Fox's Bride (26 page)

Drowsiness skewed Hiresha's sense of balance. The walkway seemed to shrink, to narrow with every step she took after the fennec. The heat of the trapped air made her gag.

She clung to the rectangles of the false doors. They were upside down in relation to her. Most every one had a number marked into it by lines, like the door that had opened into this room.

A glance up showed the sarcophagus closer.
Or further away?
The alabaster and opal coffin appeared smaller, somehow. Hiresha rested a hand against her brows as dizziness churned her insides.

Wings beat below her. Maid Janny was screaming. The fennec whined, his ears flat, chin pressed against his paws as he stared at the birds of prey below.
Above, rather.

Not liking the pitiful mousy noises the fennec was making, Hiresha threw a fistful of jewels down at the winged abominations. Only one hit, a sapphire that Lightened a cobra-vulture. The bird slowed and had to swim through the air. A viper-headed hawk flew too close to a diamond that shone yellow on a wall, and the abomination was pulled into the marble with a crunch.

Hiresha trusted Chandur to fend off the rest of them. Picking up the fennec, she edged farther along the walkway. Only one of her slippers would fit at a time along the ledge.
It has narrowed.
She had to stoop because the wall that had looked straight up and down now warped. A sense of wrongness throbbed in her head.

“Hiresha!” Maid Janny sounded more surprised than alarmed now. “How'd you get huge? You're a giant.”

“This is no time for your ridiculous....” Hiresha noticed her hand could cover an entire false door. No more than a fingernail fit into the smallest frame.

She reached up, into the bowl of the ceiling. Her arm shadowed the length of the sarcophagus. It no longer looked like a grand coffin but a toy. The opals covering it were no bigger than flecks.

“An illusion of perspective,” Hiresha said.

The sarcophagus had appeared normal sized from above. Now Hiresha saw it was too small to fit the fennec, not that she enjoyed the thought of stowing the innocent creature in another coffin.
Why, I could even touch the sarcophagus from here.

When she tried to open it, the miniature shifted. Stone scraped below, and the false door they had entered through slammed shut. They were sealed off with the embalmed birds.

Hiresha smacked her palm against her forehead. Wobbling, her balance shifted toward the drop. She feared the plunge to the crystal top was all too real.

The fennec squeaked as she tipped back toward the wall. She pressed herself against the stone in relief. Holding her breath, she shifted her hips around and took a step back down the walkway.

“Hiresha.” Chandur's voice cracked. He batted away a hawk then gripped one leg. “I think I've been bit.”

Hot anger cut into her chest at the thought of a winged snake striking him. “By which one?”

“The cobra.” He leaned against the wall, pinching his eyes closed.

The enchantress shuffled down the walkway as it widened. “Tend to me, Maid Janny.”

Setting herself against the wall, Hiresha closed her eyes. The beat of abomination wings was not much of a lullaby, but she reached her dream laboratory in a record time of sixty-three seconds.

Her reflection was pulling at her hair. “Oh, Fosapam must be in terrible pain. What if he passes out?”

“Not likely.” The Feaster was biting her sapphire claws. “Unless the cobra squirted every last drop of its venom.”

“Not helpful,” Hiresha said to them.

A rack of vials holding powdered gemstone flew from a shelf. The bauble orbited her hand, along with a diamond she was enchanting to Repulse apart the venom in Chandur.

While she worked, the mirrors spun with the images of the false doors that lined the cylindrical room. She had to find a safe path through the pyramid to the glyphed mummy.

“You think there is one?” the Feaster asked. “This could be just a death trap.”

“It is,” Hiresha said, “yet note the numbers on each false door. We entered through one with a 'three.' Those without marks must indicate zeros.”

“We don't see any patterns,” the reflection said.

“There isn't one.” The Feaster shut her violet eyes.

Hiresha stared at the blur of numbers in the mirrors. Excitement and fear coursed through her in equal measures. This tomb held the spirit of an enchantress god.

“I am listening, Opal Mind. What're you trying to tell me?”

Three mirrors closed in around her, and she gazed up to see the full swath of false doors.
Over three thousand of them.
Lines of light twisted over marble walls as she searched for sequences. She had to find a way. She needed the one true door.

The viper lashed out in a rush of speckled brown wings, stub horns above its reptile eyes. The abomination erupted in feathers and linen stuffing when a sweep of red stone severed it.

Chandur sagged against the wall, trying to control his breathing. It felt as if he stood barefoot on a brick white hot from a kiln, and the blistering pain pulsed up his leg.

The enchantress rested against the wall further up the walkway. The cobra stretched its neck toward her, dragging its wings through the air. It flailed more than it flew, a jewel stuck to its back.

Hand against the wall, Chandur limped toward her. He was afraid the cobra would slide its way to the sleeping enchantress first.

Janny smacked the winged snake with her fan. “Get back, you ankle-biting head-shitter!”

The waving fan blew away the Lightened abomination. Wings and hooded snake spun around each other down the room, up toward the sky.

The maid held the fan like a sword, panting. “All this vanquishing can't be good for my heart.”

“Better than the other way around.” Chandur set down his sword and pinched his hands around his leg to try to stop the venom from leaking higher.

Not counting the wallowing cobra, only one abomination still flew. The curved horns of a yearling ram circled beneath them, the tips of its eagle wings spiked with black feathers. Chandur kept an eye on it.

The fennec swished his tail as the enchantress woke. She handed a brown jewel to Chandur. “Swallow this.”

The gem tickled his tongue. He tried to swallow it but only succeeded in scratching the back of his throat. Three more attempts failed.
What, I can face down a croc-o-potamus but not get down a little jewel?
He tucked the gem in his cheek and hoped that would do.

Hiresha was speaking to Janny. “...you simply must have something on which to write.”

“Well, there's this, but....”

The enchantress snatched the papyrus. Not seeming to notice the sketch of the naked man with a stomach pleated with muscle, she turned it to the blank side. “It will do. Kindly hold the fennec.”

The maid flattened herself against the wall as much as possible for a vigorously dimensioned individual. “Can't. I'm allergic to fangs.”

“Honestly, Maid Janny, they could not cause you any lasting damage.”

Chandur took the fennec for her. When the small creature looked down to see the eagle wings below, he squeaked and shivered against Chandur. He comforted the fox as best he could, making cooing sounds. Janny gave him strange looks.

Thinking over his own situation, he was upside down in a tomb, and venom seared up his leg, and the wall door they had entered through had swung shut, and even trying to open it would mean hanging over a drop to his death. Even so, holding the fluffy-eared fennec made him feel a little bit of all right.

“Bless my knees,” the maid said, “you don't want to see what she's doing right now. You really don't.”

Chandur glanced at Hiresha. The enchantress had picked up one of the feathers strewn about and was writing with her eyes closed, in her own blood. A rivulet of red curved from her finger through the air to the feather's pointed end.

He suspected that this was not something most women would do, even most enchantresses. Chandur had noticed Hiresha tended not to take half measures. “She's writing numbers?” He could see the first few were, “three, one, four.”

The maid shuddered and fanned away the cobra again.

When the enchantress woke, she did not act as if she had done anything out of the ordinary. Holding the bloody paper in one hand, she took the fennec from Chandur and walked to the end, the ledge separating them from the false door that had slammed shut.

She lowered the fennec below the walkway. Chandur rested a hand on her back, worried she might tip over. “Careful.”

The enchantress turned the fennec sideways and set him against the false door. She loosened her grip. Chandur held his breath. The fox scampered up the wall as if walking over level ground.

“Stop!” Hiresha reached for the fennec, then she squirmed over the ledge, kicking Chandur when he tried to hold her back. “Fennec!”

The fox hopped onto a nearby false door and squeaked as he fell. Nothing remained between him and a tumble through hundreds of feet to crystal spikes.

Hiresha stood on the side of the wall, leaned forward, and snatched the fennec. She cradled him. “You can't walk on any section of wall you please.”

Chandur asked, “How'd you know which sections are the enchanted ones? And which are the drop-to-your-death ones?”

“They are numbered, of course.” Hiresha rested her foot on another false door. She shifted her weight onto it then walked to the center of the stone slab.

“As I see it, they're a lot of numbers but only one chance to guess wrong.”

“One number only. It compares a circle's width to its circumference.” Her hair fell straight toward the wall. Far beyond her, the top of the pyramid reddened from the nearing dusk. “Rather obvious, when you consider the circular room and entrance to the pyramid.”

“Is it?” Chandur did not see what she was talking about, but he did notice the ram-hawk flapping up toward the enchantress.

Sword in hand, he dropped himself from the ledge and waited to feel himself Attracted to the wall. Instead, he began to fall. A terror flared through him that the enchantment dispelled after the first person walked over it, and he was destined to die.

Shoving back the thought, he twisted in the air and kicked against the stone. As soon as his boots touched the false door etched with “III,” his weight shifted. He stood on the wall and dashed to fend off the winged abomination.

Its feathers slashed the air as it wheeled away, out of reach of his sword.

Janny walked along the wall behind him. “Feels like home at the Academy, am I right?”

Chandur said, “A few too many horned eagles here, but I got you.”

Hiresha muttered over her papyrus. She blinked and squinted, her head slumping toward sleep only to jerk upward again. Her fingers covered one number at a time as the spellsword, the maid, and the enchantress traveled in a crooked pattern over the walls.

“Wait,” Hiresha said. “Did we just cross over 'four, six, two?'“

He nodded. “On 'two,' now.”

They snaked along the wall. Chandur did not understand how a single number could be so long.
'Least my leg feels better,
he thought, shifting the jewel to his other cheek. The crystal at the top of the room darkened, and Hiresha's earrings began to spread a blue glow. Chandur bared his sword at the abomination when it flew too close.