'The edge of the city is down that way,' Karyn said, pointing to the left. 'It's in pretty bad shape.'
'There were quite a few domes still standing in the area my father and I explored,' Dorland said.
'We had gone into several of them before we found the square building.'
'We'll go this way, then,' Karyn said, inclining her head to the right. 'We'll run into it eventually.' Luck was on their side. They had worked their way along the riverbank for barely half an hour when Dorland stopped so abruptly Paul almost bumped into him.
'There it is,' he said, pointing. Paul could barely discern the building through tangled vines and underbrush. The spire had toppled into the river, and twenty meters of it lay underwater. Even though heavy vines covered the structure, its shape was outlined clearly enough to reveal that it was not a dome. It was a large square building like the temple.
Karyn led the way down the mossy bank and
stopped several meters from the building.
'Let's look around,' she said. 'No need to rush into this.'
She sounded edgy, and Paul couldn't blame her. He felt the tension, too.
As far as Paul could see, the building was designed and constructed exactly like the temple. It looked to be in remarkably good shape except for the side near the river, where the crumbling bank had undermined the building's foundation. The resultant settling had opened a gaping crack in one wall, and the roof sagged. A walking path or narrow roadway had once come up to the building but was now all but obliterated by trees and underbrush William Greenleaf
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that had grown up through the broken surface. Vines covered the open archway, obstructing their view inside.
'Is it safe to go in?' Paul asked. Beside him, Jacque was already using his knife to cut away the heavy, clinging vines. He grinned at Paul and said, 'Guess we'll find out.' They hacked their way through and stepped
cautiously into a room that smelled of damp stone and fungus. Rubble from a fallen section of the ceiling was strewn across the floor. Vines had crept in through the archway and the crack in the far wall to spread across the floor and up the walls, clinging to broken stones and chunks of debris. One interior wall had collapsed, and the high ceiling sagged.
'In here,' Karyn said. She had gone to a low archway and was looking into another room.
Jacque remained in the outer corridor as a sentry while Paul and the others followed Karyn through the archway. If the interior layout of this building was the same as that of the Holy Order's temple—
and Paul knew it would be—then this room would be equivalent to the sacred chamber in the temple. Inside, they found the same pattern of clustered pedestals that Paul and Dorland had seen in the sacred chamber. Vines had crept over them to create eerie hummocks of vegetation. Light filtered through a jagged crack in the wall.
Paul turned to say something to Dorland, then realized that Borland's attention had gone to something in the center of the room. Following his gaze, Paul saw an outline of something that was nearly buried under crumbled debris, clinging vines and centuries of accumulated dust.
'It's another chauka' Dorland said in a strained voice.
The general shape was right, and the object's position 'would put it in the same place as the chauka's in the sacred chamber.
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Paul began clearing away the vines and debris. Selmer and Karyn came to help, and it took them only a few minutes to get enough cleared away to be sure Dorland was right. The object was another chauka.
Selmer stepped back and used the sleeve of his coveralls to wipe the dust and sweat out of his eyes.
'Looks like it's in fairly good shape.' In fact, when the surface of the dish itself became visible, Paul could see no damage at all. He used his pack to brush out the last of the thick dust and dead leaves. Then he saw something gleaming faintly near one edge of the dish.
'What's that?' Selmer reached past him and picked up a round disk. He brought it up closer to catch a ray of light
