim of the lake to the foot of that sloping barrow with its yawning cavern mouth; Tyrhhia’s entire subterranean labyrinth would be flooded; numerous bodies of black Pargan slaves—plus a few Kledan corpses, carefully salvaged from several recent accidents—would be found floating in the lake or crushed among fallen rocks. Though the Chief Regulator’s body would never be found, it would eventually be assumed that he had died sabotaging the criminal activities of Kledan freebooters. It would be that or admit that Kuranes of Ooth-Nargai was right, and Gan knew that the Elders of Bahama were a proud lot; there would be Gan’s family name to think of, and his father’s memory to consider. Diplomatic protests would be made to Kled, of course, which would never be answered or even read; there were no kings or governments in the jungle cities where wealth alone was the law and brute strength the only order …

  Gan’s reflections ceased. Darkness was fast falling. Out from the tunnel mouth on the shore, a long line of weary slaves came shuffling, their torch-bearing Kledan guards hastening them with curses and cracking whips. The day-shift, coming off duty. But no cries of excitement to herald news of a break-in, of penetration to the treasure-chamber. Gan wasn’t much of a fatalist, but he shrugged anyway. Very well, only one course remained open to him. There was an element of risk, but … better, perhaps, to be caught in a rockfall than caught here tomorrow by his own Regulators, when the Council of Elders sent them to bring him to justice.

  It was a while now since Hero and Ula had descended with their torches the spiral stairwell to Yath-Lhi’s burial place, that eerily enigmatic tomb which they’d named “the Booming Chamber.” An hour? Two? Maybe three? Time had little meaning down here. It was measured in burning yokes, in the sputtering and flaring of oil long-since turned to resin in its jars, and in the gradually declining level of unbelievable wine, swigged straight from a clay bottle fired and glazed, filled and corked, when dreams were young. But as for treasure …

  “I understand none of it,” said Ula with a shake of her head, after they’d sat together in silence for a long time. They were back now in the chamber of the corpses, which for all its litter of broken human remains seemed friendlier by far than the place below.

  “I think I understand some of it,” said Hero, “but as for the rest, I’ve given up trying. I do understand my calculations, however—based on the number of yokes we’ve gathered up, and the lumps of oil I’ve knocked out of those jars—about how long we’ll have light and warmth. Which is to say, for another six or seven hours. And after that we’ll be burning corpses. If they’ll burn.”

  Even as he spoke these words Hero could have bitten off his tongue; he realized it must seem that his hopes were fading along with his sensitivity. Which they were, but no good to let Ula know it. And so he added: “Except, of course, that we’ll be out of here long before then.”

  Seated beside him, she shuffled closer, hugged his arm. “Don’t be afraid of despair, lad,” she said, reminding him strangely, at one and the same time, both of his mother (whom he really couldn’t remember, for she’d died long ago, when he was a boy in the waking world) and of Eldin. “As my father used to tell us: when you’re right down there’s only one way to go—up! Where there’s life there’s hope, remember?”

  “Oh, yes,” he nodded, then turned and gently kissed her. “Life! Hope! Of course …”

  “It’s just that they’ve a long way to go to break through to us, that’s all.”

  “The throw of a knife, actually,” Hero replied. “Except knives don’t fly too well through solid rock! We must hope Gan’s greed is stronger than the barrier between him and what he believes to be a treasure-chamber, eh?” And he gave a sardonic, barking laugh. Then, as Ula snuggled closer yet and rested her head on his chest, he began to think again of what they’d found below.

  The spiral of stone stairs had opened into a second and final chamber, at first taken to be circular. But later, examining the walls, they’d discovered the crypt’s sides were formed of twenty-three identical panels, three feet wide and ten high, which was the h
eight of the ceiling. There were no joins, however, so that either the twenty-three sides were thickly plastered on the inside, or the entire chamber had been hewn from the solid bedrock. Nine of the almost two dozen panels had shoulder-level brackets holding prepared torches, now fossilized; and on the floor beneath each one of these, large stone jars which had once contained perfumed oil. Hero had seen such in the temples of Ulthar; sprinkled on the flames of ceremonial flambeaux, the oil made a blue, scented smoke. Of course these jars had been here countless centuries; there’d be no oil in them now. He’d broken one anyway, and in its base … a bowl-shaped block of amber resin! Oil, condensed and hardened by the ages.

  All of this, though, had been after Hero and Ula’s introduction to Yath-Lhi: the Black Princess herself, and six of her men-at-arms—mummies now in their upright sarcophagi. But what mummies!

  Seven of them—in coffins of stone stood on end, evenly spaced in a circle and all facing outward from the foot of the stairwell—and Hero and Ula had held their torches high to examine these grim, gargoyle guardians of the place. And they’d seen, too, that Yath-Lhi and her people had been a race of giants. Their slaves had been ordinary dream-folk, aye—small men and women, generally—but Yath-Lhi …

  Eight feet tall; those stone coffins, with funnel-shaped apertures in their tops, directly over the mummified heads of those within. And though the sarcophagi were massive and at least three inches thick at top, bottom and sides, still there was little room to spare. Yath-Lhi and her men-at-arms, even shrunken by the aeons, were close to seven feet tall. Giants, then, those seven gaunt guardians—but guarding what? The staircase? For of treasures there were none at all, unless one considered the three emeralds Yath-Lhi wore—one on each hip, the other in her navel: a world’s ransom.