M. Barker - The Man of Gold

‘‘This much has been told to me by our Temple, but from here I know not,” Vridekka muttered. “Hoi, Jayargo! A light-and some guidance!”

The tall priest picked his way forward. “Lord, there is a larger chamber ahead.”

“And beyond?”

“We know not. Our creatures feared the guardians of the ancients too much to dare more.”

“Guardians? What guardians?”

Jayargo rubbed his bald pate and consulted with the skullfaced Jajgi, the cleverest of the Undead. “None, Lord. But bravery is not the hallmark of our comrades here. Those who have died once are not keen to surrender what passes for life a second time.”

Vridekka made a humphing noise in his throat. In truth, though, this section of the Underworld was awash with an indefinable miasma of forboding. The air was stale and dead, its smell reminiscent of the chemicals in an apothecary’s shop. No ornaments adorned the walls; they were as darkly blank as the surface of a stagnant pond. There were no glyphs, no murals, no friezes and dadoes and carven pilasters. This in itself was ominous, for all of the Five Empires and all of those kingdoms and states that had preceded them back to the Latter Times were prone to flowery garniture and architectural embellishment. This place was alien. What manner of men-if men they had been-could live in a bare box?

The hall Jayargo had mentioned was similar, but larger and cluttered with the flotsam of the unknown world of the ancients. Cylindrical tubes of metal stretched up out of sight toward the unseen ceiling, and housings, like Chlen-carts shrouded in grey robes, lined the buckled, littered floor. Other explorers had indeed dared to enter here; many of the cowled things along the walls had been tom open and artifacts removed. Fragments of metal and glass and bits of various softer, lighter, many-coloured substances lay strewn about amidst the rubbish.

“Steel-! A fortune in metals!” Jayargo breathed in tremulous tones.

“Not so,” Vridekka chuckled. “I have watched a smith heat and hammer a bar of this stuff for hours with no result whatsoever. If the thing is not already shaped to your needs, then you may as well throw it away. All that was usable is likely already gone, pillaged by those of the Latter Times, the Llyani, the Dragon Warriors, the Engsvanyali, and a dozen others since.”

The other was unconvinced. He paused to lay a cautious hand upon a great metal plate from which protruded studs as thick as his thumbs. Then he peered into the enigmatic innards of a container as big as a small hut, felt of the brittle tubes of red and blue materials inside, and was rewarded when these casings crumbled away to reveal fine strands of red copper: the sacred metal of Lord Sarku himself! He turned to debate further with Vridekka, but a glimpse of Harsan’s face stopped him in mid-syllable.

The youth was trembling. His eyes were shut, and his fingers made tentative, sorcerous movements in the air.

Jayargo was no stranger to spell-wizardry. He had a magic-damping counter-spell up before Harsan could complete his own incantation. The young man continued his puzzling finger-gesturing nevertheless. From behind, Jayargo heard their Yan Koryani ally exclaim, “He still has the shaking sickness! He should have recovered…!”

Harsan opened his eyes. He let his hands hang open at his sides. “Not so,” he said. “I am no longer prey to your tampering, shape-changer, nor am I in need of spells. I am directed by a thing of the ancients, as Master Vridekka knows well-a truly unsettling experience and one I could wish you both to suffer sometime-and this place is included in the instruction. Just now I was-commanded, oriented, by the Globe of Instruction. I know where I am, and I can now take you to the Man of Gold.”

Vridekka signed to the temple guards and to the Undead, and these closed up around their captives. “Guide us, then, priest Harsan,” he replied softly. “It seems that we are strangers in your house.”

Passages, corridors, shafts with oblong metal rungs, more rooms, all were traversed quickly. Twice they were forced to turn back and seek other paths because of the collapse of ceilings and the buckling of doorframes. Once they entered a chamber filled with frozen fire-stone, and Harsan spent long minutes searching for some way that did not end at a charred and blackened wall of solid rock.

The Undead cleared away obstacles as Harsan directed. Eventually they opened a hemispherical metal hatch in the floor of one of the small chambers. This gave upon a cylindrical shaft that once must have been vertical but was now tilted and twisted, here crushed and squeezed as a boy twists a hollow reed, there ripped asunder to reveal charcoal-hued volcanic ash and layers of compressed rock. Then they were there.

The shaft ended in a circular chamber. A tall, rectangular, double-leafed door barred their way, but Harsan went to this and touched the locking mechanism as the second Globe of Instruction had said to do.

Beyond was a hall of wonders.

No tomb-robber had ever set foot in the gritty dust upon this floor; nor had any party of explorers laid eyes upon these marvels since their last owner-some unknown lordling of the time of Llyan of Tsamra himself-had put his unreadable seal upon those doors and departed to face whatever destiny the Weaver of Skeins had chosen for him. He had not returned, but the treasures he had cherished still waited, exactly as he had left them so many centuries-millennia-ago. That owner had probably had nothing to do with the original building of this cache; no, that was likely the work of some stili earlier possessor, one of the wizard-princes of the Latter Times.

Tn any case, the petty warlords of the Three States of the Triangle had not reached this place, nor had the Dragon Warriors. The rulers of the First Imperium had found the secret, and they had passed it down from generation to generation until it ended, lost and buried, partially in the tomb in which the first Globe of Instruction had been discovered, and partially in the sarcophagus Harsan and Simanuya had opened. The Engsvanyali and those who came afterward had indeed pillaged the upper chambers of the labyrinth, but they had not come upon this cache! All was untouched, pristine, as though just set down by servants who know that their master will come to see his belongings and caress them one more time with his loving, greedy hands before going away.

Cases of seamless grey material leaned against the near wall. Roundish black globes, each as large as a man’s skull, lay piled carelessly nearby; one of these had strayed out into the central aisle as though some careless servant had left it there. More chests and boxes and fat, tubular casks of metal filled the shadows beyond. Things that might have been works of art-or weapons, or implements, or spare pieces for mighty engines- occupied a bay to the right. Glass shimmered red-gold in the lantern-light; metal that was still bright after all of the intervening ages-uncorroded and probably uncorrodable-gleamed amidst spheres of coloured, transparent crystal, round plaques of shiny black stuff, angular levers and silvery wheels and bars and cylinders-there was too much for the eye to see. It reminded Harsan of the Hall of Mighty Tongues in the Monastery of the Sapient Eye.

Awed in spite of himself, Vridekka slipped between his guardsmen to examine a creation of many shining rods, and Jayargo bent to inspect one of the black globes. Taluvaz supported Mirure, but his gaze was wide and rapt, his tattooed cheeks pale with excitement. Tlayesha held tightly to Harsan’s arm, their predicament forgotten for the moment. Even the Undead seemed dimly amazed.

“It is like the cache Arundomu hiFershena discovered under the City of Sarku some fifty years back,” Jayargo breathed. “Perhaps more-”