CHAPTER
SEVEN
“Kareem!” François lunged over the lip of the well, trying to grab the young man and missing. One of the crenellations jabbed him in the belly and he swayed, leaning over the pit. The Frenchman might have fallen in himself if it hadn’t been for Marty grabbing him and pulling him back.
François sobbed. “We can’t let—”
“We’re not losing another team member!” Marty gave him an angry look, and before anyone could do anything, dropped down the hole.
The Marty of one year earlier or eleven thousand years later, depending on your point of view—the Marty Cohen of the twenty-first century—would have wanted a light and a rope. He’d have wanted to plan something or move cautiously. But Marty had changed. Growing up, he’d heard of the warrior spirit and all his life he’d been training his body and mind, without any particular sense of a destination. A goal to achieve. But lately, he’d been feeling a stronger sense of that warrior spirit coming to the fore, and when it came time to react, it was something within him that asserted itself. A surge of confidence washed over him as he dropped into the darkness.
Grandpa Chang had told him tales of shaolin monks who could control their rate of fall, as long as they fell close to a wall. The stories said that those men could gently touch the wall as they dropped, with a finger or a toe, and slow their fall without harming themselves. Grandpa Chang had known no more than that, but had always nodded and smiled enthusiastically when young Marty asked if the stories were true.
Now Marty simply did what Grandpa Chang had hinted was possible. Instincts he didn’t know he had drove his actions. He couldn’t see the walls of the shaft, but he felt where they were. Falling, he reached out to grab the wall, ever so slightly. He touched it twice, three times, a fourth, and then he landed on the balls of his feet on the floor below.
Marty raised his hands in a defensive position in front of his face. He couldn’t see, but he sensed that no alien creature was within immediate striking distance. He heard the scrambling noises of one of his companions climbing down above him, and the pitch of the grunts and imprecations told him it was Surjan.
“I don’t see any of the monsters!” Surjan called, then dropped the last eight feet to stand beside Marty in the dark. Marty heard the hissing sound of Surjan unsheathing his sharpened ankh.
“I don’t sense them either,” Marty said.
“That sounds less strange than it should in my ears.”
“It feels less strange than it should in my mouth. François! Get lights down here!”
“Kareem!” Surjan roared.
The only answer was the echo of the Sikh’s own voice.
“Give me a minute!” François called. “I’m grabbing torches from the wall brackets!”
“I’m coming down!” Gunther yelled. “Catch me if I fall!”
“Someone should stay there and watch the exit,” Marty suggested.
“François and I will wait here,” Lowanna said. “Yell if you need help and the cavalry will come.”
“Can you do that lightning bolt thing underground?” Marty asked.
“I don’t know. And even if I could, do you really want me to do that in a confined place?”
It was a good question. “Never mind . . .”
“I think there may be other exits,” Surjan said. “When I fought King Zarum in the Sacred Grove, I heard . . . wailing sounds. I don’t think he was the one making them. If the Grays have an exit through that grove it would verify the story that there’s an underground network of interconnecting tunnels.”
“Gunther, how’s it coming?” Marty called.
At that moment, the German landed on top of Marty, knocking them both to the ground.
“Good aim,” Surjan said, helping both men to their feet.
Orange light appeared at the top of the shaft. “I’m throwing torches down!” François called.
Marty, Surjan, and Gunther stepped to the side and made room for the fiery brands. The floor was brick, dusted with dry dirt and sand; the torches rattled and bounced as they hit, but the flames didn’t go out. Three of the torches were burning, and three more dropped unlit. Marty saw that they stood in the corner of a long rectangular chamber with half a dozen archways leading out. The narrow well shaft ascended from a recessed corner of the room, and given the dimensions and rough texture of the walls, Marty was confident he’d be able to climb back up it without any help. The chamber’s floor was a brick-orange color, but the walls were tiled in blue and yellow.
He scooped up the torches and distributed the burning ones, holding on to the unlit brands himself. “Surjan, can you track the Gray that grabbed Kareem?”
Surjan panned his gaze across the chamber, pointed at the floor and nodded. “Easily. Kareem was resisting—look at the scuff marks.”
Marty didn’t see the scuff marks, but he trusted that Surjan did. “Lead on.”
Surjan broke immediately into a brisk walk, heading toward the far end of the chamber. Marty heard a surprised-sounding yelp, and then the scraping of unseen feet.
“I hear more than one of them,” Surjan growled.
Marty raised his burning torch higher. Overlapping pools of orange and yellow splashed out from the three torches, spilling down into side passages as they marched past. Marty heard slithering noises, and a dismayed hoot. At the end of the chamber, a heap of bones lay in the mouth of a hallway holding a descending staircase.
“Those bones are fresh,” Gunther said.
“They’ve been gnawed,” Surjan told them.
“You can tell that, standing up, ten feet away from the bones lying on the floor?” Marty asked.
Surjan shrugged.
“They’re human bones.” Gunther sounded miserable.
“Release my man!” Surjan roared. “I will kill every last one of you, if I have to!” Then he charged down the stairs.
Marty followed, making sure to drag Gunther along. The German had lost his distracted air, but still seemed shrunken, uncertain.
The stairs ended and the passageway opened into another large chamber. Marty pushed past Surjan to raise his light and look; the ceiling here rose two stories in height above the floor. A mezzanine ran around the entire room, and beneath it, on all four sides, a colonnade. The ceiling pulled up into a delicate onion-dome point. The whole thing reminded him comically of the architecture of Alhambra in Spain.
“What is this place?” Surjan growled.
“Look!” Gunther pointed at a black blotch on the floor. Steam rose in a faint wisp, and Marty’s nose detected a bitter tang.
Breathing in the all-too-familiar scent, Marty’s mind raced with a thousand thoughts at once. The smell of an injured or dead Sethian was the last thing he’d have expected in this place.
“Kareem wounded his kidnapper.” Surjan chuckled. “Good lad.”
“Be ready for a fight, there may be more than one of these creatures,” Marty pointed out.
In the center of the chamber’s floor was the mouth of another circular shaft leading down. Marty edged up to it and raised his torch to look down inside. For as far as he could see, the shaft descended.
“What is this place?” he asked.
“It’s the real palace,” Surjan said. “It’s the whole building. Queen Halpa and her servants only live in the attic, it appears.”
“Was it built underground like this?” Marty asked. “Or was it built, and then swallowed up by the earth?”
“That’s not even close to the most interesting question,” Gunther said. “The real question is, who built it? And who lives here now . . . or what?”
“The only question that matters is, where is our friend?” Surjan spat. “You academics sit here and gaze at your navels.” Turning to face the far side of the room, he threw back his head and roared. “I fear you not!”
Torch raised high in one hand, sword glittering in the other, he broke into a run.
Marty and Gunther followed.
Surjan raced toward an open archway beneath the colonnade. As he closed the final steps, Marty saw the shadows beneath the mezzanine overhead shift, and he realized that Surjan was running into an ambush.
“Surjan!” he yelled.
His cry was too late, because even as the name escaped his lips, a swarm of shadows sprang from the darkness and fell upon Surjan. As their wiry bodies articulated themselves from the shadow, the yellow light on rubbery gray skin gave them a sickly greenish hue. Marty saw long, splayed fingers, eyes like black marbles, and gaping mouths full of needle teeth beneath metallic glints, descending in a storm on his friend.
These things looked nothing like the Egyptian creatures they’d previously encountered.
But Surjan was not taken by surprise. The first Gray sprang for Surjan’s head, and the Sikh met it with a flaming torch thrust directly into the creature’s face. It shrieked, managing to rip the brand from Surjan’s hand before it fell to the brick, whining and writhing.
At the same moment, Surjan stepped forward into the net of grayish flesh and swiped left. The blade flashed yellow and then neatly sliced the heads off two Grays, like a child might take the heads off so many dandelions. Two steps forward carried Surjan into another Gray, which he slammed against a brick pillar with his shoulder.
Grays bounded to attack Surjan from behind, but Marty arrived in time to intervene. The creatures moved with great speed, but it was at the cost of poor balance. Marty deflected one head-first into the nearest column and heard its neck snap instantly. He directed a second downward, plowing it onto its face on the brick floor and then tiptoeing rapidly up its spine to gain elevation. From the Gray’s lower back, Marty leaped into the air and spun, kicking a third Gray in the face and staving in the bridge of its nose before landing in a fighting stance.
The remaining Grays shrieked and backed away, chittering.
“I feel sort of ripped off that my forte is healing,” Gunther said.
Surjan grunted. “Don’t sell yourself short. You also bless food.”
“I would like to point out that I’m doing all of this in heavy hiking boots,” Marty said. “Barefoot, I’d really be something to contend with.”
The Grays backed away in a semicircle, sniffing the air. They all had nose rings, like domesticated bulls, or like the aliens Marty’s party had encountered in ancient North Africa. They made whimpering noises to each other, noises that seemed to end in question marks.
“Return my man,” Surjan growled, “and I will spare your lives.”
The Grays broke and ran. Surjan howled, raised his ankh over his head, and gave chase. Marty followed as closely as he could, raising his torch high to give Surjan light to see by. The flame snapped violently with his motion, but didn’t go out.
A short corridor opened into a massive kitchen. Two walls were dominated by huge stone tables, one of which was shattered in the center and lay sunken in dust. The far wall bore a fireplace as wide as a two-car garage and three paces deep. The Grays split and raced away in multiple directions, bursting left and right through different exits.
Surjan hesitated, and Marty and Gunther caught up.
“Which way?” Marty asked.
“They have nose rings,” Gunther said. “Maybe we can smash their nose rings to incapacitate them, like with the Sethians.”
“These things are tiny and seem to be more fragile,” Marty pointed out. “We don’t need to know the special Achilles’ heel of hobbits to defeat hobbits. Just hit them.”
“More like Gollum than hobbits.” Gunther sniffed.
“Gollum was just a twisted evil leather boot of a hobbit,” Marty said.
“This way.” Surjan strode toward the fireplace. He wasn’t walking, he was self-consciously striding. He looked like a warrior king, on the war path to rescue his retainer.
Marty scooted around to Surjan’s side to light his path. The Sikh walked up to the fireplace, looking at the floor as he moved, ankh held out before him.
“Are you tracking . . . by smell?” Gunther asked.
“Yes,” Surjan said. “It’s not so strange. All humans have better senses of smell than we realize. We just never use it, so it atrophies. But also, Kareem’s boots leave very different tracks from the bare feet of the Grays. Look.” He pointed with the tip of his weapon.
In the depths of the fireplace, in the back left corner, there was a gap in the wall the size of a door.
“Let me go first,” Marty said. “Or take a torch.”
“Follow me closely.” Surjan ignored Marty and pushed into the gap.
Marty followed, raising his torch high. The flames burned through cobwebs and sent unseen creepy-crawly things skittering away in the darkness above Marty’s head. The passage was rough, a gap that had been torn by an earthquake or some other act of destruction. Surjan turned through half a descending twist, down a C-shaped corkscrew passage, and then stopped.
“There’s a drop here,” the Sikh warned Marty. Then he disappeared from view as he jumped.
Marty finished turning the corner, pulling Gunther behind him.
Surjan stood in the center of a cube-shaped chamber about six feet below them. The air was surprisingly good, despite the tang of ichor, which must be the scent Surjan was following. Air was circulating somehow down here, though Marty hadn’t yet felt a breeze. Surjan looked wide-eyed at the wall from which Marty was emerging.
Marty scrambled down the wall, and Gunther silently followed suit. They walked over to where Surjan was standing and he pointed in the direction they’d just come from. They both turned and looked.
“It’s clear in the light,” Surjan said. “Thank you.”
“It’s a map,” Gunther said with a tone of reverence.
Etched onto the wall was a clearly drawn map. Something about the map rang as familiar in Marty’s mind. Had he seen it before, or just similar maps?
“Those are Spain, the Pillars of Hercules, and Northwest Africa up on the right,” Gunther said.
“So that’s the coast of Brazil on the lower left,” Surjan continued. “Except that South America doesn’t dribble east like that.”
“It doesn’t in the twenty-first century,” Gunther said.
“Are you saying it once did?” Surjan asked. “Because that would make South America and Antarctica one massive landmass.”
“Not sure how old this map is,” Marty said, “but it’s obviously old, since we’re looking at it. Maybe it’s inaccurate. Maybe it shows different coastlines because the coastlines were in fact once different. Also, note that it shows windrose lines—those lines running from point to point, like spiderwebs crossing all the seas. These maps don’t have longitude and latitude, they tell you what course to chart to cross from point A to point B. That means they may not look like Mercator projections. And all three of those factors could be in effect, causing this map to look the way it does.”
“I’m not going to lie,” Gunther said. “The way it looks is amazing.”
“Thinking like an archaeologist?” Marty asked.
“Thinking like the kid who wanted to grow up to be an archaeologist,” Gunther said. “I’m underground in a palace that was ancient thousands of years before my own time and is totally unknown to my contemporaries, looking at a map on the wall that maybe shows Antarctica attached to South America. Whoever built this palace knew how to sail from France to Florida to Antarctica and back. I would have given my left arm to have known this moment, as a kid.”
“You may be about to give your left arm now,” Surjan said. “Stand back-to-back.”
Marty and Gunther complied, Gunther facing the closest wall. Marty watched Grays ooze from four arched entryways in the walls facing him. They hissed and snapped their tongues, pacing from side to side.
“Kareem!” Surjan called out.
“Can you see him?” Marty was afraid to turn his head and look.
“I can smell him,” Surjan said.
“What does he smell like?” Marty asked.
The Grays charged.