“You’ve been down here before?” she whispered.
“Many times,” he said over his shoulder. “In the old days I would visit the family down here. Not by this path, though. This is just a back door. Back then I came in through the main gates, a grand entrance onto the boulevard of the buried palaces where the retired deities of Death and War and Love and Cats all lived and played together.”
“What about this place where Lilith is?”
“Lilith’s retreat.” He paused, but didn’t turn to look at her. “I’ve been there twice. Both times to kill her creatures. Once with Horus. Once with Anubis.” He lingered a moment longer in silence, as though he had more to say, but he only shook his head and continued on down the tunnel.
The floor was rough but flat and the walls were stacked blocks and bricks, though Asha saw no mortar between them. The farther they went, the staler the air became, but it reached a certain coolness and grew no colder. And after half an hour of quietly pacing down the dark corridor, straining to hear or see some sign of life or danger ahead, the tunnel leveled out and they emerged through a broken gateway into a vast black chamber.
Asha didn’t see the transition so much as she felt it, felt the tight echo of the tunnel fade, felt the closeness of the walls spread out and away, and for a moment she recalled another tunnel that had brought her down into the darkness many years ago into a cavern where she had found something very unexpected.
Priya.
Priya, all alone, sitting on an altar, covered in lotus vines and blossoms. She was cold and still, and I brought her out of there. I brought her across India, Rajasthan, and Eran. We talked and traveled and struggled, for years, together… And she died.
If I had never found her, if I had left here there in that cave, she would still be there now. All alone in the dark.
But alive.
Asha cleared her throat as she stared up blindly into the darkness, seeing nothing of the roof or walls, having no sense at all of how large the cavern might be. “You followed us back here from Eran?”
“I did,” Gideon said quietly. “I was worried about you. About you both.”
“Thank you.”
“For worrying?”
She could hear the smile in his voice. She wanted to smile back but her mouth refused as she said, “Yes. For worrying. For caring.”
“Any time.”
Asha took a few steps past him and the harsh glare of his sword. There were faint gray gleams out in the blackness. “Where to now?”
“We’re on the eastern edge of the undercity,” Gideon said. “Lilith is to the south from here.” He pointed to their left at a veil of black nothingness.
Asha looked up. “How far down are we?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “If you shot an arrow up there, it might scrape the ceiling. A bit.”
“And the entire city of Alexandria is up there?” she asked.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You can’t see them from here, but there are pillars all around us holding up the city. Ancient pillars. Massive things.”
She nodded. “Good. Pillars are good.”
“This way.” Gideon started walking.
Asha walked beside him. “Is there anything else down here besides Lilith and her… those… things?”
“Not much. Nothing dangerous,” he said. “Rats, bats, snakes, spiders. All sorts of adorable little things.”
“Oh.” Asha nodded to herself. “Bats are fascinating. Not very useful, but fascinating.”
Gideon paused and reached for the little steel switches and bolts on his gauntlet. “I think we’re alone for the moment. So, let’s risk just a little more light.”
Asha heard him releasing the lock on his gauntlet and the sun-steel blade quietly slid free of its sheathe on his arm, extending down past his armored hand. The blade was short, even shorter than a seireiken, and it was triangular in shape with sharpened edges on both sides.
And it was bright.
Gideon held up his weapon and the naked blade shone like an exploding star, scourging the shadows and banishing the darkness, revealing the subterranean world all around them. The exposed sun-steel was blinding, and Asha squinted away from it, but still she could see the tiny crackles of blue lightning shimmering and dancing across the ancient blade, and she could feel the harsh dry heat of it tightening her skin, making her sweat. She had only seen it once before, in broad daylight, and only for a few moments. But now she let herself think about what that blade really was.
As an object alone, it was a miracle of science and artistry. The knowledge and skill needed simply to shape it had been a cataclysmic turning point in human history, even if most humans would never know of its existence. And the sword was beautiful, even though a person could only look upon it for a moment before it overwhelmed their fragile eyes. The light, the heat, the shimmer and shiver and hum of it was electrifying, like a living thing, a blazing reminder that gods had once walked the earth, and might walk the earth again.
But it was so much more. That small sword was an entire necropolis, a vast and ever-growing world for the dead, a world where the souls of hundreds of thousands of men and women had been preserved and sheltered for thousands of years.
What do they do in there? Do they sleep and dream? Or are they awake, living and speaking, meeting and parting, laughing and loving?
Gideon started walking again, and Asha followed as she dragged her narrowed eyes away from the blinding beacon on his arm and she looked around herself at the world they called the undercity.
At first, as her eyes adjusted to the strange sight of the gray facades illuminated by the white light, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. And then she blinked, and she saw.
The first pillar was directly in front of her, and it was indeed massive. She guessed its base to be the same width as the entire Temple of Osiris, and it rose up and up and up into the darkness to a shadowy ceiling that she could just barely see as she tilted her head all the way back. A faint pattern scored the face of the pillar, and she saw that it was a cylinder built from rectangular blocks with narrow gaps along their edges where the blocks had been angled apart to create the round shape of the pillar. The gaps alternated and shifted upward to create spiraling lines of black dashes across the pillar, so that it seemed to spin and swirl as it rushed up to meet the roof of the cavern.
Asha followed Gideon down the broad dusty road and saw the other pillars, all of the same titanic size and the same spiraling brick construction. The pillars continued out in every direction, far beyond the reach of the white light, like a silent forest of petrified giants awaiting the end of time itself.
Between the pillars stood the buildings, abandoned and empty and dark. Asha started to ask Gideon what they were, or what they had once been, but she didn’t. There was something humbling and frightening and beautiful in not knowing, in wondering, in imagining what might have been. Answers would have ruined it.
She saw pyramids of every size and construction, some rising only as high as a small home and some soaring up into the center of the cavern. Some of the pyramids rose in step-fashion, each square level slightly smaller than the last, rising like staircases high above the ground. And still others had smooth faces, each side a perfectly flat triangle of stone, wrinkled and cracked with age, but still elegant and whole. Blemished, but unbroken.
Between the pyramids Asha saw towers, slender stone cylinders like miniature versions of the huge pillars, and each one rising to support a round chamber with a twisting, pointed roof like an enormous stone turnip impaled upside-down upon a skewer, and set all around with small dark windows.
Below the height of the towers stood the obelisks, countless stone needles and fangs, some as small as a lone woman and some as large as a lightning-blasted tree, stripped of its leaves and branches and left bare and burned, but still standing. The obelisks had flat, rectangular faces, and upon each one were countless carvings, symbols and characters that meant nothing to Asha, but she stared at each one as she walked by.