A low pile of rubble at his feet stretched and shrugged. Moments later it took on a more distinct outline and shape. What appeared to be a large’s sculpture of a giant man flexed and began to breathe, each moment becoming a little more distinguishable from the rock.
As Achmed watched, color began to return to Grunthor’s face. The Sergeant-Major was sitting on the ground, propped against the great pil stone rubbish left from his burrowing, breathing shallowly as he returned to himself, separating himself from the earth as once he had at the end of their journey along the Root.
“Blimey,” he whispered as Achmed knelt beside him. He shook his head at the waterskin the king offered him, crossing his arms over his knees and lowering his head onto them.
Achmed stood and looked around again. The Loritorium was approximately the size of the town square in what had once been the capital city of Canrif, a city built within the crags and base of the guardian mountains at the western rim of the Teeth. When they had first come to Ylorc he had found the dead city in a desolate state of ruin. Now the Bolg were working feverishly to restore it to the magnificence it once had in the Cymrian heyday. Even in its decay, the genius of its design and the craftsmanship of its construction had been readily apparent.
The design and construction of the Loritorium was even more impressive. It would have stood as Gwylliam’s masterpiece, if he had had the chance to complete it. As with most of the structures Gwylliam designed, the Loritorium had been fashioned in the shape of an enormous hexagon, sculpted in precise proportion from within the mountain itself. The marble walls met the vault of the ceiling more than two hundred feet above the floor. The floor was smoothly polished marble inlaid in mosaic patterns whose colors glimmered in the flickering shadows. In the center of the ceiling was a dark hole which Achmed could just barely see in the blazing light of the torch.
The streets of the Loritorium were lined with beautifully sculpted stone benches and bordered with half-walls from which lampposts fashioned of brass and glass emerged every few yards. The capping stones of the half-walls were scored by shallow troughs that ran between each lamppost, channels blackened with ancient stains that appeared to be the residue of a thick oily substance.
Two large buildings loomed in the darkness at the far side of the Loritorium, identical in size and shape, with huge doors, intricately wrought and gilded with rysin, a rare metal, gleaming a metallic blue-green in the torchlight. Achmed recognized them instantly from the plans as the Library and the Prophesory, the repositories Gwylliam designed for the most valuable of his books and manuscripts. The Library was expected to house all forms of writing about ancient lore, while the Prophesory was to contain all records of prophecies and other predictions known to man. Warehouses of ancient knowledge.
Achmed turned back to his friend. “Are you all right? Are you coming around?” he asked the giant Sergeant.
Grunthor shook his head. “If it’s all the same to you, sir, Oi’ll just take a to’le rest right ’ere.”
Achmed nodded. “I’m going to have a look about, not far; I’ll be right back.” Grunthor waved a weak hand dismissively, then stretched out on the debris of the marble floor, groaning, and closed his eyes.
The Firbolg king watched his friend a moment longer until he had ascertained that Grunthor was fully separated from the earth and drawing breath without difficulty. Then he reassessed the torch; it had consumed almost none of its fuel, but still burned brightly in the darkness, as if eager to be shining in this place of ancient magic.
Achmed dropped his pack and equipment to the ground, saving out twin daggers Rhapsody had given him as a coronation gift, found on one of her exploratory sojourns within the mountain some months before. He examined them quickly; they were formed from an ancient metal that no one knew the name of, seemingly impervious to rust, that the Cymrians had used in the framework of buildings and to bard the hulls of ships. Achmed sheathed one of them at his wrist, keeping the other drawn, and quietly made his way through the empty city.
His footsteps echoed hollowly up the streets and reverberated to the vaulted ceiling as he walked, even though he was most often able to travel without sound in the world above. Achmed slowed his pace in the vain attempt to pass more quietly, but it did little good. The heavy air of the newly unsealed cavern seized upon each sound and amplified it. Achmed was filled with an unwelcome sense that the place had been without company too long and was now relishing it.
When he reached the center of the hexagonal cavern he stopped. In the Loritorium’s central area was what appeared to have been a small garden with an immense dry fountain, its large reflecting pond surrounded by a circle of marble benches. Around the fountain’s base in the dry pond was a small puddle of shining liquid, thick as quicksilver. The font from which water once undoubtedly sprayed was capped with a heavy block of volcanic rock.
This central spot afforded an excellent view of the whole Loritorium. Achmed cast a glance around. Here and there in the narrow streets were more pools of the viscous silver liquid, their iridescent surfaces glimmering in the torchlight. He brought his hand nearer to the pool in the fountain and pulled it quickly back, stung by the intense vibration issuing forth from it. It was signature of great power, one that he did not recognize, that made his fingers and skin hum with its concentrated purity. He broke his attention away from the luminous puddles and looked at the rest of the square.
Set at the directional angles north, south, east, and west around the Loritorium’s square were four displays, each roughly built in the shape of an altar. Achmed recalled the drawings of each of them from the manuscripts of Gwylliam’s plans. They appeared to be cases which were intended to house what Gwylliam had called the August Relics, items of surpassing importance from the old world tied to each of the five elements. Achmed cursed silently. He had not fully understood the manuscript that had recounted the descriptions of each of these relics, and Rhapsody had left before she could study the scroll and explain it to him.
Carefully he circumvented the fountain and approached the first of the cases. It was fashioned in the shape of a marble bowl on top of a pedestal, similar to a birdbath, encased in a great rectangular block of clear stone taller than Grunthor. Achmed’s skin prickled as he recognized the deadly shatter trap that had been set within the base of the clear stone block. The other altars also seemed to be similarly rigged with protective devices and other defenses to keep them from being removed.
Under normal circumstances Achmed was an aficionado of well-thought-out defenses. Now he was merely annoyed. Gwylliam’s paranoia toward the end of the Loritorium’s construction had led him to abandon some of the higher aspirations he had originally held for the complex. Instead of allowing it to be the seat of scholarship where broad, unfettered knowledge was enthusiastically pursued, as he had envisioned in the first records of his plans for the place, Gwylliam had seemed to become jealous of the power he planned to store there. He had ordered his artisans to set aside the craftsmanship that was beautifying the small city into a showplace of architecture and art in favor of building ingenious traps and defenses to protect it from attack. It made Achmed wonder what those cases must have once contained.
His consideration of that question was shattered by Grunthor’s bloodcurdling scream.
7
“Would you like to see my hoard, Pretty?”