Dancer's Lament

Prelude

THE PRIZE WAS his and none would rob him of it. A recent shudder of the earth had exposed it here on the Seti Plains, close by the Great Cliff, south of the river Idryn, near to where Burn herself is said to rest.

Uneasily, most obviously.

A small twinge, or minor itch, or passing flatulence from the Great Goddess had shaken the ground not more than a fortnight ago. And now this tunnel, or cave, revealed here in this narrow rocky cleft. His find. True, he’d only come across it because he’d caught a hint of movement out there on the plains and so had clambered down into the gorge out of prudent care. The plains curse, the man-eating beast Ryllandaras, was never far.

So it was his. Yet not his alone.

Someone else was lurking about: a sneaky fellow hard to pin down. And coming from him, from Dorin Rav, that was saying a lot. Not in all Quon or Tali had he met his match in stealth or murder. The so-called ‘Assassin Guilds’ he’d dug up these last years had proved themselves no more than gangs of brutes and thugs for hire. Not one true practitioner among them.

He’d been disgusted.

So much for the exploits of the thief queen Lady Apsalar, or daring Topaz, the favourites of so many jongleur songs. Petty greed, sadistic cruelty, and a kind of slope-browed cunning were all he’d found among the criminal underworld – if that was what you could call it. All of which, he had to allow, was at least the minimal requirement for extortion, blackmail, theft, and murder for hire.

Not that that had stopped him from profiting from their ineptitude. A few well-placed thrusts and their stashes of coin rode tightly wrapped in a baldric across his chest – a baldric that also supported a selection of graded blades and lengths of rope.

He was of the opinion that one can never carry too much rope.

He passed the best of the night crouched on his haunches in a thick stand of desert tall-grass, patiently watching that dark opening, and saw nothing. A hunting snake slithered over one sandalled foot. Midges and chiggers feasted upon him. A lizard climbed his shirt, lost its footing on his sweat-slick neck and fell inside the padded, cloth-covered armour vest he wore next to his skin.

Yet he hadn’t twitched. And still his rival had not revealed himself. Then, just as the sun kissed the lips of the narrow crevice ridge high above, a rock clattered close to the shadowed gap.

He ground his teeth. Somehow the bastard had slipped past. Very well. He’d follow. Dog the man until whatever lay ahead was revealed. The least the fellow could do was make himself useful by falling first into any hidden dangers.

He edged out to the mouth of the gap and, hunched, a blade ready, felt his way down. Just within, he paused to press himself against one wall of jagged broken rock. He listened and waited for his vision to adjust. A brush of cloth on stone sighed ahead. He felt his way onward.

A descending slope of loose broken rock ended at a narrow corridor of set blocks. Ancient, these, gigantic and of a dark stone he didn’t recognize. He searched the gloom; where had the Hood-damned bastard gone? Then a dim ringing ahead as of metal on stone, quickly muted. He pressed himself to a wall – could he be seen outlined by the faint light behind? He darted forward.

The corridor ended at a wall that supported a door in the form of a slab of rock of similar origin. The slab stood at an angle aslant of the portal, a slim opening running top to bottom, at the foot a gap where a slim man or woman might just squirm within.

Damn the fellow for winning through first!

He knelt at the fissure, only to flinch away from the mouldy stink of things long dead. The still air was cold too, unaccountably so. Crystals of frost glittered on the rock. Wincing, he slipped one arm through. His other hand brushed the thick door slab. A nest of symbols carved in the naked rock writhed beneath his fingers.

Wards. Glyphs. A tomb. Or hoard. Out here? In the middle of nowhere?

Yet this had not stopped his rival.

He slid onward. Rising, brushing away the accumulated dust of centuries, it seemed to him passing strange that fine sand and grit should still choke the gap. Such speculations, however, were driven away by a wan golden glow coming from further ahead. There’s the bastard and now’s your chance.

He drew another blade and slid along the wall. His breath plumed in the oddly chill air.

It was a low-roofed chamber: a lost cellar or tomb, perhaps. Gloom swallowed its exact size and shape, which might have been circular. The low flame from a single clay oil-lamp provided the only faint light. Hoar frost glittered on what of the walls he could see. The lamp rested on a monolithic raised stone platform at the chamber’s centre. A large figure, a near giant, sat at the block, slouched forward, arms resting on the surface. Its hair was long and iron-grey and hung in tangled lengths that obscured its features. Before it on the slab sat the remains of a mummified animal of some sort – possibly a monkey, Dorin thought.

Where was his rival? Hiding behind the stone? Must have nerves of iron.

He drew a breath to call the fellow out, but almost bit his tongue as the mummified animal moved. The thing reached out to sort among the dusty objects cluttering the stone. With a nimble long-fingered hand, it picked up what looked like a slim wooden tile and waved it through the air, showering dust and bright crystals of ice everywhere.

The corpse lashed out to slam the tile to the slab and Dorin grunted his shock.

‘Don’t meddle,’ the corpse breathed in a voice like creaking wood. It raised its head, revealing outsized canines and bright gleaming eyes. ‘I smell a breeze,’ it said. ‘That crack that lets in mice and cockroaches . . . and other pests . . .’

The tall figure shifted its head to fix those unnatural eyes upon Dorin. ‘Come in, then – since you have already.’ The being’s gaze shifted slightly to the left. ‘You too.’

Dorin spun to see his rival there just to one side.

Behind him all this time! A damned mage!

The fellow was short and young, dark-skinned – Dal Honese. Young? Well, no older than I. And he was an ugly lad with a scrunched-up face and a sad patchy attempt at a beard and moustache. He wore loose dark robes, dirty and tattered, and carried a walking stick – though he didn’t grip it like a warrior. In answer to Dorin’s scowl he flashed uneven yellow teeth.

Dorin shifted aside to face them both.

‘You are Jaghut,’ the newcomer called to their host, pleased with himself.

The huge man’s expression remained unchanged. He lowered his head. ‘I should think that obvious.’

Dorin took satisfaction from the fall of the smirk from the Dal Hon’s face.

The creature – a Jaghut, or Jag, such as Dorin had heard of in stories – waved them in. ‘Come, come. Make yourselves at home. We have all the time in the world.’

That gave Dorin pause. But not so his rival, who pushed in without hesitation. The youth bent over the huge block to study the scattered wooden tiles. ‘You are doing a reading,’ he announced.

‘Another stunning deduction,’ the Jag observed, acidly.

Dorin edged up behind his rival. Why so bravely, or foolishly, offer his back now? Because he knows I’ll not act in front of the Jag. Cheap courage, that. He made a point of standing close to the Dal Hon’s side. Let him sweat.

Squinting in the dim lamplight the young fellow was studying the dust-covered cards, tapping a thin finger to his lips. ‘This casting has defeated you for some time.’

One thick brow arched ever so slightly. The lips drew back further from the sallow canines. ‘Indeed.’

Dorin swept a quick glance over the wooden cards – artefacts as oversized as their host. The shadowed figures and images painted on their faces held little interest for him. His mother had once hired a reader to foretell his future . . . the woman’s screams had woken all the neighbours. After that, there’d been no more readings for Dorin Rav.

The dark-skinned youth reached out for the nearest wooden slat but the animal – more than a monkey or diminutive ape, Dorin now saw; possibly, then, a nacht of the southern isles – batted his arm aside. It chattered something that sounded eerily like ‘Doan medo’. The Dal Hon answered by hitting its hand away. The two then actually fell into a slapping fight there over the stone, until the Jag snarled his irritation and pushed the creature out of the youth’s reach, from where it busied itself making faces at the lad, who responded with scrunched-up leers of his own.

Dorin mustered his courage to clear his throat and ask, ‘What did you mean by “all the time in the world”?’

The Jag inclined his head as if acknowledging the justness of the question. ‘This structure is my retreat. None may be allowed to know of its existence.’ He raised a hand in a near apology. ‘Now that you are here . . . you may never leave.’

Dorin did his best to keep his expression neutral – to hide his thoughts – but a smile crept over the being’s wide mouth, entirely baring his canines, and he laughed, low and sardonic. ‘You would not succeed, my friend.’ He tapped a thick yellow nail, more like a talon, to the platform.

Squinting, Dorin examined the solid block of dark rock, some three paces in length. The surface was inscribed in an intricate pattern of swirls and those grooves were inlaid with silver. A humanoid shape lying flat, encircled by a series of complicated wards and sigils . . .

Dorin stepped away from what had resolved itself into a stone sarcophagus. This one’s?

The Dal Hon meanwhile had set out exploring the chamber, poking his stick into the distant edges. ‘Well then,’ the lad mused from the dark, ‘I suppose we should make ourselves at home.’ He found a shelf along one wall, jabbed the stick at it, and objects tumbled, crashing loudly in the confined quarters.

The Jag scowled his annoyance. ‘Must you?’

‘Sorry.’ The youth raised a small pot fashioned of plain brown earthenware, now cracked. He held it out. ‘Your most precious treasures, I assume?’

The Jag growled from somewhere deep within his throat. ‘Grave offerings, I’ll have you know.’

The Dal Hon returned to his explorations. The nacht had jumped from the sarcophagus and now stalked along behind the youth, mimicking his every move. Dorin put his back to one wall next to where the tunnel entered the chamber. Should I try the door? Might as well. He retreated up the tunnel. In the almost absolute dark, he felt along the door slab; the gap was there, but it now seemed far too slim for his shoulders. He’d slipped through that? How in the name of the Queen of Mystery . . .

Returning to the chamber, he found the Jag once more bent over the wooden cards. A frown of puzzlement now creased his long face.

‘Is this your bed?’ the Dal Hon called from somewhere in the darkness.

The Jag let out a long hissed breath and pressed his fingers to his temples, his elbows on the stone sarcophagus. He growled, ‘I suppose I shall have to kill you now.’

The youth emerged from the gloom, his walking stick tapping. He spoke lightly, as if disinterested, ‘But then you would just be alone again, wouldn’t you?’

The fellow came alongside, and Dorin whispered, heated, ‘What have you got us into?’

A vexed look from the lad – no younger than he, Dorin had to remind himself. ‘I was following you.’

Dorin clenched his teeth. ‘I thought I was following you—’

‘Please,’ the Jag rumbled, ‘must I now endure your bickering?’

Dorin edged open his cloak to reveal his many knives.

The Dal Hon’s brows rose. ‘You could?’

‘If anyone.’

‘If you say so. Not my field.’

‘And just what is your field?’

‘Oh, a little of this, a little of that . . . Here, I found this.’ He slipped a thin wooden box between them.

Dorin tucked it away. ‘What is it?’

‘I have absolutely no idea.’ And he wandered off again.

Dorin found himself becoming just as irritated by the skinny fellow as their host.

The Dal Hon now gazed over the hunched Jag’s shoulder, studying the cards. As Dorin watched, the nacht scampered up the young man’s back until its wizened ugly hairy face peered over the youth’s own shoulder. The sight of those three serried faces, each uglier and smaller than the one below, made Dorin feel dizzy, and rather queasy.

‘The cards are unsettled,’ the Dal Hon announced.

Massaging his brow with his fingertips, the Jag stifled his annoyance. ‘Indeed.’

‘You have ones here I have never seen.’

‘My manufacture.’

‘They appear not to be assigned.’

The Jag slapped his hands to the sarcophagus lid with a crack of bone on stone. ‘Do you mind!’

The Dal Hon flinched away, sniffed. ‘Just trying to help.’

‘Jis trya alp,’ the nacht chattered.

The young mage tried to slap the creature away but it was far too quick for him, and it bounded off mouthing something that sounded entirely too similar to laughter. The youth now stalked the beast, his walking stick cocked like a club.

‘What is to become of us?’ Dorin asked.

The Jag had returned to massaging his forehead. ‘A welcome diversion, I thought,’ he said from behind his hands. ‘Make the time pass more quickly. Already I regret it.’

Somewhere in the dark a hissing squalling fight had broken out.

The Jag lunged to his feet, gesturing. ‘I’m trying to think!’ A wave of power pounded through the chamber, slamming Dorin to the wall and squeezing the breath from him. The entire structure groaned and shifted. Dust flew up in a storm, obscuring everything. Dorin squinted into the haze, coughing and gasping. He held his aching chest, unable to straighten. Ye gods! A mere fit of pique almost crushes me!

Off in the dark, a wet coughing eased into a laboured bubbling moaning that faded into a last gasping death-rattle. The little nacht emerged from the swirling dust. It gave an almost human shrug. The Jag turned to Dorin and raised a finger. ‘Excuse me one moment.’ The huge creature stood, almost hunched double, his head brushing the shadowed stonework of the ceiling, and lumbered off. Dorin and the nacht watched him disappear. After a time came a gruff bemused growl: ‘He’s not here . . .’

A stab of anger, and envy, lanced through Dorin. Damn the fellow! Playing with us all along! I’ll have his head. No one does this to Dorin Rav. The nacht happened to be standing just in front of him then, and in an instant he decided what he’d do. And why not? I’m as good as dead anyway . . .

He snatched up the beast by its neck and pressed a blade under its chin. ‘Come out!’ he shouted. ‘I have your familiar, or pet, or whatever it is!’

The animal froze for an instant, perhaps in surprise, or disbelief. Then it went limp. It hung in his arms as if dead already and Dorin had to hitch it up to steady it. Damned heavy bastard.

The Jag stepped out of the gloom. ‘You have my what?’

‘Let me out or I’ll slit its throat.’

The same strange unreadable smile climbed the Jag’s features and he cocked his head. ‘You . . . kill . . . it?’ He laughed soundlessly. Returning to the sarcophagus, he set his elbows upon it then rested his chin on his fists. ‘Very well. I will make you a deal. If you promise to take that thing with you, I will let you go.’

Dorin stared, utterly surprised. What in the name of Hood . . . ?

‘We accept,’ came the Dal Hon’s voice from the darkness at his elbow, and Dorin flinched. The nacht came to life, wriggling and twisting, easily breaking his grip. It plucked the wooden box from his belt and launched itself upon the young mage.

The Jag studied them anew, his expression calculating. His bright amber gaze slid from Dorin to his companion, and he shook a finger at the Dal Hon. ‘You – you move in ways I have not seen in a long time.’ The blazing eyes shifted to Dorin. ‘Is there nothing you fear? Nothing you would not dare?’ And he laughed again, waving them off. ‘By all means. Good riddance! At least now I shall have some peace and quiet. Though I predict that those without these walls will not!’

Dorin began edging backwards. ‘The door,’ he hissed to his— what . . . accomplice?

‘Not an impediment, I expect,’ the youth answered. The nacht rode his shoulders, a maniac’s grin at its dagger-toothed mouth. Dorin leaned away. Gods, what is this thing?

The door was as before, the opening just manageable. The nacht scampered through first. It chattered and waved as if urging them on. Dorin squatted on his haunches, suspicious. Large, then small, then large once more? The Jag must have let them in. Must have been bored beyond reason.

The dark-skinned youth slid through. Dorin cast one last narrowed glance to the rear, as if expecting a quick attack after the lull, but saw nothing. Very well. Back to your frigid gloom and brooding silence. Good riddance to you, I say.

Outside it was dark – not the dimness of a coming dawn but that of gathering twilight. Much more murky as they were at the bottom of a narrow gorge. Dorin faced the youth who now stood waiting, his walking stick planted before him. He held the nacht curled up in one arm for all the world like a sleeping baby – the ugliest one in existence. ‘So . . .’ Dorin began, clearing his throat. ‘What is your name, then?’

The Dal Hon’s brows rose as if he was completely startled by the question. ‘My name?’ His eyes darted about the rocks. ‘Ah . . . my name.’ He smiled and raised a finger. ‘Ah! Wu! My name is . . . Wu. Yes, Wu . . . and you?’

Dorin felt his lips tightening to a slit. If you’re going to use a fake name at least make it up beforehand! He thought of a possible pseudonym for himself – his nickname from his youth? But Beanpole wasn’t exactly the image he wished to project. No other name suggested itself and so he fell back on his own: ‘Dorin.’

The Dal Hon – Dorin couldn’t bring himself to think of the youth as Wu – gave a thoughtful nod. ‘Good, good. Well . . . it has been amusing, but I must be going. Quite busy, you know. Much in demand.’

Now Dorin’s gaze narrowed. He brought his hands up close to his baldric. ‘Go? We have to decide how to split . . .’ But the damned fellow was somehow fading away. Blasted mages! How he hated them! His hands flicked out and two blades darted to fly through the mage’s dissolving form.

The Dal Hon’s expression registered shocked surprise as he disappeared. ‘Amazing! Those would have got me . . . had I been standing there in the first place . . .’

Mages! Blasted warren-rats! Dorin retrieved his knives, checked their edges. Only mages had ever escaped him. He scanned the dark cliff-sides. And yet . . . they were a long way from anywhere. Time remained. He’d find him. There was really only one place the fellow could possibly be heading for. Li Heng.

If he didn’t track him down before then he’d find the Hood-damned thief there. Eventually.

*

Within the chamber, the Jaghut waved a hand and stone grated and shifted as the entrance sealed itself once again. He returned to studying the ancient pattern of the slats before him – one set out thousands of years ago. His tangled brows rose then, and he sat back, stroking his chin. ‘Well, well . . . You would send two more upon your hopeless fool’s errand.’ He studied the darkness about him as if awaiting an answer. ‘Why should these two fare any better than all those you have sent to their deaths before?’ He waited again, head cocked, listening for a time; then his shoulders slumped and he hung his head. ‘Oh – very well.’ Grumbling, he rose and shambled off into the darkness beyond the lamp’s glow.

The clank and clatter of rummaging echoed about the chamber before he returned to set an enormous battered full helm upon the stone slab, its grille facing him, and sat once more, sighing. He eyed the helm. ‘So?’ he demanded.

‘Your problem, Gothos,’ came a weak, breathless voice from within the bronze helm, ‘is that you give up too easily.’

Gothos snorted his scorn. ‘And what of you, Azathani?’

After a long silence the helm answered, sounding almost sad. ‘Our problem is that we cannot.’