They knew the axe, if they did not know her. They looked from side to side uneasily, completely at a loss. Stark, lying on the ground, saw her through a wavering haze. She seemed to tower against the sky in her black mail, with her dark hair blowing. And he felt a strange pang deep within him, a kind of chill foreknowledge, and the smell of blood rose thick and strong from the stones.
The nobles of Kushat chose that moment to charge. This strange unmasking of the Mekhish lord had given them time to rally their remnants together, and now they thought that the gods had wrought a miracle at last to help them. They found hope, where they had lost everything but courage.
“A woman!” they cried. “A strumpet. A drab of the camps. A woman!”
They howled it like an epithet, and tore into the barbarians.
She who had been the Lord Ciaran drove the spurs in deep, so that the beast leaped forward screaming. She went, and did not look once to see if any had followed, in among the men of Kushat. The great axe rose and fell.
She killed three and left two others bleeding on the stones. And still she did not look back.
The clansmen found their tongues.
“Ciaran! Ciaran! Ciaran!”
The crashing shout drowned out the sound of battle. As one man they turned and followed her. These tall wild children that she led could see only two choices, to slay her out of hand or to worship her, and they had chosen to worship. From here on they would follow her anywhere she led, with a kind of devotion different from and more powerful than any they could have given to a man—so long as she did nothing to tarnish the image they had of her, as a goddess.
Stark almost laughed. Instead of killing Ciaran, he had succeeded in giving her power and freedom she had never had before. Now nothing short of death could stop her.
Very well, he thought, in some dark corner of his mind. Very well, if that is the way the thread is woven.
Feet trampled him, kicked him, stumbled over him. Men were fighting above him, and the padded hoofs of beasts came stamping toward him. His head cleared with a panic rush. He got his knees under him and started to rise, and the movement attracted the attention of a warrior who must have thought he was dead, judging from the expression of surprise. He yelled and started the lunge that was meant to run Stark through, and then suddenly he dropped down flat as an old sack, with the back of his neck shorn through, and somebody was telling Stark bitterly, “Pick up his sword, damn it, pick up his sword, I can’t hold them all off alone.”
It was Lugh, filthy, battered, bleeding, and a hundred years older than he had been the last time Stark saw him. Stark bent quickly and caught up the sword. He stood beside Lugh and they fought together, moving with the flow of the fight, which was becoming a rout so swiftly that before they knew it they had been carried out of the square. Here in the narrow, crooked streets, the press of refugees was simply too great. Clots of men formed like corks, bottling up the ways, and the barbarians cut them down happily at leisure. Stark grunted. “There’s no profit in this. Can we get clear?”
“What does it matter?” said Lugh. “We might as well die here as anywhere.”
Stark said, “There is a second line of battle, if you’d rather fight than die.”
Lugh looked at him out of haggard eyes, a man’s eyes where only a few hours ago they had been the eyes of a petulant boy. “Where, Stark? Where? The city is lost.”
“But another thing has been found.” The barbarians held all the streets under the Wall now. There was no way back to the places Balin had shown him. He took Lugh sharply by the shoulder. “If you can point me the way to the Quarter of the Blessed, I’ll show you.”
Lugh looked at him for a moment more. They were hemmed in by the press of people, jammed against the cold stone of the buildings. Lugh shook his head. “I can point the way, but we must still go over or through this mob.”
Stark nodded. The walls were solid, and in any case one street would be no better than another. The roofs were a blind alley, and the houses traps. “We’ll go through, then. Stick close.”
He began to forge his way by main strength through the press, being perfectly ruthless about it, as he thought that very quickly now Ciaran of Mekh would be looking for him. She—it still came very strangely to think of Ciaran as “she”—would have killed him when he challenged her because no leader could violate the customs of single combat, but he knew that she would vastly prefer to have him alive. There was still that matter of the talisman. Only the shock of the unmasking and the subsequent necessities of battle had saved him in the square. He moved faster and harder the more he thought about it. Men cursed and struck at him, but he was bigger and stronger than most of them, and a little more coherently desperate, and with Lugh to back him up he found himself before too long at the other side of the jam, where the press began to thin out into streams of people blindly running.
Stark ran too, but not blindly, with Lugh coming at a sort of loose-jointed weary gallop beside him. They passed through the gate of the Thieves’ Quarter, where they had passed before on their way to the King City. The streets of the artisans had in them only the first stirrings of chaos. Mostly the shops were shuttered, the houses quiet. The folk had left them to watch the fighting, and now the buildings stood in the winter sunlight as peacefully as on a holiday afternoon.
Lugh sobbed, an abrupt, harsh sound. “They betrayed us,” he said. “They lied.”
“About the talisman? Yes.”
“They lied!” A pause. Their feet rang on the paving stones. “But that wasn’t the worst. They were fools, Stark. Idiots!”
“Fools are plentiful everywhere. A man has to learn to think for himself.”
“They’re dead,” said Lugh vindictively. “They were paid for their folly.”
“Fools generally are. Did they die well?”
“Most of them. Even Old Sowbelly. But what good is courage at the last minute, when you’ve already thrown everything away?”
“Every man has to answer that question for himself,” Stark said, looking back. People were pouring through the gate now, and over the low wall. Over their heads he saw mounted men, forging their way in a tight group through the refugees. There were eight or nine of them and they looked as though they were hunting for something. “You were satisfied well enough with your leaders yesterday, so it might be said that you deserved them. Now let’s drop the subject and think about staying alive.” He shoved Lugh bodily aside into a transverse street. “Which way to the Quarter of the Blessed?”
Lugh opened his mouth, shut it again hard, and then made a wry gesture. “I can’t argue with that,” he said. “This way.” He started to walk.
“Faster,” said Stark. “Ciaran’s riders are on the hunt.”
They ran, looking frequently over their shoulders.
“She won’t forgive you,” Lugh said, and swore. “What a shame to us, to be defeated by a woman!”
Stark said, “Kushat has been taken by a warrior, and never forget it.”
The street had curved and twisted, shutting off the view of the main avenue, but Stark’s quick ears caught the sound of riders coming, the feet of the beasts making a soft heavy thudding as they ran. He caught Lugh and pulled him into an alley that led between the buildings, no more than three feet wide. They fled along it and into a mews behind the crumbling rear premises of the street, and Stark realized that most of these buildings had been abandoned long ago. The windows gaped and walls had spilled their carefully-cut blocks into the mews, where they were drifted over with dust and the wind-blown sloughings of a city. The sounds of war and death seemed suddenly very far away.
“How much farther?” Stark asked.
“I don’t know…not much farther, I think.”
They floundered, slipping and scrambling over the debris, their flanks heaving. And then the mews ended in a blank wall some eight feet high, and Lugh said, “The
re. On the other side.”
X
Stark hauled himself up onto the wall and sat there, breathing hard and looking at the Quarter of the Blessed.
It was not a happy prospect. Kushat was a very old city, and a great deal of dying had been done in it. The area of this quarter was greater than any of those housing the living, and it had grown vertically as well as horizontally. Above ground the squat stone tombs had fallen and been levelled and rebuilt in their own debris until most of them now stood on humped mounds higher than the wall. Beside each one stood a tall stela, carved with innumerable names, most of them long obliterated and these stelae sagged and leaned in every direction, bowed down with the weight of time, a dark sad forest with the cold wind blowing through it and the winter sun making long erratic patterns of shadow. Below ground, Balin had said, the rock was riddled with the even older shaft graves. Except for the wind, the silence was absolute.
High overhead, the somber cliffs brooded, notched with the gateway of the pass.
Stark sniffed the cold and quiet air, and the aborigine in him recoiled, shivering. He hunched around on the wall, looking back toward the increasing sounds of war and rapine. Columns of smoke were rising now, here and there, and the screaming of women had become incessant. The barbarian tide was rolling rapidly inward toward the King City. On the high tower of the king’s hall, the crimson banner had come down.
Lugh had clambered up on the wall beside him. He watched Stark curiously. “What is it?”
“I’m thinking that I’d rather go back where the fighting is hot, than in there where it’s far too peaceful.”
“Then why go?”
“Because Balin told me of a way used by the tomb-robbers.”
Lugh nodded, looking at Stark and smiling a crooked smile. “But you’re afraid.”
Stark shrugged, a nervous twitch of his shoulders.
Lugh said, “I was hating you, Stark, because you’re too damned much of a man and you make me feel like a child. But you’re only a child yourself under all that muscle.” He jumped down off the wall. “Come on, I’ll keep you safe against the dust and the dry bones.”
Stark stared at him. Then he laughed and followed him, but still reluctantly. They went between the tombs and the leaning stelae, mindful of Ciaran’s riders and darting like animals between the covering mounds. Then Lugh stopped and stood facing Stark and said, “When you told me, ‘another thing has been found’ what did you mean?”
“The talisman.”
The wind rocked Lugh back and forth where he stood, and his eyes were wild and bright, looking into Stark’s.
“How do you know that, outlander?”
“Because I brought it here myself, having taken it from the hands of Camar, who was my friend and who did not live to return it.”
“I see.” Lugh nodded. “I see. Then that morning at Ban Cruach’s shrine…”
“I knew you were lying. Yes.”
“No matter. Where is it, Stark? I want to see…”
“It’s in safe hands, and long out of the city.” He hoped that he was right. “Men are rallying to it, at the Festival Stones.”
“That’s where we’re going?”
“Yes.”
“Good enough,” Lugh said. “Good enough. Where is the door to this rat-run?”
Stark pointed toward the arched ceremonial gate that pierced the wall at the end of the street they had left. “I must count from that. Keep an eye out for Ciaran’s men.”
There was no sign of them. It was possible they had turned back. It was also possible that they had come ahead of Stark and Lugh into the Quarter of the Blessed and were now hidden from sight among the tumuli. He picked up his guide mark as quickly as he could and counted the stelae as Balin had told him, going past one that was cracked in half, and one that was fallen, and one that had carved on its top a woman’s face. “Here,” he said, and stopped below a tomb with a great slab of rock in its side, no different from any other in appearance. He began to climb up the tall mound, flinching from the icy touch of the stone and rubble that seemed somehow colder than other stones, and Lugh came scrambling up like a dog on all fours behind him.
“Stark,” he said abruptly, “what happens if you have counted wrong?”
“We go back and start over again.”
“I think not.”
Stark turned his head, startled. Lugh was looking off to his left. There was movement there among the tumuli. Stark saw the gleam of a bare red head in the sunlight, and then at a distance another as two riders came into view in the twisting lanes between the mounds. From those two he could extrapolate the whole company of riders. They had come ahead to the burying ground, while Stark and Lugh were struggling on foot along the mews. Now they were fanned out in a long line and working their way back toward the gate, hoping to flush out their quarry.
One of the men saw them and yelled, and Stark flung himself upward toward the stone slab.
If he had counted wrong….
He set his hands on the stone in the way Balin had told him, and he pushed in the way Balin had told him, and for a moment nothing at all happened and the red-haired riders were racing toward them. Then the slab tilted with a sudden harsh groan. There was a puff of dead-cold, dead-stale air in his face, and the side of the tomb was open. He shoved Lugh into the dark aperture, glancing back as he did so at the riders. They were not quite going to make it, and both of them had their arms lifted for the throw. Behind them other riders were coming into sight, gathering to their shouts. Stark dived for the opening as the spears flew. One grazed his leg, cutting a gash across the back of the calf. The other came through the opening beside him, passed between him and Lugh and clattered harmlessly against the far wall of the tomb. “Close it up,” Lugh was saying. “Close it up, we’ll have the bastards in with us.” They flung themselves against the stone and it went back with a clang on its pivots, shutting out light and sounds.
They sat for a moment, getting their breath and their bearings. Very quickly there came a pounding on the stone and the faint shouting of angry voices.
“Can they open it?” Lugh asked.
“Not likely. The stone is cleverly made.”
The pounding increased, and now there were new sounds, of men clambering over the vaulted roof and probing with their spear-points for a likely crack. “They won’t get far with that,” Stark said, “but it won’t take them long to commandeer some men with picks and sledgehammers. We’d best be going.”
“What about light?”
Stark groped and fumbled in the darkness, remembering Balin’s instructions. “Even tomb-robbers need light to ply their trade. Here—if I can find it…”
He found it, neatly set out in a corner—a lantern, a supply of slow-burning candles, and a flint-and-steel lighter with an impregnated wick that gave out a tiny flame the second time Stark snapped it. He stuck one candle into the lantern and thrust the rest into his tunic along with the lighter. Let Ciaran’s men find their own. The banging and hammering on the outside was reaching a peak of angry frustration. Stark examined the gash on his leg. It was not deep but it was bleeding enough to be annoying. He stood while Lugh bound it up with a strip of dirty rag torn from some part of his garments, studying the tomb chamber in the dim glow of the lantern. It was quite large, and quite empty. The stone ledges had been used for nothing besides the storage of loot.
“All right,” he said, when Lugh had finished. “That stone over there, with the ring in it. It lifts aside.”
Underneath it was a pitch black and narrow shaft, with niches cut for the hands and feet. Lugh peered down it. Stark glanced at his face and grunted.
“What happened to your courage, fearless one?”
“It’s not the dust and the dry bones that bother me,” Lugh said. “It’s thinking what will happen if I miss my footing.”
“I’ll go first w
ith the lantern.” Stark lowered himself over the edge, feeling for the niches, and started down, the lantern slung by a thong from his wrist. He looked up at Lugh. “Don’t miss your footing,” he said.
Lugh followed him, slowly and painfully, saying nothing.
It was a long way down. The upper part of the shaft had been constructed over many centuries, extending up through the layers of rubble as they formed. At the moment Stark had no interest in archaeology, but it was impossible not to observe the strata as he crept down through them. Then the shaft widened and the walls were of solid rock, and he knew that he was in the original, the gods knew how ancient, shaft. They had cut it deep, those long-gone builders, and Stark cursed them for every foot of it, the sweat starting on his forehead and his muscles aching, his attention shifting anxiously between his own next foothold and the soles of Lugh’s boots scrabbling uncertainly so close above his head.
He stood at last in the fine vaulted chamber at the bottom and waited for Lugh to stop shaking. The lantern glow showed the outlines of bas-reliefs as sharp and clear as the day they were finished. Otherwise the chamber was empty except for a few ambiguous fragments and a pinch of dust swept into a corner as though by some untidy housewife. The air was musty and stifling, though the candle burned well enough. Stark fought down a choking claustrophobia, holding himself firmly in hand. There was a doorway leading out of the chamber, crudely cut and brutally ruining one of the reliefs. Stark went through it, into a narrow rough-walled tunnel.
He had no idea how old this tunnel might be. Even more he had no idea why men would have gone to the immense and back-breaking labor of constructing it, unless every tomb it connected with was as rich as Tut-ankhamen’s, and even then it seemed as though it would have been easier just to work for a living. It did pass through a succession of chambers, all stripped bare except for an occasional heap of bones or potsherds. Side tunnels led off presumably to other tombs. Stark supposed that this tunneling had gone on since the first shaft grave was sunk in Kushat and that had been time enough for a lot of expansion.
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