Fox's Bride (25 page)

Jewels sprayed through the air in specks of orange, lilac, yellow, and pink. The gems rained their colors among the guards.

The velvet lapels of Chandur's coat flapped forward as the gems Attracted. The guards were hurled together, forming a clump of axe handles, chest jewelry, arms, and legs. They cursed, and a few flailed against the tiled street.

Chandur stared up at Hiresha, amazed. “Guess I was right. You don't need me.”

Hiresha rubbed the back of her hand against her brows, looking as if she hid a smile. “The enchantments were only so effective because of the men’s proximity.”

Chandur noticed she was not wearing gloves. Dark stones dotted the skin of her delicate fingers.
Are those new?

With another glance at the boulder of guards—Chandur did not think they had been hurt too badly—he followed the enchantress over the chains then down a sandstone ramp toward the pyramid, below the titan feet of the mural. The jasper sword was propped on his shoulder. Under the level of the street and shaded in the trench, they stopped before a slanted marble wall. Chandur recognized a few of the carved words.

“'The wise may wish to reach my tomb. The wisest will not.'“

Janny backed away. “Why would you want to go in there? And by 'you,' I mean not me. Can't. Feeling especially wise today.”

“When the Opal Mind wrote that,” Hiresha said, adjusting her sash then leaning back against a circular door of bluish marble, “she didn't know her soul was going to be locked in her mummy.”

“If she did, she'd have written 'Welcome, help, help?'“ Chandur asked.

Hiresha had explained some about Soultrappers on the way. As he understood it, the Soultrapper was old, dead but still alive, and too strong to approach head-on.
The pharaoh souls are like his shields. Have to take 'em away before we can swipe at him.

The enchantress' head slumped. He was impressed she could fall asleep while holding a yipping fennec. The furry ears sagged to the sides as the animal seemed to fall unconscious at the same time her purple gems glimmered. Chandur had never said so, but he thought Hiresha slept with a pretty smile.

The jewel at the end of the sword's hilt flashed violet, and a ruby light glared into Chandur's eyes from his circlet. He guessed Hiresha was sending dream magic through a bond with her enchantments. He tested his sword and found he could Lighten it. Swinging it upward, he allowed its weight to return, and the momentum of the jasper wedge hauled him into the air. The sword dragged him off his feet for a second. He landed with a thump of boots.

“Careful!” Maid Janny shuffled back though he had not come close to hitting her.

The fennec squeaked at the same time Hiresha woke. She said, “His eyes are not black.”

“Er, what?” Chandur rested the sword on his other shoulder.

“A highly saturated amber hue, yet not black.” She patted the fennec's head then straightened and stepped away from the blue-marble circle. “Attend to the door, Chandur.”

Forgetting for a moment he stood on sandstone and not dirt, Chandur rammed his sword into the ground. It embedded a foot into the softer rock and stuck.
Oops,
he thought. Both hands free, he pushed against the slab door. Then he shoved. Heaved. Scraped his boots against the ground.

Before he could turn to press his shoulders against it, Hiresha said. “It is still locked. When I say, 'attend,' I mean 'smash to smithereens.'“

Chandur backed away, enchanted sword in hand. Doubts to his own safety and the strength of the sword whisked past his mind, but he trusted Hiresha. He ran toward the door and leaped.

The red jasper thundered against the blue marble.

Rock blasted in chunks. Chandur had turned his face away, but shards knocked against the braids of his wig. Debris tumbled off his coat. The half-circle remains of the door rolled out of the pyramid. He was satisfied to see his sword had not so much as chipped.

“Enchanted stone has superior strength.” Hiresha stepped up into the darkness of the round entrance. “Formidable, when combined with your superior technique.”

Chandur listened for any notes of sarcasm. The enchantress was known throughout the Academy as a miser for compliments. “You haven't mentioned my form before.”

“I might never have another opportunity. This pyramid will try to kill us, you understand.”

“Oh, right.” He trudged into the tomb after her.

The ancient air inside scratched his throat. The slap of his boots against the floor sounded irreverent. Air chilled by stone and shadows seeped into him like a judgment, and he shivered.

The corridor ended sooner than Hiresha would have wished. A false door was carved into the marble with concentric frames that gave a symbolic impression of a longer hall. The stone illusion terminated in a portal no wider than Hiresha's palm.

She asked, “Did we miss a side passage?”

“Just more doors like this one isn't.” Chandur peered behind them. The entrance had diminished to a dot of light in the blackness.

Hiresha ran her finger over a pair of lines indicating the number two above the false door. Her earrings tinted blue the surrounding hieroglyphs: the jagged line for water, a few ropes, boxes, and a dotted circle.

She asked, “You don't happen to…?”

“Never got as far as hieroglyphs,” he said.

They retraced their way down the corridor. The other false doors also bore numbers in vertical lines, along with carved words. Hiresha would be able to translate them in her sleep, and she suspected them either taunts or clues.

The wall was coldness on her back as she set herself against it. Her eyes drooped, then popped open again at the sound of Maid Janny screaming. Prickles of fear ran over the enchantress, and she half pushed her way back to her feet to help her maid.

Chandur had already begun sprinting toward the cry. Hiresha was thankful for him.
This way is best,
she thought. The Soultrapper could send wave after wave of aggressors, and they would have to battle forever unless Hiresha found a way through this pyramid to a source of his power.

“Attend to it, Chandur,” she said as she traveled down the stairway in her mind to sleep.

Something choked the light from the pyramid entrance. Chandur squinted. The blue from Hiresha’s earrings faded, but a purple glow spread over the corridor from her dress.

Janny bounded past him, jiggling. “Oh, it's dreadful! Awful-on-a-skillet!”

The maid's cheeks were streaked with tears, and she had gripped her fan hard enough to crack its pole. Chandur was about to ask what she had seen, when a lumbering sound forced his attention back to the darkness.

Crocodile fangs burst from the gloom. Long teeth reflected violet light, gnashing at Chandur's eye level. The thumping stomps of the monster sounded more like a charging bull than a shuffling crocodile.
Has to be big as the passage,
Chandur thought,
and moving fast.

He sprinted forward to meet it.

Standing ground and trying to stop all that momentum seemed foolish to Chandur. Neither did he want to chance the beast shoving him aside and trampling the sleeping enchantress.

He swung the jasper sword back over his shoulder, letting its full weight carry it downward behind him. As he neared the creature, he had an impression of trunk-like legs, sagging black hide, and claws.

The maw bristling with teeth turned sideways to engulf him.

At that moment an awareness flickered past that he could be facing the Silver Crocodile. A bolt of terror and helplessness passed through him then was gone. He could do nothing but trust in himself, his sword, and fate. He had already begun to leap.

The jump gave him the clearance to swing the sword underhand. He Lightened it, whipping it forward, and he remembered to release his spell to return the wedge to its full weight.

The jasper sword snapped upward and splintered the jaws. The force of the collision ripped off the crocodile's head and powdered half the monster's spine.

Chandur did not smell blood, but the reek of salt pricked his nostrils. He tumbled over what looked like the leathery bulk of a hippopotamus. When he rolled past its stub tail and cauldron rear, he knew it was exactly that, except for the details of the crocodile head and claws.

The headless abomination stirred, flopped its flat feet against stone, and stumbled down the corridor toward the enchantress.

A freezing disgust washed over Chandur as he chopped off one of the hippopotamus' hind legs, and blackened strands of linen spilled from the wound. The abomination scraped forward against the wall. Off went another leg, and the monster dragged itself.

By the time Chandur had hacked it to motionless pieces, he was sweating and shivering.

“Excellent!” Hiresha strutted between pieces of carcass as if she often took her afternoon constitutional with a scenery of embalmed leather and broken bones. She stopped in front of a false door. “See the marking for 'three?' And the hieroglyphs mean 'sinking,' the closest the language comes to 'Burdening.'“

“I see,” Chandur said, “but I don't understand.”

Janny crept out of the shadows, shielding herself with her fan.

“It is quite simple,” Hiresha said. “This is the only door that matches. Burdening is a third-sphere or tertiary ability for enchantresses. That and the corridor slants, with this false door closest to the center of the pyramid. Rather obvious. I'm almost disappointed in the Opal Mind.”

“Obvious?” Chandur ran his hand along the rectangular indentations. “How do we go through this?”

“That is less obvious. You may have to
attend to
this door as well.”

He pushed at the innermost rectangle, but it did not budge.
The door said 'Burdening?' I wonder....
He pushed his consciousness into the stone and willed its ties to the ground to tighten, like he sometimes Burdened his sword. The skill exhausted him, felt like twisting a metal rope between his hands.

The stone shifted under his touch, moving downward. A beam shone through the opening, and then the wall slid forward. Light spilled in and blinded them, followed by a flow of hot air.

“A fine inference.” Hiresha blinked over his shoulder into a round room hidden behind the door. “This is the well structure I saw below the Heart of the City Lake.”

A motif of false doors continued in the circular room. Countless panels of them scaled the walls, ascending toward brightness. High above, daylight shone through the crystal peak of the pyramid. The quartz distorted the image of the sky lake above it into a jagged sphere, and Chandur realized the underside of the clear rock must jut with spikes or ridges.

When he peered down to the base of the cylindrical room, he whistled. A white sarcophagus waited there, dressed with opals. A woman's face carved of alabaster smiled up at them with invitation.

A marble path spiraled from their vantage point down to the stone coffin. Chandur could reach the sarcophagus in a quick jog. He lifted a foot over the sunlit ledge.

Hiresha gripped his arm. “Hold.”

Chandur stumbled back.

“Please, anything but waiting.” Janny's eyes peeped from behind the fan, looking down the corridor.

Wings flapped in dull feathery notes in the darkness.

The enchantress lifted the fennec into the lighted room. His fur shone gold, and his hair seemed to ripple once. His black whiskers curled upward as he squeaked in pleasure.

Nodding to herself, Hiresha folded the fennec against her chest and rubbed him. “Maid Janny, a coin.”

“They're coming, they are!”

Hiresha snapped her fingers. “A coin, if you please.”

The maid trembled as she handed over a silver piece.

“Observe.” The daylight reflected off the purple stones in Hiresha's fingers as she let go of the coin. It fell upward.

Chandur lifted his chin and tried to follow the coin's flight. It sped too fast, too far for him to hear the clink as it hit the jags of crystal on the ceiling.

“I call that a coin well spent.” He felt frail, woozy, and grateful for the enchantress. She had saved him from plummeting upward and splattering against the top of the pyramid. He wondered how long his corpse would have stayed there, like a dead fly trapped in a glass for all in the city to see.

“The entire room is enchanted,” Hiresha said.

She knelt, turned the fennec tummy up and held him to the side of the lighted walkway, where the marble path ended in a ledge. Chandur worried she was going to let the fox go.
He'll fly to his death
. Instead she pushed the fox onto the underside of the walkway.

The fennec trotted upside-down around the room's circling walkway, yipping and content.

“He does make a fine test subject.” Hiresha scrambled after the fennec, pulling herself into the room and below the marble path.

“Can't you hear them?” Janny's teeth chattered. “Wings, and not the petite bluebird kind neither.”

“You'd better go next,” Chandur said.

He helped the maid scramble down onto the ledge. When his hand grazed the heft of her bottom, Janny stopped her nervous mutterings long enough to chortle.

Wings thumped closer. Chandur stood with the daylight to his back, sword in front of him. His stomach clenched.
I can't see a thing.

The darkness shifted, and he swung. The jasper clubbed something to the ground. A feather scratched his face. He expected a squawking, but only the sound of more wings echoed down the passage.
Many more.

Not liking his position, Chandur holstered his sword behind his back. He dove into the room and caught the ledge.

Black and white feathers gusted after him. He glanced down to see vulture wings pass between him and the warped sky lake. Instead of a red neck, this vulture had a length of white and brown scales stitched to its shoulders. The head fanned into a hood. Only when fangs dug into his dangling leg did Chandur recognize the bird as half cobra.

He heaved himself onto the ledge.
Wish my prophecy had mentioned biting bird-snakes.
Heat itched its way up his right leg, and he wondered how long before the venom made him collapse and tumble off the walkway into the sky pit.

The vulture-wing cobra flipped with a few flaps to adjust to the change in gravity. It circled past the false doors, up toward them. Hawks with sand-colored viper heads followed it, and one eagle with ram horns.