like circumstances. They played Jikalla and gambled with knucklebones and dice and some pulled out Jikaida boards with games in progress. This proved they had been here some time. Presently I was able to lounge off, with a few coarse remarks, and follow where the priests led down a narrow corridor, smoking with cheap mineral oil lamps, to a moldering door at the far end. Here guards waited, men in uniform. I waited also, until an appropriate moment, and then the guards went to sleep standing up. I propped them against the architrave and eased the door open, went through like a leem and shut it silently. Beyond the door the corridor continued, ominous, quiet, with the flat tang of oil lamps burning from brass hung bowls.
Creeping along, I listened at the closed doors lining the passage. Not a sound disturbed the silence. The corridor opened out into a vast shadowy area, lit by vagrant shafts of light falling from a ceiling hazy and distant, festooned with creepers and hanging vines. Lamps and torches shone about the walls. A circle of mighty stone columns upheld the cavern roof. Above that roof the people of Vondium went about their business all unknowing of the chasm beneath their feet, or of the squat and hideous idol crouching on its black obsidian plinth at the center. The image was of a toad-thing, enormous, crouched, malignant. But its eye sockets gaped emptily, the jewels they had once held long since gouged away. The stone was cracked and flaked away and one of the front clawed arms was snapped off and lying in a scatter of detritus. This, then, was the pseudo-god Hjemur. No wonder honest folk had abandoned his worship!
There was no sign of the priests. If this was to be the place of the temple — and I doubted that — a labyrinth of warrens would stretch out ahead. I went forward cautiously, moving from shadow to shadow.
Spiderwebbed niches along the ebon walls held crumbled statues, tentacles and tusks and obscene conjurations cracked and broken and tumbled away. The blight of powerful superstition had gripped an enslaved people and here lay all that remained of that once-mighty devilry. I passed the profane rotting idols and my fists gripped the bamboo and I prowled, I think, as a leem prowls seeking prey among the chunkrah herds.
Shadows ahead, dark forms, moving in the dim lighting from guttering torch and wavering lamp, halted me, motionless, scarcely breathing, ripe for abrupt massacre.
A small party of masichieri in black armor, led by a deldar, passed uneasily. They gripped their weapons and their eyes roved. They spoke in low whispers, oppressed by the evil of this ancient and profane shrine.
“Come the Black Day, dom, and I’ll never go down a cellar again!”
“Come the Black Day and I’ll be drunk for a sennight.”
“Come the Black Day and I’ll take my pay and be off to Menaham before Armipand can jump!”
Yes, they were uneasy here, these rough tough sadistic mercenaries. They talked of guard duty, of dopa and women and were gone, walking carefully through the torch-lit shadows. I let them go. They were masichieri, mercenaries for hire; I needed to get the scrawny throat of their paymaster between my fists.
A sudden outcry ahead made me halt again. The sound of scuffles, blows, the grunted cursing of men in action, left me unmoved. Then a woman’s scream rang shockingly through that cavern of abominations. I could hold back no longer. Fool that I was, I ran and hurled myself through the crimson and ocher shadows, whipped out the sword from the bamboo and raced on, and found nothing. No sign of men or women struggling met my gaze as I searched. Had I heard some phantasmal echo of infinite evil from ancient times? Did the foul deeds perpetrated here linger on?
The torchlights near the toad-thing had revealed dark streaks running down the obsidian slab. The marks of dark blood looked recent; there might be a thousand seasons between now and the time the sacrifice screamed and shrieked until the jagged glass knife slashed his or her throat. Prowling on around this vast cavern I saw hideous things, abominations, things that were never meant to exist in the sweet sunshine of Zim and Genodras. A strange sliding clicking drew my instant attention to a jagged wall where the naked rock gleamed with the green of lichen. Shadows flittered like bats. Pressed close against a slimy pillar forming one of a rectangle enclosing a small side chapel — and the very word “chapel” brings a blasphemy upon the evil of that place — I saw a rope ladder swinging down from the darkness above. At its foot a man stood, grasping the end, shaking it. The wooden rungs clicked against protrusions in the stone.
He turned slightly and I saw him.
His powerful numim frame was clad in brilliant armor, gilded iron corselet and greaves. His helmet glistened. He held his clanxer in his right hand as his left hand released the ladder. He swung about, big and burly and fighting grim. I felt only the smallest surprise.
About to step forward and say, “And what brings you here, Rafik Avandil?” I saw the slinking shadows at his back, stealing up from the dimness between torches. I saw the black and silver and the quick glitter of weapons, and so I cried, “Your back, Rafik! Beware!”
He swung about like the great lion-man he was, and the first leaping shadow slashed and clanged a great gong note from Rafik’s helmet. A gigantic buffet sent the man sprawling back. His comrades recoiled. They gathered themselves. Without thought, I flung myself forward to stand back to back with Rafik Avandil. A noose clung about my leg and I tripped headlong.
A figure bent over me. Hands gripped my throat. A harsh, husky voice said, “Not another word, dom!”
I could not speak. I levered up and other hands bore down on me. I was lifted like a log of lumber. A crazy vision of Rafik running fleetly along past blasphemous statues — he vanished with a wink of bright armor quenched by the shadows — the sound of men breathing hoarsely by me, a sudden exclamation. The keen edge of a knife hovered under my chin. I could just see it. It was a thick, heavy long-knife, and it would slice through my windpipe as a butcher cuts up chops.
“Hold!” The men carrying me upended me and slammed me on my feet so my neck snapped my head forward and stars flew. I dragged the right-hand man around and smashed him into the left-hand one and a very hard, very sharp point came from nowhere and rested against my throat.
“Stand still, Prince! By Vox! You’ll have us all killed!”
I stared owlishly.
In the erratic illumination I saw Naghan Vanki standing before me looking charged with rage, emotion almost making his features unrecognizable. Always before he had been smooth and bland and unremarkable.
“The cramph got away, jen,” said one of his men, coming up. They all wore the black and silver, hard and supple leather, with steel bands and bracers. Vanki kept the point of his rapier at my throat. His men hung onto my arms.
“Keep silence, Prince. May I tell you something? You are a dead man unless-”
“I thought you served the racters, Vanki. Don’t you know they are leagued with me now?” It was a ploy.
He started and then his face assumed that blank, indifferent look. This was the man I suspected had drugged me and thrown me into a thorny-ivy bush to perish miserably in the hostile territories. I had the desire to know, if I was to die now.
I asked him.
“You may be a prince now, the Prince Majister; then you were a savage clansman with ideas beyond his station. No one wanted you to marry the Princess Majestrix.”
“In that you lie, Vanki. The Princess Majestrix wished it with all her heart.”
“Aye! That is why when the other wanted to slit your throat there and then I counseled moderation. You owe your life to me, Prince.”
“Alone, in the hostile territories, on foot, with the Klackadrin to cross?”
“You are here, alive, now.”
“And for how much longer? How much is the cramph Makfaril paying you.” I stopped suddenly. Then I gasped more than I liked as I spoke: “You, Naghan Vanki, are Makfaril!”
Without any change of expression, he said, “You are a prince, yet you are a clansman still, aye, and an onker!”
“Someone comes!” said one of his men, hissing from the shadows. In a bunch we melted into the darkness beyond the pillared chapel. Black and silver clothes, black and white for the racters, black feathers for the Chyyanists. I felt then that if Naghan Vanki, who on his own admission had connived at my death, was not Makfaril, then he was very high in the hierarchy and in all probability knew who the leader of the Chyyanists was.
It was pointless for me to call out. The masichieri would be less merciful than Naghan Vanki. They’d have slit my throat and gleed in the doing of it, back there in the hostile territories. Without binding me in iron chains or stout lesten-hide ropes a man can only hold me for so long. There will come a time when he may be taken. I gave no thought to the silent ferocity of these hired men of Vanki’s. They kept a perfect stillness. Perhaps Rafik Avandil had
