The variety of oaths that rose was marvelous in its diversity.
“Twelve doors!” shouted Ornol above the din, pressing them down by the pallid force of his face and authority. “We have nine left. Let us take the yellow door.”
Yellow seemed a sound enough choice to me. I glanced at the red door. It would not be as easy as that...
By the time we had traced a weary way through rooms and corridors, and reentered the circular room through the orange door, we had rested once, and were still tired and more than dispirited. Exandu was one long moan. Ilsa plumped down, and put her hands to her face, and wept openly.
“The turquoise door!” cried Ornol. “Follow me.”
His warriors dragged themselves up from whence they had flopped down, and kicked the slave porters into motion, and obediently started after Ornol. Skort the Clawsang and his people followed. Ornol swung back, his pale face wrathful.
“Ilsa! Where are you?”
I went up to Ornol. My face was perfectly blank.
“Strom. It is needful that we rest.”
He sneered at me. “Strom, is it? Is that the way to address me? You call me pantor—”
“Pantor, we rest now. You may go on; but you will go on alone.”
He glared about. Exandu tried to rescue the situation, for it was obvious and petty enough, Zair knows.
“A rest, good Ornol, for longer than the ten murs you allowed us in the room of the hanging virgins. I beg you.”
I said, “We camp here. Set the guards and let us brew some tea and cook ourselves a meal. Our rations will stand that—”
“Our rations and water are almost gone,” said Kalu.
“Aye. We must keep up our strength if we are to escape,” said Exandu.
“Escape? We have not yet started!” burst out Skort.
We all stared at him in astonishment. As though alarmed at the vehemence of his outburst, he went off, his corpse face seeming to deliquesce and melt away to teeth and bone, and started bellowing at his people to make camp.
We made camp and set watches and tried to sleep. This place of tunnels and rooms was beginning to become a trial. It reminded me uncomfortably of the Moder I’d been down in Moderdrin, the Humped Land, although — as yet — in nowise as horrifying. And this puzzled me, for I, along with the others, had been set for a trial of strength with the bandits, if they were not all dead. This maze came as a shock.
“Seems to me, my old dom, as though we shall all starve to death.”
“I could eat hellhound, if I had to. So could you.”
“Aye, and so could the others, if it came to it. They’d drink hellhound blood, too...”
“If Zair wills it.”
When we started up again after a camp of some eight burs or so, we rose with much groaning and clicking of joints, and the slaves had to be kicked into motion by equally sore warrior guards. We all straggled off, poking the floor and watching the ceiling, and followed Ornol through the doorway paneled in turquoise.
We had not eaten to break our fast, determining to press on for a few burs before consuming any more of our fast vanishing rations. We entered the next chamber, one of three, at the branch of the corridor. Everyone exclaimed in surprise.
Down two sides of the room, which was clothed in bright tapestries depicting scenes of the hunt, stood two long tables. White damask shone. The service was of silver and the viands smelled so aromatic that the saliva started up in our mouths. Amphorae of wine stood in their tripods racked against the far wall. The place was set for a feast.
Kalu swung to us. “Let no one eat or drink!”
The rush for the tables halted, suddenly. We stared longingly on the viands. Our mouths were parched and our tongues hung out. Ornol clamped his lips. He pointed at a slave, a Brukaj with a stubborn bulldog face. “You! Sit at the table and eat, drink!”
“Master!” quavered the Brukaj, shaking.
Ornol lifted his sword. He placed the point against the slave’s neck, under his ear. He twitched. A thread of blood shone. “Eat, drink! Or die!”
Ilsa hurried forward; but Shanli was there, to hold her. Exandu sat down on one of the chairs. Everyone else watched. I watched, for I felt, suddenly, that this place was not as the Moder had been.
The slave ate and drank, quivering with fear. But the food was marvelous, delicious, and the wines superb. Soon he was sweating with enjoyment, and drinking — and singing. He sang merrily, throwing-his arms about, his lowering bulldog face transformed.
“If he dies, he’ll die happy,” said Exandu, with a sigh. “If the poison does not torture him too much,” said Seg, a savage note in his voice. Fierce and fiery is my comrade Seg, with a heart as soft as a girl’s lips — at times. “We will sit and wait,” said Ornol.
I fancied he had not liked the hint of mutiny. This hiatus gave him the chance to allow us a proper rest. If the slave died — but the Brukaj did not die. We fell on the food and drink, and, by Krun it was good, all of it, superb!
At last, stuffing our packs with food and carrying bottles of wine, we set off again.
After a long march in the lambent glow of the fire-crystal walls, a march wherein we met and bested fearsome Bearded Phantoms, whining Mind Leeches and a covey of stinking Dragworms, we returned to the chamber, one of three, where we had feasted.
Our exclamations of surprise and anger, of dejection and fear, were partially mollified when we saw that the tables were again laid as we had first found them. Incontinently, we sat down and feasted once more.
“This will not do,” said Kalu, stripping a chicken bone expertly and flinging the naked bone over his shoulder. “We are like to eat ourselves to death.”
“There has to be a way,” said Seg, drinking heartily. “Aye. But which? To go left is to return to the circular room of the twelve doors. To go right is, mayhap, to return here.”
“We had best try to the right. If we do return here we can go to the circular room of the twelve doors and choose again.”
So we picked up our gear and set off along the way through the chamber we had not explored previously. The way led on, smoothly, until we came to a low-ceiled room, at the farther end of which was set a large door, and a smaller at its side. One, the larger, was green, and the smaller was red.
Everybody set down their burdens and waited. I felt that same prickling on me as I feel when unseen eyes smolder upon my naked back, as a great beast readies itself to spring. I said, “The red door.”
Ornol swung to face me. His pallor shone. “Red? Red — that is no color for a true Pandaheem! I choose the green!”
“Well,” I said, forgetting all about niceties of address, “green is not the color of Pandahem. That is blue.”
“If you seek a quarrel—”
I drew a breath. I was in for it now. Like a calsany, stubborn and onkerish, I dug my heels in.
“I go through the red door. Those who wish may go with you through the green.”
Immediately, Skort chirped out: “I go with the strom.”
“And I,” said the sorcerer.
Kalu, quietly, said, “I will go with the Bogandur.”
We all looked at Exandu. Shanli mopped his brow.
He looked at Ornol and then at me, at the large green door and the small red door. He sweated. He shook. He turned his eyes up piteously.
“Does no one then think of my poor old bones? Of my feet which are blistered to the bone? How I ache!”
Shanli whispered in his ear. He sighed.
“Very well. I mean you no offense, Strom Ornol. You, I think, understand that.” And here Exandu jingled the pouch of gold he carried strapped to his waist belt. We did not miss the significance of the gesture. “But I go with Dray the Bogandur, through the red door.”
Ornol’s head jerked back. His nostrils pinched in.
“Very well.” He swung his sword, commandingly. “Come!”
He ordered his slaves to kick the green door open. They did so. A sweet scent wafted and light shone. They all went through, two by two, warriors with swords, porters with burdens, and we heard their excited exclamations of pleasure and wonder gradually fading on the scented air.
“Perhaps...” stammered Exandu.
Seg turned to me, preoccupied. “Why make an issue of it now?”
“The red door just — seems right.”
“Perhaps we ought—” Exandu started over. “They sound very jolly.”
The green door slammed in our faces.
I kicked the red door open.
A dim blueish light shone at the head of a flight of stairs. Those stairs stretched wide to either side. On each tread a tall golden candelabrum upheld in clenched fists five golden candles. The flames rose, tall, sharp, flowerlike in their involuted calmness. The blue light dropped down, pervading everything that golden light did not reach. The air tanged, harsh, warningly. I stepped through and Hop the Intemperate, so close he pushed me aside a little, thrust his ten-foot pole ahead.
The pole clanged against marble. The floor of the space above the flight of stairs remained firm, unyielding.
We moved through the doorway, and paused, gazing down the stairs into a vast inchoate blueness far beneath.
The red door groaned and closed at our backs.
We were a small party; Kalu and his men, Exandu, Shanli and Hop and their people. Seg and myself. We stood looking down that breathtaking vista.
The red door groaned and closed — and the treads and risers of the stairway rotated and combined into a single long shining sheet, stretching away and away beneath — stretching into stygian blackness as all the candles were extinguished as one, and the blueness vanished.
In a sliding helpless mass we shot screaming down into the blackness.
Red Water
Whoever crafted those steps was a master mason. There was not a fissure between tread and riser you could slide a hair through. Down that slippery slope in the utter darkness we slid, straight down, whoosh, helter-skelter, helplessly.
People slid into me, and whirled away, and the cries bounced from the roof, weirdly, echoing like bats trapped in a vault.
How long we skidded down I do not know. It could not have been much above four or five minutes; it felt like a lifetime. Without warning, smashingly, I went feet first into water. The shock knocked the breath from my lungs.
In a moment or two, with lungs aflame, I surfaced.
Flinging the hair back from my eyes and staring around I saw the darkness relieved by a somber red glow. Even as I watched and the heads began to bob up in the water alongside, the glow grew and deepened and became a blood-red drenching of fire all about.
It was borne in on me that, perhaps, just perhaps, red was not going to be the Prescot color in this pickle.
Hop the Intemperate, flailing away like a pregnant whale, surfaced, spouting.
“Help!”
I put a hand under his armpit. The armor we wore would drag us down if we did not shed it or find a landing place very quickly.
Across from me a ledge of rock showed.
“The rock!” I heaved up and bellowed. “Make for the rock.”
We all started splashing. A Pachak at my side, using an economical three-handed paddle, dived away, yelling.
At his side, glimpsed in rosy silver flakings in the red light and the water a long fish shape darted.
Fangs opened wide, tiny eyes glared black and malevolent. Fins shivered silver. The great fish opened its jaws and bore in, hungrily.
Time, time! There was no time! I drew my old sailor knife and dived under. The sleek belly sped past above, and the legs of the Pachak kicked just beyond. Quickly, quickly! The sailor knife, honed to a wicked edge, sliced all along the guts of the fish. Redness poured out. I drew the knife along, and then turned, flailing my arms, shot for the surface. There was time only to see Hop scrambling up onto the ledge, and Seg hoisting Shanli up, before I’d drawn in a mighty lungful of air and so dived again.
There were more of the giant fish, wicked jaws agape, silver and red in the water, arrowing in.
Three of them, three I took.
Then I surfaced and Seg hauled me out.
Exandu was wailing and moaning — he had a slash along his left calf and he swore that his leg had been taken off for dinner.
Shanli calmed him. I was trembling. The fish had been — had been deadly in their intent.
We huddled on the ledge and dripped water. In that ruddy light the water dropped like blood.
Pieces of fish rose to the surface and reddened the red water, and monstrous shapes fought over them, and devoured them. Hop shuddered. He stared at me as though drugged.
“You saved us all!”
“No,” I said. “I took but three.”
“But,” he said, and pointed, “see!”
And there were many more than three fish corpses being consumed in the bloody water.
I stood up. I clutched the wall for support.
“I am going this way.” I started to move. I didn’t care which way we went “Follow me.”
Obediently, they stood up, shaking, and followed.
The ledge, slippery with fungoid things, broadened. We passed under an overhang and entered a series of chambers cut from the rock. Here, in the pervasive ruby light, giant and obscene carvings leered at us from every wall, from the roof, pranced at our side, seeming to move and beckon as we passed. I thought to shield Shanli from these awful sights, but she strode on, head up, supporting Exandu, not looking to right or left, but guiding his path.
Then, I thought — the people who construct these places love to put these carvings here, and so was myself again, able to be mocking and cynical and no longer wrought up by the darkness and the ruby light and giant fish and the horror of fangs closing on naked and quivering flesh.
As we passed on I counted the people with us; we had not lost a single soul.
Forcing our way through hanging slimy growths, like seaweed, dangling at the exit to the caverns, on we went. We were attacked by reptilian things that skittered and chirped and slashed their stingers at our legs as we passed. We squashed them and moved on.
We were assailed by stenches released from corpse pits abandoned for centuries, we stopped up our nostrils and pressed on. Skeletons dangled in our path, and came to life and sought to drag us down with bony fingers. These we cut to pieces, bone by bone, limb by limb. We sundered their blasphemous forms, and went on.