She was taking him to the Seventh Pyramid. Or what was left of it, rather, for nothing now remained except the truncated base, a square structure about twenty feet long on each side and five or six feet high, constructed from the same reddish basalt from which the great arena and some of the other public buildings had been made. East of that stump the fragments of the pyramid’s upper section, smallish broken blocks of the same reddish stone, lay strewn in the most random way across a wide area. It was as though some angry colossus had contemptuously given the western face of the pyramid one furious slap with the back of his ponderous hand and sent it flying into a thousand pieces. On the side of the stump away from the debris Valentine could make out the pointed summit of the still-intact Sixth Pyramid about five hundred feet away, rising above a copse of little contorted trees, and beyond it were the other five, running onward one after another to the edge of the royal palace itself.
“According to Piurivar lore,” Magadone Sambisa said, “the people of Velalisier held a great festival every thousand years, and constructed a pyramid to commemorate each one. So far as we’ve been able to confirm by examining and dating the six undamaged ones, that’s correct. This one, we know, was the last in the series. If we can believe the legend”—and she gave Valentine a meaningful look—“it was built to mark the very festival at which the Defilement took place. And had just been completed when the city was invaded and destroyed by those who had come here to punish its inhabitants for what they had done.”
She beckoned to him, leading him around toward the northern side of the shattered pyramid. They walked perhaps fifty feet onward from the stump. Then she halted. The ground had been carefully cut away here. Valentine saw a rectangular opening just large enough for a man to enter, and the beginning of a passageway leading underground and heading back toward the foundations of the pyramid.
A star-shaped marker of bright yellow tape was fastened to a good-sized boulder just to the left of the excavation.
“That’s where you found the head, is it?” he asked.
“Not there. Below.” She pointed into the opening. “Will you follow me, your majesty?”
Six members of Valentine’s security force had gone with Valentine to the pyramid site that morning: the giant warrior-woman Lisamon Hultin, his personal bodyguard, who had accompanied him on all his travels since his juggling days; two shaggy hulking Skandars; a couple of Pontifical officials whom he had inherited from his predecessor’s staff; and even a Metamorph, one Aarisiim, who had defected to Valentine’s forces from the service of the arch-rebel Faraataa in the final hours of the War of the Rebellion and had been with the Pontifex ever since. All six stepped forward now as if they meant to go down into the excavation with him, though the Skandars and Lisamon Hultin were plainly too big to fit into the entrance. But Magadone Sambisa shook her head fiercely; and Valentine, smiling, signalled to them all to wait for him above.
The archaeologist, lighting a hand-torch, entered the opening in the ground. The descent was steep, via a series of precisely chiseled earthen steps that took them downward nine or ten feet. Then, abruptly, the subterranean passageway leveled off. Here there was a flagstone floor made of broad slabs hewn from some glossy green rock. Magadone Sambisa flashed her light at one and Valentine saw that it bore carved glyphs, runes of some kind, reminiscent of those he had seen in the paving of the grand ceremonial boulevard that ran past the royal palace.
“This is our great discovery,” she said. “There are shrines, previously unknown and unsuspected, under each of the seven pyramids. We were working near the Third Pyramid about six months ago, trying to stabilize its foundation, when we stumbled on the first one. It had been plundered, very probably in antiquity. But it was an exciting find all the same, and immediately we went looking for similar shrines beneath the other five intact pyramids. And found them: also plundered. For the time being we didn’t bother to go digging for the shrine of the Seventh Pyramid. We assumed that there was no hope of finding anything interesting there, that it must have been looted at the time the pyramid was destroyed. But then Huukaminaan and I decided that we might as well check it out too, and we put down this trench that we’ve been walking through. Within a day or so we reached this flagstone paving. Come.”
They went deeper in, entering a carefully constructed tunnel just about wide enough for four people to stand in it abreast. Its walls were fashioned of thin slabs of black stone laid sideways like so many stacked books, leading upward to a vaulted roof of the same stone that tapered into a series of pointed arches. The craftsmanship was very fine, and distinctly archaic in appearance. The air in the tunnel was hot and musty and dry, ancient air, lifeless air. It had a stale, dead taste in Valentine’s nostrils.
“We call this kind of underground vault a processional hypo-geum,” Magadone Sambisa explained. “Probably it was used by priests carrying offerings to the shrine of the pyramid.”
Her torch cast a spreading circlet of pallid light that allowed Valentine to perceive a wall of finely dressed white stone blocking the path just ahead of them. “Is that the foundation of the pyramid we’re looking at?” he asked.
“No. What we see here is the wall of the shrine, nestling against the pyramid’s base. The pyramid itself is on the far side of it. The other shrines were located right up against their pyramids in the same way. The difference is that all the others had been smashed open. This one has apparently never been breached.”
Valentine whistled softly. “And what do you think is inside it?”
“We don’t have any idea. We were putting off opening it, waiting for Lord Hissune to return from his processional in Zimroel, so that you and he could be on hand when we broke through the wall. But then—the murder—”
“Yes,” Valentine said soberly. And, after a moment: “How strange that the destroyers of the city demolished the seventh pyramid so thoroughly, but left the shrine beneath it intact! You’d think they would have made a clean sweep of the place.”
“Perhaps there was something walled up in the shrine that they didn’t want to go near, eh? It’s a thought, anyway. We may never know the truth, even after we open it. If we open it.”
“If?”
“There may be problems about that, majesty. Political problems, I mean. We need to discuss them. But this isn’t the moment for that.”
Valentine nodded. He indicated a row of small indented apertures, perhaps nine inches deep and about a foot high, that had been chiseled in the wall some eighteen inches above ground level. “Were those for putting offerings in?”
“Exactly.” Magadone Sambisa flashed the torch across the row from right to left. “We found microscopic traces of dried flowers in several of them, and potsherds and colored pebbles in others—you can still see them there, actually. And some animal remains.” She hesitated. “And then, in the alcove on the far left—”
Her torchlight came to rest on a star of yellow tape attached to the shallow alcove’s back wall.
Valentine gasped in shock. “There?”
“Huukaminaan’s head, yes. Placed very neatly in the center of the alcove, facing outward. An offering of some sort, I suppose.”
“To whom? To what?”
The archaeologist shrugged and shook her head.
Then, abruptly, she said, “We should go back up now, your majesty. The air down here isn’t good to spend a lot of time in. I simply wanted you to see where the shrine was situated. And where we found the missing part of Dr. Huukaminaan’s body.”