Mazes of Scorpio (20 page)

There was just one chance, just the one, and the little brown and red scorpion was my only hope.

Headlong, I dived for the yellow silk curtain from which the scorpion had so delicately waddled.

No time to lift the drape. No time to do anything but hurl myself full at the wall.

My shoulder hit the yellow silk. It bulged inward. For a frightful moment I thought I had thrown myself against solid rock — for I went smashing into a hard surface. Then — and even as I burst in a shower of plaster through the false wall — a scorching fire flamed past my back.

The demon had hurled his bolts of lambent fire and the yellow silk burst into flame. Amid a shower of broken plaster and splintered laths, I tumbled head over heels out of the demon’s lair and into a chute down which I slid end over end, spinning around like a Catherine Wheel, arms and legs splaying like a drunken crab.

Lurid flames played above me as the silk wisped and more bolts of fire lashed at the opening I had made.

I hit something soft and furry and warm. Yellow torchlight blazed in my eyes. I felt the warm furry object move and lurch. In the next instant I was gripping on for dear life as a monstrous beast went screeching and trumpeting away along a corridor. Horns lifting before me, tail lashing to my rear, a gross body waddling from side to side beneath me, trapped on the back of an immense and savage beast, I went shooting away along the passage under the streaming light of the torches.

By Zair! This was a nightmare come true! I gripped on and shook my head and swallowed and so looked about to see what I could do — if anything.

What manner of beast it was that I bestrode in so strange a fashion I could not tell. I clung on and got my breath, and saw the roof of the tunnel lowering and narrowing ahead.

In only moments at the speed we were going the beast would be into the lower portion of the tunnel and I’d be scraped off as a dog scrapes off a flea against a rough tree trunk.

I swiveled around. The stone floor whistled past. I took a breath, lay flat and then rolled off aft. A tail lashed at me and winded me, and I hit the floor and bounced like a rubber ball. I tumbled hard, head over heels, and lay for a moment, flat, staring at the disappearing beast. I could see flailing tail and galloping clawed feet, and a mass of shaggy hair, and that was all. The monstrous beast dived into the narrow tunnel and vanished around a corner.

I sat up. The tunnel stopped going around, and settled for up being up and down being down. I felt myself and decided that if I had any broken bones they wouldn’t stop me from marching on and out of this Coup Blag nightmare.

And then I realized just where I was.

How often I have said that I like to be off adventuring alone! How often I have boasted emptily that to be off by myself is the height of joy! Well, right now I wished I was still with my companions. This maze of monsters and demons, of savage beasts and cunning traps, was no place to be alone.

No, by Zair!

Still, I had to go on. Quite apart from the mystery of Spikatur Hunting Sword, and the onrushing menace of the Shanks and their tremendous invasion fleet, there was the question of my life. That, I felt, was something I ought to ponder on.

As I picked myself up and settled my gear straight, I found myself wondering if, perhaps, that scorpion was another sign from the Star Lords. Could that incident have been a simple coincidence? It did not seem likely.

In the flaring yellow light of the torches becketed along the walls I looked about carefully. The tunnel contained jagged openings on my right, as though the rock had been broken open. Light splashed inside. Of course, I said to myself with little satisfaction, of course — stupid to imagine the Star Lords would actually help me, even recognize me, despite what had happened to my recent astonishment. Anyway — if that damned scorpion hadn’t waddled out so insolently from the silk drape, I would not have hesitated and would have left the demon’s lair.

The scorpion had not just saved me, he’d damned well got me trapped in the first place.

Exploring the jagged openings and the maze of tunnels beyond was a chancy business. The torches burned with their yellow light, and I ran constantly across nasties, ferocious animals and beast-men, fanged and clawed, dripping horrors of nightmare. Now, meaningfully, I wielded the superb Krozair longsword and I did not hesitate. The moment any malign creatures confronted me, it was a headlong blattering attack that swept them away in lethal bites of the magnificent Krozair brand.

“By the Black Chunkrah,” I said, sweeping my hair back, staring in foul temper at the latest dismembered corpse of a hairy horror, “I can’t spend all my life shilly-shallying about down here!”

But that seemed all too likely a prospect as I went stumbling on. In a section of tunnel from which the roof had fallen, to admit a green leprous light like a radiant leaching stripping away flesh from bone, I ran across some poor devil who had not jumped fast enough.

Off to the side and inclined down from a higher level ran a quadruple-chute. The slide was of a greenish metal, well-oiled, sharp-angled. On the floor at my feet rested a massive object like a bobbin with four sections, one to fit each part of the chute. The bobbin was man-high in diameter. Under it blood had congealed. A pair of legs stuck out, the sandals worn and with a leather strap broken and tied up over the big toe of the left foot. Also a hand stuck out here, grasping a ten-foot pole.

The fellow’s fingers had to be broken to release the pole. He wore no rings.

I pondered.

The ten-foot pole had failed him. It seemed to me that I was on a low level of the Coup Blag, perhaps at the basement level. Up higher — and, by Krun! I was going up higher! — the traps would be clustered thickly to precipitate unfortunates back down here. I took the ten-foot pole and scabbarded the longsword.

In only a few hundred yards I came across stone steps leading up.

I stopped.

Now stairs are the very devil for traps.

You can put your foot down and instead of treading on solid stone, you break through painted parchment and get caught in a bear trap. You can trigger a pressure plate, and the step at your back will gape open and something exceedingly hard and sharp will come flying out and knock you sideways to breakfast time. You can be caught as we had already been caught, in a stairway that snaps shut into a slippery slope. Stairs can be counter-balanced and geared to a pack of half-starved krahniks who treadmill away like crazy, so that you run and run and the stairway whistles back so that you do not move forward an inch.

And, inevitably, there are the stairways that deluge foul-smelling gunk on you from on high when you reach a certain tread or acid that eats you or nauseating gas that chokes you. As I say, beware of lightly tripping up and down stairs...

Prodding carefully, up I went.

This little beauty was fixed to trigger crossbow bolts through holes in the risers. The bolts were arranged to make diced meat of anyone foolish enough to trigger the bows. The ten-foot pole worked and the bolts hissed over my head. I own I stopped, then, and swallowed. Still, up I had to go...

The corridor at the top was almost like coming home after the jagged uncertainties of the caverns beneath.

The first room contained a single table, spread with fine linen, set out with a sumptuous meal — for one.

Not having a handy slave to taste the meal, and being starving hungry, I set to. If precedent was to be followed, I should be all right. Who or whatever was monitoring proceedings here was well aware of my predicament. No doubt methods of observations were fixed everywhere. This argued that the powers of a great wizard were at work. The signomants by which Wizards of Loh are able to see events at vast distances must be here, somewhere, but I could not discover them.

The little signomant like a bronze brooch with nine differently colored gems given me by my comrade Wizard of Loh, Khe-Hi-Bjanching, had been long since lost. Probably my friends were able to investigate the bottom of a river, or the depths of a swamp. I tramped on, wiping my mouth, and twirled the ten-foot pole in readiness for the next set of alarums and excursions.

Worries over Seg had to be pushed aside. He was with the main party and they had Kalu and the sorcerer Fregeff, and they should manage to keep themselves sane and alive. Moving along and prodding and keeping a watchful eye on everything, I considered the consequences of the eruption into our lives of the lady Milsi. Of course, Seg was the finest gentleman you could ever hope to meet, in the best sense, and his natural concern for Milsi was understandable. All the same, she had warmed to him. I’d seen that. She had been incarcerated, in rags, ill-used, expecting a hideous fate, and a hero had appeared and vanquished her enemies and brought her out of her imprisonment. Yes, there had been a spark in Milsi’s eyes when she looked on Seg Segutorio.

Praise be to Zair!

If Seg was really interested in Milsi, then I prayed that her reciprocal interest was not merely engendered by the circumstances and a full heart of relief at her rescue, but would continue. That, only the fates and the future could tell.

Just about then, the ten-foot pole came in handy in an unexpected way.

I’d negotiated a silly forty-five-degree metal mirror across the corridor and so had not gone thumping on. Ahead of me the corridor narrowed to something between five and ten feet wide. At its far end, well-lighted, the end wall was covered in two-foot-long spikes. They were clumped together like the spines of a bristle ball. I prodded the floor.

The stone appeared solid. But why stud a vertical end of a corridor with spikes, if they were not to pierce human flesh? And, if that was their function, how was I to be propelled onto them, or they to be hurled at me?

The answer came as the whole corridor tilted down.

Had the trap worked — well, had it worked you would not be listening to my narrative — I’d have gone head over heels down the vertical corridor as it swiveled into a pit, and so spread myself against the spikes, with piercing results.

The ten-foot-pole switched up like a quarterstaff and the ends cracked against the lip of the pit.

I dangled from the pole, balanced, as it held across the mouth of stone. If one end slipped... If I shifted my grips clumsily... I swung about like a pendulum over the spike-shafted pit and started to work hand over hand to the side. With a heave and a grunt I hauled myself out and reclaimed my faithful old ten-foot-pole. By Krun! The trap had been a dilly, a whole corridor suddenly plummeting down to form a deep shaft — and the spikes at the end were sharp enough and close enough to make diced Dray Prescot a reality.

Still, it had not been clever enough. The designer should have disguised the spikes. They had alerted a warning. And, I promised myself, when I met the designer of this maze, if I did, I’d let him investigate a few spikes of my own.

Then the ill-begotten child of a muck farm and a cesspool almost had me.

The trap was the same — a simple-seeming corridor that abruptly pitched down into a deadly shaft. Except that it was different, The shaft gaped before me in the center of a room, with dangling stink-vines and rotting corpses to insure I walked along where I was expected to walk.

And the shaft was ten feet wide.

As I pitched forward, the dangling screen of creepers ahead of me whisked aside to reveal the serried mass of spikes onto which I was supposed to fall.

The good old ten-foot pole caught at both ends on the sides of the shaft and stuck. It jammed across. And I dangled from the middle.

The pole was not exactly diametrically positioned across the pit. The famous ten-foot pole was by a hand’s breadth longer than ten feet!

After that it was a hand-over-hand swing to reach the sheer wall. Then a muscle-jerk and a chin-up and then a balancing act on the pole. I stood up on it, pressed against the wall, and hooked my fingers over the lip above me. Hauling myself out and twisting on my stomach at the top, I looked down. I did not wish to leave the jammed pole where it was.

One end was that life-saving fraction higher than the other. I reached down, and then, with a curse at my own stupidity, took off my belt and dangled that down to catch the end of the pole and that was not long enough, either. So I joined up enough of my belts and straps and swung the end down and caught it as it looped, and slid a buckle on, and pulled it all tight.

The faithful pole came up like a gaffed salmon.

An itchy scrabbling sound at my back made me roll over without even looking for the source of the noise. I rolled and came up on a knee and the longsword pointed — and a little schrafter, an animal that sharpens his teeth on the bones of skeletons in dungeons, scuttled away, scared out of his wits.

My breath gusted out in a whoosh.

Fitting my gear together did not take long, and all the time I kept looking under and between the hanging stench vines and the grotesque half-decomposed corpse-shapes. Out there the darkness closed in. And, pair by pair, in fours and eights and scores, lambent yellow eyes gathered. When I fastened the last buckle and was ready, hundreds of pairs of eyes gleamed on me from the darkness.

Flinging a torch snatched from a corpse’s withered fingers, I backed off. Careful, careful! The room offered no way forward, so I retraced my steps, turning every now and then to hurl a torch back into the host of eyes which followed in the darkness. The trouble was, flinging torches made the darkness at my back more intense. How long this went on I do not know; I know I felt more tired than a galley slave after a stern chase in a calm.

The traps I encountered when I branched off from the path I had already traversed were of the diabolical and cunning kind. Somehow I survived them, losing bits of skin, and the drexer — which annoyed me — and sundry portions of my gear. By the time I staggered into a room lit by a crystal fire roof, I had shaken off that pack of following eyes, and had also been reduced to a scarlet breechclout, a rapier — the main gauche had been carried off in the throat of a batlike creature that in swooping from the darkness had impaled itself — and the Krozair longsword. I was barefoot. Well, that is normal for a fellow who has been a powder monkey in Nelson’s Navy. I staggered into this room to see three walls lined by bronze statues of armored men, apim, diff, all kinds, and the small table laid with a meal. I just flopped down on the chair and stared at the food, summoning my energies to eat and drink.