Somehow Elegy perceived that I was joking. ‘In which case none of us will,’ she said. ‘Go ahead, Ben.’
I unstrapped my camera and laid it on the catafalque. Then I activated the radio at my throat. ‘Jaafar,’ I said, ‘we’ve found the pagoda and we’re going in. Bring the Dragonfly to this clearing, if you can.’
Jaafar’s response was swift and static-free: ‘Very good, Dr Benedict. I certainly will.’
That was the end of the conversation. I wiped my hands on my thighs and moved to push even wider ajar the door that Kretzoi had already set groaning inward.
Elegy’s voice halted me: ‘Inside, we’re going to find the “dead man” in whose shadow we’ve both been living. And that discovery’s going to liberate us both.’
‘All right,’ I said, mouthing the words.
‘My prayer for you, Thomas Benedict, is that afterward you’ll know what to do with your freedom.’ I started to speak, but she cut me off: ‘Move your butt, Benedict. Let’s see what we’ve let ourselves in for.’
I led Elegy and Kretzoi into the pagoda . . .
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Inside
‘Preternaturally cold.’ So Chaney had described the interior of the Asadi temple. The temperature was indeed several degrees below that of the Wild, but you could scarcely call the place ‘cold.’ More accurately, the pagoda was cool. This coolness undoubtedly traced to the height of the structure and the fact that a pervasive, silver-tinged gloom seemed to neutralize the jungle’s heat. This gloom, meanwhile, derived its tarnished silver glow from the morning light seeping through the central dome and moving as if by osmosis through the amethyst windows.
‘There’s the stairway to the “chandelier,”’ Elegy said, not bothering to whisper. ‘Just like my father described it. And the globes of the metal ring, they’ve been replaced and hoisted back into position.’ A faint echo overlapped her each succeeding word.
I stared up at the globes. Although possessed of a dull, mother-of-pearl luster they emitted very little light. They were each, I estimated, about the size of a Bronze Age shield rotated through a third dimension; they were also quite heavy-looking. I didn’t want to be standing under one of them if it suddenly took a notion to fall.
Huddled just inside the door, we saw many of the things Chaney describes in Death and Designation Among the Asadi – from the spindly display cabinets whose design the curators of the Museum of Indigenous Artifacts had attempted (unsuccessfully, we now saw) to reproduce from Chaney’s descriptions, to the vast, glowing wall on which were hung the Ur’sadi eyebooks. We also experienced a number of things Chaney had neglected or not thought to mention.
First, a feeling that the pagoda had unexplored recesses beyond the central chamber in which we stood.
Second, an unsettling glandular smell as pervasive as the gloom inside the temple.
And third, a distant fluting sound – a kind of hollow cooing reminiscent of wind blowing across the mouths of empty bottles, or maybe even of the rattle of rice-paper partitions during minor seismic tremors in an Oriental city.
This last sensation seemed to suggest that the pagoda was occupied, that somewhere in its eastern or western extremities there dwelt creatures accustomed to the temple and secure in their knowledge of its layout and architecture. My curiosity had just about given way to fear. I could see the three of us captured and existing briefly as ‘meat-siblings’ to the real Asadi chieftain, the one whom Kretzoi had merely impersonated . . .
‘We want some more of those eyebooks,’ Elegy said, squelching my hope that she, too, might have reservations about continuing our trespass. ‘We ought to take all those on a single rod. Maybe by taking a complete sequence of fifty – or however many each rod holds – we’ll improve our chances of deciphering the damn things. The sequence may be as important as the individual spectral pattern of each book.’
We crossed the pagoda’s immense flagstone floor, circling to the left of the stairway spiraling upward to the energy globes in the iron ‘chandelier.’ Our footfalls echoed, and our breaths came as loud in our ears as if we were wearing oxygen masks.
The wall of eyebooks glowed uncannily. It prickled with the two or three thousand glinting rods protruding like brush bristles toward us, each rod supporting a sequence of eye-books secured by a small, ornately flanged wingnut. Elegy removed one of these fasteners and scooped an entire sequence of eyebooks off its rod. Then she bound them together with a piece of elastic and deposited them in a pocket on the thigh of her jumpsuit. The weight scarcely made the pocket sag.
‘Leave the others alone,’ she said. ‘There’s no reason to take any more than we absolutely need. So far we haven’t proved ourselves worthy of the first six my father brought out with him.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘What now?’
‘I don’t know . . . Maybe we’d better ask him.’ Elegy gestured at the stairway twisting down from the pagoda’s dome.
Descending the steps was an Asadi who, more than likely, had just witnessed our theft of the eyebooks. His appearance, seemingly from out of nowhere, was as heartstopping as the sudden self-manifestation of a ghost. Kretzoi, his hackles fanning out behind his head like a peacock’s tail, assumed a belligerent bipedal stance.
The Bachelor, I thought: It’s none other than Chaney’s Bachelor.
At the bottom of the immense, looping staircase – which rose, as if without support, toward the inverted bowl of the dome – the Asadi paused and stared at us across the open flagstone flooring. Perched atop his left shoulder, shifting from foot to foot, its claws rhythmically digging, was a huri – a real huri. The huri’s gathered wings appeared wrinkled and squamous, its body as moist and smooth as raw liver, its eyeless head as fleshy as a mushroom cap. It could not possibly see us, and yet it knew we were in the pagoda as certainly as did the Asadi whom I had already identified for myself
