by Brian Lumley
“Water under the bridge now,” answered Druff gruffly, tired of words and explanations. “So now we blast until we find the right one, right? So where do we start? One wall looks pretty much like another to me.”
Gan wryly nodded his agreement. “Yes, they do. So we might as well start right here.”
At a point some three feet high in the wall directly before them, a hole had been battered through what looked like solid rock to a depth of about two and a half feet. All about the foot of the wall large chunks of stone, smaller shards and fragments lay heaped and layered with the dust of pulverized rock. At its deepest extent, the hole was just large enough to take a small keg of gunpowder.
“In there,” said Gan to the slave with the first keg. “Pack it well in.”
But as the huge black moved to obey—
“Raffis Gan! Zubda Druff!” came shouts from along the main passage. “We’ve caught one of your runaways!”
The thronging slaves were shoved aside by their Kledan overseers, and three more Kledans came into view pushing Eldin the Wanderer before them. Two of his captors held crossbows trained on him, while the third threatened with a whip. The strange thing was that the Wanderer made no protest.
“Ho, Gan!” he rumbled, waving his escort back and coming forward at his own pace. “I thought I’d find you here. And now, about our arrangement: enough wealth to buy Celephais, wasn’t it?” Eldin grinned right into Raffis Gan’s face.
The Kledans who’d brought. him were at first astonished—but in the next moment they’d fallen on him, driving him to his knees. Then Egg-head and Narrow-eyes came on the scene, and the latter snatched a crossbow from one of the Kledans, aimed it straight at Eldin’s heart. At which moment—
“Hold!” Gan shouted. He took Narrow-eyes’ weapon from him, knocked him aside. “Are you mad? Don’t you ever listen to anything that’s said? We need this man—for the moment!” And to the Wanderer, with his voice falling dangerously low:
“You dare to come in here, looking for me, speaking of ‘arrangements’? Do you think you can just come and go as you wish? You ran off, remember?”
“For the girl’s sake,” said Eldin at once, as the Kledans restrained him. “See, your offer—of great wealth—was too good to refuse. Me, I’d take a chance that you’d honor it, but I couldn’t risk the girl. So I got her safely out of it, and then I came back.”
“You got her out of it?” Gan rasped. He bared his teeth, drew back a clenched fist. “So that she can run and tell the Council of Elders what a scoundrel I am?”
“No such thing.” The Wanderer had it all rehearsed. “Just like you, Gan, when all of this is done, I’d like to disappear. A thousand places in the dreamlands where—with a bit of gold and the odd gemstone—a man might live a full and very pleasurable life. I know of many. And when I was settled in, then I’d send for the girl. That’s the plan we made together, anyway. Of course, if she doesn’t hear from me within a three-month, then she’ll go to the Council of Elders. But until then … on the contrary, she’ll talk to no one.”
Gan narrowed his eyes, unclenched his fist, said: “Let him up.” And when Eldin was back on his feet:
“Wanderer, your life’s still forfeit, for you crossed me and I’m not much for that. There’s but one way you can save yourself, one slim chance. And what’s more, I’ll even throw in a fistful of jewels to see you on your way. That’s wealth aplenty to such as you. But this is all on the understanding that you can show us the way into Yath-Lhi’s treasure. If you can, good! Only indicate which wall hides the entrance, and we have a deal. I’ll blast where you tell me, and if you’re right—then your life’s your own. But if you’re wrong …”
“Then we’ll blast our way in anyway,” growled Zubda Druff, “—but you’ll be sitting on the second keg!”
“Talking of blasting,” said one of Eldin’s captors, “he had a keg with him.”
“What’s more,” said another, “he did a bit of bloody work on poor Guz Umbus as he stood guard!”
Eldin was quick to answer: “I had no time to spare chatting with guards. As for the powder—I reckoned we’d need it. The ancients didn’t build their tombs of fine porcelain, you know!”
Gan scowled a little but nodded anyway. “Enough talk, now let’s see some action. Wanderer, walk with me. As for you two”—indicating Egg-head and Narrow-eyes—“come with us and watch him. You, too, Zubda, and a couple of your lads. The rest can wait here.”
They started round the angled perimeter of the core, passed a massive battering-ram in its frame, examined something of the extent of the work already performed. “We’ve not been idle, as you can see,” said Gan to Eldin.
“You’ve been a bit heavy-handed, if you ask me,” the Wanderer returned. He paused, stared up at an inscription.
“Well?” said Gan.
“She was cruel, this Black Princess,” said Eldin. “This one tells how, in the tenth year of her reign, she ordered that any of her people found to stand as tall as herself should have their feet cut off. If they stood taller, the order extended to their heads, too!” He walked on, with Gan close behind.
Zubda Druff held up his torch to light the next inscription. Eldin scanned it, growled deep in his throat. “Cruel, aye. It tells how she fed the beggars outside the high walls of Tyrhhia, by throwing down to them criminals tried in her courts—after she’d drawn and quartered them, and soaked their bits in poison!”
Zubda Druff shuddered. “Where’s all this getting us, eh?” he asked. But the others had already moved on.
Again Eldin paused, peered at glyphs where they leaped in torchlight. “Yath-Lhi was skilled in the occult arts,” he said. “She hunted down and trapped vampires—of which there were several sorts in those days—and then she drank their blood!”
They moved on again, and—
“Hah! Eldin gasped.
“What is it?” cried Gan at once. “What does it say, Wanderer?”
“Simply this,” Eldin replied, “‘Let him who would disturb Yath-Lhi’s longest sleep first confess his sins’!”
“Wonderful!” Gan’s turn to gasp.
“What?” said Zubda Druff. “I don’t see how—”
“It’s a threat!” Gan cut him off. “Can’t you see that? The others were all monstrous boasts, but this is a threat! What she’s really saying is this: proceed at your own peril! Because this is the panel that hides the entranceway! I’d stake my life on it, just as the Wanderer’s staked his. For all her cruelty, she was naive after all, d’you see? Oh, in her day this might have kept your average superstitious tomb-looter out—but today? It’s a dead give-away!”
“You back there!” called Narrow-eyes loudly. “Bring up the powder.”
And in all the excitement no one noticed Eldin’s continued peering at the primal glyphs, or wondered why he frowned. He’d thought to find mention of a curse here, and had found nothing. Gan was right: this was a blatant invitation. The silken-lashed wink of a common slut, leading her night’s conquest upstairs to bed. But there should be a curse, a warning much more dire than this—unless, of course …
And at that very moment, as the keg of gunpowder was lodged firmly in the gash of battered stonework, so Eldin came to the same conclusion as Hero and Ula. Except that he reached it maybe five minutes before them …
When the thundering echoes of the blast had died away and the dust had started to settle, then Raffis Gan and the rest—and Eldin the Wanderer, dragged along with them—returned from their positions of comparative safety and the slaves were set to work clearing blasted debris from the freshly opened passage. For it was clear from the first that indeed there was a passage. Zubda Druff’s torch, flickering feebly through thin wreaths of reeking smoke and billowing clouds of fine dust, showed only blackness beyond the heaped rubble now blocking the entrance.
The way was cleared with feverish haste, and the main party entered the short, gently narrowing passageway and gingerly passed along it to the far end. No
more than nine or ten paces long, it ended abruptly at an inner wall. But there, standing up from the floor, a great bronze lever set in a slot, with a crossbar at the top forming a “T.” Gan got between the side wall and the lever, tried to push it over—to no avail. He swore under his breath, glanced at Eldin. “Wanderer?”
Eldin took Gan’s place, gave a mighty shove … and slowly the lever tilted. And just as slowly, with a creak and a groan, the narrow end wall—in fact a pivoting panel—leaned away from the men out of the vertical and began to descend; and along its top and sides, widening cracks showed darkness beyond—Yath-Lhi’s inner sanctum!
Eldin felt the lever beginning to move of its own accord as the heavy slab gained momentum, let go of it and stepped back. The wall or panel, three feet wide and ten feet high, continued its slow descent to about forty-five degrees, then crashed the rest of the way to the secret chamber’s floor.
“We’re in!” cried Gan as the echoes of the crash died away. “This is it!”
He shoved Egg-head and Narrow-eyes on ahead, with Eldin, Zubda Druff and his Kledans close behind. Then followed a dozen slaves, and finally Gan himself. Torches were held aloft; all eyes searched eagerly for the warm gleam of gold, the fire reflected from myriad gems … and all eyes beheld the ring of sarcophagi and their centuried contents, seven stone tombs all standing on end.
“What?” said Zubda Druff. And again, more threateningly: “What? And is this your treasure, Chief Regulator? A handful of worm-ravaged mummies?”
Gan opened his mouth, shook his head in wild denial. He tried to speak, tried again, finally said: “No! It has to be here—has to be!”
He whirled to glare at Eldin, saw him backing away, his eyes full of terrible knowledge. The slaves were clustering together, muttering, their eyeballs huge and blackly gleaming. They, too, sensed an onrushing something.
“What is it?” Gan whispered, grasping the Wanderer’s jacket in both hands. “Where is the treasure?”
“It’s somewhere else,” Eldin answered, his throat dry as dust. “Only Yath-Lhi is here—the Black Princess, and the curse she brought with her down all the centuries!”
“Curse? But you said—”
There sounded a report like the sharp, clear snap of a whip. Veils of dust fell from overhead. All eyes, elevated, saw thin, precise, converging cracks open in the ceiling; cracks which commenced directly above the fallen slab of the door and elongated rapidly toward the ring of coffined corpses. Some hidden mechanism rumbled briefly; a segment of the ceiling moved, fractionally; the necks of the six clay bottles were shattered in unison, raining their contents downward in a gush of heady wine.
As one man the slaves began to jabber, rushed for an exit only three feet wide. Sensitive to black magic, they knew that whatever was coming was already upon them! They jammed in the doorway, a tangle of flailing black arms and legs and bodies. Outside in the tunnel, and in the maze beyond the tunnel, more slaves and Kledan overseers hearing the uproar, thought it could only be the sounds of excitement at some colossal find. Those inside fought to get out, and those outside struggled to get in.
And in the confusion, no one saw the pair of human shadows which moved together inside the circle of standing coffins—the figures of Hero and Ula who now hugged each other and listened to the babble, and seemed to hear even above that babble the gurgle and rush of weird wine coursing through stone funnels to drench Yath-Lhi and her men-at-arms.
Some of the slaves had carried torches, which now lay guttering on the floor: the light was thus greatly reduced. In the gloom, Eldin made for the crush of bodies in the narrow doorway, but Gan saw him. Whatever was going on here, the corrupt Regulator knew he must quickly regain control. Curse? There was no curse—just a crafty quester and a pack of idiot slaves and confused Kledans. And so:
“Wanderer, wander no farther!” Gan shouted above the hubbub. “I may still have need of you. The rest of you, pick up those torches there. Let’s have some light on—”
“WAKE!” a monstrous croak interrupted, silenced him at once, sounding not in his ears but in his head. In the heads—the minds—of all the others, too, including Hero and Ula. In their inky dark cave of coffins, the younger quester gazed horrified at the lady-love he held in his arms. It had been their plot—hatched in the minutes between gunpowder blast and break in—that Ula should project her female voice in imitation of Yath-Lhi, hopefully scaring off the tomb-looters and making possible an escape. For a moment Hero thought she’d done just that, and almost scared him witless, too! But only for a moment. For then:
“WAKE!” came the croaking, grunting mental command a second time—and all in the chamber knew now where it came from, and to whom it was addressed. It was Yath-Lhi, speaking with the mind of a sorceress, raising her soldiers up from the sleep of aeons and commanding their attention!
Within the ring of sarcophagi, Hero and Ula clung more tightly yet, and outside it …
All eyes were wide, fixed fearfully upon the gaunt figure of Yath-Lhi, where her coffin faced the recently opened passage to the outside world. And all saw her eyes crack open! Petrified, the entire assembly—slaves and masters, blacks and whites alike—stared into the pits of burning sulphur which were Yath-Lhi’s eyes.
The wine covered her, dripped from her mummified face and sagging breasts, shone like oil on her wrinkled limbs. And like oil it eased those wrinkles, soaked into and made soft the leather of her flesh. Her breasts filled out, her yellow eyes opened wider yet, and finally her lips cracked apart in a hideous grin. “WAKE!” she commanded a third time—and, creaking like rusted hinges, she stepped forth out of her coffin!
Worse, her men-at-arms opened their eyes and stepped out with her—five of the six, anyway. But the sixth—he whose life-giving dark wine of sorcery Hero had stolen—he awoke only to uttermost horror! Yath-Lhi’s voice, her commands, had been mental, telepathic: the voice of the sixth soldier was entirely physical; a whistle of dust whooshing out through collapsing lungs and throat, a crunch of bones brittling into shards, a hiss of flesh seething into vile vapor as bronze garments and weapons clanged to the floor in a settling heap of fossilized debris. But all who heard it knew it had been a scream, a long despairing cry fleeing back through countless ages …
The frozen tableau broke, and frenzy grew apace as the crush at the door seemed to congeal into a sea of flesh. But Yath-Lhi’s reborn mind-power was greater than that, would not permit flight.
“HOLD! BE STILL!”
The telepathic command rang out from her reverberantly, formed a sphere that filled all the nearer passages where they converged upon the core, silenced the uproar and stilled the panic on the instant.
Hero and Ula, too, they heard it—saw its result as the milling crowd in the crypt froze, then began untangling themselves, finally stood in silent ranks with their glazed eyes turned inward upon Yath-Lhi. Her five men-at-arms moved closer to her, two on one side, three on the other. All six, they gazed outward upon the spell-stricken invaders of their tomb. And:
“FRESHLY AWAKE,” said the Black Princess, “WE ARE STILL WEAK. SUSTAIN YOURSELVES, MY WARRIORS.”
She beckoned with a creaking arm, and Zubda Druff stepped forward, paced zombie-like, to stand before her. She reached out her hands and touched him. A touch merely, all ten of her fingertips, widespread, contacting his shoulders simultaneously—and the slaver began to twitch and flop like a strangled chicken. He did not scream, made no attempt at flight, merely jerked and throbbed and fluttered; and before Hero and Ula’s eyes he withered, deflated, became a bag of bones in Yath-Lhi’s sucking hands.
Finally she released him, a canvas sack that crumpled to the floor—its only resemblance to a man lay in its general shape and the black, blindly-staring marbles gazing out from a shriveled skull—and waited while her men-at-arms took similar sustenance. They, too, chose blacks, one a Kledan and the others Pargan slaves, and each went to his maker as unprotesting as Zubda Druff. And all the while, Raffis Gan and the rest stood f
rozen, and those in the outer corridors, too, like statues under the spell of the vampire Yath-Lhi.
And yet Hero and Ula, they were untouched by that spell. They saw and comprehended all that occurred but, hugging each other and trembling, they were blessedly immune. Half-fainting, Ula clung to her man; and him propping her up lest she fall, his hand over her mouth lest she cry out. Even Hero himself, he could not have told how he held silent, how fearful he was that at any moment Eldin would be called to that same fate as Druff and the slaves. For in that event, what could he do but leap forward, snatch a sword from one of Yath-Lhi’s warriors, have at her and them until … until whatever.
But it did not come to that.
“ENOUGH!” said Yath-Lhi in the minds of all. “FOR NOW, ENOUGH.”
No longer black and mummified but having metamorphosed into a color like marble, and being now fully mobile, she turned on her heel through one-third of a circle, took in all before her at a glance. And at last her sulphur eyes settled on Raffis Gan.
“YOU! I PERCEIVE YOU BROUGHT THESE DOGS IN HERE—TO RAVAGE MY TOMB OF ITS TREASURES, EH?” Laughter welled up from her black soul, was cut short in a trice. “VERY WELL, NOW YOU CAN LEAD THEM OUT AGAIN!”
Out! thought Hero, aghast. This vampire princess—out, free, loose in the unsuspecting dreamlands! No, it must not be. This thing, this exodus from the tomb, must be stopped. But how? Spring forth and Yath-Lhi would merely point and turn all those under her spell, even Eldin, against him! And then what of Ula? Hero couldn’t bear the thought of Ula as a bag of bones …
Orderly as a small army, single-file through the narrow doorway, all in the tomb filtered out into the maze beyond. Raffis Gan led the way, stiff-legged, arms like lead at his sides, eyes glazed and staring straight ahead. Behind him slaves and Kledans in no set order, with Yath-Lhi and her soldiers central in the column, then more slaves, Kledans, and finally Eldin the Wanderer bringing up the very rear.