“It doesn’t make sense,” the Menageries grumbled. They were once more in their human forms, walking in mirror symmetry; as one miniature Goon swung his left foot forward, the other moved his right.
“What doesn’t make sense?” asked Tower.
“We’re heading toward a temple, right? This doesn’t seem like a good location to attract followers. Why put it so deep inside a mountain?”
“Muhskuh wuh thuh,” said No-Face.
The Menageries chuckled, a sound like chattering chipmunks.
“What did he say?” I asked.
The mosquitoes were worse then, answered Relic.
“Obviously, they were a mining culture,” said Zetetic. “You don’t produce the gold and gemstones we’ve seen simply panning in streams. These people spent a lot of time underground.”
Relic nodded. “There was spiritual significance to the depths as well. The trees sink their roots deep into the soil. The ancients deduced that the earth was the origin of all life; the ground was regarded as sacred. Digging into the earth produced precious metals and priceless gems, further evidence that the divine dwelled beneath the surface. The deeper they dug, the greater the treasures produced. Temples were built as deep as possible so that the gods could better hear the prayers of the priests.”
Father Ver shook his head. “How sad to live oblivious to the truth.”
“A truth contained in a book your own church didn’t discover until a mere thousand years ago,” said Zetetic. “You have plain evidence men existed long before then. Does it strike you as unfair that your Divine Author condemned so many generations of men to ignorance by hiding the book?”
Father Ver started to answer, but Tower raised his gauntlet. “This is the wrong time and place to debate this. According to the map, we’ve reached the entrance to the temple.” He glanced at Relic. “I assume you can verify this?”
Relic nodded. We were in a long narrow room filled with arches covered with pale blue tiles. At the end of the hall there was a circle of stone, nearly fifteen feet across. Relic pointed to the stone and said, “That stone rolls aside. Beyond is a spiral stairway built of human bones leading down seven hundred seventy-seven steps. At the bottom is a natural cavern filled with gleaming crystals hundreds of feet tall; this was the most sacred spot in the kingdom.”
I perked up. “If Zetetic is right, and the veil between the spirit world and the realm of the living is thin in temples, could I escape? Could I come back to life?”
Relic didn’t look at me as he led the others toward the stone door. He replied mentally, saying, You’ve already escaped the pull of the spirit world, Blood-Ghost. Abandon hope; you will never be alive again.
“You know, you could sugar coat that a little. There’s no need to be rude. You still need me as your spy, remember?”
For all the information you’ve so far gathered, I believe my circumstances would be materially unchanged without you.
I punched him in the back of the head with a phantom fist. It passed right through, but I felt a teeny bit better.
We reached the end of the hall. I’d seen this type of door before, a giant disk of stone sitting inside a matching groove. The ancients were marvelous engineers. Though the stone weighed several tons, no doubt it was so well balanced even a child could move it.
The disk was ringed with cup-sized indentations. Tower placed his hands into the holes, then flexed to roll the stone aside.
The door didn’t budge. Maybe it wasn’t that well balanced after all.
“It’s locked,” said Relic.
“I see,” said Tower. “How do we unlock it?”
Relic ran his gnarled hand along the blue tiles that decorated the arch surrounding the stone. He found the one he was looking for and pressed it. It slid aside, revealing a shaft about six inches wide. He thrust his skinny arm into it. “There’s a lever that releases the…” A muffled SNAP caused his sentence to go unfinished. He pulled out his hand, opening his fingers to reveal the rusty remains of an iron rod. He sighed. “Not all ancient artifacts are as well maintained as the War Doll.”
He looked back over his shoulder and motioned that Infidel should step forward. She placed her hands into the same holes Tower had tried. The muscles of her back bulged in sculpted relief as she strained to move the door. Whatever mechanism held the stone resisted even her magnificent muscles.
“This looks like a job for a ghost,” I said, poking my head into the wall to examine the lock mechanism. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the jumbled of rusted gears and levers embedded in the wall. I drifted through the door completely, into the stairwell on the other side. I discovered that it no longer contained a staircase; the seven hundred and seventy-seven steps of bone must have crumbled to dust, though I could see the spiral holes in the wall where they’d once been anchored. Far below, in what must have been the temple, there was an eerie orange light that looked like boiling lava. The heat was unbearable.
I poked my head back through the door to tell Relic that it looked like the temple had been claimed by the volcano. I flinched when I found the Gloryhammer flying toward my face. Fortunately, it passed straight through my nose and sank into the two-foot-thick slab of stone I was ghosting through. Shards of rock flew everywhere as cracks spread across the surface. I drifted aside as Tower brought the hammer around once more, delivering a second blow. The door crumbled. He kicked aside shattered rock and looked down the shaft on the other side.
“There are no stairs,” he said. “I do see a green glow far below.”
Green? I looked back down, and found that the previously orange light was, in fact, green. As I watched, the green broke apart into blue and yellow swirls, which were washed away by waves of purple. If this was lava, it was like no lava I’d ever seen.
“Missing stairs are no problem,” said twin squeaky voices. A pair of squirrel-sized spider monkeys jumped to Tower’s shoulders. “I’ll check it out,” they said, before leaping into the shaft, bouncing back and forth across the gaps in the stone where the bone stairs once stood.
Since stairs were optional for me as well, I decided I’d beat Menagerie to the bottom of the shaft. I dropped down, passing them, the heat growing in intensity as I descended. The disk of light at the bottom continued to change colors and patterns in a chaotic, unpredictable fashion.
My ghost skin tingled as my body emerged from the shaft. What I saw defied my understanding. Relic had said the temple was in a crystal cavern, but this didn’t look like any cavern I’d ever been inside, and there wasn’t a crystal in sight. Imagine, if you can, a large, turbulent cloud, ever-changing as it drifts across the sky. Now imagine what it would look like if you were inside the cloud. The stone around me was an undulating, amorphous shape. The walls looked solid, despite their refusal to stand still or maintain a single color. The room was full of bones, no doubt the remnants of the stairwell. Fragments of skulls, femurs, and chalk-white teeth were scattered in all directions, resting on the ceiling and walls as well as the floor, though if I wasn’t looking at the round opening of the stairwell, I couldn’t be certain what was a floor and what was a wall. I closed my eyes, since the shifting walls left me feeling seasick. It didn’t help. I lost all sensation of what was up or down. My ghost form had only a tenuous connection with gravity at best, but here there was nothing at all to orient me. Fortunately, when I envisioned the bone-handled knife, I felt its familiar tug.
I turned my face in its direction, glancing back up the shaft. The spider monkeys had reached the opening to the room, staring at the chaos with wide eyes. Further up the shaft I saw a shadowy figure clambering down the walls like some human spider. As it drew nearer, I saw it was Zetetic.
The monkeys glanced up. Perhaps feeling a sense of obligation to be first into the room, they jumped, dropping lightly to the writhing stone. The monkeys stumbled as the stone shifted beneath them. Though they didn’t sink, it looked as if they were riding waves. One of the monkeys managed to rise on all fours, his tail wrapped around a shimmering polka-dotted stalagmite, but was toppled a second later when the pillar sank back into the surface. The confused monkeys tapped the stone beneath them with their knuckles, then rubbed their tiny fists. The stone was hard, despite its fluid nature.