CHAPTER TEN

 

 

Alone of all the captains, Florin had had little faith in Kereveld’s tales of cities and gold. He hadn’t needed it. Mordicio’s vindictiveness, and the knowledge of the terrible fruit it was likely to bear, had been enough to drive him across the ocean and into the cloying embrace of this dank wilderness.

Not for Florin were the whispered promises and mounting greed that had brought the others here. Not for him the dreams of wealth beyond measure lying scattered amongst the bones of a dead race.

But now, standing on the spine of the ridge that overlooked the plateau beyond, he felt a sudden flare of avarice in his chest.

There could be no doubt that the wizard’s tales had been at least partly true. The buildings that struggled up through the jungle’s choking fingers were as real as anything else in this world. As real and as inhuman.

Even from this distance it was obvious that no human hand had taken a part in their shaping. It wasn’t just the size, although the hulking lumps of smooth granite structures were massive. Nor was it the design, although surely no sane human architect would craft buildings as grim as these. Even the massive central building, which Florin guessed must be a temple, was little more than a pile of neatly stacked cubes. Devoid of windows, clean of any decoration, it slumped broodingly amongst its smaller cousins, blind and featureless.

No. What marked this city out as something beyond the power of men was the sterility of its polished surfaces. Not a single vine dared to blur its sharp edges, nor a single tree stump, or tuft of grass.

Whatever had built these gargantuan structures had lent them immunity to the wilderness, the same protection which still hung over the ruined canal.

“That’s it, that’s it!” Kereveld howled, holding the book out in front of him with trembling hands. His eyes flitted from the stark silhouette of the central building to a smudged ink drawing on the central pages, and he giggled horribly.

Florin, who’d been gaping at the incredible structures beyond, realised it and closed his mouth with a snap.

“Looks like we’re here then,” he said. “What do we do now?”

“Carry on,” Kereveld told him, his voice breaking with a high-pitched laugh that sounded a little too hysterical for Florin’s liking.

“No, we’ll inform the commander first.”

“Why waste time?” the old man snapped with impatience “It’s there, right there! Let’s go.”

“Lorenzo, go ask Orbrant to send a runner back to van Delft. Tell him what we’ve found.”

“Right you are, boss.”

“Tell him we’re pushing on down towards the city.”

Kereveld’s eyes creased, and for a moment he looked as smug as a child whose tantrum has worked. Florin felt a flash of anger at the sight of it, but hid it well. If anybody needed to be cultivated now it was the wizard.

Who knew what other pieces of useful information an enterprising man might wheedle out of those mildewed pages of his book?

“Well then, Menheer Kereveld. Look’s like we all owe you a vote of thanks.”

“Yes,” the wizard said. “Do you think we can make the temple by nightfall?”

Florin took the hint.

“I think so. Bertrand, pop back and tell Sergeant Orbrant we’re heading on, will you? Here, I’ll take that. I must ask you to step back, Menheer Kereveld. Perhaps you can wait back in the main body with your servant.”

But Kereveld was oblivious to anything but the temple. He was gazing at it with the wide-eyed rapture of true love, the rest of the world forgotten.

“Suit yourself, then,” Florin muttered, and swung the machete through a tangle of vines to his left.

As the expedition worked its way down into the plateau, the trees once more closed in above their heads. Soon their world had shrunk back down to the few feet that lay on either side of them. The surrounding vegetation grew ever thicker as they pushed on, the tangled thickets swarming with biting insects and hungry lizards that reminded Florin of the skinks they’d run from.

One by one the men fell back exhausted, passing their machetes to those of their fellows who waited behind. Gradually the ground levelled off, the sliding mud of the slope giving way to a morass of rotting detritus. It reached up to the men’s ankles, and sometimes even higher, to dump mouldy leaves and squirming things into their boots.

The shadows lengthened, and in spite of himself Florin began to wonder if they were on the right path. He was even thinking about returning to the ridge to camp for the night when the men up front cut through a great hanging wall of vines and revealed the clearing beyond.

“This is more like it,” Florin grinned and led the way forward.

“Yes, wonderful,” Lorenzo said, although there was something half-hearted about his sarcasm. After the cloying heat and suffocating mass of the jungle the clearing did feel wonderful.

The only undergrowth here was the elephant grass, fibrous and sharp-bladed but easy enough to walk through. It rolled away into the distance, a great shifting sea of green above which the dark silhouettes of the ruins seemed to float. The light of the setting shone on the crumbling stone of their western faces, but painted the other sides as black as the colossal shadows which lurked behind them.

Florin drifted to a halt, the better to feel the sun on his face and the warm breath of the wind in his hair. Then, aware of the crush behind him, he sheathed his machete and swished his way into the knee-high grass.

The first of the buildings lay before them, the giant gravestones of a dead civilization. But despite their glowering presence the Bretonnians laughed and chattered as they emerged from the dank shadows of the jungle and into the light of the sun.

“Looks like Kereveld’s found a friend,” Lorenzo said as the wizard pushed past them and trotted, robes flapping, towards the nearest of the buildings. His book, as always, was clamped tightly beneath one arm.

“We’d better keep an eye on him,” Florin said thoughtfully. “You stay here. Tell Orb rant to stake out the best site to make camp.”

“Take a couple of the lads with you, boss. The Lady alone knows what could be lurking around here.”

“No.” Florin his eyes locked firmly on the book, shook his head. “I’ll be all right.”

 

“So,” Lorenzo said, the firelight twinkling in his eyes. “What about this gold?”

“Thought you said you didn’t believe in it,” Florin chided him, and passed one of the biscuits they’d been baking to Lundorf.

The Marienburger took it with a nod of thanks.

“Well I believe in it, anyway,” he decided, tossing the morsel from hand to hand as it cooled. “Kereveld’s book was right about everything else, why not the gold? Just think: there could be a fortune sitting not a hundred yards from us. No wonder the commander posted guards on these buildings. Imagine the trouble if someone found the loot and made off with it tonight!”

A thoughtful silence descended on the little group. Florin looked across the campsite, where a score of similar conversations were no doubt taking place over a score of similar campfires.

“I already know what I’m going to do with mine,” Lundorf said confidently, and bit off a piece of his biscuit. “Stables. I’m going to build a stables, just outside of Marienburg.”

“Not very adventurous,” Florin chided him, and found himself counting the campfires. Up until now the men had been content to huddle around the comforting blaze of the expedition’s cooking pits.

Tonight, though, they all seemed to have developed a taste for privacy.

“Oh, I won’t run it,” Lundorf said. “There’s a girl back home that I know. Vienela. She can do it.”

“Vienela, hey? Got a good business head, has she?”

“Yes.”

“And a pretty face to go with it?”

Lorenzo sniggered in the darkness, and Lundorf’s even features hardened into a fierce scowl.

“Not that that has anything to do with it, but yes.”

Florin was amazed to note that his brother officer was blushing. But before he could tease him any further Lorenzo brought the conversation back to business.

“So,” Lorenzo asked. “What about Kereveld’s book?”

“He showed it to you?” Lundorf wondered, obviously keen to change the subject.

“No, he didn’t. The old goat’s not such a fool after all. Said he’d tell us everything we needed to know.”

“Maybe he will.”

“Or maybe he’ll tell van Delft first.”

“That’s all right, then,” Lundorf said, and helped himself to a goblet of boiled water. “As long as the commander gets hold of the gold we’ll all get our fair share.”

Florin met Lorenzo’s disbelieving eyes over the flickering orange tongues of the fire.

“Yes,” he said. “Just as you say, Lundorf. But if we find the gold first we can be sure that it’s appropriately accounted for.”

“I see what you mean. I don’t see why Kereveld wouldn’t want to help us recover this damned treasure, though. It’s why we’re here.”

“Although not why he’s here.”

“And why’s that?”

“The gods alone know.”

There was a muffled clink to one side of their fire and a huddle of figures, Kislevites by their silhouettes, slunk past and out into the night. Two of them had swapped their axes for spades, and Florin cursed himself for forgetting to buy his own men such tools.

“Wonder where they’re going,” Lorenzo muttered suspiciously, straining his eyes to follow them into the darkness.

“So do they,” Florin muttered, gesturing to the pair of Tileans who slipped stealthily along in their wake. A moment later both parties had disappeared into the unbroken night outside of the encampment.

Lundorf finished the last of his biscuit and washed it down with the water.

“What I wouldn’t give for a decent cask of brandy,” he sighed, swishing the flat water around his mouth. “Boiled water just never tastes right.”

“Luckily,” Lorenzo smoothly cut in, “I remembered to bring some tea-leaves. They kept well, too. Always the way with the best quality green.”

“Wish I’d thought of that,” Lundorf shook his head.

“Would you like some of these?”

“Well yes, thank you,” the Marienburger nodded, taken aback by this old scoundrel’s generosity.

“What are friends for?” Lorenzo said, and opened his satchel to pull out half a dozen sealed tins, each as big as a fist. Cracking open the lid of one he peered inside, took a sniff, and then, satisfied, closed it up and tossed it to Lundorf.

“I say,” Lundorf smiled, taking a sniff himself. “This is excellent stuff. Thank you!”

“Don’t mention it,” Lorenzo grinned wide enough to show all six of his teeth. “And because you’re a friend I’ll only ask for a dozen crowns.”

“Oh, I see. I thought… well, never mind. The thing is, though, I’m a bit short at the moment. Swamptown, you know.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Lorenzo soothed. “Just give me what you can and pay the rest later.”

“Oh. All right then.”

Florin watched Lundorf fumble for his purse and felt a sudden twitch of nostalgia. The first time he’d met Lorenzo it had cost him dear, too. His father had wanted it that way; he had used Lorenzo as a tame fire in which his son could burn their fingers.

His father. A good man, killed by the broken heart of his wife’s death.

Florin thought about him as he studied the vast cemetorial shapes that towered beyond this little circle of light. They blocked out great swathes of the starlit sky, the spaces within their sharp silhouettes so completely black that they might have been gateways into some dark, empty void.

With a sudden prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck he wondered if it would be so long until he met his parents again.

Somehow, sitting in the midst of this terrible wilderness and surrounded by the monolithic shells of a long dead race, he didn’t think so.

He shivered and spat into the fire as if to exorcise the idea.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “I’m going to try and get hold of Kereveld’s book. Then we’re going to get the treasure. And then we’re going to get the hell out of here.”

“Finally,” Lorenzo said, looking up from the handful of coins Lundorf had given him. “Some sense.”

But, unknown to Florin, tomorrow had other plans for him.

 

* * *

 

It was a council of war; van Delft had no doubt about that. Nor did he have any doubt about who the enemy was.

It was chaos.

Not the horrible twisting madness from the far north, thank Sigmar. But, left unchecked this kind of chaos could be just as lethal.

Already two men had gone missing. They had slipped away in the middle of the night, taking nothing but a pick and hessian sack, as far as their comrades could make out.

The pick had been found by the sentries, lying in the grass at the edge of the jungle. Of the men who had carried it there had been no sign.

There had also been a couple of fights, one of them over a bundle of spades and the other over some ridiculous rumour. Although captains Castavelli and Lundorf had intervened before they’d escalated into full-blown riots, there’d still been broken noses and cracked ribs. One man was still suffering from concussion.

Everyone, everywhere, seemed to have been transformed overnight, as if by some insidious magic, from soldiers to prospectors. Even now the sound of picks striking stone, punctuated with cries of sudden excitement, and equally sudden disappointment, rang out into the listening mass of the jungle. To his definite knowledge only Lundorf and d’Artaud, or more accurately, Orbrant, had called muster this morning. That damned Kislevite Graznikov hadn’t even billeted his men together.

All this and they’d only been here for less than twenty-four hours.

Well, no more. He’d be damned if he’d see his command disintegrate into a rabble.

“Glad to see you, gentlemen,” he began, meeting the eyes of each of his captains in turn. Sergeant Orbrant stood at a respectful distance to one side of them, and Kereveld was pacing impatiently around behind them like a cat on a hot tin roof.

Damned wizards, van Delft thought.

“Today we are going to start pulling things back together. I know we’re all eager for the riches that brought us here, but if we carry on like this there won’t be a man of us left to carry them home.”

The captains nodded agreement.

“Luckily for us, we have good terrain to work with. It’s already cleared of jungle, for one thing. And for another, as you can see, the central pyramid commands the entire area. Then there are these smaller structures, one at each corner.”

He paused to wave a machete at the great lump of masonry that cased the shadow in which they were standing. Although dwarfed by the towering heights of the central pyramid it was still a massive structure. The stones of its construction, some of them bigger than a carthorse, fitted together as neatly as the pieces of a jigsaw.

Some of its masonry was missing. The neatly chiselled cornerstones, for example, had long since been knocked off the structure by age or tectonics. They lay amongst the swaying elephant grass now, those great blocks, as impotent and menacing as fallen idols.

But apart from the damage every surface was blank and monolithic, the countless tons of its construction as completely unflinching and as absolutely soulless as a lizard’s gaze.

Only a single, black doorway marred the perfection of its skin. The four guards van Delft had posted there, two Kislevites and two Marienburgers, peered into the gloomy interior mistrustfully.

“We’ll use these smaller buildings as the corners of our stockade,” the commander continued. “Each of the human companies will be responsible for securing one of them, and for building, and manning, an intervening section.”

“And my men?” Thorgrimm asked. a

“Your men will be kept in the pyramid. They will also be charged with any mining tasks that may be required. That will include directing my men here in the construction of the stockade. If you think you could do that…?”

The dwarf’s eyes flashed at the challenge.

“We can certainly do that.”

“Good,” van Delft said. “Nothing too fancy. Perhaps just a line of picket stakes?”

“Better to mount them on a bank behind a ditch,” Thorgrimm told him, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “It won’t take too long, and it’ll strengthen the whole front. And instead of fixing pickets in individually we’ll make caltrops out of ’em. Six pointers I reckon.”

“How long will that take?”

“Today, and most of tomorrow.”

“All right. Would you assign one of your foremen to each of the captains here?”

“Of course.”

“We can have a race,” van Delft suggested, as if on the spur of the moment. “Let’s say that the last company to finish has to dig the latrines, shall we? That way we could have the temple sealed by tomorrow night.”

“Are we sure that the temple’s empty?” Florin asked, looking at the towering mass warily. It appeared to be completely intact: not a single section of fallen masonry, or chipped stone, marred its cubic perfection.

“Yes,” van Delft told him. “But I’m glad you’re interested. Bartolomi here wants to go and have a poke around inside it. Take a couple of men and keep an eye on him, would you?”

“Let’s go,” Kereveld interrupted the commander’s last word.

Florin stared at him, and struggled not to scowl.

“Yes, sir. Although perhaps Captain Thorgrimm here would like to accompany us. If we’re going to go poking around underground…”

“Yes?” the dwarf asked.

“I mean, I would value your engineering expertise.”

“All right,” agreed Thorgrimm, eyeing the temple with professional interest. “You’ll probably need it.”

“Well, I’m glad that’s settled then,” van Delft said, with barely a hint of sarcasm. “Captain Thorgrimm here will lend each of you a quarter of his men, and they will direct your efforts. Let’s say… Castavelli you take the northernmost outbuilding and construct your stockade to the eastern most, Lundorf you’ll take that one and dig south. The Bretonnians will take over there and go west, and Graznikov will close the gap from there. Is that acceptable to everyone? Excellent.”

“Come,” said Kereveld, actually tugging at Florin’s sleeve. “Let’s make a start.”

The Bretonnian looked at van Delft, who nodded, then turned to Thorgrimm.

“When you’re ready, captain, we’ll be at the entrance to the central pyramid.”

“I’ll be an hour,” Thorgrimm estimated.

“An hour!” the wizard snapped impatiently.

“Yes. An hour.”

Fifty minutes later the wizard, the dwarf and a handful of Bretonnians met outside the entrance to the temple. The doorway was a perfect square, a neatly shaped hole amongst neatly shaped blocks.

Thorgrimm was running the gnarled skin of his hands over the sharp edges of the pillars at the side of the entranceway and gazing up at the lintel that hung twelve feet above him with a warm smile.

“Very nice,” he muttered approvingly. “The lines are almost perfect.”

Kereveld looked up from his book and frowned.

“Is this the only entrance?”

“The only one that we can find,” Florin said. “Why?”

“There’s something in the book here about a revolving door. It looks like a flap or something.”

“Let’s see,” Florin leaned closer to the wizard, who reluctantly showed him the page. The only thing that he recognised was a smudged ink drawing of something that looked like a pile of child’s blocks. That, he supposed, was the pyramid. Apart from that the page was covered with a scrawl of undecipherable handwriting and bizarre sketches, none of which appeared to be any more useful than the doodlings of a lunatic.

Not for the first time Florin found himself amazed that the book had actually led them this far.

“Is it all like that?” he asked, trying to hide the disappointment in his voice.

“Some of it,” Kereveld said, looking up suspiciously before shutting the book with a jealous snap. “Oh well. Never mind. Let’s see what we can find, shall we?”

Lorenzo lit the first of a bundle of torches and passed them around. The tar-soaked cloth of their heads spat and fizzled into life, the flames flickering weakly in the tropical sunlight.

Kereveld seized his torch and, without hesitating, strode into the gaping maw of the temple. The others hurried after him, huddling together in the darkness and the cold.

And it was cold. Even a few metres into the passageway the humid breath of the jungle was gone, to be replaced by a chill breeze that whined miserably from the depths beyond. It iced the walls with condensation, the glistening moisture dripping down the faded carvings that adorned them.

Not that this had dissuaded the spiders that seemed to rule this dank domain. Their slimy webs were draped across the passageway, the grey fibres beaded with dew and the drained carcasses of huge insects. Moths with wings as big as a bats, dragonflies with mandibles as sharp as pliers, other, stranger things; the chitinous shells of their bodies rattled as the men brushed tentatively past their hanging graveyard and into the depths beyond.

“Hey. Hey, wait!” Thorgrimm cried, looking up from his study of the stonework as the last of Florin’s men disappeared into the darkness beyond.

“Wait for what?” Florin paused and called back, his voice echoing within the wide confines of the passageway. He didn’t like the sound of it. Perhaps it was his imagination, or perhaps some weird acoustic, but the echo made his voice sound somehow alien.

But before his own flinty tones had died away they were drowned out by a long, terrible screech, and a cry from Kereveld that was cut off as soon as it had begun.

“Kereveld!” the Bretonnian cried out, gazing wide-eyed into the gloom into which the wizard had rushed. “Kereveld!”

There was no reply apart for the echo of his own voice, twisted into a cruel mimicry by the endless depths beyond.

“Sigmar rot the bollocks off you, you old fool,” he muttered and then, since there was nothing else to do, he followed the wizard’s footsteps into the darkness.

From behind, Thorgrimm’s voice floated through the darkness, the words lost beneath the distorting effect of the temple’s stonework.

“He wants us to wait, boss,” Lorenzo said, nervously.

“Yes. But look, what’s that ahead? Is it his body?”

Squinting through the flickering shadows the torches sent fluttering around the walls, much as the spiders’ prey must have fluttered in their traps, Florin stepped forward.

“Shouldn’t we wait for the dwarf?”

“You wait here. Damn. That is a body up ahead.”

There was no mistaking it now. Alone of all the shadows the form slumped in front of Florin lay still. The dark mass of its cloak twisted around it like a ready-made shroud, the hood thrown up to cover its head.

Florin switched his torch from his right to his left hand and unsheathed his sword, the sharp rasp of metal on leather seemed almost painfully loud to his straining senses. Then, nose wrinkling at a musty smell which grew more cloying by the second, he took another step forward and licked his lips nervously.

The body was dead; there was no doubt about that. No living man could lie in Such an awkward angle. Beneath the merciful covering of his cape Kereveld’s bony form had been twisted into hideous new geometries, as though it had been chewed up and spat out.

Of the book, which until then had never left the wizard’s grasp, there was no sign.

“He must be lying on top of it,” Florin told himself, his voice flat with disbelief.

Caution forgotten he trotted forward, grasped the corpse by the shoulder and pulled it over.

The cloak fell back and death leered up at him.

Although its smile was manically wide there was no humour in the black hollows of its eyes, no emotion on the polished bone of its face. The scraps of hair that remained stuck to its head looked as false as if they’d been glued on by a grizzly practical joker.

Perhaps the same hellish comedian that had hidden nests of tiny spiders in the thing’s eye sockets.

With a sudden, spinal crack, the jaw fell away from the rest of the skull and struck Florin on the forearm.

He cried out in shock and pushed the skeleton away. As he shifted his weight there was a deafening grinding squeal: the same sound that had marked Kereveld’s demise, and the earth fell away beneath his feet.

Florin caught one last glimpse of Lorenzo’s horrified face as the passageway folded over him. A last taste of the world of the living before he, like the corpse below him, was swallowed up by the temple’s hungry stone jaws.

 

For a long time there was peace. As soft as an endless, black, velvet sheet Florin felt himself sliding down its unbroken skin, his troubles slipping away in the blankness of it all. Then the peace disappeared and in its place only darkness remained. And from the darkness came pain.

It was difficult to tell how badly hurt he was. There was a numbness that stretched down one side of his body, although in the blinding darkness of this place that could be from anything from pins and needles to a snapped spine.

Florin, his head splitting with the pain of fading concussion, drew his finger across the sticky dampness that dripped from his hairline, then tasted it.

The coppery taste of blood was sharp on his tongue.

“At least I haven’t lost my sense of taste,” he told the darkness, and tried to ignore the shakiness of his voice. “And it seems that I’ll still be able to lift a flagon of wine.”

There was no echo here, only a heavy silence.

“So I’ll be all right.”

Gradually, every movement sending bright white sparks of pain spinning through his head, he sat up. There was a muffled rattle, like dice in a leather cup, as the shattered remains of the skeleton shifted around him.

“Sorry,” he told it, then tried to get to his feet.

It was surprisingly difficult, and not just because of the numbness which still paralysed his left side. There seemed to be no floor here, just a wide semi circle of sloping wall. Florin leaned against it, and felt himself sliding down a surface that was as smooth as glass.

The bones beneath his feet shifted, and he slipped back down to a sitting position.

In the darkness, silence blossomed.

“Lorenzo!” Florin cried, his voice loud enough to start his headache pounding back into life.

“Thorgrimm!”

“Kereveld!”

Nothing.

Florin sighed, and wrinkled his nose at the sour smell of decay. He supposed it came from the corpse. Then he felt for his matches. They weren’t there.

Then, so faint that he almost thought he might be imagining it, a noise. A tiny, constant patter, as chitinous and relentless as an insect’s rush.

Florin thought about the things he had seen scuttling within the darkness of the skull’s eye socket and swallowed nervously. Edging away from the sound he began to absent-mindedly scratch the goose bumps that had risen on his skin.

The noise grew louder. It seemed to be coming from the left side of the hole, although from where exactly it was impossible to tell. The whole wall was alive with tapping now, and Florin cautiously reached out to touch it.

“Hullo?” he called out, brushing his fingertips against the cold stone. There was no way this much noise could be coming from any kind of insect.

Please Shallya, there was no way that these noises could be coming from any kind of insect.

Was there?

Clenching his jaw Florin drew his fingers back from the trembling stone and hefted his sword.

“Hullo?”

There was no reply, although the beat of whatever was approaching grew a little faster.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.

“Hu…”

Florin never finished the word. With the deep groan of shifting masonry the wall in front of him shifted and began to rise.

Scrabbling back over the shifting bones of the temple’s previous victim he bumped the back of his head on the far wall.

But before he could even feel the pain the huge block which had formed the wall of the cell lifted up and out to hover in the tunnel above. From the thin gap it left a rush of noise, and a wash of orange torchlight, flooded into the chamber.

After so long spent in the darkness it seemed as bright as the noonday sun, and Florin blinked back tears as he gazed up at the two watery silhouettes that appeared against it.

“I told you to wait,” one said gruffly, and threw down a rope.

“I hope you realise how much you’ve embarrassed yourself in front of Master Thorgrimm here,” said the other, its tones rich with carefully constructed disgust.

Relief, sweeter than champagne, flooded through him, and for a moment his injuries were forgotten.

“What’s wrong?” Thorgrimm asked him, brows furrowed uncertainly. “Why are you making that noise?”

But Florin was laughing too hard to answer.

 

The tunnel into which Florin emerged was a different place to the one he had so blindly run down a few hours ago.

For one thing the bone-hard simplicity of its walls had gone, buried beneath a forest of rough-hewn timbers. They were green beneath the axe strokes which had just shaped them, and the sickly smell of fresh sap vied with the musty odour of the temple’s depths.

For another the wide passageway was lined on both sides with dwarfs and men. Their backs strained as they hauled on ropes, sweat pouring down them beneath the heat of the torches. Beyond them the ropes disappeared into a complicated nest of block and tackles, and from these down into iron hooks which Thorgrimm had fastened to the shifting stonework beneath.

Florin watched as Thorgrimm carried on with his rescue operation, his voice booming over the grunts of his workers and the squeak of pressurised wood. Despite his size the dwarf looked like some ancient fire god as he swaggered through the torchlight, bellowing the orders that were reshaping this sunken realm.

Men and dwarfs both worked with a will as, beneath Thorgrimm’s commands, they swung the block that had formed the side of Florin’s cell forward.

“Where’s Kereveld?” Florin asked Lorenzo, who was busily cleaning the gash on his skull with some burning spirit.

“Watch,” Lorenzo told him without looking up from his task.

Florin watched. The block that Thorgrimm had swung forward was now being lowered, eased down onto the stone beyond that had formed the ceiling of his cell.

Almost immediately, there was the slow, remorseless grind of stone upon stone. The lump of masonry sank as the slab of stone that had roofed Florin’s cell moved beneath its weight, falling away as smoothly as the paddle of a mill wheel. As it did so the wall of the passageway rotated down to cover the hole it left, the stone slabs revolving in a single movement.

This second revolving slab had moved no more than a couple of feet when a wild, bony figure flung itself out from behind it to fall with a loud slap onto the paving beyond.

“Kereveld!” Florin called out as the wizard got shakily back to his feet and blinked around in the torchlight.

“Get out of the way there,” Thorgrimm roared, and manhandled the wizard away from the huge stone spoke of the turning wheel that had trapped him.

It was the second time he’d saved the old man’s life. Kereveld had just got clear when the rope, strained beyond endurance, snapped. It flew whipping vengefully back towards the men who were pulling it and the stone, now completely unsupported, plunged as quickly as a guillotine blade through the trap door.

A bone jarring thud, an ear splitting boom, and the rotating wheel of trap doors was closed forever. The gap which had allowed the wheel to spin had been plugged by the falling stone as neatly as a corked bottle.

“Well, that seems to have solved that problem,” van Delft’s voice drifted through the falling dust and echoing concussion of the impact. “I wonder, Captain d’Artaud, if you’d be good enough to follow Captain Thorgrimm’s advice whilst underground. He does seem to know what he’s doing, doesn’t he?”

“Glad to, sir.”

“Good. I’ll leave you in his capable hands, then. Sergeant Frelda. Get all of these men back to work on the barricades, will you? Captain d’Artaud shouldn’t be needing them anymore.”

“Sir,” a Marienburger snapped off a salute and smirked at Florin before barking a stream of orders to the men.

Van Delft returned the salute then, without another word, turned on his heel and stalked back out of the temple.

“Sarcastic bastard,” Lorenzo grumbled when he was out of earshot.

Florin just shrugged sheepishly as his rescuers started to file past him. Occasionally one of them would catch his eye and he would mutter his thanks. Others offered a half mocking salute which he returned, despite the twinge of pain the gesture sent through his bruised chest.

Since the numbness had worn off his torso felt as delicate as a rack of tenderised beef ribs, although he wasn’t about to mention that to the commander, or to anyone else.

Injuries or not, if anybody was going to escort Kereveld and his precious book, it was going to be him.

He even managed an excruciating little bow as the wizard wandered up to him, bony wrists proceeding from his torn sleeves.

“Are you all right?” Florin asked solicitously, but the old man staggered past without a word. At first he seemed to be in shock; his eyes had a distant, glazed sheen, and his lips moved in a constant, soundless mutter.

But then he turned back to Florin and smiled, the expression incongruously innocent on the begrimed wrinkles of his face.

“Of course, I’ve got it now!” he said, as if they’d been in the midst of conversation. “That water wheel thing that was in the book, it was that very trap. Damned clever it was too, don’t you think? I suppose that originally there would have been water below the level of the floor here, enough to have drowned us like rats.”

“So the book was right then?” said Florin, raising one eyebrow. It made his scalp hurt.

“Yes, yes. Isn’t it fantastic? I knew that those signs wouldn’t be for nothing, and they certainly weren’t. Why, if this was the rainy season we’d probably already be dead. I knew the book wouldn’t let us down.”

“Yes,” Florin deadpanned. “And what will we find next? Perhaps we should study the book before we go on.”

“No, no use,” Kereveld said. “There’s nothing there but some geometrical patterns. Quite disappointing, really.”

“You don’t say?” Lorenzo muttered. Kereveld looked at him as if seeing him for the first time.

“What are you hanging about back there for?” Thorgrimm’s voice echoed down the hall.

“Just coming,” Florin yelled back, and then turned to Kereveld. “After you, sir. Please.”

Kereveld smiled and rubbed his hands as he strolled back down the passageway. Florin, trying not to limp, picked up a torch and followed in the wake of the wizard’s flickering shadow, his men behind him.

They advanced cautiously over the fallen stone and into the darkness beyond. Thorgrimm strode ahead of them, stopping every now and then to brush his fingers across the stonework of the passage, or to sniff the air.

The ceiling began to lower as they advanced, so gradually that it almost seemed to be doing it by stealth. The walls closed in. The darkness, which retreated reluctantly before the light of their sputtering torches, closed back in around them.

Thorgrimm came to a sudden stop, cocking his head to one side as though listening to some distant sound and lifted his torch a little higher. The flame reached a lump of bitumen and sizzled, flaring up in a sudden burst of fire which illuminated the passage ahead of them.

Or rather, the dead-end.

“That shouldn’t be there,” Kereveld cried out, his voice quavering with outrage. He started forward past Thorgrimm, but the dwarf just lifted his arm and shoved the wizard back.

“Wait,” he said and sniffed the air hungrily. Then he licked one finger and held it up into the air.

“Ha!” he said at last, and strode forward until he was no more than ten feet from the dead end.

There he stopped again and craned his neck to stare upwards.

“What is it?” Florin asked, stepping past Kereveld to look upwards.

“Chimney,” Thorgrimm told him.

“And what’s that?”

Thorgrimm looked down.

“Some sort of pressure plate. Don’t touch it.”

“Yes,” Florin agreed carefully. “But what’s it made of?”

Lorenzo and the two men they’d brought with them jostled forwards, and for a moment all six explorers gazed down at the metal plate. It gleamed in the poor light of their torches.

Yet even in this gloomy light there was no mistaking the rich, liquid warmth of the stuff from which the plate had been made. A complicated checkerboard of shapes had been punched into the smooth metal of its surface, strange cubic ideograms of lizards and feathers and skulls.

But it wasn’t these strange hieroglyphs that silenced the men.

“It’s gold,” Lorenzo whispered, rubbing the sweat from his palms before reaching out to touch it.

“Don’t,” said Thorgrimm, his voice choked with emotion. Florin glanced down at him and saw a fresh sheen of sweat glistening on his brow.

He wants it all for himself, Florin thought with a flash of sudden anger. The greedy little wretch.

Thorgrimm, who was thinking exactly the same thing, took a step backwards from the little knot of men, each of who now looked like a thief.

“We’ll have to build a scaffolding over it,” he decided, wiping his hand across his face and making an effort to pull himself together. It was always the way with this much gold, he thought with a wry smile. Even the most loyal of his kinfolk could be ensnared by it, driven beyond honour by the beauty of the wonderful, terrible metal. And as for humans…

His smile was replaced by a scowl.

“Look,” Lorenzo said with a sudden excitement. “Someone’s already shaved a piece off!”

“Where?”

“On the corner there.”

“Yes, I see it,” said one of his companions, pushing forward.

“I saw it first,” Lorenzo snarled and, before anyone could stop him, he’d leapt onto the plate and snatched the shard up.

This time there was no warning groan of moving stone, or crunch of snapping bones.

This time there was just a rush of air as the plate, with Lorenzo still on it, hurtled upwards and out of sight.

It happened as effortlessly as if gravity had simply reversed itself. Lorenzo had hurtled upwards so quickly that, but for the sound of screaming that floated down from the emptiness above, he might never have existed.

Florin, the gold forgotten, leapt forward onto the spot where the plate had rested and squinted anxiously up into the darkness.

“Lorenzo!” he called, his voice echoing against the sheer stone sides of the chimney.

A distant cry rang out as if in answer, and Florin raised his torch up into the void above. Something up there seemed to be moving. Or growing.

Then there was another cry, but this time it was his own as he hurled himself back and out of the way of the returning plate. It plummeted back down from the heights above, a wash of foetid air preceding it, before slowing down to a gradual halt and settling gently back down onto the floor of the passageway.

“Save you building a scaffold, won’t it Master Thorgrimm?” Lorenzo said shakily, and jumped off the plate like a cat off an oven.

“How did you get it to do that?” Kereveld asked jealously.

“If you step on these markings,” Lorenzo said, pointing to a spiral of what appeared to be tree frogs, “it goes down.”

“And to make it go up?”

“Those bundles of snakes.”

“Here,” said Florin, slapping Lorenzo on the back and handing him a flask of cold tea.

“And where does it go?” Kereveld pressed him.

Lorenzo swallowed a mouthful of tea, his eyes glinting as he studied the wizard’s eager face. He wiped his mouth, belched, and returned Florin’s canteen before answering.

“Come on up,” he said, eager to move on before anybody remembered the shaving of gold that now rested inside his breeches, “and I’ll show you.”

 

It was difficult to tell how large the chamber was. Its ceiling and far walls were hidden by the darkness, invisible to the explorers who now stood in the little island of light their torches cast.

Around them, sprawled together as intimately as the participants in some grotesque orgy, lay the skeletons.

They weren’t all intact. Nor were they all human. Some of them had the short, blunt look of orcs. Others were smaller, their skulls elongated into snouts from which razor-sharp teeth still sprouted. Another, still held together by its chainmail, had bones as fine and delicate as porcelain. Whatever it was, it made Florin think of the tales he had heard of the elven folk that haunted Loren.

But although the skeletons differed in form and race, in one way they were all alike.

Every one of them, without exception, had been incinerated, the bones burned into powdery chalk. The motes of dust that floated through the acrid stench of this chamber were the same, dull white, colour. And that dust, the last stubborn remains of things long dead in some terrible holocaust, was everywhere. It hung thickly in the stink of the room, the shifting shroud of it that covered the dead like some frail attempt at modesty at the explorer’s presence.

Thorgrimm was unhappy.

“There is a trap here,” he told them, sniffing the air suspiciously. “And no gold. Maybe we should go.”

“No!” Kereveld snapped. “This is the place. I recognise all the skeletons from the book.”

“Do you?” Lorenzo asked, his voice slicing through the carnal atmosphere like a razor.

“Yes. There should be a lever here, or some other mechanism.”

“Which does what?” Thorgrimm demanded. Kereveld could only shrug.

“I don’t know, exactly. But it should open some sort of… some sort of window.”

One of the Bretonnians prodded a skeleton with the toe of his boot. It collapsed, crumbling into a choking cloud that hung in the still air of the chamber.

“Let’s see if we can find this lever, then,” Florin decided, tearing his eyes away from the phantom of dust.

“It should be on the east side,” Kereveld told them helplessly.

“Very well,” Thorgrimm decided after a moment’s hesitation. “If you insist on this folly, van Delft has bound me to help you. But if you’ll take my advice you’ll turn back while you have the chance.”

The dwarf looked up, but Kereveld just shrugged.

“This way.”

Clumping through the bones of their predecessors the five men followed the dwarf into the endless night of the temple. The entrance the plate had lifted them to was swallowed up by the darkness behind them, leaving them in a world of crumbling death and cold sweat.

But gradually, out of the gloom, the far wall appeared. In front of it there lay the heavy body of what appeared to be a stone sarcophagus. A great heap of bones were piled around the promontory like tinder for a funeral pyre. Thorgrimm pushed some of them to one side to make his way through.

“That’s not in the book,” Kereveld muttered, rifling through the pages as he followed the dwarf. Now that the flames of their torches had been brought to bear on the neatly cut stone Florin could see that it was no coffin. There was no sign of any lid, or of a name, or of any carving. Apart from the scorch marks that had blackened its corners, the slab was completely featureless.

Except, that was, for the spheres that rested on its surface.

There were eight of them. Eight cheerful little baubles that looked completely out of place in the darkness of this place. Beneath polar caps of dust their surfaces swirled with the bright, primary colours of children’s toys or winter decorations.

Above them, gaping open as hungrily ten holes awaited. Eight were empty, as black as empty stomachs, but in the first two, lying as neatly as eggs in a nest, were two more of the spheres.

“Looks like we found your lever,” Thorgrimm said, and took off his helmet to scratch his head. “The question is will we have any more luck pulling it than these others?”

He swept his helm around in a broad gesture that took in the ruined forms that lay around, then crammed it back onto his head.

“Let’s see,” Kereveld muttered, peering myopically at the arrangement. He reached over to the second of the filled cavities and removed a shrivelled brown twig, the end of which had been neatly sheared off.

“Looks like something did grow in here,” Florin said, taking it from him. “A vine, maybe…”

“That’s not wood,” Thorgrimm told him. “It’s a finger.”

Florin flung the thing away and wiped his hand on his robes.

The dwarf smiled.

“If we’re going to try to open this particular lock we’d better have a better idea of what goes where then.”

Florin, meanwhile, had picked up one of the spheres and was holding it up to his torch. Despite the orange glow of the flame the colours were clear enough, a great swirl of blue, broken across much of its surface by green blobs, swirled between white caps. Here and there tiny capillary lines of blue cut across the green like the veins on a drunk’s nose.

“How much does it weigh?” Thorgrimm asked, hefting another one of the spheres. This one was a deep red dotted with countless, interlocking circles. “I’ve seen something like this before. You need to build up the weight of the leverage in the right order. Those others must have got the first one right, then failed with the second.”

Florin replaced the blue green sphere and picked up another. This one was ash grey; its only features thin orange lines that crawled across its surface.

“I know what they are,” he said cautiously, swapping it for another.

“What?” Thorgrimm asked.

“At least, I think I know what they are.”

“What?”

“Ask Kereveld.”

All eyes turned to the wizard. After a moment he looked up from the book.

“Yes?”

“What’s this?” Florin asked him, and held up the first globe.

“Ahhhhhhh,” the wizard said, the sound as smooth as the end of pain. Eyes gleaming in the darkness he reached out for the sphere with trembling hands, and grasped it eagerly.

“Wonderful,” he breathed, turning it around to gloat over every detail. “Wonderful. This alone will show the old women at the college that the cost was worth it.”

“What is it?” Thorgrimm snapped, his voice harsh enough to cut through Kereveld’s rapture.

“It’s the world,” the wizard said, his voice cracking into a jagged little giggle. “That one you’re holding is Lokratia. See the meteor scars in its crust? And here, look. Deiamol. The burning world.”

Elbowing his way forward, Kereveld rested his book on the stone slab and picked up another sphere. This one was deathly pale apart from three bruised grey smudges, and a smattering of tiny black pinpricks.

“And this,” he said, his voice rising in excitement as he studied it, “must be Obscuria. That moron Brakelda said that it didn’t exist. He never did understand calculus.”

Again he giggled, and Thorgrimm looked accusingly at Florin, who shrugged.

He wanted to say, he may be human but don’t hold me responsible. What he actually said was, “What about the first of the planets, there in the wall?”

“Charyb,” the wizard said. “And that next one is Verda. It shouldn’t be there. It’s the fifth planet. Like so. Deiamol should be in its place. Then Tigris. Then our world.”

Here the wizard hesitated, and weighed the globe in his hand reluctantly.

“Better not wait too long,” Thorgrimm cautioned warily.

Kereveld sighed and placed the bauble in its niche. Then, his fingers sorting through the other five like a dealer at a craps table, he rolled each of the others into place.

“There,” he said, glancing around expectantly. “That’s it.”

Nothing happened.

“At least we seem to have avoided the trap.”

“I don’t understand,” Kereveld muttered in sudden outrage. “There should be a…”

But he got no further. With a barely audible rumble of hidden levers, the sound as powerful as tectonics and as remorseless as death, the ceiling burst asunder with a flash of blinding light.

 

* * *

 

Had the fire come it would have devoured figures frozen in every pose, from cowering terror to straight-backed defiance. It would have melted eyes that were squeezed shut in fearful expectation, or wide open in curiosity. It would have melted fat, and frizzled hair, and set sinews ablaze.

But the fire didn’t come. Instead, a thousand stars blossomed into flaming life harmlessly in the darkness above.

Yellow or white or old, dying red they hung in the black void of space, the patterns their tiny bodies made against the vast darkness beyond as complex as a handful of thrown grain. Some burned bright enough to bring tears to the onlookers’ eyes. Others, mere specks in the lightless void of space, could only be seen from the corner of the eye. And behind them all, as smooth and creamy as a trail of snowdrops across an onyx floor, lay the bulk of their galaxy, its edges frayed by the thousands of defecting stars.

“Look,” Kereveld breathed, grasping Florin by the shoulder and pointing one shaking finger upwards. The Bretonnian saw a solid green sphere, no bigger than his thumbnail.

It was Verda, of that he had no doubt. A perfect twin to the impostor that they had handled minutes ago. This Verda, though, was real. Its distant continents were lit not by candlelight but by the sun; its billions of tons were held in place not by sweaty mortal hands but by… by what?

What force was strong enough to hold a world in its orbit?

Florin winced as Kereveld’s fingers pinched harder.

“This is it,” the old man hissed, and turned his manic gaze on Florin before looking back up to ogle the naked universe above. “This is why we’re here.”

“It can’t be real,” Florin said, although he knew that it was. “It must be an illusion.”

“No illusion,” Kereveld said. “Reality. The stars as the Old Ones saw them.”

“But how can we see them? It’s daytime. The sky outside is blue, not this black.”

“Yes,” the wizard replied simply. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

His hand fell limply from Florin’s shoulder, and the first glistening tear ran down the old man’s face and into his beard.

“Sotek’s Eye,” he whispered reverently in blasphemous prayer. “With your help I will change our world.”

Florin felt a shiver run through him at the words, a twitch of superstitious fear.

Don’t be a fool, he told himself. It’s not as though this place does anything.

Above him, twinkling against the icy void of space, the galaxy burned.