Джеффри Лорд: Champions Of The Gods

From time to time the road was half-blocked by enormous carts with six and eight wheels, drawn by teams of a dozen or more oxen or draft horses. On the heavily timbered beds of the carts rose small mountains of jade blocks and slabs, on their way from the mines to the city. Each wagon was guarded by half a dozen mounted men, who sat their horses well and carried well-kept swords and pistols. They wore black cloaks, and a black pennant fluttered from a pole beside the driver of each cart.

The sight of the guards of the jade carts made Mirdon's face twist again. He spat into the dust, and Blade heard him clearly. «Damned Jade Masters! They think they can do anything as long as they have the jade. Even let us go down and make a peace with the Raufi, I'd bed If we could get their men-«He shrugged and fell silent. The patrol and Blade moved on, along a road that became more and more crowded, through a day that became hotter and dustier as the hours passed.

It was nearly sunset before they came within sight of the towers of Kano. By that time Blade was sweaty, thirsty, tired, and sore in a good many places beside his face and his leg. He promptly forgot all his discomforts when he saw the city. The men of Kano had praised their city as beautiful, and they hadn't lied.

Fifty towers and spires rose high above the walls, some rising more than three hundred feet. Every tower, every bit of the wall, every building Blade could see was faced with polished, shimmering black jade. Some of the walls had patterns picked out on them in colored stones or polished metals. At least one building had a mosaic three stories high sprawling across the entire base of its crowning spire. Stones in a thousand different colors blazed in the mosaic, blazed so brilliantly that it seemed the mosaic must be made of jewels.

The approaches to the city were heavily planted with shrubs and stands of trees, and laced with small streams and ponds that reflected the setting sun. Short humpbacked bridges carried the road over the streams. At both ends of each bridge was a massive arch, tall enough to let even the high-piled jade carts pass under. The arches were covered with slabs of black jade, and the jade was worked into a thousand different plant and animal shapes. Blade saw a lion with jeweled eyes and the hair of the mane and tail picked out in silver, a dragon with gold wings and claws and emerald eyes, a serpent, an eagle-and on and on, until his mind couldn't absorb any more.

They passed through a gate in the outer wall that was practically a tunnel. The outer wall rose on a stone-faced mound of earth twenty feet high and a hundred feet wide. The wall itself was forty feet high and fifty feet thick, built of blocks of stone the size of small houses, every bit of it faced with black jade. The sun glinted on the helmets of guards marching back and forth on top. The muzzles of cannon poked out from ports in towers set every hundred yards.

Inside the outer wall lay the Gardens of Stam, several miles wide and completely encircling the city. Who or what Stam was or had been, Blade didn't know. What he did know was that a thousand years of loving work must have gone into the Gardens. They were a breathtaking sight.

Whole acres were planted with shrubs in full blossom, millions of white and red and yellow and purple blooms. The breeze was so heavily perfumed that Blade found himself coughing whenever he took a deep breath. It was like passing through a colossal greenhouse.

They entered a long avenue where the trees arched so far over the road that they threw it into blackness. From far away to the left a flickering orange light crept through the trees. Not the sun, it was too low. The road was curving toward the orange light. Blade kept silent and waited.

They came out of the trees suddenly, less than a mile from the inner wall. Here the road curved around the rim of an enormous amphitheater, half a mile wide and three hundred feet deep. The bottom was floored with still more black jade, and in the middle an enormous jet of brilliant orange flame soared a hundred feet into the air. Blade could easily hear the roar of the flame, and he occasionally felt puffs of the heat on his skin.

Around the flame stood several tall railed platforms and a strange-looking cart. It was an enormous grill of steel bars, twenty feet on a side, set on wheels ten feet high so that it could be rolled back and forth. Back and forth-into and out of the flames that roared up so fiercely.

Suddenly Blade knew what the Mouth of the Gods was. It was that huge roaring flame-no doubt an ignited natural gas jet. He also knew what it meant to be thrust into the Mouth. He would be bound to the grill of the cart, and the cart would be rolled forward. A few seconds in the flame, and there would be nothing left of Richard Blade but a puff of greasy smoke and a few charred fragments of bone on the grill.

They were moving on toward the inner wall now. The towers of Kano were silhouetted against the blood-red western sky. The beauty was gone from them. Instead they had a sinister look of giants waiting for death-Blade's death, or perhaps their own? He couldn't keep from thinking of the irony in his situation. Here he was in Kano, where he had hoped to come, to avoid dying, in the heat of the desert. But here in Kano he might soon be burned to death in the Mouth of the Gods.

Quite literally, he had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.

The main prison of Kano lay just inside the inner wall. Here the streets were a tangled, cramped, gloomy labyrinth, winding endlessly among black, blind walls and lit by occasional torches in brackets. The only people abroad were parties of soldiers stalking about the streets and starting nervously at shadows and at each other. Twice the whole patrol was nearly brought down by a volley from trigger-happy guards. The shots and Mirdon's answering curses echoed through the silent streets.

The prison was one of those towers that had looked so graceful and beautiful from outside the city. The patrol dismounted, and Mirdon, Jormin, Jormin's guards, and four other soldiers formed a square around Blade. They headed toward a flight of stairs that led upward into the gloom.

Half an hour later they were still climbing. The inside of the prison tower was an endless madman's nightmare of stairs that rose and fell, ramps that wound up and down, corridors that seemed to head in all directions at once. Here and there were clusters of iron-barred doors with dark chambers showing beyond them. Pale, hollow-eyed figures crept out of the shadows inside to stare at Blade and his escort.

There weren't many guards, and they seemed to be poorly trained. But there never had been and never would be much need for them in this prison. How do you escape from a prison where you are certain to get hopelessly lost between your cell and the door? Blade wondered if in some distant corridors lay the bleaching skeletons of poor wretches who had gotten out of their cells, only to wander aimlessly until death caught up with them.

Eventually they reached a corridor where the view through the windows lay toward the outer wall of the city and the open country beyond. There were no bars on the windows, but bars weren't needed. It was at least a hundred and fifty feet straight down from the window sill, and there were a lot of hard rocks at the bottom. Anybody who got out that way wouldn't need a guard, only a coffin and a burial party.

At the end of the corridor was a large chamber, and in the opposite wall of that chamber there was a door with an enormous gilded relief of a leaping flame carved on it. Four armed guards and a woman sat on cushions just outside the door. The woman wore a short, low-cut blue and silver tunic.

«Ho, Arllona,» said Mirdon. «I see you march forward in your career as a Free Prisoner. Now you can even dress as you please.»