Tales From the Vulgar Unicorn Part 9

Into the chamber of living rock stepped the other suit of Hast-ra-kodi's armour.

This one fitted snugly about a man whom it utterly covered, creating a figure which had nothing human in it but its shape. The unknown metal glowed green, and the sword the figure bore free in one gauntleted hand blazed like a green torch.

'Do you come to wors.h.i.+p Dyareela?' the figure asked in a voice rusty with disuse.

Samlor set his lamp carefully on the flooring and sidled a pace away from it. 'I wors.h.i.+p Heqt,' he said, fingering his medallion with his left hand. 'And some others, perhaps. But not Dyareela.'

The figure laughed as it took a step forwards. 'I wors.h.i.+pped Heqt, too. I was her priest - until I came down into the tunnels to purge them of the evil they held.' The t.i.ttering laughter ricocheted about the stone walls like the sound caged weasels make. 'Dyareela put a penance on me in return for my life, my life, my life ... I wear this armour. That will be your penance too, Cirdonian: put on the other suit.'

'Let me pa.s.s, priest,' Samlor said. His hands were trembling. He clutched them together on his bosom. His fighting knife was sheathed.

'No priest,' the figure rasped, advancing.

'Man! Let me pa.s.s!'

'No man, not man,' said the thing, its blade rising and a flame that dimmed the oil lamp. 'They say you keep your knife sharp, suppliant - but did G.o.ds forge it? Can it shear the mesh of Hast-ra-kodi?'

Samlor palmed the bodkin-pointed push dagger from his wrist sheath and lunged, his left foot thrusting against the wall of the chamber. Armour or no armour, the priest was not a man of war. Samlor's left hand blocked the sword arm while his right slammed the edgeless dagger into the figure's chest. The bodkin slipped through the rings like thread through a needle's eye. The figure's mailed fist caught the Cirdonian and tore the skin over his cheek. Samlor had already twisted his steel clear. He punched it home again through armour, ribs, and the spongy lungs within.

The figure staggered back. The sword clanged to the stone flooring. 'What-?' it began. Something slopped and gurgled within the indestructible helmet. The dagger hilt was a dark tumour against the glowing mail. The figure groped vainly at the k.n.o.b hilt with both hands. 'What are you?' it asked in a whisper. 'You're not a man, not...' Muscles and sinews loosened as the brain controlling them starved for lack of oxygen. One knee buckled and the figure sprawled headlong on the stone. The green glow seeped out of it like blood from a rag, staining the flooring and dripping through it in turn.

'If you'd been a man in your time,' Samlor said harshly, 'I wouldn't have had to be here now.'

He rolled the figure over to retrieve his bodkin from the bone in which it had lodged. Haemorrhages from mouth and nose had smeared the front of the helmet. To Samlor's surprise, the suit of mail now gaped open down the front. It was ready to be stripped off and worn by another. The body within was shrivelled, its skin as white as that of the grubs which burrow beneath tree bark.

Samlor wiped his edgeless blade with thumb and forefinger. A tiny streak of blood was the only sign that it had slipped between metal lines to do murder.

The Cirdonian left both suits of armour in the room. They had not preserved other wearers. Wizard mail and its tricks were for those who could control it, and Samlor was all too conscious of his own humanity.

The pa.s.sageway bent, then formed a tee with a narrow corridor a hundred paces long. The corridor was closed at either end by living rock. Its far wall was, by contrast, artificial - basalt hexagons a little more than a foot in diameter across the flats. There was no sign of a doorway. Samlor remembered the iron grates clanging behind him what seemed a lifetime ago. He wiped his right palm absently on his thigh.

The caravan-master walked slowly down and back the length of the corridor, from end to end. The basalt plaques were indistinguishable one from another. They rose ten feet to a bare ceiling which still bore the tool-marks of its cutting.

Samlor stared at the basalt from the head of the tee, aware that the oil in his lamp was low and that he had no way of replenis.h.i.+ng it.

After a moment he looked down at the floor. Struck by a sudden notion, he opened his fly and urinated at the base of the wall. The stream splashed, then rolled steadily to the.right down the invisible trench worn by decades of footsteps.

Thirty feet down the corridor the liquid stopped and pooled, slimed with patches of dust that broke up the reflected lamplight.

Samlor examined with particular care the plaques just beyond the pool of urine.

The seeming music was louder here. He set his knife-point against one of the hexagons and touched his forehead to the b.u.t.t-cap. Clearly and triumphantly rolled the notes of a hydraulic organ, played somewhere in the complex of tunnels. Samlor sheathed the knife again and sighted along the stones themselves, holding the light above his head. The polished surface of one waist high plaque had been dulled 'by sweat and wear. Samlor pressed it and the next hexagon over hinged out of the wall.

The plaque which had lifted was only a hand's breadth thick, but what the lamp showed beyond it was a tunnel rather than a room: the remainder of the wall was of natural basalt columns, twenty feet long and lying on their sides. To go further, Samlor would have to crawl along a hole barely wide enough to pa.s.s his shoulders; and the other end was capped as well.

Samlor had spent his working life under an open sky. He had thus far borne the realization of the tons of rock above his head only by resolutely not thinking about it. This rat-hole left him no choice ... but he would go through it anyway. A man had to be able to control his mind, or he wasn't a man ...

The Cirdonian set the lamp on the floor. It would gutter out in a few minutes anyway. If he had tried to take it into the tunnel with him, it would almost immediately have sucked all the life from the narrow column of air among the hexagons. He drew his fighting knife and, holding both arms out in front of him, wormed through the opening. His body blocked all but the least glimmer of the light behind him, and the black basalt drank even that.

Progress was a matter of groping with boot toes and left palm, fighting the friction of his shoulders and pelvis sc.r.a.ping the rock. Samlor took shallow breaths, but even so before he had crawled his own length the air became stale.

It hugged him like a flabby blanket as he inched forwards in the darkness. The music of the water organ was all about him.

The knife-point clinked on the far capstone. Samlor squirmed a little nearer, prayed to Heqt, and thrust outwards with his left hand. The stone swung aside.

Breathable air flooded the Cirdonian with the rush of organ music.

Too relieved to be concerned at what besides air might wait beyond the opening, Samlor struggled out. He caught himself on his knuckles and left palm, then scrabbled to get his legs back under him. He had crawled through the straight side of a semicircular room. Panels in the arched ceiling fifty feet above his head lighted the room ochre. It was surely not dawn yet. Samlor realized he had no idea of what might be the ultimate source of the clear, rich light.

The hydraulic organ must still be at a distance from this vaulted chamber, but the music made the walls vibrate with its intensity. There was erotic love in the higher notes, and from the lower register came fear as deep and black as that which had settled in Samlor's belly hours before. l.u.s.t and mindless hatred lilted, rippling and bubbling through the sanctuary. Samlor's fist squeezed his dagger hilt in frustration. He was only the thickness of the edge short of running amok in this empty room. Then he caught himself, breathed deeply, and sheathed the weapon until he had a use for it.

An archway in the far wall suggested a door. Samlor began walking towards it, aware of the sc.r.a.pes the basalt had given him and the groin muscle he had pulled while wrestling with the figure in armour. I'm not as young as I was, he thought. Then he smiled in a way that meshed all too well with the pattern of the music: after all, he was likely through with the problems of ageing very soon.

The sanctuary was strewn with pillows and thick brocades. There was more substantial furniture also. Its patterns were unusual but their function was obvious in context. Samlor had crossed enough of the world to have seen most things, but his personal tastes remained simple. He thought of Samlane; fury lashed him again. This time instead of gripping the knife, he touched the medallion of Heqt. He kicked at a rack of switches. They clattered into a construct of ebony with silken tie-downs. Its three hollow levels could be adjusted towards one another by the pulleys and levers at one end of it.

Well, it wasn't for her, Samlor thought savagely. It was for the house, the honour of the Lords Kodrix of Cirdon. And perhaps -perhaps for Heqt. He'd never been a religious man, always figured it'd be best if the G.o.ds settled things among themselves ... but there were some things that any man-Well, that was a lie. Not any man, just Samlor hil Samt for sure and probably no other fool so d.a.m.ned on the whole continent. Well, so be it then; he was a fool and a fanatic, and before the night finished he'd have spilled the blood of a so-called demon or died trying.

Because the illumination was from above, Samlor had noticed the bas reliefs only as patterns of shadows along the walls. The detail struck him as he approached the archway. He stopped and looked carefully.

The carvings formed a series of panels running in bands across the polished stone. The faces in each tableau were modelled with a precise detail that made it likely they were portraits, though none of the personages were recognizable to Samlor. He peered up the curving walls and saw the bands continuing to the roof vaults. How and when they had been carved was beyond estimation; the caravan-master was not even sure he could identify the stone, creamy and mottled but seemingly much harder than marble.

Time was of indeterminable importance. Knowing that he might have only minutes to live, Samlor began following some of the series of reliefs. One group of carvings made clear the unguessed unity between the 'sorcerer' Hast-ra-kodi and the 'G.o.ddess' Dyareela. Samlor stared at the conclusion of the pattern, swallowing hard but not speaking. He was unutterably glad he had not donned either suit of mail when he might have done so.

The panels reeked of bloodshed and repression. Kings and priests had stamped out the wors.h.i.+p of Dyareela a hundred times in a hundred places. The rites had festered in the darkness, then burst out again - cancers metastasizing from the black lump here in the vaults beneath Sanctuary. A shrine in the wasteland before it was a city; and even as a city, a brawling, stinking, leaderless hive where no one looked too hard for Evil's heart since Evil's limbs enveloped all.

Alar hil Aspar - a brash outsider, a reformer flushed with his triumph over brigandage - had at last razed the fane of Dyareela here. Instead of salt, he had sown the ruins with a temple to Heqt, the G.o.ddess of his upbringing. Fool that he was. Alar had thought that ended it.

Just above the archway, set off from the courses around it by a border of ivy leaves, was a cameo that caught Samlor's eye as he returned sick and exhausted by what he had been looking at. A file of women led by a piper cavorted through the halls of a palace. The women carried small animals and icons of obviously more than symbolic significance, but it was to the piper's features that Samlor's gaze was drawn. The Cirdonian swore mildly and reached up to touch the stone. It was smooth and cold to his fingertips.

So much fit. Enough, perhaps.

Samlor stepped through the double-hung doors closing the archway. The crossbowman waiting beyond with his eyes on the staircase screamed and spun around. The patterned screen that would have concealed the ambush from someone descending the stairs was open to the archway - but judging from the bowman's panic, the mere sight of something approaching from the sanctuary would probably have flushed him anyway.

Samlor had survived too many attacks ever to be wholly unprepared for another.

He lunged forwards, shouting to further disconcert the bowman. The screen was toppling as the bowman jerked back from the fingers of Samlor's left hand thrusting for his eyes. The bowstring slapped and the quarrel spalled chips from the archway before ricocheting sideways through a swinging door-panel. Samlor, sprawled across his attacker's lower legs, slashed at the other's face with the knife he had finally cleared. The bowman cried out again and parried with the stock of his own weapon. Samlor's edge thudded into the wood like an axe in a firelog. Three of the bowman's fingers flew out into the room.

Unaware of his maiming, the bowman tried to club Samlor with his weapon. It slipped away from him. He saw the blood-spouting stumps of his left hand, the index finger itself half severed. Fright had made the bowman scream; mutilation now choked his voice with a rush of vomit.

Samlor squirmed forwards, pinning his attacker's torso with his own. He wrestled the crossbow out of the unresisting right hand. There was a pouch of iron quarrels at the bowman's belt, but Samlor ignored them: they were on the left side and no longer a threat. The gagging man wore the scarlet and gold livery of Regli's household.

The Cirdonian glanced quickly around the room, seeing nothing but a helical staircase reaching towards more lighted panels a hundred feet above. He waggled his knife a foot from his captive's eyes, then brought the point of it down on the other's nose. 'You tried to kill me,' he said softly. 'Tell me why or you're missing more than some fingers only.'

'Sabellia, Sabellia,' the maimed retainer moaned. 'You've ruined me now, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d.'

Samlor flicked his blade sideways, knowing that the droplet of blood that sprang out would force the other's eyes to cross on it. They would fill with its red proximity. 'Talk to me, little man,' the caravan-master said. 'Why are you here?'

The injured man swallowed bile. 'My lord Regli,' he said, closing his eyes to avoid the blood and the dagger point. 'He said you'd killed his wife. He sent us all after you.'

Samlor laid the dagger point on the other's left eyesocket. 'How many?' he demanded.

'A dozen,' gabbled the other. 'All the guards and us coachmen besides.'

'The Watch?'

'Oh, G.o.ds, get that away from my eye,' the retainer moaned. 'I almost shook-'

Samlor raised the blade an inch. 'Not the Watch,' the other went on. 'My lord wants to handle this himself for the, the scandal.'

'And where are the others?' the point dipped, brushed an eyelash, and rose again harmlessly.

The wounded man was rigid. He breathed through his mouth, quick gasps as if a lungful of air would preserve him in the moment the knife-edge sawed through his windpipe. 'They all thought you'd run for Cirdon,' he whispered. 'You'd left your cloak behind. I slipped it away, took it to a S'danzo I know. She's a liar like all of them, but sometimes not... I told her I'd pay her for the truth of where I'd find you, and I'd pay her for nothing; but I'd take a lie out other hide if six of my friends had to hold down her blacksmith buddy. She, she described where I'd meet you. I recognized it, I'd taken the Lady Samlane-'

'Here?' Samlor's voice and his knife both trembled. Death slid closer to the room than it had been since the first slash and scramble of the fight.

'Lord, lord,' the captive pleaded. 'Only this far. I swear by my mother's bones!'

'Go on, then.' The knife did not move.

The other man swallowed. 'That's all. I waited here - I didn't tell anybody.

Lord Regli put a thousand royals on your head... and... and the S'danzo said I'd live through the meeting. Oh G.o.ds, the s.l.u.t, the s.l.u.t...'

Samlor smiled. 'She hasn't lied to you yet,' he said. The smile was gone, replaced with a bleakness as cruel as the face of a glacier. 'Listen,' he went on, rising to one knee and pinning his prisoner by psychological dominance in the stead of his body weight. 'My sister asked me for a knife. I told her I'd leave her one if she gave me a reason to.'

A spasm wracked the Cirdonian's face. His prisoner winced at the trembling of the dagger point. 'She said the child wasn't Regli's,' Samlor went on. 'Well, who ever thought it would be, the way she sniffed around? But she said a demon had got it on her ... and that bothered even her at the last. Being used, she said. Being used. She'd tried to have it aborted after she thought about things for a while, but a priest of Heqt was waiting with Regli in the shop where she'd gone to buy the drugs. After that, she wasn't without somebody watching her, asleep or awake. The Temple of Heqt wanted the child born. Samlane said she'd use the knife to end the child when they pulled it from her ... and I believed that, though I knew she'd be in no shape for knifings just after she'd whelped.

'Seems she knew that too, but she was more determined than even I'd have given her credit for being. She could give a lot of folks points for stubborn, my sister.'

Samlor shook himself, then gripped a handful of the captive's tunic. He ripped the garment with his knife. 'What are you doing?' the retainer asked in concern.

'Tying you up. Somebody'11 find you here in time. I'm going to do what I came here for, and when it's done I'll leave Sanctuary. If I've got that option still.'

Sweat was was.h.i.+ng streaks in the blood-flecks on the captive's face. 'Sweet G.o.ddess, don't do that,' he begged. 'Not tied, not -that. You haven't been here when ... others were here. You-' the injured man wiped his lips with his tongue.

He closed his eyes. 'Kill me yourself, if you must,' he said so softly it was almost a matter for lip-reading to understand him. 'Don't leave me here.'

Samlor stood. His left hand was clenched, his right holding the dagger pointed down at a slight angle. 'Stand up,' he ordered. Regli's man obeyed, wide-eyed.

He braced his back against the wall, holding his left hand at shoulder height but refusing to look at its ruin. The severed arteries had pinched off. Movement had dislodged some of the scabs, but the blood only oozed instead of spurting as it had initially. 'Tell Regli that I'm mending my family's honour in my way, as my sister seems to have done in hers,' Samlor said. 'But don't tell him where you found me - or how. If you want to leave here now, you'll swear that.' 'I swear!' the other babbled. 'By anything you please!' The caravan-master's smile flickered again. 'Did you ever kill anyone, boy?' he asked conversationally.

'I was a coachman,' the other said with a nervous frown. 'I - I mean ... no.'

'Once I pulled a man apart with hot pincers,' Samlor continued quietly. 'He was headman of a tribe that had taken our toll payment but still tried to cut out a couple of horses from the back of our train. I slipped into the village that night, jerked the chief out of his bed, and brought him back to the laager. In the morning I fixed him as a display for the rest.' The Cirdonian reached forwards and wiped his dagger clean on the sleeve of the other man's tunic.

'Don't go back on your word to me, friend,' he said.

Regli's man edged to the helical staircase. As he mounted each of the first dozen steps, he looked back over his shoulder at the Cirdonian. When the pursuit or thrown knife did not come as he had feared or expected, the retainer ran up the next twenty steps without pausing. He looked down from that elevation and said, 'One thing, master.' .

'Say it,' responded Samlor.

'They opened the Lady Samlane to give the child separate burial.'

'Yes?'

'And it didn't look to be demon sp.a.w.n, as you say,' Regli's man called. 'It was a perfect little boy. Except that your knife was through its skull.'

Samlor began to climb the steps, ignoring the scrabbling slippers of the man above him on the twisting staircase. The door at the top thudded, leaving nothing of the hapless ambusher but splotches of his blood on the railing.

Should have stuck to his horses, Samlor thought. He laughed aloud, well aware that the epitaph probably applied to himself as well. Still, he had a better notion than that poor fool of a coachman of what he was getting into ... though the G.o.ds all knew how slight were his chances of getting out of it alive. If the fellow he was looking for was a real magician, rather than someone like Samlor himself who had learned a few spells while knocking around the world, it was over for sure.

The door at the top of the stairs pivoted outward. Samlor tested it with a fingertip, then paused to steady his heart and breathing. As he stood there, his left hand sought the toad-faced medallion.

The dagger in his right hand pointed down, threatening nothing at the moment but - ready.

He pushed the door open.

On the other side, the secret opening was only a wall panel. Its frescoes were geometric and in no way different from those of the rest of the temple hallway.

To the left, the hall led to an outside door heavily banded with iron. From his livery and the mutilation of his outflung left hand, the coachman could be recognized where he lay. The rest of the retainer appeared to have been razored into gobbets of flesh and bone, no other one of them as large as what remained of the left hand. Under the circ.u.mstances, Samlor had no sympathy to waste on the corpse.

The Cirdonian sighed and turned to the right, stepping through the hangings of bra.s.s beads into the sanctuary of Heqt. The figure he expected was waiting for him.

Soft, grey dawnlight crept through hidden slits in the dome. Mirrors had been designed to light the grinning, gilded toad-face of Heqt at the top of the dome beneath the spire. Instead, the light was directed downwards onto the figure on the floral mosaic in the centre of the great room. The hair of the waiting man glowed like burning wire. 'Did the night keep you well, friend?' Samlor called as he stepped forwards.

'Well,' agreed the other with a nod. There was no sign of the regular priests and acolytes of Heqt. The room brightened as if the light fed on the beauty of the waiting man. 'As I see she kept you, Champion of Heqt.' - 'No champion,' Samlor said, taking another step as casual as the long knife dangling from his right hand. 'Just a man looking for the demon who caused his sister's death. I didn't have to look any farther than the bench across the street last night, did I?'

The other's voice was a rich tenor. It had a vibrancy that had been missing when he and Samlor had talked of Heqt and Dyareela the night before. 'Heqt keeps sending her champions, and I ... I deal with them. You met the first of them, the priest?'

'I came looking for a demon,' the Cirdonian said, walking very slowly, 'and all it was was a poor madman who had convinced himself that he was a G.o.d.'

'I am Dyareela.'

'You're a man who saw an old carving down below that looked like him,' Samlor said. 'That worked on your mind, and you worked on other people's minds. ... My sister, now, she was convinced her child would look like a man but be a demon.

She killed it in her womb. The only way that she'd have been able to kill it, because they'd never have let her near it, Regli's heir, and her having tried abortion. But such a waste, because it was just a child, only a madman's child.'

The sun-crowned man gripped the throat of his white tunic and ripped downwards with unexpected strength. 'I am Dyareela,' it said. Its right breast was pendulous, noticeably larger than the left. The male genitals were of normal size, flaccid, hiding the v.u.l.v.a that must lie behind them. 'The one there,' it said, gesturing towards the wall beyond which the coachman lay, 'came to my fane to shed blood without my leave.' The naked figure giggled. 'Perhaps I'll have you wash in his blood. Champion,' it said. 'Perhaps that will be the start of your penance.'

'A mad little hermaphrodite who knows a spell or two,' Samlor said. 'But there'll be no penance for any again from you, little one. You're fey, and I know a spell for your sort. She wasn't much, but I'll have your heart for what you led my sister to.'

'Will you conjure me by Heqt, then. Champion?' asked the other with its arms spread in welcome and laughter in its liquid voice. 'Her temple is my temple, her servants are my servants ... the blood other champions is mine for a sacrifice!'

Samlor was twenty feet away, a full turn and half a turn. He clutched his medallion left-handed, hoping it would give him enough time to complete his spell. 'Do I look like a priest to talk about G.o.ds?' he said. 'Watch my dagger, madman.'

The other smiled, waiting as Samlor c.o.c.ked the heavy blade. It caught a stray beam of sunlight. The double edge flashed black dawn.

'By the Earth that bore this,'