by Max Anthony
They emerged onto the expected plaza. Even with the stone-working skills of the city’s makers, space was still evidently at a premium and the plaza itself was only fifty or so yards across, though it appeared to go around the entire square base of the temple. Between the last of the dwellings and the temple itself, there were none of the light-emitting glass balls, making the space gloomy, even in comparison to the rest of the city.
They had a clearer view of the temple – their first thoughts that it had been hewn whole from the rock were correct. It was a hundred yards to each side and similarly tall. Here and there, they could see stone statues, each about the height of a man, but depicting strange and misshapen humanoid creatures that were definitely not human. The steps they’d noticed were wide and steep, ascending from the centre of each side until they reached something that was unmistakeably a doorway very near the top. Wizard and thief kept in the shadows at the far side of the plaza and gawped upwards.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” said Rasmus.
“Utterly,” said Viddo. “I’ve seen bigger stuff on the surface, but nothing like this.”
“Let’s have a quick look around the base first,” suggested Rasmus. “I always like to know what I’m getting myself into.”
“I agree,” said the thief. “I’m betting that the only way in is up there,” he continued, pointing at the doorway high up.
They walked around the whole of the pyramid, keeping close to the surrounding dwellings, where they felt less exposed. They found the temple to be almost perfectly symmetrical in its shape as well as its detailing.
“Even I’d probably throw a coin or two in the collection jugs of this god,” said Rasmus. “Just for the pleasure of seeing the building.” Viddo grunted noncommittally, but it was enough to suggest that he personally would never put his hand in his pocket to give coins to such a folly as this.
“Right, let’s get up there,” said the thief without preamble. “Those abandoned goods won’t appropriate themselves, will they?” He strode across the plaza with the determination of a thirsty man heading towards the tavern on pay day. Rasmus followed close behind, his eyes looking carefully about him for danger.
The steps were knee-high and as perfectly smooth as it is possible for stone to be. Rasmus wasn’t unfit, but he found them a struggle to climb. Ahead of him, Viddo strode smoothly upwards as if he were on the gentlest of inclines. The thief paused when he came opposite the first of the grey stone statues, which was on a small plinth where the steps ended and became the sloping sides of the pyramid. The carving was indeed a part of the temple, rather than having been made elsewhere and carried up here. Rasmus caught up, puffing ever so slightly, and the two of them looked at the statue. It was the height of a man, but broad and squat. Its face was equally broad, with large eyes and a wide mouth – the lips were slightly open and even in the poor light they could make out sharp teeth within. Whatever it was, it was dressed in crude armour.
“Any idea what it’s meant to be?” asked Viddo.
“It’s not in any of the text books I read back at the university,” said Rasmus. “Though that was a long time ago and it could have slipped my mind.”
“It’s hideous,” said Viddo. “How could you forget a face like that?”
“Yes, it’s not a good-looking fellow, is it?” agreed Rasmus. “It might be an orc or a goblin.”
“Perhaps it’s a lady goblin,” suggested Viddo. “Look, it’s showing a bit of leg.”
“I am not going to try and look up a statue’s stone skirt, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” said Rasmus. “I think it’s meant to be leather armour that it’s wearing, though I have no idea where they’d get leather from down here.”
“I don’t think we’re going to get an answer to even a fraction of our questions,” Viddo told him. “But I enjoy the conjecture.”
They left the statue to its musings and climbed the rest of the steps, paying scant attention to the other statues that they passed. The steps ended at a platform – it was as though the point of the pyramid had not been finished and the makers had decided to level it off and then add a smaller, square building with a doorway in each side. The roof of the cavern was only a few yards above them, and all around them they could see the lights of the city, stretching off into the distance. It wasn’t anything like the size of many of the larger cities they had visited on the surface, but considering where it was, this underground city was huge.
“How many people do you reckon lived here?” asked Viddo, as he took in the sights.
“I don’t know,” said the wizard, who then started muttering to himself as he did some quick calculations. “Let us say four persons to each of the smaller homes and six to each of the larger ones. Eight or ten to the largest of all. Multiply by the estimated number of homes and then we have…. exactly twenty-two thousand people!” he finally exclaimed in triumph. “All of them living here under the ground. I wonder if the people on the surface ever knew they existed.”
“That could well have been what spelled the end for these people,” Viddo said, thoughtfully. “If a surface king ever found out, I’m sure he would have sent an army or two down here in order to pillage whatever wealth there might be. Look at how many men they sent just to recover that stolen hat.”
“If this city has been plundered, we might find our quest for wealth to be in vain. I sincerely hope that all of our riches weren’t carted off ten thousand years ago, and dumped in some murderous king’s treasury. It would be more than I could bear!”
“Let us not think about it and look inside the pyramid with haste!” said Viddo, as if a quick dash now would somehow get them to the hypothetical riches of the city before the equally hypothetical plunderers could get there.
The doorways in the square building all led into the same small room. In the centre of this room was a square opening, with steps leading down. In one corner were a few of the glass balls.
“I’ll wager that those were originally mounted on sticks!” said Rasmus. “And used to provide light for the people going down those steps leading inside.”
“You are likely correct,” replied his companion, though the thief was distracted by other, more practical considerations.
“What stupid idiot makes a whole pyramid with steps up to the top, only to put in more steps leading down? Why not just put a doorway in the bottom, to save all this palaver of going up and down? I’ll tell you something, if thieves had built the world, it would have worked out a whole lot better than it has done!”
“With a hidden back door into every treasury or banking house, I’m sure,” Rasmus told him, not really paying much heed to his friend’s nonsense about thieves building the world. The wizard cast his light spell again, eschewing the glass balls as a matter of professional pride, and ushered Viddo over to the unexplored steps.
“After you,” he said.
Viddo didn’t argue – he was better able to spot any dangers in advance and his thief’s hearing often provided warnings that other ears would have missed.
The steps went down through an enclosed passageway, with walls on both sides. Everything was the same drab grey that it had been up until now, and there were no signs of the writing that they’d seen in the house earlier.
“I’ll bet this place was a bugger to get out of if there was a fire,” said Rasmus, just for the sake of saying something. “Particularly for the elderly and the infirm.”
“Yes, I’d not like to send the elderly down here,” agreed Viddo, just for the sake of saying something in agreement. “What with them having dodgy hips and everything.”
With both gentlemen wondering what had driven them to the stage where they felt the need to discuss misaligned hips, they went onwards in silence. When the thief judged that they’d gone about halfway down the temple, the steps ended. What first appeared like another corridor through the stone, turned out to be a high balcony, which overlooked an enormous central room. By volume, this room took up more than a quarter o
f the temple’s interior and it was square at the bottom. It gradually tapered as it went up towards the top, when its shape became dictated by the pyramid’s narrowing. The balcony jutted out where the walls of this room were still vertical and it had a parapet all along its length, presumably in the interests of health and safety, though the wall was so low that even the smallest of children could have fallen over it. Both wizard and thief looked over this parapet, neither of them saying a word.
The reason for this silence was the sight that greeted them in the room below. It was crowded with what looked like people. From wall to wall they stood, shoulder to shoulder, with no movement visible at all. The glass balls were embedded in the walls far below the balcony, but higher than the top of the tallest head. The light cast a myriad of wavering shadows, making the surface of these figures appear to be a sickly shade of grey. None of them was clothed. In the very centre of the room was a round dais, raised five or six feet from the floor. None of the figures were standing on this dais, and there was a wide hole in the middle of it – black as pitch, as if it absorbed the light which reached it. Viddo and Rasmus stared hard, but neither of them could make out any details about what might lie within this mysterious opening.
“Thousands of them,” mouthed Viddo.
“They look like statues,” responded Rasmus.
“I don’t like the look of it,” the thief responded. Rasmus could see the concern in his friend’s face and realised that it was likely reflected in his own.
They watched the figures for some minutes. There was neither sound nor movement from below. It was as though much of the city’s population had been cast in stone and carried one-by-one into the room through the four doorways present, and left there for some unknown purpose.
“Should we go down?” Rasmus asked, already knowing that he was going to take a closer look anyway.
Viddo didn’t bother to grace the question with a reply and tiptoed away along the balcony towards another doorway. He didn’t know why he bothered to tiptoe, since he could walk in complete silence, but he liked to put on a bit of a show, even when his audience numbered only one. Rasmus came behind, though his clumsy attempts to travel quietly betrayed several scrapings, two or three scuffings and one stifled cough.
The balcony took them through a square, stone doorway and into another passageway, which continued for a few yards before it become more steps downward. They both felt their excitement building at the thought of what might lie ahead. Each was drawn towards danger for reasons they didn’t know, nor care to ponder. They were on a state of high alert – Viddo kept himself concealed in the shadows, whilst Rasmus churned through a number of spellcasting possibilities in his mind.
When they reached the end of these new steps, Viddo judged that they had come far enough down to be on a level with the floor of the room they’d seen, which was also about the same as the floor of the cavern in which the city had been made. A passage went straight ahead and another turned to the right. Rasmus watched the visible conflict in the thief’s face as he struggled with the choice now that there was no left hand turning for him to default to. In the end, Rasmus brushed past with a sigh and took the right-hand passageway, which he guessed would lead most directly to the central area of the temple. With a faint look of relief that the decision had been made for him, Viddo followed.
Light balls lined the walls, spaced just widely enough apart for there to be long intervals of shadow between them, adding to the faint air of menace that both parties had begun to notice. The walls were utterly featureless – nothing grew upon them and they were free from moisture and blemish. For a temple, there was surprisingly little in the way of writing upon the walls, given that they had earlier witnessed etchings into stone and both now assumed that this was how these people had recorded their history.
With Rasmus in the lead, he purposefully took a right-left-left-right combination of turns, to increase his friend’s disquiet, feeling a perverse sense of satisfaction at his minor mischief. The pyramid was like a rabbit warren in terms of the number of ways through it, many of them seeming to be entirely redundant. They encountered no rooms on their way and with a certain amount of inevitability they soon discovered one of the doorways that led into the large, central room. The aperture was much bigger than they’d expected it to be from the view they’d had from the balcony. With great care to be silent, Rasmus poked his head around the corner, feeling Viddo impatiently fluttering at his back because he also wanted to take a look.
The figures were all facing the centre of the room. They were unmistakably human in appearance, with men and women alike crowded closely together. Their skin, which had initially looked to have a similar cast to the stone of the city, had a merest tint of green to it, though the overall impression was of greyness.
Rasmus felt a whispering behind him and saw Viddo quickly and soundlessly dash past the entrance to the room, whereupon he took up station on the opposite side of the aperture in order that he might also look within.
“Statues,” mouthed Rasmus across the intervening ten feet.
Viddo nodded and then pointed at one of them, before pointing at his own neck. Rasmus was puzzled for a few seconds until his eyes lit upon a dull silver-coloured band around the neck of one.
“Platinum!” mouthed Viddo, even in silence managing to incorporate an exclamation mark. Platinum was exceptionally valuable and well worth plundering.
With his feet marching of their own volition, Viddo found himself dragged from the comfort of his shadows and in the direction of the neck band, his main thieving hand stretched out in front of him like a starving man might reach for a life-giving plate of food.
The target of his desires was a woman, with voluptuous stone buttocks and presumably voluptuous stone breasts, had she not been coyly hiding them away by looking in the other direction. She was crowded to the left and right by other figures, amongst a sea of these unknown subjects of the sculptor’s chisel. As he came closer, Viddo noted with satisfaction that the platinum band was thick and heavy-looking. Even the most miserly of metal merchants would pay of hefty sum for it.
Time appeared to slow down for the moments it took Viddo’s slightly-trembling hand to cross the intervening space towards the neck band. As his hand moved, his brain tumbled over the information available to it and concluded that something was definitely amiss. Too late it noted that the statue’s hair didn’t look exactly like stone, and more closely resembled an ancient wig with an extremely thick coating of heavy grey dust upon it. Viddo’s brain was also too late to interpret the beautifully fine covering of tiny wrinkles on the statue’s surface as being beyond the capabilities of even the most accomplished sculptor.
As the stop command from his brain raced along his arm towards his hand, Viddo’s fingers brushed the metal band with the faintest of touches, before he stopped and slowly withdrew his hand while his heart beat furiously in his chest. He took one step backwards, then two, holding his breath all the while.
His caution proved to be too late. Without any warning, the figure with the platinum neck band turned her head in an unnervingly jerky twist. Her face was lined and weathered as if it were a hundred thousand years old, but preserved through some magic that stopped the flesh from decaying into dust in the same way that her clothes had done. Her eyes were featureless grey, without pupil or iris. The action of turning dislodged a cloud of fine dust from her hair, which bloomed up in the dull light. Her expression, hidden before, was one of hate at this intrusion. Her long-dead grey lips pulled back to reveal yellow and brown teeth, as though the magic which preserved her skin worked imperfectly on her teeth. A sound came from her mouth, like a low exhalation of air, mixed in with a hiss.
Viddo’s hands were halfway to his daggers as he indecisively wondered whether he should try and stab this creature to death quickly. The opportunity, had there ever been one, was quickly taken away from him. Three more heads turned around in unison, followed swiftly by another six, eight, twenty, two
hundred.
“Run!” whispered Rasmus, already wheeling about.
Viddo didn’t need to be told twice, turning tail with incredible adroitness and scarpering. His keen hearing picked up a faint rustling, which build up to a susurration. Behind him, he heard jostling, followed by the sounds of long-dead feet pounding against the ancient stone floor of the corridor.
Bugger it, he thought, as he sprinted past the slower-moving wizard.
Four
As part of his thief’s training, Viddo had learned how to commit a route to memory almost automatically. This ensured that if he was ever discovered in the process of burgling someone’s house, he could take the most expeditious route to safety. Consequently, it was no surprise that the thief knew exactly which way they’d come in order to reach the room full of long-dead citizens of this forgotten city. His feet flew over the surface, taking him left, right and straight ahead as appropriate.
In his wake, Rasmus sprinted along, puffing mostly for show. As part of his wizard’s training, he was required to learn how to act in a bumbling and absent-minded fashion, when in truth he had a sharp mind and was much fitter than most. The reasons why wizards were required to act in this fashion had never been entirely clear to him, but by the time he’d thought to question it, the behaviour was ingrained.
“Slow down!” called Rasmus, raising his voice as loud as he dared. Part of his mind told him what a fool he was for keeping his voice low, since the footsteps behind him clearly suggested that his pursuers knew exactly where he was.
“No, you run faster, you dithering clot,” shouted Viddo, with no such qualms about communicating at an appropriate volume. Rasmus also noted that his companion was not so perturbed by their predicament that he failed to take advantage of the opportunity to call him a dithering clot.
Rasmus chanced a look over his shoulder, to see the corridor twenty yards behind him filled with a clamouring horde of the dead. In the dim light, their faces were hideous and twisted, their eyes focused on the living creatures ahead. They were fast and it didn’t take a genius to note that they were closing the gap between themselves and their target.
