'Look at these markings on the walls.' Rika brought the light nearer to an area of pale stone that had been noticeably smoothed away. Rock-script bled across it. 'These are deliberate markings, symbols or equations. I've never studied the subject in any detail, but I believe this could be the Mathema language.'
The jagged lines were painted in startlingly bright pigments, yellow and red, the workings of a culture tens of thousands of years old. The notion was absurd, because the writing seemed so fresh.
'Vectors,' Rika whispered. 'Geometric patterns, algebra. Integration… And yet the graffiti scribbled around it all seem like…'
'The scrawls of madmen,' Randur mumbled, studying the ragged scripts. Vaguely, one set of symbols spelled out:
To Randur it resembled 'HELP US' and he was hardly surprised they had gone mad because of all the mathematics…
'So is this what eventually happened to that great civilization, then?' Eir suggested. 'I always thought it was crop failure that wiped them out. Surely they couldn't just simply vanish underground while chasing treasure.'
There was a noise nearby, an inhalation of breath, and Randur peered towards the dark exits beyond. Sets of orbs began faintly glowing blue, two, four, then an almost exponential rate of appearance.
'They won't come at us – not with that torch.' Randur glanced to Rika, as if to ask How long will it last?
'I've plenty of sulphur and lime, and matches if it runs out,' she said. 'We're quite safe.'
They returned their gaze to the hoard and the script, independently investigating their discoveries. For some time they patrolled the area to investigate.
There was a weird and distant howl, like a fractured incantation. The group glanced at each other and readied themselves for a fight, but nothing followed. A tension persisted in the air, though, as if someone had triggered a relic. Sounds began to act abnormally, voices hanging disturbingly in the gloom. Reverberations of their footsteps became suddenly muted.
Then there was the clink-clink-clink of metal.
Coins skimmed back and forth across the floor, rolling over each other, rupturing the surface of the water. Of their own accord, the countless metallic discs began to aggregate and spool, to form a figure.
They massed, stacked and banked up, forming a torso and arms and legs, which then pushed themselves up from the mirror-pool. Resting on top of a vague metal head was a semi-shattered rust-crown.
A coin golem?
The four scrambled back up the stairway as the metal entity strode out of the pool, its legs and feet buckling rustily as it gained control of its own movements. Randur hovered at the rear, now feeling utterly useless, because it would take much more than a couple of sword strokes to bring this bastard down. Stretching upwards, the thing's head nearly scraped the roof of the cavern, sending individual discs slipping away from it like drops of water.
It began to lumber after them, vast and awkward, and making a hell of a racket.
They ran.
'Stick together and aim for narrow passageways!' Randur shouted. 'I doubt it can fit through many of them.'
'Nor do I,' Munio called back.
Light from the torch dipped as they entered pockets of stale air, retracing their route. The occasional enforced darkness made for an unlikely escape. The path narrowed, opened up again. Randur desperately wanted to pause to check on the state of the golem following them. He could still hear the rattle of metal against stone as its body clipped the outcrops of rock, spilling metal-flesh each time. It was in pursuit, but what he wanted to see was how much of it was left.
The air became fresher and colder as the outside world beckoned them again.
A burst of the glade, the stars above, the glow of snow – and they bundled out, breathlessly slipping and sliding down the slope. Behind them, the coin golem was nowhere to be seen.
Randur felt his heart slapping inside him, and he crouched on his hands and knees until he regained his composure.
'Next time,' Munio growled, 'don't let's go getting any stupid ideas about following things into dark places, right?'
'We had to rescue Eir,' Randur reminded him. 'Anyway, I wanted to know who they were.'
'I'll tell you one thing,' Eir panted, 'I'll be glad not to come across any money again in a hurry.'
As the two of them embraced, Randur peered over her shoulder, into the darkness.
She whispered into his ear, 'Thank you for coming to get me.'
'You're our main cook now,' he replied. 'Can't have you dying on us.'
TWENTY-NINE
It was called ballooning, and it was how spiders would colonize new territory.
By the open window of Voland's upstairs study, it shuddered and jutted into its new state, organs and segments unfolding in the small, candlelit room. It watched its shadow, double, triple in size against the wall.
The thing bloomed.
Under its abdomen, four glands drooled out the tougher silk it needed. It could secrete silk from its mouth also, a freak biological error that had somehow occurred, but the toughest material came from underneath. The texture began to solidify, then it quickly spun it, flattened it, elongated it, then globulated it. The spider crawled next to the window, draped those masses of silk outside, manipulated it in the air, till soon the wind caught it, began to fill it and, as this gossamer balloon became five times its size, it was hauled out into the skies above Villiren.
In this form it could not feel the bite of ice-tainted air, and so drifted along with a sense of freedom and comfort. Despite the clear skies, the twin moons were concealed by the bulk of the planet, leaving the creature with the advantage of the night. Tugging at silk strands it tilted the balloon this way and that, sensed changes in the currents above and below and took advantage as and when it pleased. Even around midnight, the city was unsurprisingly alive, so it had to choose its routes carefully so that the taller buildings obscured its passage overhead – not an easy job in Villiren, especially towards the southern section of the city. From up here, the movement of all those people registered visually as minute vibrations, minuscule alterations within hundreds of microclimates.
The spider floated above the border between Scarhouse and Althing, the Citadel almost behind. Knowing that the most proficient military gathered there, it did not want to risk being seen by a skilled archer, brought down in a nest of fine swordsmen. Over the Shanties, behind the old harbour of Port Nostalgia housing retired dockworkers and miners. The side along the coast would be particularly quiet, away from the main hubbub, and with a couple of its legs it began to pull at the threads so as to diminish the volume of the balloon.
Descending onto a small, flat roof, the gossamer collapsed to one side like a deflated corpse. It would need to re-inflate it for the return journey, but for now it untangled itself then scuttled over to the edge of the roof, peering at the movement of people down on the street.
Observing. Waiting.
Voland needed good-quality meat, enough to feed a few families for a little while longer, enough to keep the price of food a little lower. It was never a question of morality – Voland being an intellectual – they were merely serving the greater good. It could always rely on him, having endowed it as his arachnid-construct, injecting it with gifts at which it could only marvel.
There: four men in military uniform, all with bottles in their hands, shambling along an isolated alleyway, leaning in and out of varying shadows of the night, sometimes laughing, ultimately oblivious.
The creature waited for a fiacre to move by, then spat out a strand of thin webbing for a swift descent into the cobbled street below. There, it watched the men from a new perspective, moving away between rows of buildings that loomed high and featureless and continuous. A trilobite ran across its path, waist high and with antennae sifting the air, and when registering its presence the little creature emitted a high-pitched noise. With one hook-shaped foot the spider stamped down on it with a mild, clattering implosion.
