M. Barker - The Man of Gold

Tlayesha took a strip of her tattered skirt, dabbed at the N’luss girl’s forehead, and whispered something. No fool she, either.

Harsan said, “I know not. I swear I speak the truth, as Divine Thumis knows my soul! Yet I feel elated, courageous-almost intoxicated, Lord Taluvaz.” He stopped, unable to say more.

Something really was happening to him. The wash of tiny, fluting organ voices sang louder in his brain; the room dimmed and stretched and shrank. His vision blurred, and he sat down abruptly.

Pain rushed in upon him: little round spots of agony, as though a skilled tormentor of the Legion of Ketl plucked with pincers at each nerve strand. Breath fled out of his lungs-and was just as sharply sucked back in again. A fist closed around his heart, and his ribs became a ladder of aching flame. Was this a brain-stroke, such as had slain old Gnesumu, one of his preceptors at the Monastery so many years ago? He did not know, but he did not think so. Vridekka? No, the Mind-seer was far away, marshalling his followers from the dais. Jayargo was not in sight; he must be searching the inner chamber and wondering how to redeem himself in his master’s eyes. The Mihalli was there indeed, but he and his men stood grouped by the door, inspecting some discovery or other.

Tlayesha’s face, lined with concern, swam before him. It coalesced with the sharp, bluffly pretty features of the N’luss girl, shaded off into Taluvaz’ tattooed brow.

Voices gabbled, the air quivered and twinkled.

Then the pain was gone. Harsan raised sweat-smeared palms to clutch at his temples.

Tlayesha was saying, “-Some sort of seizure-the spell the Mihalli worked upon him-strain, weariness, lack of food-”

One of the skull-helmeted troopers asked gruffly, “What’s to do with him then?”

Harsan himself replied, “Nothing-nothing now.-My- instruction… Summon your master. I have a thing to give him.”

Vridekka met the soldier half way. Harsan got shakily to his feet to await him, weak but still unaccountably jubilant. The Mind-seer looked him over with a dubious eye and cast a spell.

He recoiled. “Your iron buckler is stouter than ever, priest,” he snapped. “You leave me no choice but to prod your willingness, twist your loyalties, give you more of what you endured in Lord Arkhane’s dungeons. The girl, then, Chaishru…”

One of the troopers moved toward Tlayesha, but Harsan held out his hands.

“No need, Lord Vridekka. No need to harm her or any other. No more prodding or pushing or threatening!” He felt warm, excited, as full of wild joy as must a priestess of Hrihayal who achieves the climax of the Thirty-Second orgiastic Act! “Your questioning of Hele’a of Ghaton was incomplete, Lord-shoddy for one so skilled as yourself! La, did he not tell you of the other relic I had put ‘around the comer’? Not the Globe of Instruction which you pried out of me, but something other?”

“What? — No-”

Harsan brought his brows together in fierce concentration. All else he thrust aside, all thoughts and feelings and emotions. He shut out the sights and sounds and smells of the great hall of the Man of Gold, let the alien tendrils of Other Planar power seep into his consciousness.

He groped in the dark that was not dark. Something lay there.

“Why, then, here you have the key, Lord!” he gasped. He held out his hands. The Mind-seer instinctively held out his own in return.

An object, white and shapeless, dropped from nowhere into Vridekka’s palms. Wisps of vapour arose; the thing actually smoked! A wave of deadly cold smote them all.

It was the silvery-blue rod, all coated now with ice!

Vridekka shrieked, flailed, fell backward. It seemed that he could not let go of the thing! He howled, danced, waved the rod like a glittering sword, and stumbled into one of his guardsmen. The noise brought everyone in the hall around to stare.

The nearest soldier snatched at Tlayesha. “This girl dies-!” he snarled.

She reacted in a way Harsan would never have guessed. Instead of struggling, she threw both arms about the man’s neck, drew him close, and held up her face almost as though she would make love to him.

She opened her eyes wide.

“Ohe, man, would you then slay one who wears the curse of the Goddess Avanthe!” Her eyes were very blue in the light of the artificial sun of the hall.

The trooper yelled wordlessly and jerked aside to sketch the protective sign of the Worm Lord in the air with two fingers. He fumbled for his weapon. Two very hard hands pulled his head back from behind, and Mirure’s powerful, practiced, leather-shod knee snapped up against his spine just below his copper-trimmed backplate. There was a satisfying crack, and he crumpled. She had his sword almost before he struck the floor.

The Mihalli raised his blue-glowing ball, his men fanning out beside him. Vridekka knelt upon the pavement and clutched his hands to his breast in a contortion of agony. There were shouts from the inner chamber, and Jayargo appeared at the door there to stare forth openmouthed.

Soon-soon, now…

He realised that he had no idea what was to happen “soon.”

Harsan reached “around the corner” one more time. Had not Chtik p’Qwe said that other sages had experimented with this strange place, stored their secrets, their artifacts, and possibly their victims therein? He let his mind swim in the unimaginable tides and eddies beyond his own bubble of familiar reality. Another object emerged to drop upon the floor in front of him: a round ball of blackened ice within which he glimpsed the shrivelled remains of a body, a creature that had many limbs and a face more grisly than any demon carven upon Lord Sarku’s temple walls!

He lacked the power, magical or physical, to throw it. But a kick sent it skittering and smoking across the floor to scatter the agents of Yan Kor like goblets from an overturned tray.

Unperturbed, the Mihalli lifted his blue globe and sighted.

A thunderous roar from the room of the picture-box made the creature miss. The beam of twinkling blue light snapped soundlessly over Tlayesha’s head. Both Harsan and the Mihalli turned to stare unbelievingly.

Soldiers, the Undead, the remaining Qol, a half dozen of Vridekka’s small Underworld monsters-all came boiling out of the narrow door. The living fled toward the anteroom, the Mrur stumbled and rose sluggishly to fall again under the feet of comrades behind; the Jajgi was visible for a moment, and then it, too, disappeared under the press. Jayargo dragged himself free to scramble up by the wall just outside of the inner chamber.

Something brown and huge loomed just within the door to the room of the picture-box. It flowed forth, a low and massive wave of crusted, stained reddish leatheriness borne along upon a myriad tiny greyish cilia-a thing like a many-legged flatworm, but with a thousand wetly gleaming, soft tendril-legs for every one that any normal worm possessed! The upper integument was smooth, undulating, glistening russet-like a great carpet carried along by a horde of Dri — ants.

A living carpet, Harsan thought.

Yes, that was it! A carpet! The brown carpet he had glimpsed within the chamber of the picture-box! The thing must be some sort of guardian!

Taluvaz Arrio shouted in his ear, “A NgoroV'

“A what?”

“One of the beasts of the ancients-kept to guard their tombs and treasures!” The Livyani seized Tlayesha’s wrist, pulled her and Mirure back around behind the dais.

“Hurry,” he panted, “for it slays all! In Livyanu-”

Harsan did not wait to hear what a Ngoro might do in Livyanu. He must stop both this monster and Vridekka. A glance told him that the old man was no obstacle now. He was either dead or unconscious-perhaps he had used some trance-like spell to prevent his mind from feeling pain. His hands were white and shrivelled, as though long immersed in ice water.