The Descent

 The sun was but a suggestion on the burnt cobalt horizon when they resumed their ride, passing shapes in darkness that had once had purpose, buildings abandoned and half ruined, steles raised in commemoration of deeds forgotten, their sides traced with the eroded remnants of hieroglyphs in lost languages. It was a brooding and resentful land they traversed, one whose history could easily be read in the skeleton that remained of Horon's suburbs. Here and there lay piles of masonry where scavengers had torn down a structure and sifted through its corpse, broken potsherds and fragments of statues amid timeworn bricks and clay tablets and cobblestones like snowdrifts, all enfolded by an eerie silence. So it shall be with all your works, the ruins seemed to say in a hoarse oice of wind and echoing hoofbeats. So it always has been and will be, here and among all men. Here is the measure of your ambition.

Neteth was surprised to see the city proper similarly desolate. It was clean there, everything in order, the streets swept and the icons of the temple facades polished to a mirror sheen. It was intact in the manner of a mummified corpse, row upon row of lifeless buildings worked with elaborate reliefs and fronted with columns of brass and columns of marble, murals of vibrant, swirling colors, cloth streamers hung from spires and minarets so that when the wind blew the sky came alive with rippling motion as though they looked up at waves on the surface of the sea. The city gave every impression of being ready for a festival save that the soldiers and their captive prowled the streets alone. Menepatros was at the fore, riding alone like a serpent's head thrust boldly ahead of the body. A quiet urgency carried him onward, or perhaps pulled him, a tether fastened about his soul that was now being drawn taut by some force in the city's heart. The limestone face of the ancient mausoleum where the kings of Nar were traditionally buried towered before them, an imposing white carcinoma whose eaves and balconies and many-tiered arcades dwarfed those lesser structures clustered about it. And there in the open parade ground at the base of its walls Neteth saw what had been hidden by the screen of intervening buildings, fresh scaffolding and streaks of dirt where work crews had performed some titanic excavation and the aperture of the tunnel they had made yawned in sullen silence, a ragged oval of night torn from the body of the world. Closer they marched, on foot now, for the horses shied and would go no further. By smell or some sense not known to man they detected an evil more terrible than any punishment their handlers could mete out.

Cool, damp air rose from the depths like the exhalation of some dreadful giant entombed ages ago but unable to die. Something too wicked for any mundane force to lay to rest and so the world had contented itself in concealing the wretched thing in hope of some time when one arrived who could challenge it. By trial of wits or trial of strength those who descended would be tested and those who forfeited or failed be consumed. This was the promise of that oddly charged atmosphere, redolent with the dread of the grave, fragile and deadly as ice hanging from a limb high overhead. Onward they walked, to whatever their respective fates may be.

They descended the sides of the shaft where a winding ramp had been carved from layers of rock in whose bands one might read the ages like the rings of an impossibly old tree. Torches set into niches at intervals flickered and held back the darkness in feeble pools of pitifully wavering light. The sky receded to a pinhole puncture in the black curtain that seemed to hang all around, as oppressively dark as a canvas slathered in bootblack. All distinction between air and earth ceased to exist for Neteth, so uniformly void as to be outside his perception. He followed the line moving single file down that knife blade edge scraped in equal parts from the substance of the world and the forlorn places socketed deep in the human heart where none can see. But they are felt, and keenly so.

He could not say how long they had been walking when they emerged in the immense cavern where the dead city lay, and within that city a palace with no equal on the world above. From atop its ramparts a tower thrust almost to the ceiling of the cave and from its windows gleamed the green light of witch-fire. Though the young prince did not yet know, this was the abode of Gorice XIII, king of Nar and as mighty a sorcerer as his land had ever birthed, solitary lord of a solitary realm. When the cavern had been discovered he had moved his court there and breathed some semblance of life into the ashes of the abandoned necropolis. The streets below them teemed with people moving in the direction of a step pyramid where the thaites with their sacrificial daggers performed gruesome ceremonies. Spearheads glinted in the hands of guards who ushered the crowds up blood-slick steps, the paths they trod thickly shadowed by monuments to the old emperors and the gods they had worshiped, gods among whom one was supreme. Signs of the serpent were everywhere, in mosaics partially restored by the new occupants, in cleverly worked columns and an enormous idol, beautiful and terrible, that looked upon the city in like manner as the king's spire, as though the two were twin hands of the same being that they might grasp the world together.

“Did you know about this?” he asked Asphodel.

“I knew they had found something of the greatest importance,” she answered truthfully, “but never thought it was like this.” She, too, had many things to consider as she looked upon the ruins for the first time.

“This was built by Narakur, long ago.” He could not hide the awe that muted his voice so that it was nearly lose in the immensity before them. “Why, though? This was no ordinary city.”

The question troubled them both as they reached ground level, a space cleared adjacent to the grand avenue running past the palace and temple. For a moment the guards stood in awe, looking from their new perspective at sights that had already felt overpowering from above. It was a city whose very existence spoke to them more eloquently than any tale of the qualities of those who built it, their ingenuity and grandiose vision and above all else the grim determination that drove them, the bleak and burning need to be remembered for all time. The fall of their civilization had been insufficient to snuff it out.

In the throes of this dark reverie none noticed a lone figure bringing up the rear, inconspicuous in his black sorcerer's robes. He had nearly failed to catch up and considered the locale in a somewhat more prosaic manner than the others.

It was going to be a long climb back to the surface.