“Fascinating,” Akiro murmured, stroking his fingertips over the crystal wall. “There are no joins. It is truly one single gem. All of it. Fascinating.”
“Better it were ordinary marble,” Conan said roughly. “I could contrive a means to scale that. Come. We must find a doorway of some sort.”
“There is none,” Akiro said without breaking his abstract reverie.
“How,” Conan began, then thought better of asking how the wizard knew there were no doors. “Then how in Zandru’s Nine Hells do we get in?” he asked instead.
Akiro blinked in surprise. “Oh, that part is easy.” He walked to the edge of the landing and pointed to the water. “Down there is an opening. I could sense it the very first time I tried, perhaps because it is the only opening I found. It is big enough for our uses.”
“A means of getting water from the lake?” Zula said doubtfully.
“I do not like water,” Malak grumbled, but it was the palace he eyed nervously.
Conan knelt beside the round-bellied mage and peered at the water’s surface. It was unruffled once more, and he could see nothing but his own image. It could not be possible, he told himself, that this Amon-Rama would build a palace with no way in, then leave such a simple entrance as this. A trap, he thought, with Jehnna for bait. Then let the trapper discover what manner of creature it was he meant to snare. He breathed deeply to flush his lungs with air, and dove into the lake. Only a small splashed marked his entrance
There was a grayish clarity to the water below the surface. The Cimmerian took himself deeper with powerful strokes, searching along the face of the landing. The crystal surface was unmarked by the slimes and green things that grew on normal stonework immersed so.
Quickly he found the opening, a great pipe nearly as wide as his out-stretched arms, with a crosshatch of thick iron bars across it. Seizing the bars, he braced his feet against the wall beside the pipe and heaved. Nothing gave, not even the slightest. Harder he pulled, till his sinews creaked, and still to no avail. Abruptly he was startled to see other hands beside his own. He looked up and stared into the straining face of Bombatta, stripped of his black armor. Conan threw himself into redoubled effort. Bone and thew quivered, and lungs burned.
Suddenly, with a sharp crack, one bar tore loose in a shower of jewel-like shards. The grating shifted in Conan’s hands, and he found he had more leverage. Crystal splintered and broke, and one by one the other bars came free.
Letting the grate fall, the Cimmerian sped back to the surface. As his head broke water he gulped air. He did not look around when Bombatta surfaced beside him. From the landing’s edge three anxious faces peered down.
“The way is open,” Conan said between pants. “Come.”
“Wait but a moment,” Akiro said. “Regain your breath. We must make a plan.”
“No time,” Conan replied. One last breath he drew, then rolled over and swam downward again.
With a quick twist he turned into the pipe, powerful strokes carrying him deeper. The light faded behind him, and he swam in darkness. Thirty paces, now. Forty, and his lungs demanded air. Fifty. And suddenly there was a glow ahead. Swiftly he swam toward it, then turned upward toward the light’s source, moving arms and legs to slow his ascent. He broke the surface with only the sound of a droplet falling.
He was in a well, he saw, walled with the same smooth crystal as made up the palace. A wooden bucket was sunk in the water next to him, its rope pulled taut. Carefully he tugged the rope. It did not give.
A deadly smile came onto his face. Amon-Rama no doubt thought himself secure, and his trap subtle. In the northlands, though, there was an ancient saying. To trap a Cimmerian is to trap your own death.
Someone surfaced beside him with a splash that echoed from the well’s walls, but he did not look to see who it was. He would allow only one thought, now. Grasping the rope, he climbed hand over hand with a grim face. The Cimmerian had entered the trap, and he hunted.
In the chamber of mirrors Amon-Rama thoughtfully tapped his pointed chin with a long, thin finger. They were inside the palace. He had forgotten the pipe that brought water to his well, and they had found his oversight quickly. Good sport was indicated.
With a malevolent smile he lightly touched a mirrored wall. It was not, of course, as if these interlopers had some chance of escape or—all the powers of darkness forfend!—victory. This palace was his in ways no king could dream of. The shriek of the crystal as the bars were torn free. That had come to him. The tread of their feet in the corridors, the disturbing of the air by their breath, all came to him. But then, he found sport in other ways than offering true hope to his prey. Their false belief in false hope sufficed, and even greater sport came when all hope was stripped away.
Now was time for preparations. He spoke a word, raised his hands, and the golden draperies shrouding the walls rolled neatly upwards revealing the five score great mirrors that surrounded the chamber. Each mirror reflected the clear plinth that held the glowing Heart of Ahriman, but none showed Amon-Rama. A lifetime drenched in darkest thaumaturgies had many peculiar effects on the earthly body of the practitioner. He had no reflection to be shown in any surface.
Only two breaks were there in the phalanx of mirrors. One was the door to the corridor. Through the other he could see endless dark and the bed on which Jehnna’s still sleeping form lay. It was through this last that Amon-Rama moved. A sound rolled round the chamber, like the splash of a rock in a pool of water, and there was but a single gap unmirrored in the wall. Five score and one reflections of the Heart of Ahriman waited with the original.
Akiro pulled himself from the well with a grunt and, ignoring the water that dripped from him, stood staring at gem-like walls and ornaments of gold and silver so finely wrought that it seemed the mind of man could not have conceived them. Everywhere were tapestries of other-worldly scenes and carpets that changed in infinite variety of color and pattern as he watched.
“Akiro?” Malak said.
The rotund wizard shook his head admiringly. All done with sorcery; no one of these things had ever been crafted by a human hand. It was magnificent.
“Akiro?”
Irritably the mage turned to regard the small thief. Malak’s hair hung in his face, and a pool of water about his feet splashed with a rain of drops from his garments. He looked like a drowned rat, Akiro thought, then quickly scrubbed his own dripping hair from his face. “Yes?” he snapped.
“They are going,” Malak said.
Akiro looked in the direction the other pointed, and bit back an oath that would have curdled the air. Bombata and Zula were disappearing around a bend in the corridor, and Conan was no longer to be seen. “Fools,” he muttered. “Wait!” As swiftly as he could make his old bones move, he ran after them, with Malak dogging his heels. “Half-wits!” the old mage growled. “You do not wander about a wizard’s lair as if it were a merchant’s garden! Here, anything can happen!”