Shadow of Ararat

THE NECROPOLIS OF DASTAGIRD

Krista stood in the rain, feeling the heavy drops drum against the thick wool of her cloak. A storm thundered overhead, filling the sky with lurid yellow light. Lightning arced from cloud to cloud, or walked across the fields on the other side of the river with long jagged legs. She stood at the summit of the ziggurat in the dead city, her back to the great stone altar that capped the monument. Thunder growled, filling the heavens. Within the cowl of the robe, her face was dry and pensive.

On the horizon, a red glow stabbed through the murk. In the last hour, it had doubled in size. It pulsed like a great burning heart, visible even through the sheets of rain that blew across the dunes and the fields.

It must be a city, she thought, being consumed in fire.

She wondered who lived in the city-were they men like lived in Rome? Were they monsters as she had read in the tales of travelers, with faces in their stomachs?

She sighed, putting the question to herself again.

Is this the time to go? We are at the edge of the world, surely far enough to escape the curse. But where could I go? I spurned the Prince’s offer-that at least would have gained me horses and supplies.

Her ribs still ached, though Maxian’s touch, when he had grown strong enough to channel the power that healed, had knitted bone and sinew back together. Her bruises were gone and she could walk without limping.

Without him, said one voice, the timid voice, you would be dead.

Without him, another answered with asperity, you would be back in Rome, safe and sound, at a party or in bed with some handsome, well-spoken noble.

The stones under her feet began to tremble, causing the pools of rainwater to shiver and jump. She sighed and stood away from the wall. The Prince was at work again, far below, and she should be there. Descending the steps of the pyramid, she felt the two Valach boys slink out of the rainswept darkness around her and take up at her heels.

She smiled, her teeth white in the darkness. Among the Valach, the tribe followed the strong. She enjoyed thinking of herself as the Queen Bitch but winced, feeling a phantom of the pain it cost to gain their devotion. At the middle terrace, she turned off the stairs and pressed a stone in the wall. A door opened, steam and smoke curling out of it. A red glare shimmered down below. She went inside, and the Valach boys crept after her.

• Days of crawling along dusty corridors and banging on the walls of abandoned rooms had finally borne fruit. A deep cellar, beneath even the furnaces that drove the fire pits of the temple, had yielded an uneven pavement. Under the moldy bricks, carefully prized up by the Valach boys under the eagle eye of Gaius Julius, a circular door had been discovered, set into a floor of chalky limestone. The door was inscribed by seven circles of brass; each etched with a thousand signs. Between the circles of brass, ancient characters had been chiseled in neat rows.

There was no lock, or hinge, only a smooth surface of stone and metal. Minute examination of the stones around the door found that to the right of it, about seven feet away, there was a dimple in the floor, as if a great weight had rubbed there repeatedly.

Maxian had taken the quarters of the high priest of the temple for his own after the battle in the room of fire. The entire camp had been moved into the chambers under the ziggurat. The larders were well stocked, and brick-lined cisterns filled with sweet cold water were buried under the pyramid. Even the great engine had been hauled down into the city by Khiron and the Valach boys, and rested, quiescent, within the walls of an ancient temple. The Prince devoted himself to the books of the priests, searching for the key to unlock the circular door.

Gaius Julius, with a cheerful insouciance and an eye to the desires of his master, looted the temple, loading the engine near to bursting with crates and boxes of scrolls, letters, tomes, tiny odd-looking soapstone figurines, parchments pressed between sheets of copper, flint daggers, and a box of jeweled skulls. Large sums of coin and ingots of gold went into the machine as well. Krista was bored nearly to tears, but she steeled herself to the smell of ancient dust and the feel of dead worms on her fingers and helped the Prince sort through the documents.

“This is too much,” Maxian snarled, pushing a diary of some long-dead priest away from him on the tabletop. “During the time of Faridoon the Twelfth, the priests came and went from the tomb on a daily basis, taking measurements, praying, all manner of things. Never once a mention of how the door is opened.”

Krista gently put down the motheaten scroll that she had been piecing together. “It seems that it was always so, until quite recently.” Her voice was tired. It had been a long day in a succession of long days. “That other diary, the one you found here, said that steps had been taken to prevent the Master of the Lie from gaining entrance to the tomb.”

“Yes,” Maxian said, thinking, “but who is this Master of the Lie? Why were the priests afraid now-and not before?” He tapped a finger on the side of his skull. “A pity that Abdmachus suffered so cruelly at Alais’ hands-if he could speak, he might be able to tell us how to open the door.“

“The Lie is the greatest of their sins,” said Gaius Julius, who had been sitting on a bench by the door, bouncing a ball of some dark flexible substance he had found in the storerooms on the ground. “One of the temptations sent by their god of darkness to tempt men from the light.”

Krista arched an eyebrow at the old Roman. Maxian just squinted at him. “And you know this because…”

The dead man hooked his thumb over his shoulder, the ball held between his palm and his forefinger. “They have a list on the wall of the kitchen, for prayers probably. It lists them all, with a nice solar icon of the God of light at the top, and below, under his feet, the God of darkness.”

Maxian stood up, stretching, and shook the black robe he wore into place over his tunic. “This god of light, is it the one they call ‘Ormazd’?”

“I think so, oh Great Lord,” the old Roman said, tugging at a nonexistent forelock. “The rival of the one they name Ahriman.”

Krista frowned at the dead man and stood up as well, brushing bits of rotting papyrus from her sleeves. Gaius Julius was fond of playing the rustic, but she knew that his mind was very sharp and though he rarely helped them with the search, he knew Greek, Latin, and Persian better than either of them.

“Then,” the Prince said, “lets see what a little prayer will do.”

At the invocation of the name of Ormazd, the god of light and the way of right thought, the door gave a great groan and slowly, inch by inch, unscrewed itself from the floor. Gaius Julius’ eyebrows went up as it rose. He had suggested breaking through it with hammers and chisels, but the plug was at least two feet thick. The air hummed with some unseen power, and when the plug had backed itself out, it rotated to one side and laid against the floor.

Stairs went down, narrow and dark, roughly carved from the greenish stone.

Lantern light illuminated the bottom of the steps. Krista shed her cloak, hanging it up in the cellar, and stepped lightly down the winding staircase. The tomb was buried in thirty feet of solid limestone. The staircase wound down, uneven and irregular, through bands of white and ochre and tan and finally past a dark layer the width of a man’s thumb. The room that contained the sarcophagus was small, barely larger than that required for the coffin itself and space for a man to walk all the way around it. Krista stopped in the narrow doorway, her hands on the walls on either side.

The Sarcophagus was a glory of gold and silver and jade under the light of the lanterns Maxian and Gaius Julius had carried down from above. The air in the enclosed space was already thinning. The coffin was made in the shape of a man, tall and handsome, with wavy hair and a piercing gaze. It was crafted in the manner of the Egyptian pharaohs, arms crossed over the chest, features smoothed and rounded. Signs and symbols, scribed in gold paint, ran along the sides of the coffin in rows.

Maxian sat at the foot of the Sarcophagus, his legs crossed under him. Gaius Julius sat to his right, in the corner near the head of the coffin. Krista slid past the Prince and went to the other corner. She settled to the floor, crossing her long legs. The Prince already seemed to be gone, his face calm and composed, though his eyelids twitched with the movement of his eyes. The dead man, for all she could tell, was sleeping.

The homunculus and the Valach boys waited at the top of the stairs, crouching around the mouth of the tunnel.

Maxian began to speak, raising his hands. His eyes remained closed.

“Give us the corpse hung from a nail,” the Prince said in a hollow voice.

There was a pause.

“The corpse, though it is our King’s, give it to us.”

Pale-blue light sparked around Maxian’s hands. Krista felt a hum begin to build in the flat stone blocks of the floor, vibrating against her legs.

“On this corpse, I sprinkle the food of life.” The Prince’s hands moved in the air before him.

“On this corpse, I sprinkle the water of life.” His hand cupped and then turned over, as if to pour some liquid onto the floor.

The pressure in the air of the room changed, crushing down upon her. Her eyes began to water and she blinked furiously. The Prince raised his hands, stretching them out to her and to Gaius Julius. She calmed her breathing and raised her hand, trying to fill her mind with calm.

White light burst around her, filling the entire space, flooding up the staircase. Her whole body trembled as a tingling sensation rushed over her skin. Even though eyelids screwed shut, she could see the room in stark detail, each stone, groove, surface, and symbol outlined in a clear white light. Lightning crawled through the air toward her with infinite slowness. She realized that she had stopped breathing. She panicked, but her body refused to listen. She screamed, feeling her blood halt in her veins. But no sound came from her lips.

The burning spark of lightning crept closer, arcing from the Prince’s hand to hers.

It touched, and her universe collapsed, every memory, every sensation rushing together in one point just behind her eyes. Every thought, every emotion, every word she had ever spoken flashed past her, swallowed into that one hot point of fire that spun and flickered behind her eyes.

Something clicked, then scraped in the room.

Awareness flooded back into its usual dimensions and shapes. Krista sagged to the floor, her nails skidding across the rough stone. There was a tart smell, like burned pepper, in the air. She looked up, her hair falling around her face like a thicket of tight reddish-brown brambles.

The coffin had folded away. A man sat up from a bed of linen; a strong hand, burned almost bronze by some ancient sun, rubbed a face of noble proportions. He was naked, not a tall man, but well made. His limbs were long and clean, with sharply defined muscles. His hair was long and golden, falling in a wave of curls over his shoulders and broadly muscled back. The man looked around, his blue eyes narrowed in apprehension. Krista remembered to close her mouth. She brushed the hair out of her face.

“Was… was I dead?” His voice rang with command, a voice that would inspire men to valor on a field of battle. His Greek sounded strange to her ear, clipped and hurried. Krista felt her throat dry at the sound.

“Yes,” she croaked and stood up, forgetting to keep her head low. “Ouch!”

The man laughed, a musical sound, and offered her his hand. She did not take it.

“You’ve been dead a long time,” she said, glancing at Maxian, who was only beginning to recover consciousness. She pointed. “He brought you back.”

“Then he is a well-met friend,” said Alexander, son of Phillip, standing gingerly on unsteady legs. “I will thank him for it.”

Gaius Julius rolled over, groaning and pressing the palms of his hands to his eyes.

“Yes,” Krista said, eyeing the Conqueror as he stood up. He was well made. “Yes, you will.”