least an hour to get down.
The steps kept going down. They didn’t curl round into a spiral, they didn’t dance about like a drunken viper, they just stretched on and on, leading me deeper and deeper, and the feeble light of my magical lamp barely even reached the ceiling.
Before I reached the second level, I counted 1,244 steps. It will always remain a mystery who built this monstrously long stairway, carving the steps straight into the body of the earth, but in my mind I cursed them roundly, especially when I thought about climbing back up again.
I was surprised by how different the second level was from the first.
In the first place, the ceilings here were all vaulted, not flat. In the second place, the walls didn’t look bare and lifeless. In one hall after another there were images on the walls, and even inscriptions. Some of them were in human language, although the ancient letters were very elaborate. And most of them were signs indicating the way to the various sections, and saying which burial place was where.
In the second place, there were lots of stone gargoyles, one planted almost every hundred paces, in fact. The statues all seemed absolutely different; at least while I walked along, I didn’t see two that were the same. The unknown sculptors had created gargoyles of every possible size and set them in the most incredible poses. Many of the statues were so hideous that just looking at them was enough to set your knees trembling.
Water was running out of one gargoyle’s mouth in a jingling, silvery thread and falling into a shallow chalice that the statue was holding in its hands. I tasted the water gingerly. It didn’t seem to be poisoned, so I took the opportunity to drink my fill and top up my flask.
In the third place, on the second level there were no torches. Fire only flickered in the open palms of the gargoyles or in small cages up under the ceiling. But for the most part there were no flames at all, and the light flowed straight out of the ceiling. In some places it only glowed very faintly, and then the hall was flooded with a dense, obscure twilight.
The reputation of the Palaces of Bone as the most gigantic graveyard in the world was well deserved. In addition to the architecture, pictures on the walls, and gargoyles by the dozen, the Palaces were also the resting place of thousands and thousands who had departed to the light.
There were two sarcophagi waiting to greet me at the very entrance to the second level. Stone boxes with massive lids that were obviously tremendously heavy. Out of simple curiosity I went up to one and read the man’s name and date of death on the plaque. He had been buried more than seven hundred years earlier. I walked on, occasionally stopping at one coffin or another out of curiosity, to learn the name of the departed. But my curiosity was soon exhausted; there were far too many sarcophagi—if I’d read the names of all the dead, I’d have been stuck there for ten years—and I had to keep looking around desperately to make sure, Sagot forbid, that I didn’t turn off into the wrong corridor.
Sometimes the stone boxes were piled up on top of each other, reaching right up to the ceiling, or hidden away in niches in the walls, which started to look like the honeycomb in a bees’ nest. And very often there was a carved likeness of the dead man on the lid of his sarcophagus. More often than that, especially in the halls farther away from the stairway, the dead had been buried in the walls, and the niches closed off, or in the floor, with a gravestone left on the spot as a memento.
I thought there would never be an end to all those halls, corridors, galleries, passages, rooms, and stairways. And everywhere I went I was greeted by the silence of the graveyard, graves beyond count, and gargoyles, who followed the visitor to this place with their sightless stone eyes.
I came across my first body after wandering through the second level for a long time, on my way ignoring several stairways that led down to the third level. (The only way I wanted to get into the third level was through the Doors; that was what I had the Key for, after all. And any detour around the Doors made about as much sense as plunging headfirst into a whirlpool or running naked into a burning house.)
The body was lying on the floor with its arms and legs flung out, and the man must have been dead for a few months at least, because his clothes were well rotted and there was no flesh left on his bones.
To be quite frank, this is exactly the kind of dead body I prefer, because they cause the least trouble. Only I didn’t like the look of his clothes, because they were gray and blue. And any brainless sparrow could have seen that this wasn’t a civilian outfit, but a military uniform. The uniform of a member of the royal guard. The broken sword lying beside the man’s remains also confirmed that he had been a soldier.
The lad could have been a member of the first expedition, the one that had been sent to get the Rainbow Horn in the late winter or early spring. That time no one had returned to the surface, and Alistan Markauz had lost more than forty of his men in the Palaces of Bone. This warrior was one of them. Or perhaps I was mistaken, and the dead man was a member of the second expedition who had found his final resting place in the gloomy depths of these catacombs.
His skull had been crushed thoroughly and I wondered what could have killed him. I leaned down to study the body more closely and my eye was caught by a black bag lying underneath it.
Without any squeamishness (bones are just bones), I moved the skeleton aside and picked the bag up off the floor. The cloth had been turned stiff and dark by blood that had soaked into it. There was a book in the bag but, unfortunately, I couldn’t make out what was written in it—it was almost entirely blotted out by the blood. I tried turning the pages, but they were stuck together, and only a few of them yielded to my insistent efforts. Darkness! It was impossible to read anything, although I could see that the book had been used for writing in the margins.
fe … int … t … ap …
Mmm, yes, I can’t make out a thing. Maybe it would be easier on the later pages?
As I leafed through the book, I came across one inscription that I could just barely make out.
D ors locke … going to look for a wa rou … Blue l t brings d ath!
Aha! So the expedition had reached the Doors leading into the third level. What was “Blue l t”? Perhaps light?
On the last page there wasn’t a single drop of blood, but the only piece of writing was almost illegible and I had to struggle to make out the scribble. Whoever wrote it seemed to have been in a great hurry.
The lieutenant is dead, the beast squashed him as flat as a pancake. Siart and Shu have gone to the steps.
Poor fellow.… What was it that crept up out of the depths and crushed his head?
I cast a wary glance round the empty hall and the entrance to the next one. But whatever it was that had killed the poor man, it had gone away a long time ago, so I walked on without making any attempt to hide.
There were no tombs here, just tall square columns set on broad bases. They seemed to go on forever. The ceiling glowed faintly and that made the hall seem obscure and endless. I began sticking close to the columns. Darkness only knew what came over me, but suddenly I didn’t like this place at all. I was about a quarter of the way across it when the trouble started.
The entire hall was suddenly filled with an appalling rasping sound and I froze, taken completely by surprise. After eight seconds of deafening silence, the rasping was repeated and two columns ahead of me, three long, deep scratches appeared in the wall. As if a set of powerful, invisible talons had scraped furrows into the stone. I was dumbfounded and my teeth started chattering. Then a new set of scratches appeared on the next column, and I heard the same terrifying rasping sound.
The piercing noise set all my teeth on edge.
I didn’t waste any time trying to figure out what was happening; I just took off at top speed in the opposite direction. The column behind me exploded in a cloud of grit and splinters. Something struck me a painful blow on the right shoulder and almost knocked me off my feet.
The heavy footsteps and rasping noises were right behind me, but I kept hurtling along as fast as I could and didn’t look back (in the Palaces of Bone, the penalty for excessive curiosity was death). The columns flickered past on the right and the left, but the way out of the hall suddenly seemed an impossible distance away. As ill luck would have it, the cobweb-rope I thought I had attached so securely slipped off my belt and fell to the floor. There was no question of stopping to pick it up—my life was more important to me than all the magical rope in the world.
Whatever it was that was chasing me, it wasn’t going to give up, and another three columns snapped behind
