Robert Silverberg: A Long Night's Vigil at the Temple

“So you haven’t taken it to the police yet, then?”

“No,” said Mericalis. “I haven’t.”

“But why not?”

“I don’t think there’s anyone for them to arrest, that’s why. Look here, Diriente.”

He took the Warder by the arm and tugged him forward so that the Warder was standing in front of him. Then he reached his arm under the Warder’s and flashed the torch into the passageway just ahead of them.

The Warder gasped.

Two men in rough work clothes were sprawled on the tunnel floor, half buried beneath debris that had fallen from overhead. The Warder could see shovels and picks jutting out from the mound of fallen earth beside them. A third man—no, this one was a woman—lay a short distance away. A sickening odor of decay rose from the scene.

“Are they dead?” the Warder asked quietly.

“Do you need to ask?”

“Killed by a rockfall, you think?”

“That’s how it looks, doesn’t it? These two were the diggers. The girl was their lookout, I suspect, posted at the mouth of the tunnel. She’s armed: you see? Two guns and a dagger. They must have called her in here to see something unusual, and just then the roof fell in on them all.” Mericalis stepped over the slender body and picked his way through the rubble beyond it, going a few paces deeper into the passageway. “Come over here and I’ll show you what I think happened.”

“What if the roof collapses again?”

“I don’t think it will,” Mericalis said.

“If it can collapse once, it can collapse again,” said the Warder, shivering a little now despite the muggy warmth of the tunnel. “Right on our heads. Shouldn’t we get out of here while we can?”

The custodian ignored him. “Look here, now: what do you make of this?” He aimed the torch to one side, holding it at a 90-degree angle to the direction of the tunnel. The Warder squinted into the darkness. He saw what looked like a thick stone lintel which had fallen from the tunnel vault and was lying tipped up on end. There were inscriptions of another era carved in it, runes of some sort. Behind it was an opening, a gaping oval of darkness in the darkness, that appeared to be the mouth of a second tunnel running crosswise to the one they were in. Mericalis leaned over the fallen lintel and flashed his beam beyond it. A tunnel, yes. But constructed in a manner very different from that of the one they had been following. The walls were of narrow stone blocks, carefully laid edge to edge; the roof of the tunnel was a long stone vault, supported by pointed arches. The craftsmanship was very fine. The joints had an archaic look.

“How old is this?” the Warder asked.

“Old. Do you recognize those runes on the lintel? They’re proterohistoric stuff. This tunnel’s as ancient as the temple itself, most likely. Part of the original sacred complex. The thieves couldn’t have known it was here. As they were digging their way toward the temple they intersected it by accident. They yelled for the girl to come in and look—or maybe they wanted her to help them pull the lintel loose. Which they proceeded to do, and the weak place where the two tunnels met gave way, and the roof of their own tunnel came crashing down on them. For which I for one feel no great sorrow, I have to admit.”

“Do you have any idea where this other tunnel goes?”

“To the temple,” said Mericalis. “Or under it, rather, into the earliest foundation. It leads straight toward the deepest vaults.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve been inside already. Come.”

There was no question now of retreating. The Warder, following close along behind Mericalis, stared at the finely crafted masonry of the tunnel in awe. Now and again he saw runic inscriptions, unreadable, mysterious, carved in the stone floor. When they had gone about twenty paces yet another stone-vaulted passageway presented itself, forking off to the left. The custodian went past it without a glance. “There are all sorts of tunnels down here,” Mericalis said. “But this is the one we want. So far as I’ve been able to determine at this point, it’s the only one that enters the temple.” The Warder saw that Mericalis had left a marker that glowed by the reflected light of his torch, high up on the wall of the passage they were following, and he supposed that there were other markers farther on to serve as guides for them. “We’re in a processional hypogeum,” the custodian explained. “Probably it was just about at ground level, ten thousand years ago, but over the centuries it was buried by construction debris from the later temples, and other trash of various sorts. There was a whole maze of other stone-walled processional chambers around it, leading originally to sacrificial sites and open-air altars. The tunnel we just passed was one of them. It’s blocked a little way onward. I spent two days in here going down one false trail after another. Until I came through this way, and—behold, Diriente!”

Mericalis waved his torch grandly about. By the pale splash of light that came from its tip the Warder saw that the sides of the tunnel expanded outward here, spreading to the right and the left to form a great looming wall of superbly dressed stone, with one small dark aperture down at the lower left side. They had reached the rear face of the temple. The Warder trembled. He had an oppressive sense of the thickness of the soil above him, the vast weight pressing down, the temple itself rising in all its intricacy of strata above him. He was at the foundation of foundations. Once all this had been in the open: ten thousand years ago, when the Visitants still walked the Earth.

“You’ve been inside?” the Warder asked hoarsely.

“Of course,” said Mericalis. “You have to crawl the first part of the way. Take care to breathe shallowly: there’s plenty of dust.”

The air here was hot and musty and dry, ancient air, lifeless air. The Warder choked and gagged on it. On hands and knees, head down, he crept along behind Mericalis. Several times, overcome by he knew not what, he closed his eyes and waited until a spasm of dizziness had passed.

“You can stand now,” the custodian told him.

They were in a large square stone chamber. The walls were rough-hewn and totally without ornament. The room was empty except for three long, narrow coffers of unpolished white marble side by side at the far end.

“Steady yourself, old friend,” Mericalis said. “And then come and see who we have here.”

They crossed the room. The coffers were covered with a thick sheet of some transparent yellowish material that looked much like glass, but in fact was some other substance that the Warder could not identify.

An icy shiver ran through the Warder as he peered through the coverings.

There was a skeleton in each coffer, lying face upward: the glistening fleshless bones of some strange long-shanked creature, man-like in size and general outline, but different in every detail. Their heads bore curving bony crests; their shoulders were crested also; their knees were double ones; they had spike-like protrusions at their ankles. Ribs, pelvises, fingers, toes—everything strange, everything unfamiliar. These were the bodies of starfolk, not those of people of this world.

Mericalis said, “My guess is that the very tall one in the center is Vonubius. That’s probably Aulimiath on the right and the other one has to be Oberith, then.”

The Warder looked up at him sharply. “What are you saying?”

“This is obviously a sepulcher. Those are sarcophagi. These are three skeletons of starfolk that we’re looking at here. They’ve been very carefully preserved and buried in a large and obviously significant chamber on the deepest and therefore oldest level of the Temple of the Visitants, in a room that once was reached by a grand processional passageway. Who else do you think they would be?”