John Roberts - Oracle of the Dead

We found a few more of the vent holes, but nothing more. “All right,” I said. “To the river chamber.” So we made our way lower into the chamber where this had all begun, when the priest Eugaeon had surfaced in the bubbling water. Here I had extra torches ignited and lamps lit. Soon we had a very tolerable light, dimmed and diffused somewhat by the ever present mist from the water. While I set the other men to searching walls, floor, and ceiling, Hermes and I stripped and went into the water. In the excellent light, this was quite pleasant, making up for the lack of a decent bathing facility near the temples.

I went first to the place where the water, as we now knew, emerged from the other place, an unknown distance away, where it was accessed from the other tunnel. The current was quite strong, making it difficult to hold my place. The water was chest-deep to me, the bottom perfectly smooth beneath my feet. There seemed to be no growth of lichen or any of the usual slimy stuff that grows where water and stone meet. The heat of the water may have accounted for that, or possibly its sulfur content. The channel where the water entered seemed to be almost as wide as my outspread arms, and the same distance from the surface of the water to the floor. I felt that, had I been able to make my way against the current, I might have walked to the access from the other temple.

From there I went to the opposite wall of the chamber, where the water ran out. Hermes was examining the bottom, feeling every inch of it carefully, with his feet. “Absolutely smooth,” he reported. “No rocks, no sand, nothing-wait.” He stooped, ducked under the water, and came up a moment later with something. “Felt it with my foot,” he said, handing the thing to me. It was a bone pin about as long as my hand, the sort women use to dress their hair.

“Let’s keep searching the bottom,” I said, and commenced to feeling with my soles. In a short time we came up with a bronze stylus for writing on wax tablets, a necklace of blue Egyptian beads with the clasp broken, and a woman’s sandal, but nothing more.

“What do we make of this?” Hermes said. “Offerings?”

“It’s an impoverished god who’d accept such trash as sacrifices,” I said. “Petitioners have to wade into the water to get their prophecy. Maybe this stuff just got dropped and lost in the water over the years.”

I waded on, still feeling with my feet, until I was almost at the far wall and the current around my feet and calves began to quicken. I turned to the men who were searching the chamber. “Anything yet?”

“Nothing, Praetor,” said one man who stood on another’s shoulders to search the ceiling. “Not even one of those vent holes in this room. It’s probably why the mist stays here.”

“Well,” I said, feeling my way closer to the outlet, “you just keep on. . Awwk!” Something that felt like a giant hand grabbed my ankles and jerked me beneath the water. I was almost to the wall and I grabbed at it, my hands scrabbling at the rough rock, nails scraping and splintering against it as I was dragged into the outlet fissure, feeling my legs scrape against the side. I was drowning and I knew that this was definitely not the way I wanted to die, unable to breathe in the utter darkness of a subterranean tunnel.

I was losing what little purchase I had on the rough stone, knowing I was lost forever, when strong hands seized my wrists and pulled hard, almost disjointing my shoulders, so powerful was the current that was trying to drag me the other way. Then other hands grasped me and tugged and I was free of the fearful current. My head broke water and I coughed and sputtered and they carried me from the water and sat me on the stone floor.

After a few minutes I got my breathing under control and my lungs cleared of water and, best of all, my heart stopped hammering like a mad blacksmith pounding hot iron which, incidentally, is what my chest felt like.

“What happened?” Hermes wanted to know. He’d just saved my life, but then, that was his job. His expression was decidedly odd and I took that to mean he was relieved that I was alive, but there was something more to it. He looked amused . I looked around at the other men and they were all trying to hide smiles, unsuccessfully. One began to chuckle, then they all chuckled, then roared with laughter.

“Let me in on the joke,” I said in my deadliest voice.

“P-Praetor,” said one when he could talk. “If you could have heard the sound you made just before you went under!”

“And the look on your face!” said another. Then they were all off laughing again.

“I can only regret,” I said, “that I didn’t drown and make your mirth complete.” This set them rolling on the floor. Hermes, too. True, they had saved my life, but there is such a thing as carrying gratitude too far. I waited until they returned to sanity. I needed the time anyway, to get my breath under control.

“What did happen?” Hermes asked at length.

“Something I should have anticipated. I’m no aqueduct engineer, but I know a little about how water moves. The tunnel where the water comes in is almost man-height and just as wide. Where it goes out is a tunnel not one-fourth as large. Yet the level of the water here in the cave stays the same. How can that be?”

“The same amount flows out as flows in?” Hermes hazarded.

“Precisely. And how does it do that?”

He thought for a moment. “It has to flow out a lot faster than it flows in.”

“That is right. Just as when a river flows through a narrow canyon. At the spot it enters, the water speeds up and foams and rapids form. Same here. The current is strong coming in, and it has terrible force going out. I should have been more cautious. So you found nothing else?”

“Nothing, Praetor,” reported one of the men.

“Very well. Let’s get out of this place.”

Hermes and I resumed our clothes and we began the trudge back to the surface. “Do you think we’ve learned anything?” he asked. “Other than to watch out for fast water?”

“I think we have. It may not be apparent just yet, but we know more of that cave than we knew before, and when we know a little more, these things may fall into place.”

“I hope so,” he said. “At least we’re through wandering underground.”

“No, we are not,” I told him. “Now we’re going to do the same thing with the other tunnel.” Hermes groaned. So did the others. Now it was my turn to smile. Laugh at me, would they? We’d see about that.

At least the priests of the Temple of Apollo were all dead and didn’t try to hinder us. I got a good close look at the trapdoor first. There were what appeared to be bloodstains on its underside. I thought about this for a while, then I realized what I was looking at.

“Hermes, you remember when we found the bodies of the priests and their hands and forearms were battered?”

“Yes, we figured they’d been defending themselves from their attackers.”

“We were wrong. They were bashing their fists against this stone, trying to get out after it had been shut behind them.”

He thought about the implications of this. “Then we’re back to the possibility that there was just a single killer. Let them suffocate down there, then dispose of the bodies afterward at your leisure.”

“That is how I see it. I suspect there was more than one, but it was certainly an easier task than it appeared at first.”

Next we examined the tunnel, and I left a man to guard the trap with drawn sword to make sure that it stayed open. I had no desire to emulate the example of the late priests. The tunnel told us nothing at all. The smooth-dressed stone would have revealed any irregularities immediately and there were none.