The fresh footprints led through one of six archways. Doc went through this cautiously, ready to jump back at the slightest sign of anything suspicious. The room beyond was immense and lit by bulbs in brackets secured to the granite walls. There were more skeletons and axes and swords. And in the centre of the room, sitting on an oaken high-backed ornately carved chair on a granite slab, was a figure.
They approached slowly, though it was obviously a corpse.
It was a very old corpse, a mummy. Its white hair fell over its shoulders and its white beard covered its lap and its knees. The dark eyes stared at them.
It wore a cap like a dunce's crown and leather garments and leather boots with curled-up toes. The brown, wrinkled, and heavily veined hand held a golden sceptre with six diamonds inset on the polygonal knob of gold at the end of the sceptre.
On the slab and around the oaken throne were many figurines of stone about a foot high. They represented a squat, hairy people: males and female adults and some children. They were dressed in clothes similar to that on the mummy. There were a few figurines of animals, mostly badgers, but two were of some sort of monster.
'What do you make of it, Doc?' Pauncho asked.
Pauncho did not expect an answer. But Doc said, 'I am not sure. The mummy looks much like Iwaldi, as you know from my description and my sketch of him. And the figurines are modelled after his people. How this man came to his death, why he's been preserved, I don't know. But you must remember that Iwaldi's people are - were - some sort of dwarfish Caucasoids with a slight Mongolian mixture somewhere along the line. They're the little people who gave rise to the tales of gnomes, kobolds, and even trolls. I'm sure of that. They did a lot of mining and tunnelling, and if my theory is correct, they survived in Germany and some parts of Scandinavia up to 1000 A.D. Then they were absorbed or just died out. Iwaldi kept on living. He would, of course, being one of the Nine. And he had this castle built over the ancient stronghold of his race during the medieval period. Though I think he also was the one who built the earlier fortress on which the castle was based.
‘This man here may have been some kjng, perhaps a son of Iwaldi. If we get Iwaldi alive, maybe we can find out about all this. But I would prefer that we kill him. The moment we get the chance to. That old man is too wily, too dangerous, to let live for more than the time it takes to cut his throat.'
He quit talking, and the oppressive silence returned. Pauncho shifted uneasily. The fierce-eyed and long-bearded figure seemed to have moved, though he knew it was an illusion. For the first time, he became aware of the millions of tons of stone over his head. The silence was as heavy as the stone. He was so awed by this that he whispered his feelings to Barney. Barney might have laughed at another time and place, but that he did not do so now showed that he felt much the same as Pauncho.
Doc gestured at them to follow him. He held the detector out ahead of him. Its light was flashing yellow, but the masses of iron weapons were responsible for that. He passed through a tall archway into another room which was filled with digging tools and swords and axes, all neatly stacked in piles along the wall. He chose to go down another broad staircase of stone steps. Footprints led away from it, but footprints also went down it and these seemed to be fresher. The stairs went on and on. Doc counted a hundred, then two hundred, then three hundred with no end in sight. The bottom was hidden somewhere in the shadows below. Along the wall there were bulbs which had been set much further apart.
Moreover, the walls began to move in closer, and the way slowly curved to the right. Then it straightened out for a hundred steps, after which it curved to the left.
'I wonder how far down these diggings go?' Pauncho whispered to Barney. 'If this Iwaldi geezer is 10,000 years old, he may have started digging back then. The whole mountain could be honeycombed.'
Abruptly, the stairs ceased. Doc waved the detector back and forth before the huge oaken door before them. The column in its face was red.
'Hey, Doc!' Pauncho said. Those hinges are gold!'
Doc signalled and Barney handed him the knife. Doc touched the golden latch on the door with the knife as if he expected an electrical spark to leap out. Nothing happened. He slipped on the goggles and examined the door and the latch under the 'blacklight.' Then he raised the goggles and said, 'We'll have to take a chance. Stand way back, you two.'
The door swung outward, revealing a cavernous room beyond. This was lit with the ubiquitous bulbs. It seemed to be a storehouse for many things: battle-axes, swords, cuirasses, and leggings, oaken and stone chests, many of them open and glinting with gold bars or gleaming with jewels. There were also statues, ranging from a foot high to life size, carved out of stone or formed from gold and silver. Some were of well-proportioned humans, some of the squat and muscular and thick-calved dwarfs, some of animals, of monsters.
The three walked slowly into the chamber, pausing to look at but not to touch the wealth strewn everywhere. Some of the chests contained coins and paper money of many nations.
Doc kept his attention on the fresh footprints in the dust. These led straight across the immense room toward a set of three arches at the far end. But before they reached them, they halted. On their right, set into the wall, was a steel framework with steel bars. This was at the entrance to a small cell cut out of the stone.
Pauncho and Barney said, simultaneously, 'Wow!'
Doc Caliban's face did not lose its expressionlessness. But a close observer might have noticed those peculiar yellow-flecked eyes narrow.
A young man and a young woman were staring at them from behind the bars.
It was the woman who had caused the two men to express delight, surprise, admiration, and desire.
'Your cousin has finally got some real competition,' Pauncho said to Caliban.
The woman's hair was long and loose and of an unusually deep red. Her skin was very clear and white, and her eyes were large and violet. Her only makeup was a bright red lipstick. She wore heavy hiking clothes and boots, but they were tight enough to reveal a superb figure.
The man was wide-shouldered and muscular but very short. He had black hair and brown eyes and a handsome face.
The woman's voice was throaty and caressing even though she was evidently under heavy stress. She gripped the bars and said, 'My God, where did you come from?' and then, 'Please get us out of here!'
The young man had also grabbed hold of the bars, but he did not say anything.
Doc Caliban looked past them. The cell was furnished with a double bunkbed and some light blankets and pillows, a washbowl with a pitcher of water and a glass, an open toilet bowl, and a stone shelf on which were two trays with dishes on which were the remnants of food.
'Did Iwaldi take the key to this lock with him?' Doc said.
'Who?' the man said.
The old dwarf,' Doc Caliban replied.
'He went thataway,' the woman said, pointing her finger at the far end. She smiled, but she was evidently trying to be brave. Her fingers were white where she was clutching the bars.
'How many men did he have with him?' Doc said.
‘Ten,' the man said. His speech was, like the woman's, Received Standard English - that of an educated Londoner.
Pauncho and Barney were pulling rolls of thin wires from their vest pockets. Doc raised his hand as if to check them, then let it drop. The cell and its prisoners might be an elaborate booby trap of some sort, but the only way to find out was to try to free them. The two wrapped several turns of the wires around the more slender bars which held the lock to the door. They pressed the button on the battery in their pockets; flame spurted out from around the wires; the bars and the lock were removed with a yank. Pauncho pulled the barred door open and said, 'Exitez-vous, madame.'