the Tomb was one of the mightiest of these, renowned throughout the Five Empires.
A tessellated pavement of smoky amber quartz and white marble swept away between legions of ponderous, demon-carved pillars to a broad staircase at the end of the nave. This led up to a colonnade on a higher level, the upper shrines of the temple. The in-curving, barrel-vaulted walls of the great hall displayed tier upon tier of sculptured figures: priests and kings and nobles and soldiers and slaves-and creatures who could only have been conceived in the dark, fearful race-memories of mankind. All were done in mosaics of red camelian, brown jasper, glittering tourmaline, and a host of other stones, with eyes of black onyx and secretive yellow topaz. Each figure brought offerings to the frieze of coiling worm-lords depicted in the upper registers.
Still higher, under the painted vaulting of the roof, a narrow gallery ran along each side of the chamber in the grandiose, monumental style beloved of the architects of the Bednalljan kings. Chains of bronze, half again as thick as a man’s wrist, swung down from the ceiling to support massive chandeliers of branching oil lamps. All along the lower walls of this nave were niches containing images of the one hundred and eight Aspects of Lord Sarku: the fearsome monsters of the Undead, Ku’un the Corpse-Lord, Siyenagga the Wanderer of Tombs, Chmur of the Hands of Grey, and a score of others. He did not wish to look upon them.
The nave teemed now with worshippers: men in brown vestments, faces painted with the skull-white of the Lord of Worms, others in ritual masks fashioned in the likenesses of beasts and demons, women in robes of dull russet and sombre earth hues, aristocrats in rich blues and reds and yellows, but always with the copper worm of Lord Sarku upon their breasts. Lesser folk, servants, and slaves circled about the outskirts of the throng or squatted patiently at the bases of the columns.
Over all hung a sickly sweet fragrance: resinous, smoky incense compounded with the sad, funereal perfume of flowers, the oily stench of the lamps, and a submerged, subtle flavour of decay.
Vridekka did not enter but instead presented himself to an officer in the brown livery and skull-helmet of Lord Sarku’s temple-guard. This man pointed them to a tiny door hidden behind the nearest pillar. A cramped, winding stair led upward from this to the balconies. Here Vridekka’s soldiers took careful hold upon their captives, for the balustrade was only of knee-height. One of the guards gripped Harsan’s wrist chains tightly, and another walked behind him with halberd butt poised to strike, should he display any urgent yearning for self-sacrifice. The groining of the ceiling leaned out into space at a frightening angle just above their heads, and the swarming worshippers below were like begemmed insects. Old Vridekka stepped out upon the narrow balcony with surefooted confidence, but the others hugged the wall. Once Eyil stumbled and gave a muffled cry, but one of her captors muttered a nervous oath, leaned into the wall, and dragged her back.
At the far end, the balcony gave onto one comer of the upper colonnade. This level, too, teemed with devotees. Twinkling lamps provided unnatural life to the rows of images crouching along the carven walls; stony eyes shifted and stared; bronze lips writhed; and misshapen arms and tails and tentacles wriggled in the glimmering, smoky murk. Urns of incense and tall cult-standards of ebon and ochre plumes stood here and there amidst the crowds of devotees. On each side of a single central aisle sat groups of ritual priests, their faces ruddy in the glow of little braziers of coals, to chant the litanies of the Lord of Worms, Master of the Everlasting Life Beyond the Tomb.
The odour of things dead was stronger here.
A black-silhouetted Lector Priest pointed on across the front of the colonnade to where several senior hierophants stood with Prince Dhich’une upon the brink of the staircase that led back down to the nave.
The Prince had exchanged his brown robe for the vestments of ceremonial office: a surplice of silky Gudru- doth the colour of dark humus; a collar of copper, engraved with runes; a golden pectoral set with topaz and chrysoberyl, from which two lappets of jewelled plaques hung down to his knees; a pleated kilt of rust-red brocade worked with iridescent threads of shiny black; and heavy armlets of massy copper, Lord Sarku’s favoured metal. Upon his head he wore an intricate headdress of little golden skulls intertwined with ebony serpents. Feathery Kheshchal- plumes towered above this and swept down behind him almost to his heels. His hands and feet were bare, painted with the bone-white of the Worm Lord.
The Prince had seen them. He motioned Vridekka to have them wait beside one of the squat columns.
“There are preliminaries,” the old man muttered to Harsan. “First must we satisfy those who have paid for the performance.”
A distant, moaning thunder filled the cavernous hall, and in its centre Harsan glimpsed a figure upon a pedestal who blew into a mighty horn, some two man-heights long and hung by chains from a high tripod. He had heard of that horn, “The One Who Is Mournful of Life.” The echoing boom of the Tunkul-gong of the temple added its voice to the dirge.
Prince Dhich’une went to stand at the head of the stair, and those below became silent. One earthen hand went up, and the Tunkul-gong roared again. He pointed, and a phalanx of copper-helmeted temple-guards advanced to clear the throngs from the centre of the nave. He made another sign, and now a rectangular area of the pavement there slid soundlessly down. A sloping rampway appeared, from which arose the dank smell of a sepulchre long sealed from the sun.
Things milled and swarmed in the shadows of that pit: pale creatures who held up gaunt arms to shield themselves from the amber lamplight. Presently one ventured up, then another, and another. Harsan knew not whether he looked upon reality or upon an illusion like those cast by the adepts of his own temple. For the beings that emerged were the Undead: liches and corpses and cadavers, the withered husks of departed life, the dwellers in Lord Sarku’s myriad heavens-the hells of other Gods. Warriors clambered up the ramp, accoutred in armour of antique fashion, green with verdigris and corruption. Then came spectral beings wrapped in tattered cerements and graveclothes, clay-hued apparitions whose skeletal limbs yet glittered with funerary armlets and finery, all that forlorn wrack that men and women leave behind when they pass forth from this life.
Others were there as well: creatures muffled in robes of charcoal black with the flat faces of serpents, towering monsters of pallid yellowish fungus, flying things with the heads of dead men and creaking leathery wings, bulbous Thunru’u, deformed and twisted crypt-dwellers with rodent snouts and razor claws-a thousand horrors of nightmare and beyond.
The priests ranked along the aisles of the upper colonnade shouted out a litany. Drums thuttered, flutes shrieked, and horns brayed. The living flowed forward to greet the grey tide of the Undead. A woman rushed to clutch at a lurching corpse, to press her lips to its fleshless face, to cry endearments against its rotted winding sheet. A lover who had died? A husband who now spent eternity in this travesty of life? Another, a stout nobleman, embraced the grinning remains of a child and held it, weeping, to his breast. A young man threw off his mantle and took the greyed cadaver of a woman into his arms, to fall in tangled embrace to the floor where they were lost to view.
Some knelt and stretched out their hands to Prince Dhich’une above them on the stair. Some cried, “Life forever in the tomb, Oh Master!” and danced and jigged in a frenzied parody of joy. Some chanted and sang and dragged the relicts of the catacombs into their midst to be caressed and fondled. “Life forever!” they shrilled, “Life! To die and yet to live!”
The vast hall was a spinning turmoil, a maelstrom of noise and light and music and shadow, a streaming glare of lamps and torches, a choking stench of oil and flowers and sweat and drugged incense… Above all hung the overweening redolence of death.
The Tunkul — gong clamoured again. Prince Dhich’une turned and strode back into the darkness of the upper colonnade. Five senior hierophants arid five Lector Priests bearing lanterns of brown glass fell in behind him. Vridekka motioned for his captives and their guards to bring up the rear.
In the far wall, a high-arched corridor led off away from the nave. They traversed this for some distance and halted before a great bronze valve of a door, guarded on either side by stone gargoyles who bore unintelligible symbols of gold. This gate opened upon a round tunnel that led down at a steep slant.
The passage was rough and unomamented. Curious gobbets of frozen stone hung from its roof-a natural cavern created by the fires of Tekumel’s creation. They ended in an oval room, egg-shaped, entirely empty, stained with the white hoar of age. The Prince crossed this chamber to stand before the entrance to a still smaller tunnel that plunged almost vertically down into blackness. The five hierophants knelt behind him, and the Lector Priests arrayed themselves along one curving wall. Vridekka stationed his party at the rear of the room where they could see, signalling two of the men of the Legion of Ketl to stand by the entrance. The rest he dismissed to return to the great hall. Silence seeped into the chamber; not even the cacophony of the nave above reached them here.
Then another figure appeared in the tunnel through which they had come. It was Hele’a of Ghaton. He was
