Jason stood at the gates of Hades. He tried to remember how many people had prophesied his arrival.
Gas detector extended, Maria led the way single file down a corridor wide enough only for single file. Even so,
Jason's shoulders brushed against the walls constantly, and he bowed his head. The corridor wasn't built for the size of a twenty-first-century man. Anyone who didn't believe in evolution should try strolling through a passage carved two thousand years ago.
Rubble, either from Agrippa's attempt to close the passages or moved there by one of the two explorations, littered the stone floor, sometimes piled so high that the trio had to crawl between it and the roof.
The lights on their helmets revealed chiseled marks on the low ceiling as the passage began a gradual descent. At regular intervals, the rock was streaked with black above small ledges that had once held lamps. There was the smell of long-dead earth and a silence that rang in the ears, a quiet that seemed to resent the interruption of footsteps upon stone. At the periphery of his light, Jason could see moving things, large insects, he guessed, indignant at the intrusion. They silently swarmed, divided, and reunited in hazy clouds before disappearing back into the sea of gloom.
He shined his light on a handheld compass for a few steps, surprised to see the excavation had been placed in a precise east-west orientation. How could that have been done underground before compasses were invented?
A few minutes later they entered a vaulted chamber, the roof invisible above. In the center, a slab of the native tufa rock had been carved with figures of gods and animals, still quite clear.
'A sacrificial altar,' Adrian whispered as though in a church. 'Where animals were slaughtered, I'd guess.'
Past the chamber, the passageway took a sharp turn. Maria was so intent on the gas detector she bumped into the far wall before she saw it.
'Stronzo!' she exclaimed, backing into Adrian.
Jason was fairly certain the exclamation had not invoked the name of a saint. 'You okay?'
He could see Maria rubbing her nose. 'I will be fine,' she grumbled in a tone that said she didn't believe it.
Jason took a step backward, the light on his helmet probing shadows he had not previously noticed. He looked closer. A slit carved into the rock led into an even narrower passageway that seemed to go in a direction that intercepted the angle made by the turn like the hypotenuse of a triangle. On one side, crumbling iron hinges were still visible.
Adrian had somehow managed to turn around despite the bulk of his backpack. 'A concealed path, I'd say.'
Jason nodded. 'One that would put the priests and animals in front of the visitor when they had been behind, just as Severenus described. That must have seemed like magic.'
'Na' chance we could squeeze through wearin' this kit?'
Jason shook his head. 'We'd have to leave the air tanks here.'
'That would be unwise.' Maria's head was poking around Adrian's body. 'If what Jason says is correct, we will see where this path comes out anyway.'
With Maria still holding the gauge in front of her like a crucifix leading a choir's procession, they continued until they reached another chamber with its sacrificial altar. To the altar's left was another ancient doorway, probably the end of the passage they had discovered a few minutes earlier. On the other side of the room, the slope decreased and flattened out.
Shortly past where the passage began again, they came to a dry riverbed. Their lights shone into only a void, the far shore being too far away to see. The water had been hardly three feet deep, but the sharp edges of the banks indicated the current had been swift. The streambed was mostly polished slabs of stone, making their crossing fairly easy.
The River Styx had been about a hundred feet wide, although the dark and the time it would have taken to pole against or across the flow could have made the distance seem longer.
The far bank was an immense cavern, sloping gently upward from the riverbed. Its walls soared like the nave of a cathedral until vanishing into darkness beyond the beams of their lights. A sole bat, disturbed by the illumination, flew erratic circles before disappearing into the dusk from which it had come.
'See here.' Adrian was kneeling over what at first looked like a slight depression in the rock floor. 'It's a hole with what looks like a tunnel at th' bottom.'
'That would allow the 'shades' of the dead to appear and disappear,' Maria observed, pointing to several more.
Very interesting, Jason thought-but not what they had come to find. Walking slowly to avoid falling into one of the openings, he played his lantern across the nearest wall.
'Maria,' he called, 'what do you make of this?'
She was beside him in a moment, both looking at a series of round gray boulders. Between each a scraggly, seemingly dead bush had been inserted into a hole cut into the rock floor. How could anything grow in such darkness? It couldn't, Jason concluded. Someone had placed them here. But why?
Maria knelt on the hard-packed earth, running a hand over one of the rocks.
'Pumice.'
The word took Jason back to the house in Georgetown, to Saturday mornings when Laurin, clad in rubber gloves, goggles, and coveralls bearing the logo of some oil company, would begin work on an obvious piece of junk rescued from one of the local shops. Before the day was out, her abrasive-sandpaper and pumice-usually produced a treasure that had been hidden below years if not centuries of chipped paint and blackened varnish.
Even here in Hades, she followed him. She had always threatened she would. He pushed the thought away to concentrate on the problem. Laurin went reluctantly but with understanding.
'You mean like what people use to sand furniture?'
Adrian had joined them as Maria said, 'It can be used as a fine sandpaper, yes. It is a volcanic glass, very poor, er… full of holes.'
'Porous?' Jason suggested.
'Very porous. And I will guess that it will match exactly the specimen you brought me.' She passed her meter over the stone, 'Yes, just like the one you brought, I am receiving indications of ethylene gases. I have never seen such a property of volcanic rock before.'
'But why,' Jason asked, 'would someone take rock from here halfway around the world, unless-'
There was a flash almost in front of Maria's face. One of the bushes had begun to burn. More correctly, flame danced just above it, leaving the plant unconsumed. Almost immediately nearby stones began to give off a thin trail of smoke.
'The rock is giving up its gases as it heats,' she snapped. 'Put your regulators in your mouths, and don't breathe through your nose.'
As a scuba diver, Jason had no trouble doing just that. He was relieved to see that the other two seemed equally at home with the arrangement. He stood back as yet another of the scruffy plants seemed to burst into flame soundlessly. He could imagine the reaction of the drugged, susceptible young Roman, Severenus.
Or was it another sound that overrode the whisper of the flames? He listened intently. Had the solitary bat returned? No, what he heard was not the beating of tiny wings. It sounded more like…
Like footsteps from the darkness in front of them.
Chapter Forty
Amtrak
Somewhere between Washington, D.C., and Atlanta
1430 EST the previous day
Rassavitch had wanted to fly from New York to Savannah, but being subject to scrutiny both when he boarded for Atlanta and when he changed planes for Savannah was putting too much credibility in the Americans'
