The stairs creaked as the host descended. He held a bung-starter in one heavy fist. 'Didn't they tell you to go by the side?' he rasped. 'D'ye think I want the name of running a devil's brothel?' He took another step. 'By Ils and his sisters, you'll remember the next time!'
Samlor's fingers moved on his knife hilt. He still held the point away from the innkeeper. 'We don't have a quarrel,' he said.
'Let's leave it at that.'
The host spat as he reached the bottom of the stairs. ' Sure, I know you hot pants folderols. Well, when I'm done with you, you take my greetings to your pandering psalm-singers and tell them there'll be no more customers through here!'
'The priests share their privileges for a price?' Samlor said in sudden enlightenment. 'But I don't come for sex, friend.'
Whatever the tavern-keeper thought he understood, it frightened him as sight of the dagger had not. He paused with the bung-starter half raised. First he swallowed. Then, with a guttural sound of pure terror he flung the mallet into the shadows and fled back up the stairs. Samlor frowned, shrugged, and turned again to the fooder.
There was a catch disguised as a knot, obvious enough if one knew something of the sort had to be there. Pressed, the side of the cask swung out to reveal a dry, dark tunnel sloping gently downward. Samlor's tongue touched his lips. It was, after all, what he had been looking for. He picked up the lamp, now burned well down. He stepped into the tunnel, closing the door behind him.
The passage twisted but did not branch. It was carven through dense, yellow clay, shored at intervals with timbers too blackened for Samlor to identify the wood. There were tiny skitterings which seemed to come from just beyond the light. Samlor walked slowly enough not to lose the lampflame, steadily enough not to lose his nerve. Despite the disgrace of his vocation, Samlor was a noble of Cirdon; and there was no one else in his family to whom he could entrust this responsibility.
There was a sound behind him. Without turning, Samlor lashed out with a boot. His hobnails ground into something warm and squealing where his eyes saw nothing at all. He paused for a moment to finger his medallion of Heqt, then continued. The skittering preceded him at a greater distance.
When the tunnel entered a shelf of rock it broadened suddenly into a low ceilinged, circular room. Samlor paused. He held his lamp out at arm's length and a little back of his line of sight so that the glare would not blind him. The room was huge and empty, pierced by a score of doorways. Each but the one at which Samlor stood and one other was closed by an iron grate.
Samlor touched but did not draw his double-edged dagger. 'I'll play your silly game,' he whispered. Taking short steps, he walked around the circumference of the room and out the other open door. Another empty passage stretched beyond it. Licking his lips again, Samlor followed the new tunnel.
The double clang of gratings behind him was not really unexpected. Samlor waited, poised behind his knife point, but no one came down the stone boring from either direction. No one and no thing. Samlor resumed walking, the tunnel curving and perhaps descending slightly with each step. The stone was beginning to vibrate, a tremor that was too faint to be music.
The passage broadened again. This time the room so formed was not empty. Samlor spun to face what first seemed a man standing beside the doorway. The figure's only movement was the flicker of the lampflame over its metallic lustre. The Cirdonian moved closer and prodded the empty torso. It was a racked suit of mail, topped by a slot-fronted helmet.
Samlor scratched at a link of the armour, urged by a suspicion that he did not consciously credit even as he attempted to prove it. The tightly-woven rings appeared to be of verdigrised copper, but the edge of Samlor's knife could not even mar the apparent corrosion. 'Blood and balls,' the caravan-master swore under his breath. -
He was touching one of the two famed suits of armour forged by the sorcerer Hast-ra-kodi in the fire of a burning diamond. Forged with the help of two demons, legend had it; and if that was open to doubt by a modern rationalist, there could be no doubt at all that the indestructible armour had clothed heroes for three of the five ages of the world.
Then, twelve hundred years ago, the twin brothers Harash and Hakkad had donned the mail and marched against the wizard-prince Sterl. A storm overtook the expedition in the mountains; and in the clear light of dawn, all had disappeared - armour, brothers, and the three thousand men of their armament. Some said the earth had gaped; others, that everything had been swallowed by the still-wider jaws of airy monsters whose teeth flashed in the lightning and whose backs arched high as the thunderheads. Whatever the cause, the armour had vanished in that night. The reappearance of one of the suits in this underground room gave Samlor his first tangible proof of the power that slunk through the skittering passages.
From the opening across the room came the sound of metal scraping stone, scraping and jingling. Samlor backed against the wall, sucking his cheeks hollow.
Into the chamber of living rock stepped the other suit of Hast-ra-kodi's armour. This one fitted snugly about a man whom it utterly covered, creating a figure which had nothing human in it but its shape. The unknown metal glowed green, and the sword the figure bore free in one gauntleted hand blazed like a green torch.
'Do you come to worship Dyareela?' the figure asked in a voice rusty with disuse.
Samlor set his lamp carefully on the flooring and sidled a pace away from it. 'I worship Heqt,' he said, fingering his medallion with his left hand. 'And some others, perhaps. But not Dyareela.'
The figure laughed as it took a step forwards. 'I worshipped Heqt, too. I was her priest - until I came down into the tunnels to purge them of the evil they held.' The tittering laughter ricocheted about the stone walls like the sound caged weasels make. 'Dyareela put a penance on me in return for my life, my life, my life ... I wear this armour. That will be your penance too, Cirdonian: put on the other suit.'
'Let me pass, priest,' Samlor said. His hands were trembling. He clutched them together on his bosom. His fighting knife was sheathed.
'No priest,' the figure rasped, advancing.
'Man! Let me pass!'
'No man, not man,' said the thing, its blade rising and a flame that dimmed the oil lamp. 'They say you keep your knife sharp, suppliant - but did gods forge it? Can it shear the mesh of Hast-ra-kodi?'
Samlor palmed the bodkin-pointed push dagger from his wrist sheath and lunged, his left foot thrusting against the wall of the chamber. Armour or no armour, the priest was not a man of war. Samlor's left hand blocked the sword arm while his right slammed the edgeless dagger into the figure's chest. The bodkin slipped through the rings like thread through a needle's eye. The figure's mailed fist caught the Cirdonian and tore the skin over his cheek. Samlor had already twisted his steel clear. He punched it home again through armour, ribs, and the spongy lungs within.
The figure staggered back. The sword clanged to the stone flooring. 'What-?' it began. Something slopped and gurgled within the indestructible helmet. The dagger hilt was a dark tumour against the glowing mail. The figure groped vainly at the knob hilt with both hands. 'What are you?' it asked in a whisper. 'You're not a man, not...' Muscles and sinews loosened as the brain controlling them starved for lack of oxygen. One knee buckled and the figure sprawled headlong on the stone. The green glow seeped out of it like blood from a rag, staining the flooring and dripping through it in turn.