The tunnel increased in size and the irregularities of the walls smoothed out until the passageway was as wide and lofty as an Italian basilica of the other dimension. A pair of grooves had been cut in the floor which, Prestin intuitively guessed, were tracks for the carts that carried the jewels cut from the rock.
Dalreay cautioned Prestin to silence yet again. He pressed himself close to the side of the passageway that here curved gently outwards, concealing anything at the farther end from their view. He slowed down and moved cautiously around that convex wall of brilliance. By now the scintillant light was hurting Prestin’s eyes. He wiped away tears and felt the burning sensation that told him in no uncertain terms that he was damaging his eyesight. He pressed both hands flat against the wall and shut his eyes tight, creeping along that way after Todor Dalreay.
He bumped into the tough green-clad huntsman.
His eyes flew open. Dalreay pushed against him with a hard elbow and shoulder and he half-fell sideways into a niche in the wall. Chisel marks showed on the rock and fallen jewels lay scattered on the floor. Noises suddenly spurted from around the bend: harsh footfalls, the clanking of metal, voices raised in arrogant confident tones, laughing, careless, authoritative.
Dalreay put his bearded face close to Prestin.
“Forsaken imps of Honshi guards! For the sweet sake of Amra, don’t let one get away if there are more than two. Here.”
He thrust a javelin into Prestin’s less than enthusiastic hands.
Prestin didn’t like this one bit. It now seemed he had made a serious mistake to come down here at all. The footfalls neared; the strong confident voices and the clanking of metal made a deep diapason with those arrogant fancies of a moment ago. If there were more than three… Well… He gulped. That meant he was to silence his man, at least.
Dalreay had put his canvas bag down, pushing it further into the niche. His whole body was tensed in absolute concentration on one objective. These Honshi guards—whatever they were—would receive scant shrift from Dalreay.
Prestin swallowed and tried to forget he was a civilized man of twentieth-century Europe and America; he tried instead to pretend that he was a lethal and bloody-minded savage from the palaeolithic age, armed anachronistically with a steel tipped assegai.
Three guards rounded the corner. Dalreay spat a single expletive under his breath, “Parduslikaloth!”
It sounded delightfully obscene. The Honshi guards just looked obscene. Their faces most resembled frogs’, wide and grinning, with large far-spaced eyes, flat wedge-shaped cheeks, gray and yellow, with a lick of blue around the chops. They stood perhaps five-foot-six and strutted on short bent legs; they were tough, nasty and altogether repugnant. They wore metal armor—a reddish metal Prestin thought more likely to be copper than bronze—with tall conical helmets, banded in red and black. From the top of each spiked helmet hung a cluster of hair, still attached to shriveled skin. They looked too small to be scalps.
Dalreay shouted, “Hieyea!” and lunged. His javelin passed clean through the sidepiece of the first guard’s breastplate; the death warrant of that Honshi was clearly written in the sudden spout of green ichor that bathed the woodsman’s hand.
The Honshi carried swords of a similar pattern to that now whipped out by Dalreay: short broad and leaf-shaped like Celtic or Greek swords, they were handy for circling and thrusting, evenly balanced for the short chop to a defenseless neck, but not so good for open attack on an armored man. Broader than the classic Celtic leaf sword, they would be clumsier, too. Prestin hurled himself at the second Honshi, his javelin held like a rifle and bayonet. His mind was clicking along grooves he had forgotten existed.
The Honshi gutturaled deep in his throat. His sword flashed up. Prestin carried on with his lunge; he felt the javelin strike metal, begin to penetrate, and then bend. The force of his rush carried him on and he collided heavily with the struggling Honshi. From the tail of his eye as he sought to grasp the sword arm, he saw Dalreay’s sword go up, in, out, and leave the third guard’s face a bloody mess.
The worst that could happen now was that this second guard would escape. Prestin brought his knee up sharply and pushed hard sideways, his head down and urgently thrusting into the thing’s breastplate, like a front row forward.
They went over together. Then he had the sword arm. He bashed it frenziedly against the floor. The Honshi resisted like a piece of sprung steel. They thrashed about, now one on top, now another, and all the time the thing breathed in hoarse, foul gulps and gasps that filled the air with a stink that made Prestin feel sick.
From somewhere he heard Dalreay say, “If you’d only keep still a moment, Prestin—Ah!”
He was underneath at the time and with a loud and coarse thwack! the thing collapsed on top of him like a bag of hops when the string is cut.
He struggled up, avoiding the green ichor.
“I had him, Todor!” he said indignantly. “I had him beat!”
“Sure.” Dalreay laughed, his face relaxed and filled with satisfaction. He kicked the corpse. “Sure. You had him beat, Prestin. I just helped him on his way.”
Prestin shrugged his jacket back on and tried to wipe some of the muck off. Dalreay began to strip the three dead Honshi of their weapons. He left the armor. Looking on, Prestin bent and picked up a helmet that rolled loose. He indicated the scraps of hair.
“Scalps?”
“Scalps?” Dalreay looked puzzled. “I have learned the other-world language, Eytalian, but this word I do not know—”
Prestin explained.
Dalreay chuckled as though at a huge joke. “The idea is the same,” he said. “But head hair, no. They’re pubic hair. The Honshi must have a sense of humor your redskins lack.”
Prestin didn’t think it was funny. He had been holding the helmet and looking at the hair. He dropped the thing with a clang.
Dalreay chided him. “Here in Irunium a man must be a man, friend Prestin. No state aid here.”
He draped the weapons around Prestin and then dragged his canvas bag out. He wedged it firmly into the angle of floor and wall, piling the three bodies onto it. He seemed to like his work. “We can’t go any farther. These tunnels aren’t being mined now—I’ve had a hand in that—but it seems they are well patrolled. We do it here.”
“Do what?”
But before he had finished, Prestin understood.
Dalreay produced a long length of rope and an ordinary box of terrestrial kitchen matches from his belt pouch. He wedged the fuse well into the bag, and walked back running it through his fingers. Prestin made sure he was not left behind.
When Dalreay lit the fuse, Prestin was irresistably reminded of a man at his devotions.
Then they both hared down the passageway past the glowing jewel-encrusted walls. The swords kept clanking together but Dalreay got a little ahead and Prestin, forgetting about the noise, raced like a madman to keep up. They had almost reached the foot of the earth-cut steps when the explosion boomed, banged, ear-deafened and air-blasted along the tunnel behind them.
Prestin was pitched forward against the jeweled wall.
Dalreay, one foot on the stairs, looked up and yelled.
From above, louder and growing louder every moment, the long, drawn-out rumbling of a rock fall thundered down to bury them alive.
VI
Savagely, Dalreay hauled Prestin past the end of the earth-cut steps. They crouched in a narrow recess gouged from the living jeweled rock, their ears ringing with the clangor of falling gem stones, their eyes blinded by the thick dust and the roiling clouds of rock chips; any single flying glint of rock could blind them forever if it struck their fleshy eyeballs. Prestin, hands over his face, cowered down and felt his fear lashing him unmercifully.