There had to be an answer, no fool would ever build an entrance especially so that no one could ever use it. So, if I was going to get to the basin, the giants had to close their eyes for a while.
But how could I make them do that? They were statues, after all. Some kind of mechanism? I couldn’t see anything of the kind. I must admit I thought long and hard over this puzzle. But no clever ideas came to mind. The statues looked monolithic and immovable.
Deciding to test their fiery gaze, I put my hand into my bag and took out the very smallest of the emeralds. It was the only thing I wouldn’t be sorry to part with. I put the stone on the smooth floor and gave it a smart kick. It slid along the surface, flashing in farewell to me like a little green star, moved into range of the giants’ gaze, and disappeared in a blinding flash.
“Oho!”
I had to go back to work on the essential problem of how to get down to the sixth level. I rummaged through all the papers I’d taken from the Forbidden Territory, paying especially close attention to the parts I’d thought were unnecessary. A heap of incomprehensible drawings, showing the architecture of several halls, a meaningless sequence of symbols, and some other obscure rubbish … Mmm, yes. Damn all in the papers. It was a rotten idea. But the answer had to be somewhere close! I could feel it in my gut.
I approached the giants cautiously, almost turning myself cross-eyed. With one eye I tried to watch the statues’ heads and draw the line limiting the effect of their fiery gaze across the floor. With the other I tried to spot some kind of clue to the answer. Eventually I had to stop or risk being roasted and then incinerated.
The giants were close now, and from where I was standing I could see quite clearly that the statues were not so very perfect and the craftsman’s chisel had worked the stone rather crudely. And I also noticed something else, something that made it worthwhile almost going cross-eyed. The giants were both standing on rather tall round plinths. Well, what was so special about that—a plinth’s a plinth, isn’t it? But I would have offered up an eyetooth if those plinths didn’t rotate (together with the giants, of course), if you just knew how to make them to do it. The seasoned eye of an experienced man will always spot a concealed mechanism. All I had to do now was find out how the mechanism was activated and the job was as good as done.
The hall with the giants was subjected to another intense inspection. I was looking for something like a lever or a protruding block of stone, but there didn’t seem to be anything of the kind there. Then my gaze fell on the floor, slid over the smooth claret-colored slabs, and stopped on the signs of an alphabet that I didn’t know.
I’d seen squiggles like that somewhere before. Why, of course! In the “unnecessary” part of the papers! In among the drawings and incomprehensible sketches there was a piece of paper with a sequence of symbols like those. I took the bundle wrapped in drokr out of my bag again, opened it, and started rummaging through the manuscripts.
There it was! My memory hadn’t deceived me. There on the paper were the same symbols as on the floor. Some kind soul had noted down the key, but forgotten to mention when and where it should be used.
I leaned down, found the symbol that was shown first on the sheet of paper, and pressed the appropriate little slab. It moved an inch. Everything turned out to be outrageously simple (if you happened to have the answer on a piece of paper, that is). All I had to do was to press fourteen of the seventy or so symbols shown here in the right order. As soon as the last of the blocks slid in, the hall was filled with a quiet humming sound, as if counterweights and pulleys had started moving somewhere under the floor, and the giants started slowly turning their backs to me and their fiery gaze toward the far wall.
I gave a whoop of triumph, as if I’d found the entire treasure of the Stalkon dynasty under my bed.
The way was clear, the menacing giants were no longer looking at the basin, and I set out in the appropriate direction.
The humming started again, the plinths trembled and started slowly turning in the opposite direction. I broke into a run, trying to cover the distance to the basin before the giants’ gaze became a deadly threat again, and jumped into the black hole without thinking.
“Aaaaaaaaagh!” I howled in fright, realizing that my feet wouldn’t be touching the floor again in the immediate future.
The hole turned out to be very deep. I fell the first twenty yards like a stone, and I’d already said good-bye to life, but just then the air thickened, I started falling more slowly, and the descent became smooth and gentle.
I had enough wits and courage to stop yelling and light up one of my magical lamps. I was falling slowly down a narrow shaft. Its walls drifted past me and disappeared upward. If I’d wanted to, I could easily have reached out and touched them with my hand. It was only through some caprice of the gods that I hadn’t smashed my head against the wall when I first started falling. About two hundred yards farther down I slowed down even further and found myself in one of the halls on the sixth level, in the very heart of the Sector of Heroes.
8
Playing Tag With The Dead
The sixth level is the deepest limit for men. Even during the centuries when the evil of the ogres’ bones and the evil of the bird-bears had awoken and roamed freely around the Palaces of Bone, it was a rare human being who was bold enough to descend below the sixth level.
There were rumors of crazy men who wandered even as deep as the twelfth level, but no one had ever seen the lunatics alive afterward.
The Sector of Heroes, located on the sixth level, was the only proof of a human presence at this depth. For some reason, neither the elves nor the orcs had ever been in any hurry to bury anyone at this level, and men jumped in to exploit this oversight by the older races. When the Firstborn and the elves moved out of Hrad Spein, the Palaces of Bone were left entirely in the custody of men, and they immediately started “planting” the empty sector with their most prestigious corpses (prestigious during their lives, that is).
For five and a half centuries they put coffins and tombs in the Sector of Heroes. Only great and famous people were granted the honor of being buried in the sixth level: generals, warriors who had distinguished themselves in battle, the higher nobility, kings.
Then they started putting everybody down there indiscriminately and in the end the sector was so crammed full with bones that some people even started thinking they ought to clean out the old graves and put new corpses in instead of the old ones. But then they got too lazy to take the bodies down there, and the burials continued on the upper levels. There was only one human burial site below the sixth level—Grok’s grave, which was where I happened to be headed.
Men only realized why the elves and the orcs had not been in any hurry to bury their dead in the Sector of Heroes when the evil awoke in Hrad Spein. For some reason this was the level affected most palpably by the Breath of the Abyss—the ominous name given by the big brains of the Order to whatever it was that had risen up from the levels without names and was playing games with the dead.
For no obvious reason, old bones that had been lying in their coffins for centuries suddenly started growing new flesh and then wandering about. Eventually there were more living dead in the Sector of Heroes than cockroaches in a dirty kitchen.
At least they didn’t come out onto the surface, they just stayed in one place as if they were glued there, feeding on the emanations of evil rising up from the depths. But those in the Order used to say that what was happening on the sixth level was mere child’s play, and what was rising from the depths wasn’t the Breath of the Abyss at all, but merely its distant echo. Unlike a certain Hallas (who starts trembling in fury at the very mention of the word “Order”), I am inclined to trust the magicians of the Order, in the same way as I trust manuscripts in the Royal Library. And to judge from all of this, there could be some very, very nasty things waiting for me, problems I wouldn’t be able to solve that easily.
I started trembling nervously, and tried to reassure myself with the thought that I only had to tramp across the sixth level for a pitiful three hours, and that was nothing at all in comparison with the fourth level, where I’d lost heaps of time. And the idea that Lafresa and her group would have to walk through the entire sector from start to finish gave me hope and warmed my heart—I hoped my enemies would run into an entire regiment of dead men, so that they could learn for themselves how I felt when I was wandering around the Forbidden Territory.
I walked very carefully, almost as carefully as at the beginning of my visit to the Palaces of Bone. I kept
