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Maram couldn't suppress a smile. Evidently she wasn't the only one who loved what she shouldn't.
NINE
For the first time, Aladdin found Gwandoya had not lied. Inside the door sat a stack of torches. He seized one and carried it back to what remained of Gwandoya's fire. It was enough to light the torch, which was all Aladdin needed. He stepped back inside the cave and set off down the tunnel into the depths.
After several turns, Aladdin found himself at a crossroads of sorts, with two paths to choose from. Gwandoya and the doorway were out of sight, so there was no one he could ask for directions. Swearing, Aladdin peered down both tunnels, but neither dusty stone passage seemed more inviting than the other.
This cave ran deeper than he'd thought. Deep enough for a man to get lost in, maybe. Was that how Bugra had died? Aladdin moistened his suddenly dry mouth. Other men might have died here, but he would not. He backtracked to where he found another unlit torch in a bracket on the wall, and lit that, too, before he headed down the right hand passage. Any torch he saw, he lit, so he'd know he'd passed this way before.
Pretty soon, the warm light of all the torches behind him made Aladdin comfortable enough to start looking around him, at what wasn't a cave at all. The tunnels had been carved by tools, not nature, and he could see the marks of axes where they'd been opened out. Some tunnels came to dead ends that looked more like rooms where people had lived and worked. But where were the people?
They'd left tools and clothing behind, even bedding, but everything was covered in a thick layer of dust. As though the people who lived here had left in a hurry, intending to return, but they had not. What had driven them out, and what had prevented them from returning? Aladdin wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer to either question.
Especially not if the answer was somewhere in the city with him. Someone or something had killed Bugra, and Aladdin had no desire to be next.
He entered, then backed out of a prayer room. Perhaps he should take a moment and pray, he thought, then decided not to bother. Who knew which direction to face, anyway, so deep underground? No one would hear his prayer from here.
The next corridor ended in a dead end, blocked off by a boulder that looked like a smaller version of the one at the entrance. A door, Aladdin guessed, eyeing it. "Please open?" he suggested.
The round stone rolled smoothly aside, revealing a new passage. Aladdin breathed a sigh of relief, and stepped through.
More passages, more rooms, more torches, and more doors that opened at his request. Aladdin knew he descended deeper into the earth at each step, but he'd seen no sign of treasure, lamps or otherwise.
If he wanted to hide a pile of untouchable gold in this maze of a city, where would he put it? Aladdin considered this for a moment, before he had his answer. He'd put it either in the very centre of the city, or in the furthest depths from the entrance. Whichever was easier to defend if the city were attacked.
Aladdin laughed, the sound echoing through the empty tunnels. What would he know about defending or attacking a city? He should be safely home in his. All he had to do was find the benighted lamp, hand it to the madman outside, and he could go home.
Deeper he went, taking the tunnels that led down until he could go no further, for his way was barred by a bigger door than any he'd seen yet. This was the one, he was certain of it.
"Open, please," he breathed.
The door rolled open. Aladdin took a deep breath and thrust his torch inside.
At first, it didn't look too different from the store rooms he'd passed, with dusty casks, boxes and sacks piled up on either side of a narrow aisle. But something glowed at the end, as though he'd arrived at the surface and not the depths of the city.
Aladdin crept forward, suddenly glad he was so thin, for a bigger man wouldn't have fitted so easily between the chests piled up to the ceiling. The hem of his tunic dragged along the top of a chest, revealing costly polished wood under the dust. This was the treasury, all right. What had Gwandoya told him to watch out for? Not to touch the gold, or let his clothing touch it. Pulling his tunic tight around him, Aladdin proceeded forward into...the light.
The second chamber didn't look any different from the first, at first, for whoever owned the contents of this place preferred to keep it safely locked in chests, instead of piled up all over the floor, as Aladdin might have expected. Someone with countless wealth would surely be careless with their coins. But the first glimpse he got of gold was in a chest that someone had pried open so roughly it no longer closed. Bugra would not have had the strength to do this – and nor did Aladdin. How many men had Gwandoya brought here? And why had they all failed?
Aladdin rounded the corner and found his answer. A lit lamp sat in an alcove on the wall, so blackened from use it was hard to tell it was brass. But the flame was as bright as ever, illuminating a chest full of riches that surely belonged to a king or a sultan. Gold jewellery snaked around a collection of gold lamps, so shiny they hurt his eyes. Aladdin squinted, and looked again. The chest was not full – it was barely half full, and some rings and a necklace lay on the ground in front of it, as if dropped by someone in a hurry to cram as much treasure as they could into a sack to take with them.
Automatically, Aladdin stooped to return the treasures to their chest.
"I thought you were brighter than the others," a strange voice said.
Aladdin jerked upright. "Who said that?"
A blue glow appeared on Aladdin's right, atop a barrel. The light grew until it took the shape of a man. A man who was as lanky as Aladdin himself, though his clothes were far finer than anything Aladdin owned. "That would be me," the bluish man drawled, snapping his fingers. The blue light vanished, leaving the magic man looking as normal as Aladdin, or as normal as any man who hadn't appeared from a ball of light.
"Who are you?"
The man bent double without rising from the barrel. "Kaveh, servant of the ring you wear on your finger." He nodded at Aladdin's hand. "And you?
"Aladdin." He didn't know what else to say. Unemployed street rat? Minion to the madman outside? Son of a spinner? His heart lurched at the thought of what would happen to his mother if he died here. It would break her heart. "I need to grab that lamp and get it out of here." He reached for the alcove.
Kaveh whistled. "So you are brighter than the others. You're the first one who went for the right lamp."
Aladdin's hand closed around it, a moment before he realised that a lit lamp would be hot to the touch. To his surprise, the metal was as cold as the stone underfoot. "Must be magic," he muttered.
