of violent changes of form, contracting and elongating wildly, the borders of his body blurring and recomposing with bewildering speed.
But the archaeologists too, both the human ones and the two Ghayrogs and the little tight-knit group of Shapeshifters, were staring at Valentine as though he had just said something beyond all comprehension. Even Tunigorn and Mirigant and Nascimonte were flabbergasted. Tunigorn turned to Mirigant and said something, to which Mirigant replied only with a shrug, and Nascimonte, standing near them, shrugged also in complete bafflement.
Magadone Sambisa said in hoarse choking tones, “Majesty? Do you mean that? I thought you said only a little while ago that the best thing would be to leave the shrine unopened!”
“I said that? I?” Valentine shook his head. “Oh, no. No. How long will it take you to get started on the job?”
“Why—let me see …” He heard her murmur, “The recording devices, the lighting equipment, the masonry drills …” She grew quiet, as if counting additional things off in her mind. Then she said, “We could be ready to begin in half an hour.”
“Good. Let’s get going, then.”
“No! This will not be!” cried Torkinuuminaad, a wild screech of rage.
“It will,” said Valentine. “And you’ll be there to watch it. As will I.” He beckoned toward Lisamon Hultin. “Speak with him, Lisamon. Tell him in a persuasive way that it’ll be much better for him if he remains calm.”
Magadone Sambisa said, wonderingly, “Are you serious about all this, Pontifex?”
“Oh, yes. Yes. Very serious indeed.”
The day seemed a hundred hours long.
Opening any sealed site for the first time would ordinarily have been a painstaking process. But this one was so important, so freighted with symbolic significance, so potentially explosive in its political implications, that every task was done with triple care.
Valentine waited at surface level during the early stages of the work. What they were doing down there had all been explained to him—running cables for illumination and ventilating pipes for the excavators; carefully checking with sonic probes to make sure that opening the shrine wall would not cause the ceiling of the vault to collapse; sonic testing of the interior of the shrine itself to see if there was anything important immediately behind the wall that might be imperilled by the drilling operation.
All that took hours. Finally they were ready to start cutting into the wall.
“Would you like to watch, majesty?” Magadone Sambisa asked.
Despite the ventilation equipment, Valentine found it hard work to breathe inside the tunnel. The air had been hot and stale enough on his earlier visit; but now, with all these people crowded into it, it was thin, feeble stuff, and he had to strain his lungs to keep from growing dizzy.
The close-packed archaeologists parted ranks to let him come forward. Bright lights cast a brilliant glare on the white stone facade of the shrine. Five people were gathered there, three Piurivars, two humans. The actual drilling seemed to be the responsibility of the burly foreman Vathiimeraak. Kaastisiik, the Piurivar archaeologist who was the site boss, was assisting. Just behind them was Driismiil, the Piurivar architectural expert, and a human woman named Shimrayne Gelvoin, who also was an architect, evidently. Magadone Sambisa stood to the rear, quietly issuing orders.
They were peeling the wall back stone by stone. Already an area of the facade perhaps three feet square had been cleared just above the row of offering-alcoves. Behind it lay rough brickwork, no more than one course thick. Vathiimeraak, muttering to himself in Piurivar as he worked, now was chiselling away at one of the bricks. It came loose in a crumbling mass, revealing an inner wall made of the same fine black stone slabs as the tunnel wall itself.
A long pause, now, while the several layers of the wall were measured and photographed. Then Vathiimeraak resumed the inward probing. Valentine was at the edge of queasiness in this foul, acrid atmosphere, but he forced it back.
Vathiimeraak cut deeper, halting to allow Kaastisiik to remove some broken pieces of the black stone. The two architects came forward and inspected the opening, conferring first with each other, then with Magadone Sambisa; and then Vathiimeraak stepped towards the breach once again with his drilling tool.
“We need a torch,” Magadone Sambisa said suddenly. “Give me a torch, someone!”
A hand-torch was passed up the line from the crowd in the rear of the tunnel. Magadone Sambisa thrust it into the opening, peered, gasped.
“Majesty? Majesty, would you come and look?”
By that single shaft of light Valentine made out a large rectangular room, which appeared to be completely empty except for a large square block of dark stone. It was very much like the glossy block of black opal, streaked with veins of scarlet ruby, from which the glorious Confalume Throne at the castle of the Coronal had been carved.
There were things lying on that block. But what they were was impossible to tell at this distance.
“How long will it take to make an opening big enough for someone to enter the room?” Valentine asked.
“Three hours, maybe.”
“Do it in two. I’ll wait aboveground. You call me when the opening is made. Be certain that no one enters it before me.”
“You have my word, majesty.”
Even the dry desert air was a delight after an hour or so of breathing the dank stuff below. Valentine could see by the lengthening shadows creeping across the deep sockets of the distant dunes that the afternoon was well along. Tunigorn, Mirigant, and Nascimonte were pacing about amidst the rubble of the fallen pyramid. The Vroon Deliamber stood a little distance apart.
“Well?” Tunigorn asked.
“They’ve got a little bit of the wall open. There’s something inside, but we don’t know what, yet.”
“Treasure?” Tunigorn asked, with a lascivious grin. “Mounds of emeralds and diamonds and jade?”
“Yes,” said Valentine. “All that and more. Treasure. An enormous treasure, Tunigorn.” He chuckled and turned away. “Do you have any wine with you, Nascimonte?”
“As ever, my friend. A fine Muldemar vintage.”
He handed his flask to the Pontifex, who drank deep, not pausing to savour the bouquet at all, guzzling as though the wine were water.
The shadows deepened. One of the lesser moons crept into the margin of the sky.
“Majesty? Would you come below?”
It was the archaeologist Vo-Siimifon. Valentine followed him into the tunnel.
The opening in the wall was large enough now to admit one person. Magadone Sambisa, her hand trembling, handed Valentine the torch.
“I must ask you, your majesty, to touch nothing, to make no disturbance whatever. We will not deny you the privilege of first entry, but you must bear in mind that this is a scientific enterprise. We have to record everything just as we find it before anything, however trivial, can be moved.”
“I understand,” said Valentine.
He stepped carefully over the section of the wall below the opening and clambered in.
The shrine’s floor was of some smooth glistening stone, perhaps rosy quartz. A fine layer of dust covered it. No one has walked across this floor for twenty thousand years. Valentine thought. No human foot has ever come in contact with it at all.
He approached the broad block of black stone in the centre of the room and turned the torch full on it. Yes, a single dark mass of ruby-streaked opal, just like the Confalume Throne. Atop it, with only the faintest tracery of dust concealing its brilliance, lay a flat sheet of gold, engraved with intricate Piurivar glyphs and inlaid with cabochons of what looked like beryl and carnelian and lapis lazuli. Two long, slender objects that could have been daggers carved from some white stone lay precisely in the centre of the gold sheet, side by side.
Valentine felt a tremor of the deepest awe. He knew what those two things were.
