Myth-Fortunes

Chapter 2

We transferred silently from the dusty, sunlit office into instant and total blackness. In my mind's eye, I could see plenty of force lines arching overhead and deep underground, below my feet. They were all shapes and sizes, from thin and spindly threads of lilac up to a surging, shining black torrents. I reached tentatively toward a long, snaky blue force line. When it didn't burn me, I drew some power from it. I had learned through bitter experience that if you didn't grab every opportunity to refill your internal magikal supply, you'd find yourself short at the most inconvenient moment. I took some of the power into my hand and formed it into a ball of light. I held up my impromptu torch and looked around.

We were in a narrow chamber of pale tan stone with a flat tan ceiling. Each wall had been deeply carved with tiny pictures that seemed to dance in the wavering light of my spell. The air smelled musty but cool.

"Where are we?" Aahz asked.

"This is the tomb of Waycross," Samwise explained, pointing to a large image incised into the wall just above our heads. "All visitors have to come through here the first time.

And ... they like me to enter the dimension this way. I don't exactly know why.—There's the old boy himself."

I lifted the light to illuminate the portrait. Waycross had the face of a turtle. The beady eyes looked disapproving. When I shifted to get away from its gaze, the eyes seemed to follow me, even though they were pointed toward each other.

"He originated that phrase about looking at someone cross-eyed," Samwise explained. "He's reputed to have had a really bad temper, so no one ever did anything without his oversight. And he overlooked a lot, I gotta tell you. Shoddy construction in most of his projects, especially this one. This was supposed to be on a gridwork pattern, six storeys high, but it isn't. Don't worry. We'll get out eventually."

"Don't you have a map?" I asked.

Samwise shrugged. "It doesn't help. The rooms move around by themselves. No one anchored them where they were. Cost-cutting. You won't find that on my projects. You just keep on walking toward the light." That startled me. Samwise waved a hand. "It's not like a near-death experience. If you see the light, you're actually getting closer to the outside. When you find an open window or a door, hang onto it.

That's the easiest way out. No one ever died in here unless they panicked. Well, almost no one. Come on. There's almost always an opening off the Grand Gallery."

Just a few feet beyond the looming portrait, a long corridor stretched off into blackness. The walls here, too, were covered with incised designs.

"What's all this?" I pointed to the carvings.

"Tourist rules," Samwise explained. "Ghordon has strict regulations. 'Don't cheat the Ghords, lest you suffer a dire curse. Don't spit on public roads, or a dire curse will follow you. Do not make unwelcome advances to fellow guests in drinking establishments, under pain of dire curse.' You know. Don't worry about reading them. I've been here for years, and no one has ever tried to enforce any of them on me. I get along great with everybody. Come on."

I peered closely at the minute figures of men in skirts, birds, dogs, lions, and deer and frowned. My facility with spoken languages didn't stretch to written lingo. If I had to, we could hire a local interpreter to translate the rules.

We trudged along. The corridor was wide enough for us to walk abreast. The smell of cool stone and ancient sweat made my nostrils twitch.

"Say, Samwise, where'd you get the name?" Aahz asked suddenly.

The Imp waved a hand. "My mother read the classics."

"Tough break," Aahz said sympathetically, but there was a big grin on his face. "Hope you don't feel hobbited by it." I didn't know why the name struck him as funny. I made a mental note to ask later.

"There's one," Samwise said, ignoring Aahz's jibe. I looked up. A square of brilliant blue light beckoned. "Hurry. It's already shifting sideways."

Indeed it was. The blue square started to narrow as the room to which it was attached ground to the left. I rushed toward it, my long legs eating up the distance faster than my two shorter companions.

By the time I reached it, the portal had narrowed to a rectangle.

"What do I do?" I shouted.

"Hang onto it!" Samwise shouted back.

I braced my hands against either side of the open window. The heat from outside slammed into me like a charging bull. I gasped. The wall continued to shift sideways, carrying the window and the room with it toward the corner. I hopped up into the casement and shoved my feet against the oncoming wall. The room didn't like having an obstruction in its way. It slammed against the bottoms of my feet a few times, trying to dislodge me so it could move. Samwise and Aahz hurried toward me.

"Hurry!" I yelled.

"Hang in there, partner," Aahz called.

I summoned up all the magik force I was carrying, but I wasn't strong enough to argue with an ancient stone wall. It kicked me loose. I landed on the ground, groaning. The room shifted out of sight, leaving us in darkness. I summoned up another ball of light.

"Well, you know what they say," Samwise said gamely. "Where a window closes, a door opens."

"If I find one, I'll throw you out of it first," Aahz said. "Do you have to go through that every time?"

"It's where my transference spell lands me," Samwise said. "So, yes."

Aahz looked disgusted. "I knew we should have let the kid here do the transporting. He'd have popped us right into the middle of the action."

"Why not you?" Samwise asked, with a curious look at my partner. "Or are the rumors about the great Aahz losing his powers true?"

Aahz waved a hand airily. "C'mon, I've been in the business for centuries. I don't do the penny-ante stuff. That's for apprentices and, er, junior partners."

I was still so glad to be back with M.Y.T.H., Inc., that I didn't mind Aahz saving face in front of clients—once, anyhow. At least this time he didn't suggest he would step in if I couldn't handle things.

"I'm pretty good now," I said modestly. "Aahz taught me everything I know."

"Well, that and a two copper pieces will get you a can of warm ale," Samwise said. Just before Aahz grunted out a retort, we spotted another opening, a door, as the Imp had predicted. Almost as soon as it appeared, it started to head for the floor, and the ceiling of the new room with it.

My wits were back where they belonged. Instead of running for the gap, I gathered up a large quantity of magik from the deep-rooted black force line and built a nice little frame inside the bright square. It was as strong as I could manage. I could hear the groaning of the stones as they fought against the obstruction. Sparks of magik broke away from the master spell with a ping! I threw more and more force into the gap. Waycross must have been one powerful magician. We ran for the opening, I nursing my bruises and the others panting behind me.

"It's going to break," I said, gritting my teeth as I rebuilt the spell one more time. I ran toward the hole.

With a loud report, the spell shattered, sending hot splinters of light shooting outward. I averted them from us with a quick flick of my wrist, but it meant that I wasn't doing anything to prevent the rapid descent of the ceiling of the next room toward the floor of this one. The gap had closed to four feet. I could just make it. Three.

"Come on, partner, let's fly!" Aahz said. He held out his arms as if he was lifting off. I scooped him up with a hank of magik and dove to join him.

"Hey, wait for me!" Samwise pleaded. He flapped his arms as he ran to catch up.

I didn't have time to look behind us. The stone slab of the ceiling was just knee height from the floor. If we misjudged our speed, it could chop our legs off. I didn't want to start off in Ghordon two feet shorter. I threw out a hook of power and wedged it into the doorway at the far end of the shrinking room, tied the other end around Aahz and me, and pulled.

The magikal cord contracted faster than a Deveel's good will. Aahz and I not only reached the door, but catapulted through it. I hit the sand-dusted flagstones outside Waycross's tomb and rolled to a halt twenty feet beyond. I blinked up at the hot yellow sun. Aahz struck just behind me, bounced and ended up landing across my legs.

A shadow cut off the blinding sunlight. A face surrounded by a draped cloth headdress peered down at me. The face had the long nose and floppy ears of a hound, but the bare chest and arms of a Klahd. It extended a normal-looking hand to me. I took it, and he helped me to my feet. A lion-faced Klahd

helped Aahz up.

"Welcome to Ghordon, wayfarers," the dog-faced man said. He and his lion-headed companion wore pleated white skirts and sandals, but nothing else except their headdresses. "Receive the eight greetings of the Pharaoh Suzal, the eternal hospitality of her people, and the warm regard of the land of the Ghords be always upon . . . oh, no, not you again!"

I frowned at the unfriendly tone, then relaxed.

It was not addressed to me or Aahz, but rather to Samwise. The Imp crawled out of the porticoed door through which we had just been propelled.

The Imp dusted off his loud suit and stumped over to slap the two males on the back. "Hey, Fisal and Chopri, good to see you!" They accepted the gesture with resignation and returned to the posts they had occupied beside the doorway. He turned to us. "I told you I get along great with everybody here."

Ghordon's climate was similar to Deva's, a dry desert with a hot sun and wispy breezes that did nothing but stir up the dust, but there was something subtly different. At first I couldn't put my finger on it. Then I realized that there was little more noise outside Waycross's tomb than there had been inside it. The sprawling Bazaar at Deva, which covered much of its dimension, was never quiet. During the day, it was filled with the shouts, cries, bellows, and ululations of the Deveel traders who liked to argue at the top of their voices. Adding to the din were street performers, friends and soon-to-be-friends greeting each other, musicians, the entourages of important visitors announcing the name and business of the person they were escorting, the roar of dragons and other beasts for sale, and just the endless audible tumult of thousands of beings all talking at the same time. By extreme contrast, Ghordon was almost silent. I could hear the wind. It reminded me of the bucolic isolation of my parents' farm on Klah. It was unnerving. I felt like singing or shouting just to remind myself what noise sounded like.

My footsteps made a hushed, shushing noise as I trudged along in the drifting sand behind Samwise and Aahz.

"Come on, we'll catch a Camel," Samwise said.

"As long as we don't have to walk a mile for one," Aahz said, and waited for applause. None was forthcoming, since I didn't know what he was talking about.

Ahead, I spotted long, oval heads bobbing on narrow necks. I couldn't tell what they were, but the humped shapes behind the heads suggested gigantic serpents.

"What are they?" I asked as we got closer. The heads turned toward us, and large brown eyes with long lashes fluttered at me. They didn't look like snakes, but the necks connected to a lumpy body that lay flat on the desert.

"Camel, sir, Camel?" the first one, a creature with dark brown fur, inquired in a loud, hoarse voice. "Take you sightseeing around the grand pyramid, Hobokis, the city of Suzal, may she live forever, the Pharoah Isles, or the terrific shopping in the Khazbah? Your choice, reasonable rates! I will give you a most mild ride. You will think you are sailing a sheep."

"Ship?" I asked, curiously.

"Sheep," the Camel said. "I am not a boat, I am a living being. Come with me, come, hurry!"

"I saw them first," exclaimed a pale tan Camel, trying to bump the first one out of the way. "I will convey you safely and well, O tourists . . . oh, Samwise." The Camels' enthusiasm petered out.

I was beginning to realize that our potential employer, if not actually disliked, had worn out his welcome with the people of Ghordon.

"We'll walk," Aahz said.

"You'd never make it," Samwise said. "The quicksands will drag you down in no time. The slowsands are even more dangerous because they have a firmer grip."

"We could just fly."

"Er, I prefer to patronize the local businesses," Samwise said hastily.

"Hmmph!" The local businesspeople—all right, Camels— didn't seem that grateful for his custom. I suspected he wasn't good at keeping up with his bills.

"It's okay," I said, jingling my belt pouch to show that one of us had money. "My name's Skeeve. Will you take us to . . . ?" I looked at Samwise.

"To the And Company main office," the Imp said.

"And Company?" I asked.

"Well, everyone knows me," the Imp said. We stepped gingerly onto the humps behind the Camel's head and settled in between them. There was barely room for the three of us. I got wedged between Samwise and the rear hump. "But I have partners in some of my projects, so I named the enterprise after them. That way they get the credit they deserve, too."

Once I was on the Camel's back, I realized that it wasn't a snake or serpent. The beast had limbs at the four corners of its body, but they were submerged beneath the surface of the sand. Instead of running, it swam, gliding as smoothly as a water bird. I looked behind us. Our passage left a V-shaped wake that swirled and settled again into gentle peaks.

"The hump keeps them afloat in the quicksand," Samwise explained.

"Hold on, please. No jumping up and down, no music, no photographs," the Camel said, as he swam away from the stand. "Spitting is allowed." As if to demonstrate, he let go of a gob of brown goo that plopped onto the surface of the sand and sank. I felt my stomach turn. "I am Dromad, your driver for today."

He paddled a distance out from Waycross's tomb and began to circle around to the right. No matter what criticism Samwise had for the ancient architect, I admired the monument's construction and how well it fit into its setting. It looked as if it had just risen out of the desert at the beginning of time and would be there forever. The admonitions and curses I had seen inside continued on around the building in endless rows.

Waycross sure had a lot of rules.