The Priest of Blood (33 page)

“I smell death,” she said. “Nothing more. An old stink of blood, everywhere. These stones, washed with it over many lifetimes. But nothing more.”

I pointed to the floor. “The altar is beneath us.”

She sat back on her haunches, crossing her arms across her chest as if she were cold. She drew out her dagger, and pressed it against the stones. Scratches of dust and fragment came from it. “It’s solid.”

“To get here, we walked up the steep stairs from the milky waters. I have followed my dream too much. The temple is inverted. This is the lowest depth of it.” I waved my hand toward the serpent doorways. “Those go toward the Earth, yet their paths go upward. If we followed the paths, I would surmise that we’d find the milky waters again. We have been descending underground since we entered the temple.” Then I tapped on the floor. “This was once ceiling, and that,” I pointed upward to the domed rooftop, “was a basin for catching the blood of sacrifice. See the way the stones in the dome spiral downward? It is a drain at its top, although this has been sealed.”

“Then how do we go down, to the altar?” Ewen asked, rising from the floor.

“We go back,” Kiya said, but her voice was filled with dread.

I understood why, seconds later. We felt it, in our stream. Something haunted this place. Some presence, heavy and smothering. It was as if we were inside some monstrous body, some breathing, living creature made of carved stone and filled with the bones of others. We each kept close to the others. I smelled the odor that Kiya had mentioned—like dried chrysanthemum and ambergris as well as putrefying corpses. It had grown stronger since we’d remained long in the domed room.

Something’s changed
, I thought, and wondered if Kiya could read me. It wasn’t anything other than the sense that there had been an awakening since we’d arrived. The sentient being of this temple, whatever fueled it, whatever remained within it, knew we were there and had come to a state of growling wakefulness. All around us, this invisible presence became palpable, yet untouchable, unknowable. I began to think of it as male. I can’t say why, but it felt masculine.

Ewen went to the wall by the way from which we’d entered and put his hands upon it as if to crawl up it, but instead he put his ear to it.

“It’s a puzzle for us,” I said. “The serpents. The chambers. There’s something we’ve overlooked. Someone has put out a game for us. The pieces are all here.”

“The vampyre statues,” Kiya completed my thought.

7

We returned along the narrow corridor to the chambers of the trophies, all stuffed and sewn room by room. I found a thin dagger made of material that seemed to be fashioned of amber—it was in the girdle of a man who held a maiden aloft and penetrated her in a mockery of sexual pleasure.

Kiya gathered up the sewing needle and skeins of thread from the woman in one room, and Ewen returned with coins in his hand. I turned these over and saw some ruler of old upon them. None of us could identify the words upon it, but there was no doubt that the coins were made of gold.

Still other things, mainly small, made to fit in a pouch were found; Kiya brought the scroll from the room of the scribe and student. Ewen brought the sculptor’s tools in the tableau of the artist. In the chamber of the warrior scene, I took an enormous sword and scabbard. I lifted it up—it was of some heft and size, and I drew the sword from it. It was carved of a translucent black stone. Along its lower edge, the stone had been shaped like pointed teeth, and it was sharp to the touch. I hoisted it and bound the scabbard about my waist, securing it with a shoulder strap. I had missed the feel of a sword, and though we did not find them useful—for they could be clumsy in our attacks on prey—I did not want to leave this treasure behind.

When we’d gathered the finds, I said, “Some craftsman has put these elements together. As if for us. An audience.”

“To play a game,” Ewen said.

“Each scene is meant to be understood,” Kiya said. “The woman who sews is making a shroud. In the room where the scribe writes, knowledge is passed.” She brought forth the scroll that she’d put in the sling along her shoulders. When we unrolled it, I could see the slight bits of hair along the parchment.

“Flesh,’” I said.

Kiya nodded. She pointed to the picture-writing up and down its length. Images of heron and crocodile as well as jackal and serpent. Now and then these were interrupted by the image of Lemesharra, wearing the same jackal mask that the statue at the front of the temple wore.

After we took our inventory, wondering at the uses of these things, we returned to the entry hall where we had first seen the stuffed skins of the vampyres.

They were in a ring, as they had been before. Kiya noticed something about them. “All of them are doing something. They are waiting for someone. Waiting on someone.”

“These are servants of the one entombed here,” I said. “Meant to stand guard against those who enter. They’re meant to scare us, to warn us. Our tribe. Ancestors. These were extinguished, skinned, then raised again like scarecrows.”

“As those outside were,” Kiya said.

“The other Maz-Sherah,” I added, feeling grim about our prospects.

I traced a wide circle with my foot at the edge of each of their heels.

Beneath a thin layer of dust I noticed interlaced designs on the floor below us.

“A seal,” I said, withdrawing my sword from its scabbard. I traced what I saw as a door of some kind, a perfectly round reflection of the dome above us, and the dome basin far below. “Between where we stand and the last chamber we entered, there is another chamber. We must open it.”

8

We made little progress over the next two hours, using an ax, dagger, sword, and sculptor’s tools, as well as other items gathered from the chambers. It would soon be daylight in the world. We needed to rest, and also to drink, but did not know how we would be able to do so. Had we come this way for nothing? Had we come to find a tomb that meant nothing, that contained nothing? This dust-thick chamber with its dead vampyres posed as if in some drama for our benefit?

The stink of death had increased, and although we were not living creatures in the mortal sense, still the smell of rotting death brought us no solace.

When we slept that day, close to each other there on the floor, guarded by the ring of the vampyre statues, I could not even sense the stream around us, though I knew it had to be there.

Somewhere beyond this temple, beyond this city and its mountain rock, the sun arose, and the seeping blackness of oblivion entertained me with its peace.

I awoke sharply, feeling as if my senses had become keen again. I sat up. Kiya, already up, gazed down at the circular seal in the floor. Ewen, beside me, coughed as he awoke, as if he could not breathe.

“I had dreams of terrible things,” he gasped when he had his breath again.

“Of what?” I asked.

“Of a mortal,” he said. “One such as I have never seen. He watched me as I slept and put his hand upon my hair. He made me think I would end like...like one of these.” He pointed to the statues near us.

As I rose, I thought I saw a handprint in the dust near where my head had rested.

Was it Ewen’s? Kiya’s? But it seemed larger than either of their hands. It struck me: someone else had been there. While we slept. I showed it to Kiya, and she nodded. “There is a watcher. But I have no sense of him.”

“Who would watch us, but not destroy us?”

“A cat plays with its mouse before slicing it open,” she said. Kiya got down on all fours on the floor, using the amber dagger to scratch away at a curve of the sealed door below our feet. She pointed out the edges where we’d worked on it the previous night—all our work was for naught, for it was as if the door beneath us had resealed itself.

I dusted off much of the door and saw that the designs in the stone seemed to be in small, round shapes. “There is a key to this, I’m sure of it,” I said. “But what is the key?”

Kiya brought the scroll out, unrolling it. It was as long as the door itself, but not nearly as wide. Yet, when she placed the scroll in such a way that it bisected the middle of the seal, the picture-writings seemed to line up with some of the carvings in the floor, although many were very faint.

“If only we could understand it,” she said.

“There’s the sword.” Ewen pointed to the lower left hand area of the scroll. He was right—the black sword that I had secured to my waist had been depicted in the scroll. Likewise, we saw the sewing needle made of human bone and the thread of human hair among the images of jackals and birds. Then three gold coins, which seemed to be resting over three perfectly small, round indentations. An outline of what also might have been a human hand was depicted in the scroll, and, beneath it, a very faintly similar shape in the stone door.

Then, as I put my fingers over the scroll, I noticed that by covering two letters of this strange alphabet I could make out some letters.

“Look.” I pointed this out to Kiya, who was the reader among us.

“Aleph,” she said, looking at the letter. She shrugged. Then she covered the next four letters and came up with another letter. Then another, and another. Then the letters stopped. The rest of the scroll was unreadable, full of pictures and wedge-shaped curves. “The only word it spells is a name,” she said. “Ar-tep. Artephius.”

“Is that a place?”

“A person, a place,” she said. “Or perhaps the name is an indication of something else. It is of no consequence—it may be the signature of the scribe who created this.”

“Give me the coins,” I said, looking up at Ewen.

When I had them in my fingers, I removed the scroll, and placed three of the coins in the round indentations of the door beneath us. Then I took the sword and laid it down exactly in the arrangement of the scroll that corresponded with the door. We took each of the materials and did this.

“It’s a map of some kind. This is a map for this doorway,” I said. “Only...only it will not open.”

“The hand,” said Kiya. She put her hand, palm down on the indentation where it was meant to go.

Nothing happened. Ewen followed suit. They looked to me, and feeling that strange feeling of being “the One,” I put my hand down on the stone, but nothing happened.

Then I arose and went to the guardians of the place, the statues of the dead vampyres.

I tore the hand off one youth and brought it back with me.

9

I set the hand into the recessed stone.

Suddenly I heard the turning of some mechanism, like the creak of the wheels and ropes of a trebuchet. It was an engineered doorway, and only when each item had been placed into it would it begin to work. All around us, the bowls of oil lit up with fire, without benefit of fusil or flint, casting flickering shadows all around us. I pressed the hand a bit harder into the stone.

Again, the grinding of wheels and rope; the round doorway beneath us began to sink farther downward. I drew the scroll back, and we watched as the seal sank farther and farther—perhaps two or three feet down.

Then the room itself began to vibrate as if from an earthquake.
 

The chamber itself began moving—its walls dividing, and the floor beneath us splitting as if run by some mechanism.

Chapter 16

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T
HE
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OMB

1

The walls around us moved with that mechanical grinding sound then closed together so that entirely different chambers appeared beyond us—not the corridor back or forward, but other pathways. I had been wrong—it was not just one chamber level between the bottom level and us. It was a vast canyon of a room that stretched downward.

We each stepped onto one of the floor segments. The stuffed vampyres seemed to move in a strange dance—although no limb moved, their entire bodies seemed to float by on the great jagged plates of the floor, until much of the floor had been pushed back to the walls. We stood there as if looking down from a cliff. An icy wind rose from the chamber below. Near one edge of the newly moved flooring: a platform at the top of a stone staircase, leading downward to the center of the newly formed pit below us. We only had to step floor piece to floor piece to get to it, like hopping stones across a stream.

I grabbed up the black sword and went first into the icy depths of this new hell.

As I went, I was on guard, for I smelled death more strongly—mortals were within, flesh was there, and even blood. It was strong and terrible and not of the usual enticement of mortal blood, which was nearly erotic in its pull to me. Frost lined the steps so that we had to be careful not to slip. Some engine churned and spat, humming like a thousand bees. Although I would only learn of such things centuries later, it was a freezer of some kind—whether natural or unnatural, I could not then know.

A blue light began to form the farther down we went. Then I saw what looked like white wheels and gears and locks shifting and clicking as if in some mechanism.

Human bones were stacked together in bundles, interconnected, some carved into rounded wheels, others a semblance of their former existence as femurs, pelvis and skull. They moved together, clicking, turning, the engine of this pit.

Who in Heaven or Hell had created this? It was an engineering marvel, and it operated without human hands pushing or pulling at it. The crack of bone, the hiss of some unseen steam (for how could there be steam in such a frigid place?), and the slight squeal of the turning gears all accompanied our descent. It was as if it were the machinery of the Devil himself

As the blue light brightened, I saw shapes and shadows along the wall. They became clearer as I descended closer to them.

It was a large chamber full of mortal beings. There were ropes of some strange red hue that ran between them and around them like a spider’s web. They hung suspended along the curved walls and wore masks of gold and silver upon their faces, men and women, youths and maidens. They hung like stags in the kitchen butchery after the hunt. Their flesh had been made so cold that it was nearly blue, with a limning of frost at their extremities.