He had rarely had occasion to use this road. There were old altars higher up on the mountain, remnants of a primitive fire-rite that had become obsolete many hundreds of years before, during the Samtharid Interregnum. But they held no interest for him. Mericalis, pursuing his antiquarian studies, probably went up there frequently, the Warder supposed, and now he must have made some startling discovery amidst the charred ancient stones, something bizarre and troublesome enough to justify breaking in on him during the invocation. A scene of human sacrifice? The tomb of some prehistoric king? This mountain had been holy land a long time, going back, so it was said, even into the days before the old civilization of machines and miracles had collapsed. What strangeness had Mericalis found?
But their goal didn’t seem to lie above them on the mountain. Instead of continuing to ascend, the custodian turned abruptly off the road when they were still only a fairly short distance behind the temple and began pushing his way vigorously into a tangle of underbrush. The Warder, frowning, followed. By this time he knew better than to waste his breath asking questions. He stumbled onward, devoting all his energy to the job of maintaining his footing. In the deep darkness of the night, with Mericalis’ little torch the only illumination, he was hard pressed to keep from tripping over hidden roots or vines.
After about twenty paces of tough going they came to a place where a second road—a crude little path, really—unexpectedly presented itself. This one, to the Warder’s surprise, curved back down the slope in the direction of the temple, but instead of returning them to the service area on the northern side it carried them around toward the opposite end of the building, into a zone which the Warder long had thought was inaccessible because of the thickness of the vegetation. They were behind the temple’s southeastern corner now, perhaps a hundred paces from the rear wall of the building itself. In all his years here the Warder had never seen the temple from this angle. Its great oblong bulk reared up against the sky, black on black, a zone of intense starless darkness against a star-speckled black backdrop.
There was a clearing here in the scrub. A roughly circular pit lay in the center of it, about as wide across as the length of a man’s arm. It seemed recently dug, from the fresh look of the mound of tailings behind it.
Mericalis walked over to the opening and poked the head of his torch into it. The Warder, coming up alongside him, stared downward. Despite the inadequacy of the light he was able to see that the pit was actually the mouth of a subterranean passageway which sloped off at a sharp angle, heading toward the temple.
“What’s all this?” the Warder asked.
“An unauthorized excavation. Some treasure-hunters have been at work back here.”
The Warder’s eyes opened wide. “Trying to tunnel into the temple, you mean?”
“Apparently so,” said Mericalis. “Looking for a back way into the vaults.” He stepped down a little way into the pit, paused, and looked back, beckoning impatiently to the Warder. “Come on, Diriente. You need to see what’s here.”
The Warder stayed where he was.
“You seriously want me to go down there? The two of us crawling around in an underground tunnel in the dark?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“I’m an old man, Mericalis.”
“Not all that old. And it’s a very capably built little passageway. You can manage it.”
Still the Warder held back. “And what if the men who dug it come back and find us while we’re in there?”
“They won’t,” said Mericalis. “I promise you that.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Trust me, Diriente.”
“I’d feel better if we had a couple of the younger priests with us, all the same.”
The custodian shook his head. “Once you’ve seen what I’m going to show you, you’ll be glad that there’s no one here but you and me to see it. Come on, now. Are you going to follow me or aren’t you?”
Uneasily the Warder entered the opening. The newly broken ground was soft and moist beneath his sandaled feet. The smell of the earth rose to his nostrils, rich, loamy, powerful. Mericalis was five or six paces ahead of him and moving quickly along without glancing back. The Warder found that he had to crouch and shuffle to keep from hitting his head on the narrow tunnel’s low roof. And yet the tunnel was well made, just as the custodian had said. It descended at a sharp angle until it was perhaps twice the height of a man below the ground, and then leveled out. It was nicely squared off at the sides and bolstered every ten paces by timbers. Months of painstaking work must have been required for all this. The Warder felt a sickly sense of violation. To think that thieves had managed to work back here undisturbed all this time! And had they reached the vaults? The temple wasn’t actually a single building, but many, of different eras, each built upon the foundation of its predecessor. Layer beneath layer of inaccessible chambers, some of them thousands of years old, were believed to occupy the area underneath the main ceremonial hall of the present-day temple. The temple possessed considerable treasure, precious stones, ingots of rare metals, works of art: gifts of forgotten monarchs, hidden away down there in those old vaults long ago and scarcely if ever looked at since. It was believed that there were tombs in the building’s depths, too, the burial places of ancient kings, priests, heroes. But no one ever tried to explore the deeper vaults. The stairs leading down to them were hopelessly blocked with debris, so that not even Mericalis could distinguish between what might once have been a staircase and what was part of the building’s foundation. Getting down to the lower strata would be impossible without ripping up the present-day floors and driving broad shafts through the upper basements, and no one dared to try that: such excavation might weaken the entire structure and bring the building crashing down. As for tunneling into the deep levels from outside—well, no one in the Warder’s memory had ever proposed doing that, either, and he doubted that the Grand Assize of the Temple would permit such a project to be carried out even if application were made. There was no imaginable spiritual benefit to be gained from rooting about in the foundations of the holy building, and not much scientific value in it either, considering how many other relics of Earth’s former civilizations, still unexcavated after all this time, were on hand everywhere to keep the archaeologists busy.
But if the diggers had been thieves, not archaeologists—
No wonder Mericalis had come running up to him in the midst of the invocation!
“How did you find this?” the Warder asked, as they moved farther in. The air here was dank and close, and the going was very slow.
“It was one of the priests that found it, actually. One of the younger ones, and no, I won’t tell you his name, Diriente. He came around back here a few days ago with a certain young priestess to enjoy a little moment or two of privacy and they practically fell right into it. They explored it to a point about as far as we are now and realized it was something highly suspicious, and they came and told me about it.”
“But you didn’t tell me.”
“No,” Mericalis said. “I didn’t. It seemed purely a custodial affair then. There was no need to get you involved in it. Someone had been digging around behind the temple, yes. Very likely for quite some time. Coming in by night, maybe, working very, very patiently, hauling away the tailings and dumping them in the woods, pushing closer and closer to the wall of the building, no doubt with the intent of smashing through into one of the deep chambers and carrying off the vast wealth that’s supposedly stored down there. My plan was to investigate the tunnel myself, find out just what had been going on here, and then to bring the city police in to deal with it. You would have been notified at that point, of course.”