by Brian Lumley
Or was the Black Princess simply … waiting? Had she expected, perhaps, some marvelous reincarnation which never came to pass? Certainly there seemed an air of implacable patience about her …
Hero, no midget himself, had gazed up wonderingly into the faces of the seven. And that was another wonder: that after all these years they had faces at all. Or anything else of muscle, sinew, flesh and bone, for that matter. But there they stood, black and wrinkled as prunes, the men-at-arms with their belts and kirtles and swords of bronze; and Yath-Lhi proud and regal, her black hair braided and falling to her shoulders, dressed only in ropes of gold-painted cowries at her loins, with her empty breasts lying flat upon her chest. And in the flickering torchlight it seemed that at any moment their eyes might pop open or blackened tongues wriggle forth from stony lips, and so Hero and Ula had not gazed long upon them.
It had been then, though, staring up at the mummified figures in their stone coffins, that Hero had noticed overhead the necks of seven bottles of fired clay protruding from apertures in the ceiling. There was one bottle for each coffin, its neck directly over the corresponding funnel in the top of the sarcophagus. They must have been incidental to the burial ceremony; perhaps it had been intended that they should drip their contents (some time-forgotten preserving fluid?) on to the heads of the seven after interment, presumably to “anoint” them preparatory to their long voyage down the stream of time. Of course, the bottles would be quite empty now …
And yet it seemed to Hero that the age-blackened corks were intact.
Using an upturned oil jar as a stepping stone, and the stone coffin of one of the soldiers for support and balance, he reached up and finally wrested a bottle free of its hole. Its base had been cemented into place, but the cement was brittle as chalk now, and had given in to Hero’s persistent tugging. And wonder of wonders, within the bottle’s opaque, fragile body—something sloshed!
At which time, frightening the explorers almost witless, had commenced that singular and repetitive sound for which they’d named the crypt the Booming Chamber. But more of that anon.
Finally, all done in the burial vault and eager now to be out of there, the pair carried their prizes of oil-lump and miraculously preserved bottle and contents back up the winding stairs, where Hero smashed the bottle’s slender neck against the wall. And if they had been at first astonished to discover anything still liquid in the bottle, picture now their utter amaze at the heady, aromatic fumes which on the instant began to escape from it!
Wine, certainly, but of what rare and incredible vintage? And palatable—they’d nursed the bottle between them from then till now, and one sip at a time had warmed their innards while reducing the wine’s level by at least two-thirds. In between, Hero had nerved himself to return below, broken the remaining oil jars, carried their precious fossil fuel lumps back to the tomb of the slaves. He’d tried the rest of the bottles, too, but alas, these had been fixed in their ceiling-holes more securely than the first. Finally he’d again admired (indeed, confiscated) Yath-Lhi’s jewelry …
As for naming the crypt the Booming Chamber, that had come about like this:
When Hero had got down from taking the bottle from its hole in the ceiling, and just as he’d given it a shake and determined that there was still a full measure of liquid inside, so there had come the first of a long series of thunderous reverberations.
So sudden and startling was the sound, he almost dropped the newly acquired bottle. Ula threw herself into his arms, and as the booming echoes receded she tremulously began to ask:
“What on earth—?” Only to be cut off as a second crash sounded, again filling the chamber with thundering echoes. But as the booming continued regular as clockwork, so reason replaced fear, and the answer dawned: this could only be the work of Chief Regulator Raffis Gan. This place was, after all, Yath-Lhi’s tomb; and hadn’t Gan boasted that he’d solved the maze, reached the core, and was now seeking to breach the treasure-chamber itself? Obviously the system he employed was that of the battering-ram or -rams; but while the concussions were thunderous, still they caused no more than trickles of dust to fall from the ceiling. Hero’s conclusion was that these walls were tremendously thick; the sound of the battering itself carried through them, but nothing of the slaves who worked the machines, or of their overseers. Even in the upper chamber the booming could be heard, so that Hero and Ula had been quite dizzy with it when finally the assault stopped. The pair couldn’t know it, but that was when the day-shift had gone off duty, tramping back through the labyrinth to the outside world.
Since when … the silence had become more unbearable than the booming! Had Gan given up? If so … but that didn’t bear thinking about. To avoid thinking about it—about dying down here, and becoming a crumbling corpse like the many littered about—Hero now said:
“You were saying? Er, ‘what on earth’? Something you don’t understand? What, exactly, don’t you understand?”
“Several things,” Ula answered at once, so quickly indeed that Hero was given to wonder if she’d been thinking along the same lines, and so was grateful that he’d broken the silence. She glanced at him in the flickering firelight. “This wine, for instance. I mean, how could they possibly forget to pull the corks, or prick them, or whatever?”
Hero shook his head. “Maybe it was for them to drink in the afterworld.”
“What?” she gave a snort. “And they’d have to go piggy-back to get at it? Undignified sort of afterworld that, isn’t it?”
“Umm,” said Hero. “I suppose it is, a bit.”
“And what of the treasure?” she went on.
“You mean the un-treasure,” Hero corrected her.
“The un-treasure, then. Where is it?”
“Don’t look at me!” Hero protested. “I was with you.”
She obliged him with a grin. “That’s the first funny thing you’ve said in ages! Now I know we’ll be all right.”
“Must be the wine,” Hero scratched his chin. “But actually you’re right: I do feel a bit better about things. I mean, what else can happen to us, eh?”
Rather than answer that one, she said: “Don’t change the subject. We were talking about things we don’t understand.”
“Like, f’rinstance?”
“Like: why did Yath-Lhi advertise the presence of her burial chamber by building a damn—excuse me—great maze around it? I mean, it was bound to be found. But who’d have tried to search out a simple little hole in the ground, eh?”
“No one,” Hero answered. “They wouldn’t even want to—unless they thought there was a fantastic treasure buried with her. You know, the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that Yath-Lhi … that she wanted …” He faltered to a halt, short hairs stiffening on his neck.
“That she wanted to be found?” Ula said it for him.
And slowly, oh so slowly, the pair turned their heads to stare wonderingly at each other. At which precise moment the Booming Chamber boomed again. Except that this time it was louder, and the rock beneath their feet gave a small but very definite lurch, and the dust didn’t merely trickle, but began to come down in veritable rivulets!
An hour earlier …
Eldin had seen the night-shift of slaves go on duty—and he’d seen Raffis Gan, Zubda Druff, Narrow-eyes and Egg-head go with them. His vantage point was a deep, dry ditch crammed with kegs of gunpowder, which ran from the foot of the cavern barrow to the lake, almost. But certainly it would run all the way, when this lot went up! Eldin had been obliged to dive into the ditch head-first when the torch-bearing procession had come weaving out of the underbrush toward him. And, as the long snake of slaves had passed by, he’d heard Gan’s raised voice warning:
“Careful with those torches, there! Only drop one in that trench and we’ll all be blown to blazes!” Which happened to be a thought very close to the Wanderer’s own, so that he might even have considered it—were it not for all those poor blameless slaves. He did jiggle his firestones in
his pocket a bit, before putting the idea firmly out of mind. Life wouldn’t be a hell of a lot without David Hero around, but it would be better than nothing. Oh, he wanted Gan dead, all right, but that wouldn’t be much good if he, Eldin himself, wasn’t around to enjoy it.
Also, the Wanderer now found himself with a bad case of cat’s disease—incurable curiosity. He was curious about two things: Yath-Lhi’s curse, and Yath-Lhi’s treasure. It might be amusing to steal some of the latter while doing his damnedest to bring down all of the former on Gan. And if he couldn’t bring down the curse on him, maybe he would bring down the roof after all.
Which was why, when the slave-gang had tramped out of sight into the barrow’s throat, and all that remained of them was the faintest flicker of the hindmost torch, Eldin found a keg with a fuse, tossed it out of the ditch and climbed up after it. With the keg on his shoulder and approaching the mouth of the excavation out of the shadows, he called out to the solitary Kledan guard:
“Ho, there!”
The guard, seated on a boulder, looked up in surprise. “Eh?” he said.
Keeping his face half-hidden behind the keg, Eldin moved closer, grunted, “Keg, see?” He gripped the small barrel between both hands, held it chin high.
Now the guard got a glimpse of his face, jumped to his feet. He drew breath and yelped: “Who—? What—?”
“Keg!” said Eldin again, straightening his arms and ramming the keg forward into the black man’s face.
“Uk!” said the guard, as his flattened features bounced off the keg and he flew backward, striking the wall of the tunnel with his head.
Eldin, swiftly tucking the keg under his arm, drew back one massive fist to strike a second blow—saw that it wasn’t needed. Dribbling spittle and teeth, his brown eyes rapidly glazing over, the Kledan slid down the wall into a seated position.
“There!” Eldin nodded his satisfaction. He took a torch from its bracket on the wall, glared his hatred once at the Kledan ships suspended over Yath, turned into the tunnel, and set off at speed after the column of slaves.
Swift as a moonshadow, and as silent, Una moved through the vegetation of Yath’s shore—but back toward the excavations, not (as she’d promised Eldin) away from them toward Baharna’s safety. He’d told her she must go back to the city, report to the Council of Elders, tell them all she knew of what had passed. He would go with her except … he had something to finish. With luck they’d meet again; he hoped so, for he loved her; but for now he had work to do and there were dangers in it, and it was no job for a girl, and anyway she’d already done her bit. He’d been a little surprised, but glad, when she hadn’t argued.
But if Eldin was bent on vengeance, so too was Una. The Wanderer had seen Hero murdered before his very eyes, and so too had Una seen her sister’s cruel death; both of them had scores to settle. Which was why she hadn’t demurred, at least not out loud. Why let him see in advance that she intended to defy him? That’s the trouble with love: it’s fun when the sky is blue and the sun is shining, but when the crunch comes, then you’ll lay down your life for it. Una had loved her sister—loved Eldin, too, great oaf—and while she might possibly face life without the one, it would be quite unbearable with neither.
As for danger: there’d be that, she knew, but on the other hand who’d be looking for them, she and Eldin? Those Kledan pursuers they’d seen rushing along the shore in the afternoon were after a couple on the run, not a couple in hiding. Which was why they hadn’t investigated the tiny island. Eldin and Una wouldn’t be hiding, but hurrying away from here, on their way to report to the authorities in Bahama. So the Kledans must have reckoned, and doubtless they were still thinking it when they returned with the twilight, weary and empty-handed. Following which, the fugitives had waded ashore.
Then she’d given Eldin time to get out of sight, watched him disappear in the shadows cast by bulrushes and palms, before following on behind. But bulky as the Wanderer was, few men (much less women) could match his prowess in darkness. A great prowling cat, he’d rapidly outdistanced Una, so that she arrived at the entrance to Yath-Lhi’s labyrinth a good ten minutes after his brief altercation with the guard. By then that worthy had fallen over on to his side and was snoring loudly and blowing bloody bubbles. His ravaged face and the great bump on the back of his head spoke less than eloquently but amply of what had gone before.
Eldin’s blood was up, no doubt of that, and his mind so full of revenge that he’d overlooked a certain instrument of that emotion, for he’d neglected to take the Kledan’s great curved sword. Una weighed it, found it too heavy, settled for the guard’s knife instead. My, but the Wanderer was in a hurry! Then, fearlessly and with never a backward glance, she followed in Eldin’s footsteps into the tunnel’s gloom.
After about a hundred and fifty yards of shallow descent, and when visibility was almost down to zero, suddenly the way turned to the left, and Una saw ahead a flaring torch in its bracket. By its light she paused to tear a great wide hem from her dress (which had been very pretty, but now hampered her movements enormously) before taking down the torch and carrying on into the maze. And after that she went very much faster.
Then, too, she started in on the maze proper; where the way twisted and turned, with side-passages branching off and myriad junctions; with pitfalls, sand traps (all of them sprung now), ominously stained pivoting slabs (now permanently shored up), and other such hazards. But along the way the walls were daubed with yellow arrows, recently painted, and the stone floor was scuffed in a faint telltale track, so that she knew she couldn’t get lost in the labyrinth’s coils.
And coils they were! Serpentine, and yet in cross-section weirdly angled, the walls of these passages occasionally leaned outward from bottom to top, and at other times narrowed almost to a triangular shape, but they were never straight up and down. On the other hand, all junctions or crossroads looked precisely alike, with corners faceted seemingly in defiance of sane geometric laws. In the dreamlands, of course, the laws of the waking world were often stressed or warped almost beyond recognition, but never so much as here. All in all, the discovery of the way through the maze to the core must have driven Raffis Gan and his Kledan friends almost to the point of madness.
So Una was thinking when she came upon a clay pot of yellow paint with a brush still in it, sitting on the floor close to the wall. At first she passed it by, then retraced her steps and took it up. She looked at it thoughtfully for a moment, then gave a slow smile. So Gan needed painted arrows to find his way through here, did he? And did he also need them to find his way out?
She was about to make certain alterations to her first yellow arrow, when from fairly close at hand there came sounds of shouting and of leather Kledan sandals slapping the stone floor. The Eldin-mauled guard had been discovered! Ducking into a passage to her left, then taking a right, and another left, Una quickly hid herself away—hid herself so well, in fact, that long minutes after unseen slavers had clattered by, she was still trying to find her way back to the maze’s main route! But finally she did …
“No more battering-rams,” said Raffis Gan. “Too late for that now. Now it’s blasting time!”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Zubda Druff was a little claustrophobic: he didn’t like darkness, tunnels, or tombs, and he especially didn’t like the idea of being buried under millions of tons of rock.
“No,” Gan snapped, “I’m not sure I know what I’m doing. But I’m very sure of what will happen if we’re still here tomorrow! You, there!” he called to a massive Pargan slave. “Get that keg of powder over here—and the rest of you be careful with those torches!”
They were at the central core, which Gan had long since charted. He sat on a wooden stool at a small folding table, a map of the maze spread before him. In design the subterranean labyrinth was like half a disc, with the core almost at the center if the disc had been full. The semicircle—the maze’s perimeter—reached almost to Yath’s shore, which was represente
d by a wavy line. The core was shown as a regular geometric figure with twenty-three sides, around which the inner corridor turned full circle unobstructed.
Gan stabbed a finger at the chart. “That’s where we are,” he told Zubda Druff. “These twenty-three facets”—another stab—“are those walls. And we’ve had a go at all of them!”
“Tell me something new,” said Druff, a little less nervously.
“This core is maybe seventy or eighty feet right through to the other side,” Gan continued. “And at its center, Yath-Lhi’s tomb and treasure-chamber—which must be fairly extensive, to contain all the loot she took in her time!” He stood up, crossed to the wall of the core, gave it a tap with his knuckles. The wall or facet he’d struck was maybe six feet wide by ten high, which was the height of the ceiling. “I believe,” he went on, “that behind one of these facets is a passage leading into the tomb.”
“Agreed,” said Druff. “The problem is, that whichever panel it is, it’s more than three feet thick. Indeed it might be ten or even fifteen feet thick!”
“Now who’s stating the obvious?” said Gan. “But you’re right: we’ve battered our way two to three feet into the base of each facet, and we’re not nearly through yet. So now you see why I wanted that man, that Eldin the Wanderer, down here to help us out.”
“I do?” Druff wasn’t convinced.
Gan sighed. “He reads glyphs, understands Ancient Dreamlands—which happens to be the writing at the top of these walls!” He pointed.
Toward the top of each facet or wall, lines of glyphs stood sharp-etched in the flickering light of many torches. “I’m sure,” Gan continued, “that these writings contain a clue. The ancients might have been sophisticated in their tomb building, but I think they must have been rather naive in other ways. They were, after all, primitive people. With the Wanderer to read these inscriptions, we might have got a lead on which wall covers the entrance tunnel.”