Alan Burt Akers [Dray Prescot 21] A Fortune for Kregen (pdf)

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from the edge to bring up the rear.
Light blossomed ahead, glowing orange and lurid through the darkness. I was still in rear as we
debouched into a cavern vaster than any we had yet encountered. Here the water ran into a lake that
stretched out of sight, beyond the fire-crystal walls streaming their angry orange light, past the weird
structures that broke the surface of the water with promises of diabolism.
Well, by all the Ibs of the Lily City! said Ariane. We will not meddle withthem !
Fastened by rusty chains and rusty rings at the stone-faced jetty lay seven ships, sunken, their
superstructures alone rising above the waters. They were carved and decorated grotesquely. Many
skeletons were chained to the oars. In the clear water hundreds of darting shapes sped dizzyingly. They
were not fish. Their jaws gaped with needle-teeth, and their eyes blazed. We drew back from the edge
with a shudder.
The gravel expanse began where the stone ended, and then more stone flags started again, some twenty
paces farther on.
No one offered to step upon the gravel.
Tarkshur, Strom Phrutius, Kov Loriman and, even, Prince Nedfar, would simply have told a slave to
attempt to cross. I looked at the lady Ariane nal Amklana and wondered what she would do.
Naghan! She spoke briskly. Tell some of the slaves to break a piece away from the nearest boat.
Throw it on the gravel.
Quidang, my lady! [2]
No slaves fell in the water as a piece of the rotten wood, the gilding peeling, was broken off. It was
thrown out onto the gravel. It sank out of sight, slowly but inevitably, and a nauseating stench puffed up in
black bubbles around it.
We cannot cross there, then!
And we do not go back
We cannot swim
The boats!
But each piece of wood we tried sank, for the stuff was heavy as lead, and rotten, and putrid with
decay.
Examine the wall for a secret door, commanded the lady.
As the slaves and retainers complied, she turned to me and bent a quizzical gaze on my harsh features.
You say you are a paktun of a kind, Jak. And you are Jak, merely Jak and nothing else?
Now the paktuns had called me notor, lord, without thought, and no man who is not a slave upon
Kregen goes about the world with only one name. Unless he has something to hide. And anyone with an
ounce of sense in his skull will invent a suitable name. I would not say I was Jak the Drang, for in Havilfar
no less than Hamal, that name would be linked with the Emperor of Vallia. So, without a smile, but as
graciously as I could, I said, If it please you, my lady, I am sometimes called Jak the Sturr.
Now sturr means a fellow who is mostly silent, and a trifle boorish, and, not to put too fine a point upon
it, not particularly favored by the gods in handsomeness. I picked the name out of the air, for, by Krun! I
was building up a pretty head of boorish anger and resentment at the tricks and traps of this Moder. By
Makki-Grodno s leprous left earlobe! Yes!
She laughed, a tinkle of silver in that gloomy torch-lit cavern.
Then you are misnamed, I declare, by Huvon the Lightning.
I did not smile. Huvon is a popular deity in Hyrklana, and I was not going to pretend to this woman that
I came from that island. If she asked where I hailed from...
And, Jak the Unsturr where in Kregen are you from?
Djanduin, my lady.
Djanduin! But you are not a Djang!
No. But I have my home there. The Djangs and I get along.
Yes. She wrinkled up her nose, considering. Yes. I think you and they would Obdjang and
Dwadjang both.
What, I wondered, as shouts rang out along the rocky wall, would she say if I told her I was the King of
Djanduin? For a start she would not believe me. And who would blame her?
We walked over the wall and Naghan the Doom indicated an opening in the wall. I would have
preferred to have found a boat and gone gliding down the stream to the outside world. But as no craft
were available we were in for another confounded corridor. Anyway, there were probably more
waterfalls, and things with jaws that were not fish, and all kinds of blood-sucking leeches and lampreys
and Opaz-alone knew what down the river...
The room into which we pressed at the end of the corridor presented us with another puzzle. I let them
get on with it.
Whatever it was Ariane had come here for, the scent was growing cold as far as I was concerned. Yet
every step we took could bring a horrible death, and therefore this Moder had to be taken seriously, very
seriously indeed, by Vox!
The room was some hundred paces wide and broad with a fire-crystal roof from which light poured. We
had entered by a square-cut opening which was the right-hand one of three. Across the room towered a
throne draped in somber purple. The throne itself was fashioned from gold, and surrounded by a frieze of
human skulls. Bones and skulls formed the decorations around the walls. On the throne sat the wizened
body of an old woman. She had, we all judged, died of chivrel, that wasting disease that makes of
Kregans old folk before their time.
Her robes were magnificent, cloth of gold and silver, studded with gems and laced with gold wire. Her
skeletal fingers were smothered in jeweled rings. Her crown blazed.
A series of nine white-marble steps led up to the throne. Each side, and tethered by iron links, crouched
two leems, motionless, their yellow eyes in their fierce wedge-shaped heads fastened upon us. The fangs
were exposed.
On the third step up to the throne lay the armored body of a Kataki. He had been a famous warrior, one
judged, a slave master, powerful, in his prime. Now he moldered away and he had not been dead for as
long as most of the Undead in this fearsome place. The silence hung as an intense weight upon us.
He is not, I judge, a Kaotim, observed Ariane. She was remarkably composed. He was an
adventurer, who failed the test.
We all nodded solemnly.
On seven tables spread with white linen down the left hand side of the chamber a feast lay spread out.
The viands looked succulent, the wines superb. Not one of us was foolish enough to touch a scrap of
food or a drop of drink.
Going as near as I felt sensible to the dead Kataki I saw that his face was black and his eye sockets
were empty.
A small spindly-legged table to the right of the lowest step contained on its mosaic surface a golden
handbell.
The lady Ariane paused before this little table, and looked down. She mused within her own thoughts
before she said lightly, To ring or not to ring? [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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