XIII. Pretenders

Wrapped in snow puma furs the Duxess Emphyr watched her subjects at their toil.  For at least a day the ring of steel and the fall of stone had been their music, collapsing dreams.  She sat on a traveling throne near the Grand Seal, where her pavilion had been pitched and her guards posted. 

            The sheer cliffs of the Great Cleft, the most ultimate level of the Nysul Badlands, rose above, a jagged seam of sky letting in a bit of cloudy, morning light, along with a whistling breeze which fought against the sound of pick and hammer.  Along the wall before her dark eyes and mouths gaped empty, some natural fissures, others bored by her ancestors.  Petroglyphs marked the hands of the ancients, helpless in the face of destruction.

            A band of laborers would be sent into a cave and from the shadows came the crumble of shattering stone and the chime of metal gouging at the supports.  After a bit, maybe an hour, maybe twelve, there would be a hurry of activity as men fled the entrance, the ceiling close on their heels.  With a thunderous cry the old mouth would be silenced.

            Glancing aside the Duxess saw her captain at her command and thought of the old days.

            Emphyr was young and powerful then, just as Sol came, red, terrible, quiet.  Memory brought him forward as an engine crushing the past under his terrible tread.  He took her magician screaming, half-finished spells dripping from his lips, and left to whatever hell had spawned him. 

            Power is what rules and without magic her subjects became unruly.  Chaos threatened her realm.  Her guards, seeing this trouble made a solution.  They would rule.

            The coup was effortless and the military dictatorship quick and efficient at bodies.  The Duxess they kept as a sort of trophy, feted and plied with every pleasure except freedom or power.  

            “Would you like something to warm yourself?” asked her attending lady, holding a vial in a white gloved hand.

            Another crash, another plume of dust.  History sealed away bit by bit, second by second.  The guards looked on, pleased at this punctuation of the new order.  Soon it would all be lost as ice and snow returned to fill this place white and blue.

            Looking up into the face of the young woman who offered the drink she saw those two well-known and knowing eyes look into hers.

            “Blood,” was her answer.

            The servants worked all at once.  Hidden knives found seams in armor and tickled hearts.  Laborers, shocked at first at the obvious command, took their tools and fell on the Duxess’s knights in a throng of muscle, dust and red.  Emphyr had her request after all.

            When things had calmed, and the dead were as quiet as the stones, she had her captain brought to her.  The fair woman, the daughter of the original rebellious guard commander, seethed wounded and furious.  Hair in tangles, blue eyes glaring.    

            “How long?” she demanded from her knees.

            “Since the day,” hushed Emphyr and gave the order.  The woman’s body fell and sighed once.

            Politics have punctuation, sometimes festivals, other times carnage.  Emphyr had played a long game but now felt it was time to exclaim herself in this cold air, the first she had breathed since she became a prisoner in her own castle.  Before her many possibilities gaped.  One of them certainly held the crown of all things for her, the Regalom, the final touch on her ascendancy.

That same cold morning Glor of Moor and Bzer the Ornate exchanged pleasantries over a breakfast they had hunted together.  The fleet, grey mountain goat had given both old men some trouble, but together they worried the beast against a cliff and brought it back claimed with spear and arrow, like twin flags. 

            In the halls around them the peoples of the badlands mingled.  Some brawls had started and ended without noble intervention and all reviled the upper floors which still ran red with the High Queen’s kills. 

            It had taken some convincing but the remaining guards and stalwarts prepared to set out in the cold to challenge the vaults.  They had a collection of antique arms and armor, weapons bright and sharpened and ceremonial, now put to the test of their craftsmanship, memories of elder, better times.

            “Your memory is untouched by the crown’s sorcery,” said Glor, scratching at his bandaged stump.  The Queen had taken far more than she gave, despite her generous words. 

            Bzer nodded, old and addled, a total act. 

            “The others, Emphyr, Daothre, all of them are sending bodies to the Great Cleft in search of this thing.  None of them, none of us, can have it.  Summer’s reproach would be terrible.”

            “Not them I’m worried about,” said the maimed king.  “I wore the thing, I drank its power, but it was the true ruler, not me.  By exercising my words its will was done, power without memory or thought, only consequence once the power is lost.”

            Glor had grown grey suddenly, being some twenty years younger than the old duke of Phelegome.  Not even thirty when the Uplifting came and left.  Since that time Bzer reckoned that the boy-king hadn’t grown a year.  It seemed that now all such maturity raced to fill in the lost time.

            “No one should wear the thing,” nodded Bzer.

            “No thing either,” said the other.

            Together they set out at dawn to try for the Cleft before nightfall.  Each man had his things, survivor’s equipment won and worn through the years.  And in each case they had secret knives, should either man change their minds, or wonder at the motives of the other.

The Trumpeter clambered after his Queen, afraid of what she might say.  The great cat thing, swollen with magic, easily climbed the steep tilt of the ruined wall.  It seemed even gravity was fearful of such a beast.

            Quick as he could the musician followed, scrambling up protrusions of brick and mortar, gaining foothold on stern marble women and grasping the wings of sculpted beasts.  Though not as difficult as the Wondering Mountains of his home he took each meter with dread, knowing what he followed and fearing what awaited them.

            Thankfully the livid blue mist swirled above the entrance they sought.  He watched the Queen the whole way up and into those cruel teeth of calcite runoff, gleaming, strangely colored porcelain.  The Mouth ran long and jagged for many meters to either side, but so short a ceiling that the tall man would have to stoop.  Pulling himself onto the last ledge he now felt the breath of depths seethe past him with unsaid words.

            The Queen’s form shifted, molten and plastic, to fit the low ceiling.  Harsh gleams of blue light haunted the far entrance some ways off.  It wasn’t dark here and the Trumpeter wished it was.

            Silence loomed over their journey.  The musician labored under each second.  His tongue was always active and though he must stifle it for the sake of his Queen’s words the act sent all that energy inwards, growing the seed of worry in his stomach. 

            The ruse continued as long as he could fend off the possibility of her attention and words.   He could only hope her name offered him the chance he sought.

            Polished quartz and slate ran alongside their passage, cracked and molten, like a frozen sea of dirty water.  It could only be from a dream, and the dreamer glowed before them.  The light increased as they moved and with it came a sound, a slight vibration in the air, higher and finer than the coarse breath which seethed beyond.

            Exiting through a similar gash in the stone they descended a short ramp into a bizarre cavern.  No liquid action marked this place of harsh angles.  The blue they saw was from a massive set of glaring strings which stretched at a slant from floor to ceiling, like the cords of an insane harp.  The material was metal and fantastically bright, its light both cold and sharp.  As the air came in from a further cavern it caught these filaments and produced the sound they heard before.

            High Queen Hope snarled with one head and looked about with the other, taking in the symmetries involved and gauging what her rule would gain from them.  Other, smaller banks of cords were strung here and there, making use of the room’s bizarre acoustics for the sake of music which the small musician was both eager and frightened to score.

            “This must be its voice room,” said the Trumpeter, worried that he might be asked first and lose his mind because of it.  “The wind is produced further in the unknown depths and flows through at such velocity that the chords are rung and so produce the voice we have heard.  Its sounding board must be huge, perhaps the whole of the vault.”

            The Queen turned on him, eyes like citrines, yellow and evil.  Her lips never moved, except to express animal rage.  The snake did the talking and it now looked upon the man with its many eyes, words on the edge of its forked tongue.  That was when the Mouth replied.

            The Trumpeter was only partially right.  Wind of sufficient force and volume to provoke the noise he was speaking of would’ve blasted both invaders to pulp.  The chords thrummed with their own power, some motion in the walls agitating language from those moonlight streaks.  This, and the wind, produced the voice and carried it along.  Here it was deafening.

            Huge and resonant, larger than thrones, broader than armies, it sounded.  While the mortal man couldn’t determine the words he knew a critic when he heard one.  The Queen, however, did hear.

            Words tumbled over them like an avalanche but the monstrous cat stood against the tide.  Quiet, she said, and the sound died down.  Listen, and it did hear, even if it had no ears.

            The Trumpeter felt electricity in the air.  The blue of the strings was no less bright and uncanny.  Power here, like the enchanted pool and neon cloud.

            “We are the highest now,” began the beast, rising to a larger state.  “We will have no pretenders or regents, no peers or usurpers.  Only subjects, the natural order of things.  We are Nysul.”

            Sound blasted in response, a trumpet of rebellion.  The air’s gleam intensified and from this light more of the same stepped out.  Like the thing in the theatre from which he had fled the Trumpeter stumbled away from creatures of ribboned light, knights in the employ of this fantastical place, hunting the hunter.

            Delighted at this tribute the ruling cat went to play.  Her black claws tore at the gleaming things to the sound of screaming metal.  Blades struck her liquid flesh without effect, only to be shattered at a turn of a well-muscled paw.  The air glittered with their luminous blood.

            Yet a howl commenced from the High Queen.  A sword of light had tickled too far, pricking her royal person.  Indeed the surviving cohort, a band of glaring silver which seemed to dance as a whole, fought with puissance at the behest of old Nysul.  This was an unwelcome surprise; the Queen loathed a fair fight.

            “Darken,” she cried and the things died down to sunset glimmers and winked away.

            Their damage had been done, however.  The Trumpeter was emboldened.  There was a way around her words, creeping places in the language where one could slip apart from the edicts of the crown.  After all, she must’ve wriggled free of Glor’s grasp somehow.  His only challenge was to be as clever a cat.

            The elder voice spoke again, shimmering ripples of air like a disturbed sheet of water birthed more knights of liquid brilliance.  These forms flowed into each other, dividing and recombining in a mercurial splay of lances, swords and flails, tabards, shields and banners. 

            “Vanish,” said the Queen, and they did, but the voice rumbled a third time and more and stranger champions bleed from its bright cords.

            “Gone!” she roared, and more left room for the Mouth’s endless horde.

            “Enough!  Enough!” raged the beastly ruler.  “Never!”

            The object of her edicts had changed from the luminous soldiers to the Mouth itself.  Yet even as she spoke so did it, and continued, a creaking tension filling the vocal room as they negated each other. 

            The Trumpeter was filled with emperor words, feeling like a rung bell, all vibration and anxiety.  It would take only a simple aside from either power to blast his mind or his body to scattered, bloody notes.  Perhaps what he needed was to change the tune.  He hefted his Trumpet for reassurance and scanned the far corners of the room.

            The light was met with the will, the air locked with tension, like a fault line along the meeting point between two stubborn glaciers.  Suspended in the air was a kind of music, like a symphony tuning itself before the resolution of silence into noise.  They were not the same kind of voice, these two, but they held power as peers and in the realm of empires and kings there could be no pretenders, only war.

            Counting time, watching the crescendo, gauging meter, tempo and harmony, the Trumpeter added a note.  With one long arm he snatched the crown from the mutant cat’s head as bright forces tore at the air. 

            “Treachery!” yowled the beastly Queen as the man dashed for the exit he had spied and would’ve given chase except a vast array of entities glared into being and she was beset.

            No matter her troubles the Trumpeter worked his long legs as fast as he could, first through the fissured tunnel, then towards a rush of sound, another roar.

            Behind him cried High Queen Hope in her rage, which shook the walls and brought down dust and fragments of ancient works.  There was nothing but to chase the unknown.  Drowning in stone the Trumpeter delved, the smell of the depths burning his nostrils.

On Riddles

There is a thing which is expressed but unsaid, an uncaring ethos driven by the cold wind over ice and body alike.  I speak of course of that last strange telling, Winter’s Riddle.  Having done a survey of existing traditions, and modeling the future according to current enigmatic trends, I feel it is time to frame this great mystery.  Along the way I will provide examples of the various facets which comprise the Riddle, for, as we will see, the telling goes beyond one voice.

From early days, beyond memory and perhaps time, the Riddle of Winter has been known, told, understood and ignored by generations living through our icebound world.  It imparts the notion of cruelty, meaninglessness, savagery and wonton behavior in the smallness of things.  What is most tantalizing about this is the promise that there was another world before, one warmer, teeming with life, abundant with pleasure and possibility.  Sages and wizards speak of this verdant past, but Winter is cruel to the learned and much information is cloistered by myth and legend, the entropy of time.  What is most telling is that no magicians survive from this elder place, or if any do they are too far gone into their philosophies to share their memory.  

This brings me to a more formal point on the nature of riddles.  As a form of oral storytelling and a mixture of play riddles represent a form of cultural memory, a trait greatly lacking on the savage tundra.  These spoken artifacts classically take two forms: psychoma, which are word puzzles couched in metaphor and allegory, and somata, more playful games of language set with puns which must be unraveled in order to come to a solution.  Our prime Riddle seems to belong to the psychoma classification, though there is a strong argument from the somata camp.  In either event this conundrum often invades the place of other traditions, dominating minds and dousing spirits, and as we will see it is not content to abide classification.    

Little time or effort has gone into cataloguing our collective enigmas.  The reasons for this are varied from barbarism to the alien hubris of the magically inclined to the vast barriers which lie between cultures fighting for survival on the endless ice.  Despite this trouble some examples persist in certain texts and histories and these examples I have provided.

What is most striking about these riddles is the breadth of experience implied.  These are beings of all statures and comportment, sex, inclination, and even type.  Some are inhuman, while others are simple people who managed to have their puzzles caught upon the written page, saved for future arcane researchers to discover.  There are mind games from the ice-chewers of Ka’an Atul and death-curses from the duelists of An’bi, victory rhymes by Jassal tribesmen upon the taking of a finger from a live opponent to freeze-songs sung by the pale women of Xet.  All different voices, different tellings. 

Canny readers will realize that the solutions to the riddles presented are vexing.  I can partially illustrate this.  While the subject of each is the notion of Winter’s Riddle, the answers involved are not the Answer.  The larger resolution is absent in each telling, which are personal, specific, bounded by contexts which are obscured, hidden or entirely missing to us distant readers.  It is as if I burned a stick of incense and then asked where the lighting match was made.  Yet answers do persist, even in the face of such adversity.

What is being told here is the struggle of a single being, a survivor of our riddled world.  There lies the answer, not in the huge and numinous, but in the specific and personal.  The character described is the answer, as they are asking about themselves, in most cases.  To engage in these requires one to go out into their story and experience their otherness.  Even this writer couldn’t help but add his note to the list.

That is the howl of Winter’s Riddle, the many, disparate and heedless of each other.  Cast through time, across brittle continents and frozen seas, speckled across cultures according to the law of stories.  Each interacts with the Riddle in their own way, their answers riddles unto themselves, in sequence and recursion.  

That is the great trouble with discovering the Answer: we are not sure of the Riddle itself.  It has many variations and versions, translations, mistranslations, errors, mistakes, all part of some great and unknowable whole.  It is perhaps insoluble, despite how greatly this pains the inquisitive mind.  So then how might it be solved?

The Riddle is everything.  Every moment and frost, every sword and barbarian, even unto the house of magicians, the great continent of Summer floating on its gilded impossibility.  If one were to have the whole of all information, past, present and future, only then might one have the full telling of the Riddle.  I can only imagine that the Answer must be forged through means yet undiscovered, or so sublime that it escapes the educated mind.  

Winter’s Riddle is neither psychoma nor somata for the reason that there seems to be no Answer, no dedication to form, any such certainly has escaped this lone chronicler, as all I can do is add my voice to the others in telling.  I propose a new classification for the Riddle: nousa, as it pertains directly to the realm of unreality which some call magic.  Yet, if even the archmasters are helpless in determining the unknown, then what can any icebound hope to discover?   

 

           

              

XII. Unquestioned Loyalty

Amongst the smell of old death and strange, alkaline magic the Trumpeter observed ripples growing upon the pool of electric blue.  Some frantic, primitive portion of his brain froze him more solidly than Winter cold ever would, and even the Mouth of Nysul seemed to hold its breath in anticipation of this new arrival.

            What emerged from the waters was huge and muscular, a beast of fantastic proportions.  Huge forepaws drew the hulk from the pool dripping, claws of black diamond tearing into the centuries-old stone like flesh.  The beast’s chest and shoulders were swollen large, though the back paws and torso were equally menacing and built, leading to a tail tipped with a vicious club.  Yet it was the head which made the Trumpeter almost cry out from the depths of primal fear.  Massive jaws overwhelmed by an insane splay of fangs, dark as starless night, distracting from yellow eyes of pristine intelligence.

            To call the thing a cat anymore was a difficulty, a half-truth.  This was a monster feline of a whole new order, one of magic, crowned by a device of platinum and opal, the Regalom swimming in the light of that eldritch pool.

            Truth, that this thing really was High Queen Hope, now trembled through the man, gone half mad by the notion that such a beast could become something more terrible than it was already.  She must’ve been talking to herself.

            The Queen rippled her royal purple flesh and considered her surroundings, the wealth of bones, the ruinous walls and the cloud of magic.  Breath like bellows grumbled out from her frame and that inquisitive nose of hers twitched its whiskers.

            Only so much time before he was discovered, thought the small man hiding amongst the bones.  Instinctively he had crept amongst the hoard when the rippling began.  Even now he didn’t curse his curiosity for getting him into this deadly mess, only wishing he had the Fencer there to prove louder and more violent than any monstrosity. 

            Inevitably the creature would find his hiding spot.  Though he first hoped that the stench of magic would cover his trail he knew there was no such luck in life.  Instead he pondered the events which had brought him this far, like a rare vintage.

            They were on a mission for the Queen, after all, and though she seemed to not have the patience for hard work, even from others, she had no reason to think that her words had lost weight.  That there was a range to her edicts was unknown to her, as it also had been to Glor, and maybe all who wore the crown.  They didn’t understand the range of words, the only limiter to the Regalom’s powers.

            “My Queen!” he declared and standing up in a tumble of bones.

            The creature bristled.  Its jaw opened, revealing a huge asp tongue of vivid green.  Upon its head six eyes watched with keen interest.

            “Hello, failure of a subject,” replied the genteel voice of the snake.

            All rested upon words now, the Trumpeter knew this.  If he were to allow her to ask him a question, to demand anything, to engage in any shade of command or fraction of request would invoke the powers of the ruling crown and then the man would be lost, his brain fallen under the heel of that dictator.

            “The thing you seek is close,” he began, fighting with his inner muse to keep his words clear and concise, to not leave a single leak in each sentence which he sent adrift into the dark waters of the beast’s mind.  “By thing I mean the home of the great treasure, objects of power akin to your item of station.  There are swords of legend, and gowns of spun dream, royal jewels which grant wisdom, and relics of holy mages gone to ash and bones for your pleasure.”

            He took a breath and the snake head looked about, as if searching for second opinion.

            “The Fencer,” spouted the lost magician, his brain full of uncried tears and trembles.  “Dead at the hands of a ghostly trap.  His sword swallowed up by a bottomless fissure.  With sufficient men we may salvage the device.”

            Oh how it hurt him to play this game.  The words were everything, each bought only a second of life, while one dropped note would mean death, or worse, servitude.  Sweat mingled with irradiated condensate and poured down his neck but he dared not produce a handkerchief, it might be a sign of weakness.

            “This is the Grand Vault,” noted the High Queen as she stalked about, senses ablaze, in search of every atom of power. 

            “It is,” he began, his heart bursting at her words, “but it is also more.  Old magics have infused the stones here and it grows like a wild root beneath the ice, reaching down into the Lattice for sustenance.  Engorged, it grows mad and dangerous in the halls.  Abominations are plentiful and stones themselves are flesh.”

            High Queen Hope prowled from one end of the room to the other, glancing up at times to the glowing cloud above in that jealous way cats have.  She investigated the chute which brought the musician in and sniffed through the old bones.  This led up the tall slope of the far wall where the gaping fissure of the Mouth leered at them with its stalactite teeth.

            “The Mouth of Nysul, my Queen,” said the Trumpeter with well-intoned reverence.  He felt he was becoming better at this game.  Yes, he could see how it was like music.  Perhaps he could shout through his Trumpet to better effect.

            “It is a puzzling strange thing that we have noticed with you,” said the beast as she sized up the gaping maw above.  “It is customary that our royal person speaks first and the subject responds upon command.  We aren’t acquainted with the protocol of a subordinate preceding us in discourse.”

            The Trumpeter heated the air around him like a sun.  If he was lucky he would pass out before the question fell, but then again he wasn’t sure that unconsciousness was any defense against the Regalom’s command.  Any moment she would ask and he would be lost, they all would fall under her carnivore rule.

            A gust of cool air brushed up against the man, swimming through his sweaty coarse wools, and face and long, tangled blond hair.  It wasn’t a breeze from some surface opening but sprang instead from a deeper source.  The Mouth of Nysul inhaled while the same breath caught in the Trumpeter’s throat, too frightened to breathe.

They passed on in strangeness.  The treasure horde led to a hall with many doors, each leading to many thrones, each different.  One was a u-shaped seat without back, carved from ivory, set with skins.  Another was stone, the same as the chamber, its back stretching up to the ceiling.  Still more were cut from gems or primitive flint, well-framed and etched by artisan hands, or crudely gnawed from the rock and set with spirals and eyes.  Each empty, each useless and the Fencer grew angry at these secret daydreams of the long dead.

            Then the ruins began.

            The walls gave way from common rooms and empty treasure to huge vaults of night and twilight and gleaming stars, jewels of the long dead.  In these huge spaces they wandered like dolls set loose in a cathedral.  Often they felt lost in the dark and a bluish fog drank up their feet and shrouded the ground.

            Pressing on a huge place loomed.  It was a palace, broken and half-made, with arcades along its tens of stories like the mouths of some protoplasmic beast.  Ghostlights blinked like eyes, revealing the inhabitants.

            People watched from that granite hulk, their eyes in shadow, their bodies broken like their dwelling.  Parts of them, swaths of porcelain flesh, seemed corrupted and eaten away, frothing through the air in still, liquid expression.  It was as if their bodies were fluid and some kind of unwholesome breath had ripped them apart with bubbles from within.  They were more like paintings then beings, those inhabitants, expressionistic and unreal and though the Fencer hesitated his companions pressed him on through the lowlands towards a darkness they hoped had more promise. 

            Other structures waited.  Each more fantastical, without reason or utility, the things castles may dream of if possessed by demons.  The next was all spires and garrets, cone-topped, windows full of more sad eyes and strange spirits.  A series of domes followed, and then a jumble of towers linked by high skywalks and glass facades.

            Here the Fencer stopped.  Turning, Jaal of Night, their guide and potential traitor, hissed at the man to continue.

            “We’ve no time for ghosts,” he urged.  “They’ll do us no good but death.”

            “Perhaps it is clarity of a rested mind but I wonder at that,” said the Fencer, watching the ghosts watch them, the living.  “The dead are from the past and it is the past’s mystery which enthralls us.  Might they have knowledge of the Regalom?  Of High King Nysul and his mad dreams in which we wander as victims?”

            “They might also feast upon our souls or drag us down into the Lattice,” reasoned the masked man.  He had taken up his guise as soon as the first ghostly lights spilled through the abyss.

            Hnah had nothing to add to the conversation.  She seemed bored and listless, always one eye on the Fencer for fear of losing him.  So when he marched off towards the next palace, a fine manor set with marble lions, she followed after as if connected.

            Despite Jaal’s protests the swordsman marched up the steps and reached for the door, which opened before his hand.  Inside cold light danced amongst a hall set with banners to long-dead lords and through the lady.

            She wore a formal gown which clung to her lithe shape before spilling to the floor in a train of moonlight, but though her face was fair and her eyes stirring, she was broken past this mask.  Her back was torn apart, trailing off into the air in what they now saw were little clusters, or filaments of some unfinished shaping. 

            “Sawar,” she rasped, huge eyes taken up with emotion.  “You’ve come back.”

            “None of us are that,” frowned the Fencer, thinking this ghost to be mad.  Yet there was no cold fear of the dead which he felt would come with speaking to such a spirit.  Instead he felt completely out of place, an invader.

            “The lemur-things are up again,” she continued, stepping aside as if to usher the strangers in.  “My mother takes to the warpath tomorrow.  It will only rile them and the Cleft will fall into their bloody paws.  Speak some reason she will hear.”

            The phantom admitted her guests and continued her plaintive speech.  The door shut out cold Winter and inside the warm drama of war and politics glowed amongst the ghostlights.  The three still stood outside, in the vaulted dark.

            “These are no ghosts,” decided the Fencer.  He was in a fume now.  Such false places these mages made, all show and theatre, no truth. 

            “All the better,” declared Jaal happily.  “But if not ghosts, then what?”

            “Memories,” began the southern swordsman, “or fantasies.”

            “As if there was a difference,” Jaal said.

            “No!”  The Fencer’s voice, rarely raised, echoed through the garden of palaces, coming back huge and hollow.  “There must be a difference between the two, a hard line which can be cut, like meat from bone.”

            “Sawar is true,” noted Hnah.  “That was the last High King’s name, Sawar Nysul, though in his royal personage he was one with the name of his dynasty, his being the same as the land and palaces to which he laid claim.”

            Sobered, the actor realized that there was more to this and took off his mask.

            “Perhaps the old king lives on in some fashion here,” he pondered unhappily.  “The last thing we need is more nobles.”

            A paused silence descended, nothing but a faint draft reminding of sound.  This place was a horde of all things, of gold and gems, of memories and dreams, of shapes from the past and impossible places set as gardens, all according to the will of something long sealed, gone bad like wine left open.

            Hnah craned her neck into the darkness, pale radiance raced down her metal veins.  She looked all around, hunting. 

            “This way,” she said and turned back to the Fencer who was intent on scowling at the dark.  “There is greater dark over there.”

            The princess pointed out into the void, the portion of this endless room which had no glow of palace or ghost.  They had avoided it so far, thinking it lost and empty.

            “Emptiness won’t do us any good,” began the Fencer but he was cut off by Jaal.

            “No, I see her reasoning.  The light shines from these castles but in the dark we might find the way out.”

            With a shrug the Fencer hopped down the steps to prove them wrong.  He had nothing better to do than think, which would gain him nothing in present circumstances.  He had a hungry girl after him and a revolutionary with a face of lies.  He hoped for fiends and trouble and violence to make some honesty out of this world of illusions.

            Instead he found an oblique opening at what he realized was a jagged column supporting the room.  Leading down at an angle entrance to the ramp showed slick and reflective in the golden light of the fantastical scarab which still clung to the swordsman’s tunic.  Here the air became warm and the Fencer drew his weapon.

            “A lucky guess,” he hissed but the girl took no pride in her find.  All her being was tilted forward, leading on. 

            The ramp led down and down.  Being some ten meters across it felt more like a huge, slanted room cut by diamond through sheer rock.  The walls were all polished, showing veins of vivid minerals which gleamed with faint lights of their own. 

            “I guess we are past the mask now,” grinned Jaal.  His voice lost all his usual inflection as he spoke.  These were simple words.

            The Fencer nodded with guarded approval.

            “Those first halls teemed with gaudy treasures and hideous monstrosities, but since the vault door we seem to be in a more intimate realm.  There are memories for show, and seats of power, and now we descend towards great secrets, the true vault.”

            Hnah kept quiet, as she did so often after her escape from the great cat’s claws.  That a resulting change had come over the girl was certain, like a calming blanket it covered her haughty nature.  And now she stopped.

            The two men watched as she swayed on her feet.  Perhaps it was exhaustion or a gust of some noxious and unseen gas.  She found the wall and leaned heavily upon it.  When Jaal went to steady her she slapped him away with a reflex which was as much class-based as it was automatic.

            “Don’t ever touch me with those filthy hands,” she murmured and looked up and around.  She saw the masked man as if for the first time and scrambled away. 

            Hnah vanished down the darkened slope, the last sight being her metallic veins gleaming in the scarab’s light.  Then a noise came from the dark below, the gust of words too large for their ears.