“Peace, the two of you.” Taluvaz wandered back towards Mirure. He saw that she had risen to her feet and was watching the entrance.
“You hear something?” he asked her softly in Livyani.
“I do,” she replied in the same tongue. Her slim sheath-knife hung ready in her hand. “Not the shape- changers, I think. Echoes! armor, clanking, quicker footsteps. Soldiers? They are distant yet, but they come.”
“Yes, love,” Taluvaz sighed. “We must move quickly.” He stood close to brush a hand against one rounded breast just visible beneath the ruins of her tom and stained tunic. She gave him a hidden look of adoration, her face averted so that the others might not see.
Mirure had been gifted to Taluvaz by his clan-fathers when the Hierophant ofTsamra had first pricked the glyph of the Tenth Circle of the Temple of Qame’el upon his right cheek. He had then been forty, she perhaps no more than fifteen summers. What lay between the towering N’luss girl and the diminutive, urbane, middle-aged Livyani was theirs alone to share.
“Ohe, glassblower!” he called. “Naturally your bazaar storytellers will have mentioned which crypts are dead-end shafts and which lead to further labyrinths below?”
“Great lord-”
“Oh, spew it forth! Else we shall all be a repast for Sarku’s worms! Someone approaches.”
Simanuya glanced anxiously around, counted domes. “That one, I have-ah-heard, master. The one with the triangular hole in it…”
Together they got the priest and his woman on their feet, she still weeping, he with a face as waxen as an incense-candle.
Harsan turned to Taluvaz. “We-I-must try to carry on Itk t’S’a’s mission. In her memory, as a Tii Petk — speak to the Underpeople-”
“That water has not flowed down the river yet. Come, pursuit is near.” Taluvaz took Harsan by the hand. He noted with distaste that the young man’s fingers were cold and clammy. It felt odd to touch anyone but one’s beloved, one’s children, or the others of one’s sodality in the Mysteries of the Temple of Qame’el. To lay a hand upon another person was a ritual act of personal identification in Livyanu.
Something would have to be done to bring this Harsan back to the reality of their predicament. Taluvaz paused to consider the alternatives: curse him, slap him, remonstrate with him-what else? He decided to continue kindness for the moment. “On, priest Harsan, this dome over here. There will be opportunities later. All things in their times.”
The others had already crawled through the narrow aperture into the dome. The floor within was covered with shattered pottery, stone tablets engraved with the powerful virile script of the First Imperium, heaps of fallen plaster and rubble, and a heavy, circular slab of stone that had once hidden the opening of a shaft in the centre of the floor.
Morkudz stooped nervously to hold his ball of radiance over this pit. “Those crevices-handholds?”
Simanuya growled, “Hold the light. I’ll show you how to get down.”
They descended, the glassblower first, then the Heheganu, Harsan, Tlayesha, and Taluvaz. Mirure came last, dagger clenched between her teeth.
“No haste,” Taluvaz whispered. “Our light will not be visible to any outside this dome, and they’ll look for other exits before starting to search each tomb-if they believe us to be here at all.”
The shaft was perhaps six or seven man-heights deep. At one point a tiny crawl-way led off to the side, but Simanuya forbade them to enter this, saying that it only became smaller and smaller until one could go no farther. Sharp ridges and projections of rock had been constructed around the circumference of this side-tunnel along its length at an inward-pointing angle, making it easy to move forward but difficult to go back. The bones of many previous violators of this place were heaped there, he added. Even Taluvaz forbore from inquiring how he knew.
The bottom of the pit was littered with shards of stone, the remains of a plug that had once sealed a low, horizontal passage. Two or three paces along this, and they entered another chamber. This was filled with crumbled pottery, the desiccated remains of wooden chests and boxes, standard-poles from which wisps of dim red and gold banners still hung, cult symbols of beaten gold, tables that had collapsed beneath the weight of their marble and onyx inlaid tops, and a myriad other things too numerous to see all at once in Morkudz’ flickering illumination.
Mirure gave a soft cry and bent to pick up a gold-hilted sword from the ruin. The blade showed black and pitted, but it was steel. In this dry, musty place it had corroded but little. Who knew how strong the metal was after the passage of so many centuries? Still, a sword was a sword.
“Your acquaintances did not exhaust this place completely,” Taluvaz observed coldly.
“Only the best jewellery and the finest artifacts are worth bearing forth,” said the glassblower. “That sword J'our warrior-girl found would have brought much money, had-ah, someone seen it.” He poked ruefully in a mouldering mass that might once have been a delicate casket of carven Ssar-wood and extracted a ring of massy gold and dark, somnolent peridots. This he pocketed with an apologetic smile. “It is a long and dangerous path back from here.”
“It would seem that you may know that path.”
“He is a veritable guidebook, Lord,” Morkudz put in.
“And, like any book long unread, he would benefit from a little dusting and a shaking out of his pages,” Taluvaz looked over at Mirure.
Simanuya qualed. “Well, it is true that I have been an industrious student of the past, Lord-of a practical nature, one must admit. Ah.
“Then you could lead us out of this catacomb if we can evade our foes long enough to send them haring off in some other direction?”
“I–I think so, master. Not easily, of course, but…” Morkudz made as though to spit. “My people know this Simanuya, Lord Taluvaz. He could lead us a dance around the innermost shrines of the ancient gods below Purdimal, and never a priest would see us! He is almost more native to this place than we, as were his vile fathers before him!”
It was Taluvaz’ turn to screw up his lips, but his mouth was dry and no spittle came. He addressed Simanuya. “And I suppose that you could lead us hence for some small but suitable recompense?” A thought struck him. “La, when we met the Sramuthu, were we not close upon the exit? Was that route not as familiar to you as your own greasy palm? How else do you-your ‘acquaintances’-find their way hither to relieve these poor corpses of their unused wealth?”
The glassblower dug a sandalled toe into the rubbish, bent to retrieve a small coin and rubbed it on the stained front of his leather vest; he tossed it back when it showed only the green verdigris of copper. “As you say, Lord. I am somewhat travelled in this part of the labyrinth. We would have soon come to the exit, had it not been that the fool Pe Choi chose to dispute passage with the Sramuthul' He let out a windy sigh. “Let those who follow us go by, and then I’ll take us out of here- into the very cellars of the Livyani Legate’s house or into the palace of the High Governor, as you please.”
“So you shall.” Taluvaz turned around. “What else is here, good Simanuya?”
“Three exits. Lord. That one leads to another storage chamber, now pillaged, alas, by disrespectful persons. The second-the one behind that clan-banner-goes to a similar room, and from thence a crawl-hole has been dug into a neighbouring tomb chamber. The sarcophagus there is overturned and sadly despoiled, and there is no way up into the guesting room and its shaft above. The third is promising, as I-ah-recall hearing. It opens into another sepulchre: several rooms like these. One can easily clamber up the exit shaft there.”
“We can stand in the passage between these two places?” Mirure asked. “My Lord, if our foes come down this shaft, we go up the second, and if instead they choose that one, we retreat up this one, the way we came.”
The plan of their refuge proved to be as Simanuya had described, and Mirure’s idea was adopted for lack of any better. Taluvaz strove to bring Harsan and Tlayesha back into the discussion and was relieved to find both of them responding. The resiliency of the young! There were compartments in the mind, he knew, and the death of Itk t’Sa must be shut into one of these in order for life to go on. Grief, mourning, vengeance-and final acceptance- could come later.
They explored the tombs quickly. All of the storage cubicles had been roughly looted; all were rubbish-filled,
