The Halls of Narakur

The rope uncoiled and hung slack in the oppressive stillness of the cavern. Like a fuse burning to some inevitable end a figure descended its length, his torch a mote of light against an enduring and unfathomable darkness that had been there since the world's forging and would outlast it as well. Minutes of steady progress brought him within sight of ground worn smooth by eons of water dripping from above and all about him the knurled, milky white fingers of stalagmites reached upward as he touched down on the trail. There was the first marker, a red cloth secured around one of the mineral formations, and he was soon on the way to camp. Today, he told himself, he would make it further than ever before.

There was a serenity he found in that remote place, with its cramped passages and lichen-encrusted surfaces, its steadiness and silence. Down there he felt part of something absolute, some other form of existence free of everything he found petty and mundane about civilized life. He was a servant to a wealthy man, a bloodless mode of existence that failed to stimulate his intense curiosity. All his work did was keep him fed, which for most people was enough and for him was close to torture. One day, leading a flock of sheep to a watering hole, he'd spotted a deep, narrow fissure hidden where a grove of olive trees embraced the ragged edge of an escarpment. Later that night he revisited the place and in the months since it had dominated his life. While working he thought in secret of how to solve some problem, whether to enlarge an existing passage or find some other way around, what to do if there were a cave-in somewhere along the route. He named the tunnels and chambers he discovered: the foyer, the wolf hook, the gallery, the amber room. He spent an increasing amount of time in there, and the longer he stayed the less meaning time had for him.

Camp was at the shore of an underground lake of such size that his attempts to go around it had all failed; walking more than a day in either direction had revealed only more water, flooded tunnels, and warrens of the strange creatures that somehow lived in that forlorn and forgotten place. This had forced him to adopt a new approach, one for which he'd spent the last two weeks in diligent preparation: he would simply go over the lake. Stockpiling supplies one trip at a time, he'd built up a little outpost, food and a tent and a rowboat disassembled and carried plank by plank to a natural jetty. It was with an immense feeling of satisfaction and anticipation that the explorer fastened the final pieces together, checking the pitch seals and ensuring the oars fit securely in their brackets, and then he pushed off, crabs scuttling away and their glass-clear shells throwing the meager light like shooting stars. He leaned back and propelled the little craft into the unknown.

He did not know how long it had been when he made landfall, only that there had been provisions for three days and these had long been exhausted. He was sustained by the water of the lake, sweeter than any he'd ever tasted and so cool that he always felt renewed by it. Every time he thought to turn back some voice within begged him to go on as if this were his only chance to know what was out there. At some point the pleas turned to demands, a compulsion he could no more resist than a moth before the flame. Landfall came as an abrupt shock. He stumbled onto the alien shore disoriented and almost mindless with excitement. There in the shifting, sputtering torchlight was the decayed remnant of some ancient quay, and leading away from it a stone-paved road.

Walking the abandoned path he saw dim, time-eaten ruins, crumbling walls and stumps of broken statues looming in the murk like phantoms conjured by a mad wizard. A marble hero, shorn of its head, stood with sword eternally raised against the hazy bulk of a monster lurking in the infinite gloom. This lost city was filled with the most delightful remnants, inscriptions he could not read, intricate mosaics and gruesome, lifelike bas-reliefs commemorating kings he'd never heard of, places he'd never seen, battles and myths sufficient to fill any library in existence. The effort of reaching this place fell away from him and his heart raced as he flitted from one idea to another – to tell others of this unimaginable bounty, to bring them to the city and show them what had been beneath their feet all along, or perhaps to bring some token with him, or even keep it a secret, sell off treasures and become a rich man himself. But whenever his mind turned to personal profit guilt welled within him. Whatever sort of people had built the city, they had forgotten nothing. They had made of it a cenotaph for the departed as much as a home for the living and it would have been a sad thing indeed to pry it apart for no other reason than to satisfy his avarice.

Awash in such thoughts, quietly cataloging the multitude of wonders all about, he wandered in an awestruck daze. The road merged into a broad avenue lined with what he took to be reliquaries, meticulously preserved mementos, bejeweled mummies of saints. The path took him to the city's heart, a great ziggurat from which all roads radiated like the spokes of a wheel. Slowly, as though carrying with him the accumulated hopes and regrets of this strange people, he ascended the steps, and at the temple's summit found one image he did recognize: a vast idol, rendered in basalt and obsidian, of the abyssal serpent Erebaia, dark and terrible and inlaid with thin strips of carved human bone to give the impression of tears running from her rugose face to the altar, an altar gleaming with fresh blood.