But between Gan's going and Una's coming, the Wanderer had lain there with a strange and savage grin on his scarred face. There was no pleasure in that grin, which was more the smile of a wolf, but there was a deal of satisfaction. And not a little of anticipation â¦
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“My father was right,” said Ula Gidduf, with a low moan. “I should have stayed home and looked after him. Oh, HeroâHero, what is this place?”
Hero gulped, opened his mouth, gulped again. Then he found his voice. “It's the biggest damn catacomb in all the dreamlands,” he finally replied in little more than a whisper. “Lord, it
has
to be!”
The flaring torch flickered lower as fragile rags went up in smoke; Hero looked about for longer lasting fuel. Some of the crumbling corpses that littered the floor of this huge circular room wore wooden yokes, which were now very nearly fossilized into a peaty coal. Hero had no trouble wresting one of these from a skeletal neck, knocking loose its corroded metal hasps and chains against the wall. Then he gave the yoke a harder clout and it shattered, displaying a core of black, woody fibers. Tilted into the smolder of the foul-burning rags of the flambeau, the splinters of ancient timber very quickly caught fire. And as the flames leaped bright and yellow, so Hero and Ula could take in the full size of the chamber, and the full measure of the singular atrocity long since perpetrated here.
The vault was perhaps one hundred feet across, roughly hacked from the raw rock, with a ceiling maybe fifteen feet high. With the exception of a spiraling stone stairway at its center, apparently passing up into and through the ceiling, and the evenly spaced flambeaux around the wallsâand of course its contingent of grotesque mummiesâthe place was featureless. As for the antique corpses:
There must be at least two hundred of them littered about, some in small piles, some singly, seated with their backs against the walls or lying in various crumpled positions. And it hardly took close inspection to tell what they had been or how they had died. Their yokes and corroded chains and ankle clamps spoke all too clearly, however dumbly, of their once-station, or lack of it, in life; hacked vertebrae, necks, crushed skulls and caved-in chests told the rest. They'd been slaves, and some long-dead master or mistress, for some long-dead reason or upon a similarly extinct whim, had decreed that they be incarcerated and slaughtered here.
Mistress? Hero's nostrils flared. Suddenly, an ideaâa suspicionâhad formed itself in his ever-bright mind. He put it aside at once; it now appeared there'd be time, after all, to examine it later. And turning to Ula:
“Lass, you're still shiveringâfrom cold or sheer fright I'm not sureâbut I reckon our first priority is to warm up our marrows a bit. Soâd'you reckon you can help me gather up an armful of these yokes? It's not hard work, but it's not especially pleasant, either.”
Ula was made of the right stuff: in a very little while she was naked, drying her clothes over a small bonfire of aeon-old hardwood. Hero left his jacket, shirt and boots with her, went off with a sputtering brand to explore the stairway. He would never be very far away, and he talked to her as he wentâa running commentary on his discoveriesâbut still ⦠she averted her eyes from the blind, almost accusing gaze of countless eyeless sockets and got on with drying herself.
“I'm going up the stairway,” Hero called back, unnecessarily, for of course she could still see his flickering outline in the flare of his torch, but mainly to help her fight down her fear of the unknown, the darkness beyond the firelight. Not to mention his own.
The stair wound about a central pillar; Hero climbed, passed out of view on the far side, reappeared and pressed on higher. Then:
“Dead end,” came his voice, echoing down to Ula, its disappointment plain. “Literally! More corpses at the top, several of 'em chopped in half when the plug fell.”
“What?” Ula didn't understand. “Stairs going up to nothing? Plug? What are you talking about, Hero?”
“Oh, these stairs went somewhere once upon a time,” he answered, holding his torch aloft and sending shadows leaping. “Up through the bedrock and into her palace,
I should think. But she had this great stone plug prepared, you see, and at the endâ”
“Hero, you're rambling,” she cut him off. “Explain yourself. She? Who, she?”
He came winding his way back down the spiral of stone steps. “Yath-Lhi, I suppose. I mean, it all fits, doesn't it? We were brought inland, on the tide, into this subterranean crypt. We doubtless passed
under
Yath the lakeânamed all that time ago for the princess herself, and the fact of it forgottenâand so found our way into this antechamber. Here it was she killed her slaves, before sealing it and proceeding to her last resting place.”
“Eh?” said Ula, seeming to Hero to sound more like Eldin all the time. “She âproceeded' somewhere from here? Where, pray?”
“This staircase,” he answered across the radius of the vault, “not only goes up, but down!”
He started down the winding stairwell.
“Hero!” Ula cried out at once, starting across the corpse-littered floor toward him. “You're not going anywhere without me!”
He peered at her for a moment, managed a roguish grin, however contrived. “And you're not coming anywhere with meânot dressed, or undressed, like that!”
She glanced down at herself, said, “Oh!” returned to her fire.
Hero joined her. “Very well,” he said, “we go together. Are our clothes dry?”
“Mine are,” she began dressing. “Yours ⦠not quite.”
“They'll have to do.” He dressed slowly, turning himself before the fire, left his boots till last. And finally: “Ula, Iâ”
“No need to say it,” she cut in. “I know. Up, we'd have stood a chance. Downâwe're going nowhere.”
Hero reluctantly nodded. “I thought I'd mention it,” he said. “Easier to face now we're warm and half-dry. And of course, it's not definite. It just wouldn't do to get too deliriously happy, that's all.” He tossed his brand into the fire, took up a fresh one. Ula did likewise.
“Very well,” she said. “I'll try not to get carried away. So let's go and have a look at Yath-Lhi's treasure-chamber, shall we?”
“Why not?” Hero kissed her roughly. “Who knows? It might be the last treasure-chamber we ever see!”
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“What?” Eldin was astonished, almost shocked.
“What!”
he repeated, this time an exclamation. “A minute ago you were very sweetly crying your eyes out, and now you'reâ
Una
!”
“Shhh!”
she shushed desperately.
“But why are you groping me? I mean, this is hardly the time or the place forâ”
“Oaf!”
she whispered, anything but sweetly. “I am
not
groping you! Wouldn't that be like taking onyx to Inquanok? Or playing the dingaphon to impress the maestro Gaez Voorpin? Would I dream of groping the Grand Groper himself?”
If anything, Eldin was a little disappointed. “Then what are you doing?”
She sighed. “You haven't noticed that your wrists are padlocked together behind your left thigh?”
“Eh? Why, no, I hadn't, actually.”
“My tears were for Gan and his cronies,” she said, “so they'd see how helpless I wasâwhile I snatched the key to these padlocks you're wearing!”
“Padlocks? More than one?”
Una sighed again. “Your ankles are padlocked, too.”
“So they are!” He clanked his chains a bit. “Don't take any chances, these lads, do they?”
“Oh, they do,” she answered grimly, “but with the wrong people! So I wailed and cried a lot to distract them, and in the end they were only too glad to send me down here.”
Now her eyes were bright and glinting. “They killed my sister,” she said huskily. “Oh, yes, let them see my tears nowâbut later I'll show them the cutting edge of a sword! Or a knife! Or an axe!”
“I hope you'll leave some for me,” Eldin growled. “See, my mind runs to mayhem, tooâand if that doesn't work out there's something even nastier.”
“The worse the better!” she said, giving him a hug.
“Right,” said Eldin, “no time to waste. How many of 'em, up top?”
“Gan and his two, that's all. The rest of the Regulators probably don't know their boss is a bad 'un.”
“My feeling exactly,” the Wanderer agreed. “Now then, I know we're sailing for Tyrhhia, but what's our e.t.a.?”
“We're more than half-way across Yath now, I reckon,” she answered, and shrugged. “Ten to fifteen minutes at most. Maybe even less.”
Eldin weighed chains, wrapped his great fists in them. “Just the three of âem, eh?” he scowled. “Can you whirl a chain, d'you think?” He handed her a very unladylike length.
They crept soundlessly to the ladder, and Eldin stepped up it to try the hatch. Mercifully it wasn't battened: with his head, he pushed it open a fraction and peered out. He recognized the vessel at once: a Regulator patrol boat, small, with a fast, fancy sail. He pushed the hatch open more yetâand gasped.
Una heard him, saw his bulk stiffen on the ladder, tugged at his trouser leg. “What's up?” she whispered.
“Your e.t.a. was a mite off,” he answered. “We're already there!”
At that moment the boat answered the helm, swung to port a little, lost impetus. And:
“Ahoy there, Slave-Master Druff!” Gan's sudden hail from for'ard caused Eldin to duck back. “How goes the work?”
“Ahoy, Raffis Gan!” came back the answer, in guttural Kledan tones. “Slowly, I fear.”
Eldin peered out again.
One hundred yards away, the shore was thick with reeds, bulrushes, semi-tropical shrubs and small palms. Good cover there. The Regulator vessel was closing on a spindly, makeshift wooden jetty; beyond the jetty, a pair of huge Kledan sky-slavers rolled on a fresh-risen breeze, anchored fore and aft with their keels just clear of the water. Another, approaching from the north, was in the process of dropping down from the sky, her anchors about to dip into the lake. Swarthy Kledans galore were plainly visible on the decks of all three squat, ungainly vessels; they mended crude-seeming flotation bags and tended rigging and sails, fished from the gunnels, busied themselves with unloading. But it was
what
they unloaded that interested Eldin the most.
Small lighters rowed by Pargans, overseen by their Kledan masters, wallowed to their gunnels as they bore piled gunpowder kegs ashore, sat light in the water when they came back empty. Eldin's narrowed eyes went back to Yath's shore. A shallow mist lapped the surface of the lake, but it failed to obscure his view.
Long lines of Pargan slaves, each man carrying a keg atop his head, moved between the lighters and a spot where the shore of the lake sloped back and rose up
sharply into a sort of barrow or small hill. Covered by rank green growth, the hill lay approximately centrally in an extensive area of ancient ruins which came right down to the water's edgeâthe tumbled remains of primeval Tyrhhia, as Eldin was now well aware. The side of the hill facing the lake had been shorn of vegetation down to naked rock; the great black throat of a cave led back into darkness, where a long line of fixed torches receded, descending out of sight: the entrance to Yath-Lhi's maze.
Again Gan's shouting startled the Wanderer. “You haven't found a way into the core? Not even a lead?”
“Nothing!” came back the cry from the deck of the closest Kledan vessel. “The walls seem solid. Some are even suggesting that there is no chamberâjust a core of solid rock.”
“Fools!” Gan shouted. “I've a man here who can read the glyphs on those walls. We'll be into that treasure before nightfall!”
“Oops!” said Eldin. Catlike for a man his size, he slid out of the hatch and drew Una up after him. Under the mainsail's boom, they could see the lower half of the legs of Gan and his two bullies. “Quickly,” Eldin whispered. “Over the sideâwithout a splash, mind youâand make for the shore. Do it in stretches, underwater as best you can, and stick close to me. Go!”
Masked by the sail and the cabin's low superstructure, Una slipped overboard like an eel into the milky water; Eldin followed immediately after her, kicked hard for the bottom and chased Una's lithe shape across the muddy, weedy bed of the lake. They surfaced when they had to, and looked back. The Regulator vessel was visible through a thin shroud of mist. But after diving again, swimming, surfacing a second time, only the outlines of the boat could still be seen. Moments later the
lake shallowed out and they were able to half-swim, half-crawl ashore into the weed-draped bulrushes. Heads kept low, they made firmer ground, ran almost crouching through dank fern, bulrush and shrub, away from the cavern entrance and the moored ships.