If Gan had expected a reaction he was disappointed. Hero
did
react, but the wrong way. The younger quester
was expressionless for a moment, then blinked vacantly, then gave a chain-clanking shrug. “So?”
And as for Eldin: “Puzzling, isn't it?” said the Wanderer. “Hero, lad, that's why I didn't mention it. Oh, I would have done, eventually, but since it didn't seem to make much sense ⦠why let it spoil the night, eh?”
Gan's eyes bored into the Wanderer's. “You took this from the seer, right?”
“He â¦
gave
it to me”âEldin looked uncomfortableâ“sort of.”
“Kuranes sent you to see the seer with invisible eyes, who in turn gave you this piece of paper,” said Gan. “I see ⦔
“Well I don't!” said Hero. “First, Kuranes didn't send usâwe came of our own free wills to see the girls. Second, meeting the seer was entirely accidental. If the
Quayside Quaress
had been open, we never
would
have seen him. And thirdâ”
“Yes?” said the Chief Regulator.
But how could Hero tell him about Eldin's prophetic dream? That would be seen to be a deliberate lieâeven though it wasn't! “Third, it was the Kledans started the ruckus at the
Craven Lobster,
not us. We only, well, finished it ⦔
Gan nodded, sourly added, “Disastrously!” He held up the coded message taken from the bird. “And this?”
“A message from Kuranes,” Eldin shrugged, trying to muffle
his
chains as he did so. “We are the old King's questers, after all! Pâraps it says: âReport to me in Celephais,' or some such. We won't know till we've read it, now will we?”
Gan turned to Hero. “What do you know of Yath-Lhi? Tyrhhia?” Still looking for some sort of reaction, he snapped the words out.
Hero looked blank for a moment. “Nothing,” he said, honestly believing that he spoke the truth.
The Wanderer's memory was better, however. “Well, we do know a little,” he said.
“Oh?” Gan smiled thinly. “You do know âa little,' eh? Go on, then, tell me.”
“I mean, it's no secret, is it?” Eldin raised his bushy eyebrows. “It's recorded in certain of dreamland's olden tomes, a story out of the immemorial past, a tale told by grandams about roaring winter fires. At best a legend, almost certainly a flight of fancy, a myth.”
“Say on,” said Gan.
Eldin glanced across at Hero for his approval. “Oh, by all means!” Hero sighed, gave his chains a feeble clank. “Let's have a story, since we've nothing better to do than hang about here!”
“Yath-Lhi was known as the âBlack Princess,'” Eldin began. “Black as Zura of Zura, maybe even worse. But âblack' describing her nature, you understand, and not her color. Back in the pre-dawn dreamlands, when dreams were young, she ruled in Tyrhhia, a walled slave cityâthe richest city in all the lands of Earth's dreams! For even the spires of Yath-Lhi's palace were of silverânot leaved with the stuff,
made
of it! Anywayâ”
“Ah,
now
I remember!” Hero cut in. “Of course! We had some of it from Aminza Anz, up there in the Great Bleak Mountains, that time we found our way into the Keep of the First Ones. Tyrhhia, yes. And Yath-Lhi, the Black Princess. And her maze. I remember how Aminza likened the maze within the keep to Yath-Lhi's maze under Tyrhhia.”
Gan slowly nodded. “Now, we're getting somewhere,” he said, sarcastically. “And just see how memories catch fire when someone strikes a flint, eh? So
maybe you can finish the story, David Hero. What else is there?”
Hero sighed again. “I don't know where all this is leading,” he said, “but ⦠very well, if it will hasten matters.
“She had very bad habits, this princess. She was greedy, for one thingâenormously soâand she was cruel beyond measure. She sent out her armies in search of treasure, and thus amassed so much of the stuff she'd lie awake nights wondering if it was safe! Eventually she hit upon a scheme, using thousands of slaves to build a subterranean maze deep under Tyrhhia itself. They worked down there under the lash, those poor creatures, and died in droves before the job was done: a labyrinth extensive as the city itself. And at its centerâYath-Lhi's treasure. Only she knew the way in. When she went in to admire her treasure, or add to it, she would have her bearers slain as soon as she led them back out through the maze. Worse, she even killed the labyrinth's architect, her own lover, by having him dipped in molten gold and adding his âstatue' to her monstrous, ill-gotten hoard.
“When she diedâthe legend doesn't say how, except that in the end she grew old and vanishedâher city-nation died with her. Penniless! No one could ever find his way into the maze, let alone discover the treasure at its center.” Hero paused, nodded, said: “That's it. How did I do?”
“Admirably!” said Raffis Gan. He gave a derisive snort. “And knowing so much of the old legend, you two, still this note you got from the seer with invisible eyes means nothing to you? Well, we'll see about that.”
He approached Eldinâbut carefully, staying well clear of his reachâand held up the second piece of paper,
the one he'd said was coded. “Well; and what do you make of this?”
Eldin drew his eyebrows close together, peered, read in silenceâor would have.
“Well?” said Gan.
“Give me a chance,” Eldin grumbled, absorbing everything.
“Word by word,” said Gan, impatient. “Let's have it.”
“What? Word by word? A direct translation? Impossible! Man, this isn't in codeâit's Ancient Dreamlands!”
“Eh?” said Gan, his thin eyebrows shooting up. “The primal tongue? And are you telling me you can actually read it?”
“Oh, damn right he can!” said Hero from across the cell. “What? Why, if he wasn't a quaint old quester, he'd doubtless be Assistant Curator of the Archives in Ulthar!” His sarcasm bounced off Eldin, failed to impress Gan.
“Be quiet, you!” snapped the Chief Regulator; and to Eldin: “Well, what does it say?”
The Wanderer had read and absorbed all. “Hmm!” he said. “Well, it says this: âTo Raffis Gan from Eldin the Eruditeâup yours!'”
Quick as thought Gan snatched back the note, crumpled it into his pocket, backhanded Eldin a clout that rocked his head and cut open the corner of his mouth. The Wanderer reacted in typical fashion: he went berserk, or would have if he hadn't been chained to a wall. While he raved and roared, Gan called out to his thugs:
“Come in, you two. I've had more than enough of this!” His bully-boys rumbled in. “Bind their arms securely and shackle their feet, then bring 'em to the well. If they give you troubleâany trouble at allâbeat them black and blue!” He stormed out of the cell.
“You've really miffed that one,” said Hero to Eldin. “And you had me worried, too, for a minute or so.”
“What?” Eldin stopped roaring on the instant, looked with mild reproof upon the younger quester opposite. “You didn't really believe I was going to tell him what Kuranes said, did you?”
While the two conversed, Gan's hoodlums released them one arm at a time from the walls, bound their arms to their bodies with ropes and their thighs together. Against all this restriction of movement, still Hero managed a shrug. “It would've been no stranger than not telling me about that note from the seer with invisible eyes!”
“Would you have made anything of it?”
“No,” Hero had to admit. “Not then, anyway.”
“And now?”
Hero smiled a tight smile, which turned to a grimace of pain as the Regulator with the egg-shaped head cinched a rope up between his legs just a little too tightly. “Hey, I have tackle down there, my manâwatch it, will you?” he grunted.
“A pair of real comedians, you two,” the man jerked the rope tighter yet. “Quester? Jesters, more like! I've seen carnival dancing clowns who weren't half so funny. No, not a patch on you lads.”
“It's you who'll need patching, friend,” Hero gaspingly returned, “if ever we meet on terms a bit more even.”
“Daydreams. within dreams,” the other replied, and he laughed and spat in Hero's face. And Hero unable even to wipe the spittle away.
“Ex-waking worlders,” Eldin growled his opinion of them. “You have to be. Or else your fathers were Lengites! Lord, there's some real rubbish finding its way into the dreamlands these days. Now how did such
a cute and cuddlesome pair of chaps like you two ever get to be roughy-toughy Regulators, eh? I mean, Bahama's police force has something of a glowing reputation, doesn't it? It certainly used to haveâunder your current boss's father.”
The bandy-legged, narrow-eyed thug whirled on the Wanderer and drove a knotted fist into his belly. Eldin said “Oof!” and bent a little, but seemed otherwise unhurt: bindings and good cloth and sheer mass had absorbed the blow like a huge block of rubber. Hero found it surprising that the gray-clad hadn't broken his hand;
Homo ephemerens
weren't normally all that substantial, so perhaps Eldin had been right about these lads being ex-waking worlders. Except that unlike the questers, they worked for the wrong boss. And on the wrong side of the law? That seemed more possible, however paradoxical, by the moment.
“No more arguments, no snide comments, no lip whatsoever!” Narrow-eyes coughed out the words. “You just come along with us to the well and do exactly as you're told,” he indicated the door, propelled Eldin in that direction with a boot up the backside, “and hop to it!”
Hopping, as means of locomotion, isn't overly dignifiedâbut it beats boot-propulsion to a frazzle.
Tight-lipped, each one of them promising a terrible revenge, albeit mutely, the questers hopped.
Â
Â
The well â¦
In the old days, when Regulating HQ had been a slave-harboring area, the well had served a triple purpose. It had provided water for the slavers when (often) they were thirsty; a threat if ever (rarely) they should prove rowdy or in any way ungovernable; a last embrace,
however dark and dank, on the occasion (regular) of a sudden demise. Housed in a room half virgin rockâliterally a caveâand half rough porphyry blocks, located deep under the cliff's overhang where the light scarce filtered at all, the well was now Hero and Eldin's destination. The second of its ancient functions was about to be resurrected. And depending on the outcome, possibly the third.
There was no door to the room of the well, just half an arch of raw rock and half of roughly cemented blocks, containing a yawning cave with uneven floor and inward-curving walls that met overhead in gloom, cobwebs, and spindly aeon-formed stalactites. And in the center of the floor, the well.
As the eyes of the questers and those of their Regulator guards grew accustomed to the gloom, so Hero felt the cold: a continuous stream of icy air flowing up out of the well and passing knee-deep outward and away. Eldin felt it, too, and couldn't quite stifle an audible shiver. Then Egg-head struck flint to a prepared flambeau in its rusty iron bracket on the wall, and at once the shadows were driven flickeringly back. Their guards pushed the questers stumblingly closer to the well's rim.
It had no parapet, that gaping fissure, and so the pair held instinctively back from it. They could see now that it was a natural rent in the bedrock, a split whose ends tapered to mere cracks while its center was roughly oval or almond-shapedâlike a half-open eye in an old, seamy face. The eye's iris was jet black, a hole that went down to ⦠where?
“Tide's turned,” said Narrow-eyes, his voice echoing hollowly. He sniffed, then breathed deep. “Smell the salt?”
Egg-head nodded. “Sea's coming in,” he agreed. And to the near-mummified questers: “Sweet water goes
outâwell, brackish water, anywayâand when the tide turns salt water comes in. It's a river, see, underground. Sunless, never breaks the surface. There's a story how long ago a troublesome black jumped down there hugging an empty barrel. He was never seen again, but the barrel surfaced miles out to sea. When the tide's fully in, you can fish in this hole, and it stinks of weed. When it's right out, the air comes up fresh as a field of daisies. Well, maybe not
that
fresh. Whichever, it's always cold: a cold, dark place to die. You fallâor get pushedââdown there, and you drown, of course ⦔
“If you can't swim,” said Eldin, after a moment.
“Oh, it's swimming, is it?” said Narrow-eyes quietly. “In the dark? In the cold, cold, midnight water? There are many would just let themselves sink. Quicker that way, you know?” He chuckled low and evilly.
The questers were prodded closer to the hole, found themselves leaning backward away from it. Thenâ