"So there is a necromancer," he said to the panting Bunniswot.
Trees had grown up on the plateau, atop the low hillocks that had been in Toede's dream buildings of amber and
glowing jade. What was once the main thoroughfare was now a bracken-filled mass of shrubbery. In the back, vaguely definable through the dead, brown brush, the leafless and lifeless trees, and the withered vines of wild grapes, was a hillock somewhat higher than the rest.
"That's where we're heading," said Toede. "Come along." He plunged into the brush, unaware of, and totally ignoring the scholar's moans and complaints trailing behind him.
The two explorers did not have much to say as they pressed their way across the plateau's cluttered debris and waste. Their conversation was limited to warning each other about branches or loose rocks beneath their feet. Sometimes the original flagstone pavement would appear, taunting them for feet, sometimes yards, before diving beneath another tangle of briars.
In time they reached the hill that, according to Toede's dream, would cradle the buried temple. The hill in question was relatively free of brush, and nothing more healthy than a sickly, yellowing moss grew on its flanks.
Toede scaled the hill about halfway, pointed to an otherwise unremarkable depression in the dirt, and ordered, "Dig here."
Bunniswot muttered a few vague curses, but pitched in with the larger of the two shovels. The dirt was not packed solid, however, and after breaking through the sod, the scholar quickly uncovered a low carved stone, wider from side to side than bottom to top.
"A step!" said Bunniswot, delighted. Toede just shrugged as the scholar dropped to his knees to examine it. "No writing on it, but the carving technique is identical to the forest of stones. But this city is so far removed from the plinths. The question is why?"
Toede frowned. "Far for your legs or mine. Perhaps your proto-ogres had longer limbs, or more endurance. Also, the neighborhood has changed a great deal since these areas were last used. What say we keep looking, eh?"
Bunniswot's enthusiasm lasted for a second step and most of the third. He started to tire significantly by the fourth, and if there had been a fifth step, he would have insisted that Toede take a turn at the shovel.
Instead, metal hit metal. Bunniswot beamed at the hobgoblin. "Pay dirt," he said, and began clearing the area around the door, until a two-foot-square area of rusted iron was revealed.
Toede smiled, noting, "You're going to have to clear a lot more. The door swings outward."
Bunniswot reversed his shovel and pressed the handle firmly against the iron barrier. It fell away at his touch, and the sound of it striking the flagstones rang through the darkness beyond. A strong breeze smelling of wet rot and decay billowed out, and both human and hobgoblin stood there for a moment, gagging on the fumes.
"First time you're wrong," smiled Bunniswot. Toede just furrowed his brow and peered deeper into the hole. It yawned like the Abyss. No far wall was visible from their entrance.
"Awful dark in there," said Bunniswot, then added, "We didn't bring torches."
"I don't need them," said the hobgoblin. "My people were hunting by night while yours were still trying to invent
socks. But here…"
Toede fished through his pocket, pulled out Renders's gem, placed it in another pocket, and produced the small box containing the magically lit stone.
"My stone," said Bunniswot. "You never returned it," he added sharply.
"You never asked for it," said Toede absentmindedly, looking into the temple's new entrance. "But that's all right-you've been busy."
While it was true that hobgoblins such as Toede did not particularly need light to see, the presence of light did help him discern colors, and now revealed to him a checkerboard of purple and bright yellow stretching out into the darkness.
"Guess we better go in," said Toede.
"After you," said Bunniswot. "You are smaller than I."
"The history should say that Sir Bunniswot was the first to enter the greatest temple discovery since the War of the Lance," said Toede. "Please, I'm feeling noble about it," he added for anyone or anything that might be listening.
The scholar could not dispute that last point, and so, taking the light-stone, he poked his head through the small opening and slowly wormed his body through the doorway. When there were no immediate screams of pain or sounds of flying axe blades whirring through the air, Toede tossed in the large shovel and followed.
Bunniswot had not wandered too far from the door, and indeed was inspecting the frame and tiles that the falling iron door had smashed.
"You were right," he said, the scholarly part of his mind running at full tilt. "This door should have opened outward. The pins had rusted almost clear through, and that push knocked it off its hinges."
The air was thick with humidity, and in the darkness Toede could hear the distant sound of water dripping. Seepage from farther up the hill, or perhaps some natural spring.
Toede picked up the shattered tiles. They were square, about a foot across and the thickness of a fingernail. The purple ones were lapis lazuli, sliced to a thinness that would make a dwarven craftsman salivate. The yellowish ones were beaten gold, sliced even thinner. Toede held one of the purple ones up against the doorway. The light reflected through its thinness, casting smokey purple shadows on his face.
The tilework stretched farther into the darkness. Bunniswot shouted and was rewarded with a crisp, clear echo.
So there was a solid wall on the far side, far out of reach.
The human and the hobgoblin exchanged glances as they started down the hallway.
The entranceway was lined with statues and inscriptions. The statues were humanoid and bilaterally symmetrical-that is, the left side of each blobby figure matched the right side. Some had definite heads or arms, but others seemed to be nothing more than fire or water caught at an opportune moment and transformed to stone.
"Are these your proto-ogres?" asked Toede.
"Yes and no," said Bunniswot. "I think their sculpture, aside from the carvings down in the camp, is supposed to represent the 'true form' of an individual. In the temple's prime, there would have been colorful pigments smeared.on the stones, or even magically illuminated ones." ' Toede grunted, wondering about the sanity of these creatures, if they truly were the ancestors of the ogres. He had heard worse tales, but he definitely did not want to meet the original models of some of the statuary-particularly the ones represented clutching spikes.
The hallway opened into a large room, its side walls falling away in the darkness on the right and left. The tile-work continued, ending in a great edifice carved into the living rock at the center of the hill. This carving was over thirty feet high and tilted forward at the top, so as to loom over those below.
There was no abstract nature to this carving. It was the leering head of a jackal or coyote, its eyes not circular, but hexagonal hollows that once held lights or flames. The jackal head only had an upper jaw, its ivory spears of teeth set into stone. What would have been the lower jaw was instead a wide horizontal roller, like that used for children's toys or a baker's rolling pin.
Both explorers stopped and looked up at the monstrosity. It towered over them so that the ceiling itself was lost to view.
At length, Bunniswot said, "The legends I told you about, the ones that brought us here?" His voice carried a thrill of wonderment.
"Uh-huh," said Toede, suddenly aware of a chill in the air.