CHAPTER 14
PHANAMHARA
Green dust still floated on the air as I followed Valeriev’s men through the breach, feet rattling on the carbon sheeting they’d laid over the glassy walls of the hole the plasma bore had made through more than five cubits of Vaiartu plascrete. Valeriev had argued against the procedure vociferously, citing the potential damage the heat and drilling might cause whatever artifacts were to be found on the far side—to say nothing of the walls themselves.
I had relented to Neema’s hectoring in time, and had taken to wearing my armor when I went into the ruins. The old Imperial suit still fit me, and served to protect me against the copper arsenite favored by the Vaiartu-Enar in the coloring of their stones. But there were other benefits.
What was it Neema had said?
It was a matter of prestige. So armored, I was Lord Marlowe again, and not a scarred and graying old man in somber Jaddian finery. The face I showed the workers was polished adamant, black as night, and my voice—which had once commanded legions—sounded loud and deep from the speakers hidden in the sculpted breastplate.
“Where has Valeriev gone?” I asked, stepping down onto the floor on the other side.
“That way, lord!” said a man.
I hardly heard him. I was looking down in wonder, and had quite forgotten the Durantine xenologist. I’d forgotten the workers all around me, and the metallic egg-shape of the plasma bore.
Sonic and gravimetric detection had hinted at this massive chamber, but to see it for the first time was something else entirely.
Already a constellation of floating glowspheres was spreading out to fill the volume, dropped or thrown from the ledge before me by the men who’d gone ahead. Many were remote piloted, as were the mapping drones whose green fan-lasers swept every graven surface.
“Are you all right, lord?” Edouard Albé had entered just behind me.
I looked round, saw him watching me through the glass of one of the filter masks. Like the majority of the laborers, A2 had chosen to wear the quilted jumpsuit of the engineering corps, whose helmets had the same profile as the faceless casques of common soldiers, but whose visors were clear alumglass, a close-fitting bubble about the face that gave way to combat ceramic and steel just before the ears and below the jaw.
“Do you see this?” I asked him.
We had emerged onto the upmost gallery of a chamber vast and round as the bowl of a coliseum. Standing on its precipice, I judged the space perhaps a thousand feet in diameter, and deep. Terribly deep. The dim edges of the circular room were only then becoming visible, and the margins of the domed roof—supported by buttressed pylons of rude stone—were only rumors hinted at by the dull gleam of distant green.
Below us, level upon level of circular galleries descended, each one slightly smaller than the last. The floor of the one upon which we stood slanted down as one approached the inner rim—which had no rail or parapet whatever. I imagined hordes of the Enar standing, swarming over the stones, so that those highest and farthest from the rim might peer over the iron carapaces of their fellows and see the floor of the rotunda far below.
“We’re right under the center of the mountain!” Edouard said from my elbow.
“I know,” I said to him.
In a sense, the city was the mountain, and the native rock that piled over it was only the deposited sediments of the vanished sea. Without the city, there would have been no mountain.
“Stand clear of the edge!” one man in the white-quilted uniform of an engineer was shouting, waving his gloved hands. “The stone’s not stable!”
I saw what he had seen then: Whole time-eaten chunks of stone had fallen away at the lip of the gallery and smashed to rubble on the level below. There were yet whole arcs of the circumference smooth and unblemished, but there were likewise sections that had crumbled like old plaster.
“What do you think they used it for? This place?” Edouard asked, backing up as the engineering team went down the line, warning their fellows to keep back. I heard one man shouting for glow-tape, intending to mark the edge. “Some kind of temple?”
“Archaeologists always think the things and places they find are religious,” I said.
“You don’t think so?”
“It could well be,” I allowed. “Whatever this place is for, it lay at the center of their lives. But we know so little of the Vaiartu. This might be a public square. A court. An arena!” I cast my gaze round at the walls, and felt my breath catch. The walls behind were covered in flaking friezes, images depicting the Enar—flat, many-limbed crustaceans wielding lightning in their claws—as they marched against a shrinking people depicted as bow-legged quadrupeds with no discernable head and a finely chiseled texture that might have been fur. Precisely as Valeriev had cautioned, our bore had burned a hole clean through it.
What was lost could never be regained.
Men hurried past us, carrying more lighting equipment. One unspooled a cable through the fresh opening.
“That’s strange,” Edouard said, and turning I saw him wiping at his visor with a gloved hand. “There’s water.”
“Water?” I echoed.
“Well,” he said, “Sabratha was covered in water at one point. We’re so deep underground, it’s no wonder there’s some left.” He looked up, and doing so I saw a droplet plink against the alumglass of his helm.
Following his gaze, I saw a thin rivulet wending its way down a course in the ribbed ceiling, dripping here and there as it dribbled along the wall.
A thought occurred to me, and I called, “Valeriev!”
The Durantine doctor—dressed in his customary browns with only the filter mask in place—hurried toward us. I showed him the water. “You should clear out,” I said, acknowledging his state of dress. “You and anyone not fully suited.”
“Sranna!” he hissed. “Where is it coming from?”
“Maybe some higher chamber still has water in it,” Edouard speculated.
“Most likely,” I said. “I can handle things here. You take the lads as need it. Get cleaned and checked.” I grabbed one of the engineers. “Get a wire probe and fish up there!”
The man saluted and hurried out through the probe hole. Valeriev hadn’t moved. I pointed out the way we’d all come. “Remove yourself, doctor! The last thing we need is you or your men dying of arsine gas. Go now!”
To my surprise, Valeriev did not argue, but shouted for anyone not fully suited to follow him. A dozen or so men—his men, I noted with some frustration—all followed.
“Has anyone found the way down?” I shouted.
“Here, lord!” One man waved from a space to our left, arms white in the green darkness. “There’s something down there!” I peered over the lip, but the light of our glowspheres had yet to penetrate the full depth of the gloom that filled that echoing cavern.
So I moved to follow the man who had shouted.
What he had found was the top of a steep stair made by the overlapping of angled treads like wedges projecting from either side of the wall, so that looked at head on the steps formed a V, with the lowest point in the middle.
Our descent was precarious and slow. The steps had been made for creatures six-legged, squat and flat, and all too easily I could see myself tumbling to my doom. We emerged onto the second level, which was little different than the first, a slanting gallery of smooth stone overlooking the floor below. In time we descended past five levels to the floor, and found it a flat expanse of stone with a dais in the middle, a great round stage perhaps three hundred feet across. Trapezoidal doorways led from the chamber in all directions, leading to deeper and darker halls. The three nearest had all collapsed.
All this retreated from my senses, however.
I had eyes only for the thing on the dais.
All black it was, blacker than the gloom, though it lay beneath the dust of eons, its surface faceted like hammered steel. I knew what it was at once, what those tangled, seeming-fallen pillars of stone had been in life. Great as tree trunks they were in girth, the smallest of them many times the height of a man. Seeing them moldering there, I fancied that I heard a whispering, just as I heard in the teeth of the gates at Akterumu, and felt my eye drawn to them, plucked from my head entire and dragged through the air between.
“What in Earth’s name is that?” asked one of my companions.
They were the bones of a hand.
A giant hand.
Wordlessly, I approached, mounting the steps of the dais, Edouard and two engineers close behind.
“That can’t be real, can it?” asked one of the techs. “Some kind of statue?”
I said nothing, approached it like a man approaches a sleeping panther with only a sharpened stick, shoulders raised. It was identical in substance to the skull of Miudanar, its surface like chipped black glass.
“It looks almost human,” said the other engineer.
“Almost,” I said. “Count the fingers.”
There were six.
The dais was not wrought of the ubiquitous green stone, but of a white marble pale as milk.
“That’s not Vaiartu writing,” said Edouard, pointing to the perimeter of the stone. “It looks like Cielcin.”
“It’s neither,” I said, sparing the inscription a glance. “Cielcin looks like it.”
I thought of the Asara Cylinder, of the tablet Attavaisa had given Dorayaica in homage, and the ones I’d seen in other memory, from voyages to Echidna I’d never taken. All of them showed Vaiartu writing and graven images clustered about the round characters of the Quiet’s speech.
Of the Watchers’ speech.
So too, the ruins of Phanamhara were clustered about that place, about that hand.
The hand of one of the Watchers, long dead.
“It’s just like the one our men recovered from Echidna,” Edouard said, not two paces to my left. He craned his neck, the better to examine the full height and majesty of the bones.
“What is it?” asked one of the techs.
“The bones of a god, sirrah,” said I. “This is what we’ve come to kill.”
“Looks dead to me,” the fellow said.
“No.” Spurred by some instinct I could not name, I released the tab that unbolted the vambrace on my right arm. The armor fell to the stone with a clatter, and I broke the seal that secured my glove.
“What are you doing?” Edouard asked.
I did not answer him, but pressed my bare hand to the glassy material that made up the Watcher’s bones.
I drew it away at once.
“It’s bitter cold,” I said, and touched the massive finger with my other, still-gloved hand, feeling the cold seep through the polymer. “You can feel it through your gloves, see?”
The HAPSIS man did not approach, instead checked his helm’s thermal readout. “Eleven centigrade. That’s chilly, but it’s not cold.”
Abruptly, my mind went to the black stone of Calagah. How similar had that substance been—like obsidian!
“It’s only cold to me,” I said, certain I was right. I possessed senses the others lacked.
I looked at my fingers, aware that I’d exposed myself to the ambient poison. I told myself I ought not worry. I had not touched the poisoned stone. Indeed, what I had touched was not stone at all. On Eue, I had not had occasion to closely examine the bones of Miudanar, but I was certain that when Valeriev’s men and Rassam’s examined that dark material, they would find it identical to the exotic matter that formed the black halls of Calagah, of Annica, of the Temple at Athten Var.
Just then, a shout sounded from the galleries high above.
Then something struck the slab not ten feet from us.
“Mon Dieu!” Edouard swore and leaped back, drawing the stunner holstered on one hip.
I had crouched myself, and drawn the hilt of my sword, ready to conjure the blade.
But there was no need.
The man was already dead.
The fellow had worn the quilted white of the engineers, his helmet the same clear metal-glass as Edouard’s. Blood red and bright as vermillion spread along the inner face of that visor, which had not shattered in the fall. The fall must have broken every bone he had.
I looked up. It was nearly a quarter mile to the topmost gallery, more than a thousand feet in that cavernous space.
My fingers found the comm on my wrist-terminal, and I pressed the tab behind my right ear to ensure the conduction patch was seated through my helm. “What happened?”
The response came back garbled, as I knew it would. “—ot sure, m—lord.” Static hissed, and I turned to take three paces away from the body as the man kept speaking. Phrases came out broken, slashed, but I discerned one word through all the chatter.
“Jumped.”
My blood ran cold.
The poor bastard must have jumped the instant I touched the hand.