Sedrik gave orders to his men, who formed a quick but effective block across the street, preventing the departure of the gathered citizens. That done, he marched forward and bellowed, "You, there! What is this?" He pointed his sword at the nearest person of responsible appearance. By chance, he had chosen the same man Garth had spoken with.
"My lord," the man said, recognizing the black plume that marked Sedrik as marshal, "an overman has come and entered the temple of Dhazh!"
Startled, Sedrik realized that he was standing before the forbidden shrine. He did not like the temple of Dhazh; to a man born and raised in the weathered streets of Ur-Dormulk, the unworn condition of its step, and indeed of the whole building, sheltered as it was by the great rock barrier, appeared alien and sinister. Furthermore, he was an educated man, as the Marshal of the City had to be, and knew something of the cult itself, outlawed centuries earlier. Dhazh had been a demonic earth-god, and as such did not fit anywhere in the accepted Eramman theology. A destructive male earth deity seemed to contradict several basic tenets of the popular religion. No one had ever visited the shrine but a handful of hereditary priests and their unwilling sacrifices, even in its heyday, and Sedrik considered it a wise decision of an ancient overlord to have outlawed the cult and put its priests to death.
There was also the unpleasant myth of the god's heartbeat, a sound said to be heard by those the god had chosen as servants or sacrifices.
Sedrik's thought was echoed by the crowd's spokesman, who added, "He said he heard something!"
Sedrik glanced at the pillared facade. Perhaps there was some connection between the overman's presence in the temple and the order to kill him. The overlord might be worried that the overman would somehow restore the cult to life.
That was none of Sedrik's business; his duty was to obey orders, not to guess why they had been given. He had been told to kill the overman, and the overman was in the temple of Dhazh. Therefore, it was his duty to enter the temple and seek the criminal out. That such an action might serve to dispel some of the lingering respect accorded the demon-god was an added bonus, really. The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea of entering and defiling the temple. It should have been torn down long ago, he told himself.
The thought of killing the overman was also pleasant; he found himself looking forward eagerly to the coming battle.
"All right, men," he called. "Follow me, arms at ready!"
With that, he marched up the step and into the temple.
After a moment's hesitation, the twelve soldiers followed him, with varying degrees of reluctance. Each knew that he was one of the city's best, a chosen master in the art of killing, but the dark legends that clung to the temple lingered in each man's mind. The finest warrior was no match for an angry god.
Had one soldier hung back, others might have joined him, but none dared be first to be called coward, and all marched on into the forbidden temple, following their commander.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The only light in the temple came from the open doorway; the few clerestory windows were heavily curtained, and the prickets and sconces on walls and pillars held only melted wax, almost invisible beneath dust and cobwebs. There were no torches, no clouds of incense, no chanting priests; there was no sound at all, except for Garth's own footsteps scraping through the dust and the low, dull throbbing he followed. The fane was empty, save for a stone altar on either side of the single great hall that made up most of the building's interior, and dust lay thick everywhere. No carpets covered the stone floors; no tapestries hid the stone walls.
Garth stood still for only a moment as his eyes adjusted to the dimness; then he advanced into the room, sword ready. He saw no sign of a monster, and nothing that might be making the sound he pursued.
He found a large door, black with age, at the rear of the chamber; Garth pushed at it gently, hoping it was not locked, and it fell to dust beneath his hand.
He stepped through immediately, sword held before him, swinging the blade gently from side to side to help him feel his way; though he held his breath and blinked, the dust from the door stung his eyes and nostrils. The inner chamber was even dimmer than the main hall, due to the dust and the greater distance from the main portal, but once Garth had rubbed the grit from his eyes with the back of his free hand, he could see that the room was quite deserted.
The sound, however, was definitely louder here; he listened, trying to ignore the noise that still reached him from the street.
The vibration grew, then dropped, then sounded a long beat like a distant, rolling thunderclap, then began again, with a steady, ponderous rhythm, each cycle taking whole minutes. Hearing it more clearly now, Garth realized what it was, or at least what it seemed to be.
He was listening to a heartbeat, so slow, so deep, that he could only think it to be the pulse of the earth itself; no conceivable leviathan would be a fit possessor of that drawn-out throbbing.
As he listened, his eyes took in the details of the inner sanctum. He was in a small, bare chamber, with a thin trickle of light seeping around the curtain that covered a window high in one comer. There was no furniture, only dust, layered on the floor and drifting in the air around him. On either side of the room were open doors, the areas beyond them utterly in darkness.
At first glance, Garth saw nothing to choose between one door and the other, but a second's careful listening convinced him that the sound was slightly louder to the left. Accordingly, he turned left and stepped through the doorway.
The room beyond was totally black, and Garth found himself groping along cautiously; nonetheless, he almost fell when he reached the top step of a staircase leading down. He had been alert for walls, doorways, or living creatures before him; he had not been paying attention to the floor beneath him.
He caught himself at the brink and paused, hesitant to continue onward in the dark. If there was a monster in the temple, it would have the advantage of him in its lightless lair; he was unfamiliar with his surroundings, but any longtime inhabitant would be at home here.
A slight movement of the air distracted him. The sound was definitely coming up from below, he decided, and that was one attraction beckoning him on, but the faint breeze was strange. It took him a moment to realize what was odd about it.
A slight current could be felt coming from almost any cave or cellar at times, cool and moist, and he would not have been surprised by such a thing here, particularly since the chill water of the lake might seep in somewhere-but this breeze was warm.
That did not seem to make sense. The only places Garth knew of where underground chambers or passages were warm were volcanic, and he had thought that the mountains around Ur-Dormulk were no more prone to volcanic activity than the Yeshitic jungles of the distant south were prone to snow in midsummer. Furthermore, the air that he felt ascending the stairway was damp and slightly fetid, like the air of a swamp.
Fascinated, Garth was determined to investigate further, but the darkness still daunted him. He had flint and steel and tinder in a pouch on his belt, but nothing that would burn well enough to provide a reliable light.
It occurred to him that some of the melted candles in the main hall might still retain enough of their substance to serve him, but he dismissed the thought; he had no idea how far he might want to pursue this venture and he needed something that would last longer than a burned-out candle stub.
Surely, he told himself, the priests who had once used this shrine would have had some way of lighting the stairs. He reached out and felt along first one side of the room, then the other. His hand struck something metallic that rattled, and he heard a faint gurgling as well. He sheathed his sword carefully, reached up, and felt the object he had discovered.
It was an oil lamp, still partly full, hanging from a hook.
Once he had found the lamp, it was a simple matter to light it. The wick was still in place, but cut off from the reservoir by an airtight metal lid that had to be unscrewed; even after h
e had worked the lid free and dipped the lower end of the wick into the oil, it remained so dry that it ignited almost immediately, only to flare up and burn mostly away before any of the fuel caught.
The oil had thickened with age, and after the first bright flame died away, the light was low and smoky, scarcely reaching above the remaining stub of the wick. Still, it was adequate for his purpose. He marveled that, even sealed, the oil had not all dried up long ago, and wondered whether the temple might not have been completely abandoned for as long as he had first supposed.
With his sword again naked in his right hand and the lamp slung in his left, he began his careful descent.
The staircase was much longer than Garth had first thought, and after about fifteen feet, the steps changed from the solid and unworn ones that he had expected from the condition of the street outside the temple to shorter, narrower treads worn to a slippery polish, sufficiently ancient and used that the center of each step was an inch or more below the ends. They were almost as difficult to negotiate as the steps at the city gate and made for very slow going.
Garth guessed that this change must indicate that he was below the city proper and entering the legendary crypts. When he finally reached the foot of the staircase, he paused to catch his breath and shine the light around; as he did, he thought he heard sounds above him. He dismissed the idea as absurd. He had just come through the temple and seen it to be completely empty; if he was, indeed, hearing anything from above, it could only be street noise, reflected down to him by some freak of acoustics.
He was in a rectangular room, long and relatively narrow, with side walls that sloped inward at the top and curved over to blend smoothly into the ceiling; the comers of the chamber were also curved. The floor was a curious uneven inlay of several different varieties of stone, and the ceiling was low overhead.
The walls and ceiling were gray, and the floor a maze of dull colors half-hidden by dust. The sound of the monstrous heartbeat, if heartbeat it actually was, was louder than ever.
There was a door in the far end; Garth flashed his lamp around, but could see no other entrance or exit, save for the staircase and the single door.
He strode the length of the chamber and pushed at the door, halfway expecting it to crumble to dust as the one in the upper temple had done. It did not; with a high-pitched creak and a flurry of disturbed dust, it swung open, revealing another chamber.
Garth stepped through, lamp held high. This second chamber was identical with the first, save that the walls and ceiling were a dull red instead of gray.
He had now descended at least thirty feet below street level and moved more or less due west, with only the single jog to the left at the top of the stair, since entering the temple. A rough estimate told him that he had come at least a hundred feet from the front pillars-which meant that he was now in or under the great stone outcroppings, since the temple itself had been no more than sixty feet from front to back.
That was very interesting indeed, he thought. He wondered if he might find his way under the lake, to the ruins on the far side.
He proceeded through the second chamber and into a third, this one walled and ceiled in dead black, the floor again a dust-covered polychrome. The door at the end of this chamber opened onto another staircase leading down; he followed it without hesitation.
It seemed to run on forever. He had been in crypts before, in the Orunian city of Mormoreth, but this stair appeared far longer than any he had previously encountered anywhere.
It was also straight, which might have added to its apparent length; the crypt stairs in Mormoreth had wound slightly back and forth, so that he had never been able to see their full length at one time. Here, though, he found it disconcerting to hold up the lamp and see step after step after step, stretching away into the distance both above and below him, both ends lost in the darkness beyond the reach of his feeble lamplight.
Finally, as the lamp swung forward, he glimpsed the lower end; he increased his speed as much as he dared, for the steps were as treacherous as the lower portion of the first set.
The stair ended in a short corridor, and that in turn led to another stair, this one ascending. Garth wondered whether he would find himself in the midst of the ruins beyond the lake.
He did not; the upward-bound steps ran only a tiny fraction of the distance he had just descended. Almost as soon as he reached the first step, he glimpsed the upper end.
A moment later he emerged into another room, away from the confining stone walls of the stairway, and paused to catch his breath again.
Again, he thought he heard noise behind him, but now it was almost drowned out by the slow beating ahead of him, a sound that had acquired a sinister, menacing note as he drew nearer its source. Something about it made him nervous.
He had not yet given much thought to what the beating might be; he had decided that it was a heartbeat without considering what that might mean. Now, as he stood in a passage that he judged to be several hundred feet below the level of Ur-Dormulk's streets, he wondered what he might find if he went on. Could there be a monster with a heart so great? If so, he would stand no more chance against it than a beetle. A mere mechanical dragon had been capable of killing him; how could he think to face a creature whose heartbeat could be heard half a mile away?
On the other hand, why would such a monster even notice him? He need not worry about being devoured; an overman could scarcely begin to feed the appetite of such a thing, and he could easily retreat into places where a behemoth could not reach him.
The idea of such a creature went against all his instincts, and he decided that it was far more likely that the sound was being artificially produced by some lost remnant of the outlawed cult, for reasons of its own. In any case, he was not about to turn back at this point. He held up the lamp.
He was in another long, narrow, low-ceilinged room, longer than the three on the upper level and walled in gray stone. Again there was a single door at the far end, yet this one was not a simple portal in a post-and-lintel frame, but an elaborate carved construction of several different woods, hung in a red stone arch embellished with golden tracery.
Garth approached cautiously; the ornate door, so different from the others, seemed almost threatening. He paused when he had reached it and put a hand to one of the wooden panels. It vibrated beneath his fingers with the slow, slow beating.
For a third time he thought he heard something behind him, the sound only detectable in the interval between beats, and lost thereafter in the throbbing he had followed for so far. He turned and looked back at the stairs, but saw nothing.
This new portal did not yield to a simple push, but the latch handle still moved freely; he lifted it and shoved the door wide.
Beyond lay a chamber unlike the others; although the walls curved into the ceiling in the same fashion, this room was circular rather than oblong. The walls were black, and the floor here was also black, made up of stones arranged in a spiral leading in toward the room's center.
It was what stood in the center, however, that was most different. A column of horn or ivory projected upward from the floor, yellowed with age but still almost white, tapering from a diameter of eighteen inches or so at the base to about a foot where it was cut off, three feet above the floor, to form a slanting surface. In the center of this tilted top, a single drop of some reddish-black substance was very slowly oozing forth.
A circular trough surrounded this strange column, and Garth saw that there was a trickle of the red-black goo down the side of the column and a shallow pool of it in the trough.
He saw no way in or out of the chamber, save for the single arched door. Garth entered cautiously, lamp and sword both held high.
There was nothing to look at but the column and its curious issue, so he studied that. As he watched, a fat black drop rolled sluggishly from the center of the column's top to the edge, joining the slow trickle. Its separation from the central spot coincided exactly with the end of one of the v
ast heartbeats, Garth noted idly.
Another drop began to grow as Garth studied the walls, looking for concealed openings. He turned back as a beat ended and saw the new drop follow its predecessor.
That the first drop had happened to fall in time with the sound had struck him as nothing but coincidence, but the second one made it seem more than that. He listened, watched, and soon reached an inescapable conclusion: the sound he had followed came from the base of the mysterious shaft. Furthermore, it was somehow connected with the oozing fluid.
It occurred to him that it might be the vibration that caused the drops to fall in synchronization with the beating, rather than any more direct connection. It did not seem reasonable that so great and ponderous a throbbing should do nothing but pump out a stream of blackish goo. He looked for some secret opening or lever on the column or in the trough surrounding it, being careful to touch nothing, lest he trigger a trap.
His investigation of the small metal pipe that allowed the excess fluid to drain off when the trough was full ceased abruptly, however, when for the fourth time he heard sounds other than the beating, coming from somewhere outside the arched doorway.
Once, perhaps twice, he could dismiss this as illusion, or the action of overwrought nerves, but now there was no chance at all that noise might be reaching him from outside the crypts. No vermin would be audible over the great throbbing, yet the sound was there once more. It was closer than before, and he did not lose it again after the first hearing. Now that he was no longer moving deeper into the catacomb, whatever made the noise was gaining on him quickly. After listening carefully for a few seconds, he thought that it was the rattle of armor.
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