Aahz looked at me as if I had gone out of my mind. "You call this food? If I eat this wallpaper paste and rabbit food I'll die of boredom! You could use these crackers for roofing tiles! What made you buy them?"
This wasn't working out the way I had hoped. "Well, you seemed as if you weren't . . . feeling well," I began. "I didn't want to bring you anything that would upset your stomach." Even as I said it, I knew how foolish it sounded. I wasn't supposed to know anything was the matter.
Aahz blew a raspberry. "That was nothing, kid. I was ticked off at an incompetent craftsman, that's all. I'm fine. In fact, blowing off steam made me feel pretty good. I'll pop back to Deva and stop in at the Pervish restaurant near the dump."
I brightened. If he felt he was up to his native cuisine, then he couldn't be very ill, not yet. No weakling ever attempted to eat Pervish food. Half the time you had to wrestle it back in the bowl before it escaped.
"No, don't bother," I said hastily, heading for the door. "I'll get something better."
Samwise's books didn't take much longer to review. That left the main puzzle to investigate: the accidents. The first variable to consider was the people involved. Aahz and I split up to interview the workforce.
The workers on site were generally cheerful. Many had come directly out of school. I had seen the ads for Glyph Art College ("If you can carve Ra-nem-het, you could be an artist!") in the local daily papyrus left around the necessary. They were overseen by long-time veterans of projects around the dimensions, including Deva and a few other places I had visited. Even the team of professional mourners were upbeat people. They only sounded sad when they were rehearsing.
Except for the accidents, they felt Samwise's pyramid wasn't that bad a place to work. I got some of the stonecarvers talking over the communal water jug about where they came from and what they thought. It was a convivial location, presided over by a shrine dedicated to the Ghord of the water cooler, Hapi-Ar, He Who Makes Others Merry Through Drink.
Very casually, I introduced the idea that the accidents and mishaps might be deliberately caused.
"Oh, no, Skeeve, no," Ba-Boon, a monkey-faced Ghord assured me. He bared his teeth. "Saboteurs? No, not at all. We are proud to be part of this operation. It is not every day you work on something that will become part of history."
I recognized some of Samwise's pep talk and grinned.
"Does everyone feel like that?" I asked.
"I am not so sure about the commitment of the Scarabs," sniffed Pe-Kid, a male who resembled a Klahd except that his skin was dark green. "You notice that none of them ever seem to get hurt."
"O My Ghordess, but that is not true," piped up Lol-Kit, a kitten-faced young female. "I was on the second mastaba when those four stones fell all at once from above. Many Scarabs were killed, and all of them were destined to be buried here!"
"I forgot about that," said the green Ghord. "But, when you are working with heavy stone, some mishaps are to be expected. It is the will of the Ancients. They must not have placated the sacred ones in the correct manner."
"You believe that's the reason?" I asked.
"Sincerely," said Pe-Kid. "The Ancients control every aspect of our life. Who is to say they are not responsible for the departure from it?"
"How can that be?" I asked. "I mean, they're not around anymore."
"Did not your parents not order your comings and goings when you were a child?" Lol-Kit asked.
"I guess so." I thought of how it was before I left home. I defied a number of rules my parents laid down, but I was always aware of them. And I was punished when they caught me.
"Think, then, of the power that your fiftieth-times great grandfather will have over you, then. That is why we pay attention to their will and desires."
That the Ghords did their best to obey those desires I knew to be the truth. Shrines abounded on every level and in the most unexpected places of the construction site. All the Ghords performed little rituals prized by whichever ancestor they wished to honor or placate, such as blowing a whistle, ringing a bell, tossing a pinch of tiny leaves in the air, turning in a circle, waving an incense stick, or saying a word like lboo.' They performed these ceremonies upon clocking in every morning. Aahz refused to do it, calling it nonsense, as did Samwise. Those weren't their ancestors, after all. Still, I felt a little guilty about not participating. When in Zyx, as Aahz might have told me, do as a Zyxian.
"Oh, yes," added a baritone Mourner, Bah-So. "Nonli lost his favorite chisel between two blocks and nearly was squashed between them before the Scarabs noticed him. It took several offerings of beer to placate the Ancients."
"You don't think it could just have been bad luck, do you?" I asked.
"Oh, no!" the Ghords agreed. "We don't believe in superstition!"
A loud blatting interrupted our conversation. The overseers of the carvers, master scribes, came to urge their workers back to their stations.
I was impressed by the workers' eagerness to get the job done. Samwise was in a hurry for his investment to pay off, and his people reflected that sense of urgency. It didn't mean they were cutting corners, though. I had never seen such fine stonework.
Throughout the day, I noticed strangers climbing the invisible ramps overhead. Most of the time they were accompanied by Ghord salespeople, but often they were following someone from a different race altogether. I guessed those were customers who had the same deal as Aahz; they wanted to reduce their own payments through commissions, but by their gestures I could see their enthusiasm for the project itself. I'd done some listening around the Bazaar. No one had ever proposed such an undertaking before. Many of the Deveel merchants thought Samwise was crazy, but I think they were just jealous. One look at Diksen's structure across the way, and it was hard not to want a piece of that.
Samwise was right about Beltasar, too. Several times during the day, the voluble Scarab came flitting after the Imp, with a high-pitched complaint about something. I tried to tune her out, but her voice carried. I could hear her almost anywhere on the site.
In spite of my efforts to steer Aahz to healthier food, he invited me to join him for lunch on the far side of the pyramid at Fat Ombur's, an open-air cookshop run by a Ghord with a bird's face but a corpulent body. ("I get this way from eating my own cooking!" he assured us. We both considered it a good sign. Aahz's motto never to trust a skinny cook almost always held true.)
Like everything else we had seen in Ghordon so far, the tables and stools were made of chunks of stone. I perched at the edge of a squared-off piece that seemed to have been a practice sheet for some pretty complicated runes. My rump was going to have reverse impressions of goats, birds, shepherd's crooks, and open eyes by the time we finished eating.
Fat Ombur did good business, for good reason. The thick, flavorful stew, which we ate with our fingers or with torn pieces of fluffy flatbread, was delicious. Even Aahz went for the grilled vegetables, snatched off a low burner heated by a tiny snoring Salamander.
"Here, my good gentlemen," Ombur said. "Eat up!" He beamed proudly.
The strips were too hot for me to eat, so I chilled them with a touch of magik. Aahz, impervious to most temperatures, grinned as he ate them by the handful. As we chewed, I listened to the mourners keening on the level above us.
"Not my idea of dinner music, but it adds to the local color," Aahz commented.
"They're actually pretty good," I said. The ululations combined in six-part harmony. Then a shrill buzzing audible over the wailing and moaning made my ears contract. I winced. "There she goes again."
I turned toward the painful sound. Samwise picked his way through the tables, his eyebrows drawn down, as Beltasar harangued him from the air.