Thomas Harlan - The shadow of Ararat

"This." The German dug in a leather pouch on his wide belt. His grubby fingers drew out a disk of tin, pierced with a drilled hole. The fire had scored it, but portions were still readable. Galen took it, turning it over in his hand. The letters, driven into the face of the metal with a hammer and punch, were disfigured but still readable.

"Dardanus Nikolaeus. Nikos. A fifteen-year man." The Emperor felt a brief disappointment.

"This tells me enough. Bury the rest and tell the quartermaster to mark this name and those of any others you find among the list of the dead."

A pity, the Emperor thought as he walked through the ruins, the cowl of his cloak turned up. She and her men seemed to have the very luck upon them.

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 Walach boys slink out of the rain-swept darkness around her and take up at her heels.

She smiled, her teeth white in the darkness. Among the Walach, 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 Walach 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 firepits in the temple, had yielded an uneven pavement. Under the moldy bricks, carefully prized up by the Walach 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 Walach 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 moth-eaten 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 in 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, "let's 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 lay against the floor.