'It must be the oldest suit of sentinel plate in the world,' she decided. It was true plate armour, an intricate suit of interlocking pieces that had been posed as if its missing occupant was deep in thought, elbow on knee, with the raised gauntlet supporting the edge of the open-faced helm. It must be wired together, she thought, staring into the cavernous emptiness of the helmet, and then realized: The slime is holding it together, like glue. 'It's absolutely huge,' she said, shaken. 'It would fit a Mole Cricket-kinden, I'd guess.' It was made to fit one of those statues, came the next irresistible thought, but she shook it off. Perhaps that stone coffin held only ashes, or perhaps they had folded up Garmoth Atennar before putting him inside. Perhaps the box was actually the mouth of a pit and they had buried him standing up, or even standing on his head. She didn't know, so there was no reason to get jumpy about it. Garmoth Atennar, Greatest of Warriors, sitting silently upright on his plinth, those dead stone eyes opening at last.
I have to get out of this place. It is not healthy for the mind. 'I have seen workmanship like this before,' she said, 'in drawings in very old books mostly, but once or twice in life, and never a complete suit. It's Mantis work. It's beautiful. I wish I could see it in the light, to look at the colours of the metal.'
'The Masters of Khanaphes were Mantids?' Thalric frowned.
'Not if their statues are anything to go by, but they would have possessed the best of everything. A complete suit of Mantis-kinden sentinel plate like this …You could buy half the Assembly for the price of it.'
'Che,' Thalric interrupted, and the tone of his voice had changed. She felt her hand stray instinctively for her sword-hilt, ready for trouble.
'What is it?'
'I can see light.'
'Daylight?' she asked him instantly.
'No, not daylight.' His inflection said there was no doubt about it.
'You'll have to guide me, then. I just see, here, and I see greys and shadows. If there's light coming from anywhere, I can't make it out.'
'Somewhere to our left. It's very faint, but it looks … bluish. I think I can make out something … a further hallway there?'
'There's another hall each side,' Che confirmed, 'but I suppose we go left then.'
'It must be daylight,' Thalric said, without conviction. 'What else could it be?' His stance changed suddenly. 'Or it could be lamplight. The Rekef?'
'It could,' Che confirmed. 'So let's creep up on them very carefully and find out whether it is or not. They won't see us, after all.'
'If it is Rekef, we'll have to kill them all,' Thalric said flatly. 'If we catch them by surprise, my sting can take two or three down before they have a chance to react. We should be grateful for what happened in your embassy. That cut the numbers down a great deal.'
Che paused a moment before saying, 'Thalric, two of my friends died in that fight.'
He stared back towards her, caught out, torn between spymaster and human being. 'Of course they did. Forgive me.'
'But you're right,' she said. 'If there's a chance we can surprise them, then we have to do it. I have my sword.' Her voice trembled just a little.
'Pray you don't have to use it,' he said.
They crept forward, and this timeThalric took the lead. It was a long time before Che's sight began to tint and waver, the light bleeding in to curdle her Art. It was not daylight, certainly: a strange unhealthy pale blue that picked out the alcove walls in stark contrast. More, it was not still, but dancing and guttering, playing up and down the floor and ceiling and making the slime gleam and glitter. It was clear that it was no kind of lamp that the Rekef could be expected to carry. They approached with trepidation.
Before an open archway they found them: two metal bowls, each a foot across, on elegantly worked, coiling legs. Some oil within them burned almost smokelessly, its scent rusty to the nostrils. Che and Thalric stopped and stared, half ducking into an alcove. It was not fear of the Rekef that made then seek cover, but a feeling of trespass, like two children lost in a giant's castle.
'The oil burns,'Thalric observed. 'So it has been lit — but by who?'
If I said by magic, would he believe me? she asked herself. Perhaps now he would. 'I think that we have … caused them to be lit. I think that our presence here has made this happen.' Ancient enchantments — but why give tomb robbers light to work by?Why this long-dead hospitality?
'Some device …' Thalric mused. 'It's possible.' Yet he did not seem eager to examine the braziers for artifice. Che looked past them into the next hall. There were other braziers there, glowing and flickering with pale light. Did I notice those before? She could not be wholly certain that she had.
What are we nearing? How large is this place? She felt they had been exploring, admittedly at a cripplingly cautious pace, for hours.
They stepped through the archway and stopped. For a long time they simply looked.
The ceiling was at least another six feet higher, and it was supported by great columns that had been fantastically worked into the shape of abominations. It was an old motif. She had seen carvings like it in Tharn, but never as grandly detailed as these. Human features were merged with those of beasts so that each column became a monster with its arms or claws raised high to support the earth. There were spiders with the faces of women, and scorpion-tailed men with pincered hands, beetle-headed, wing-backed, joint-legged. One depicted a woman who was partly consumed within the shell of a great mantis, and this image in particular Che turned away from, finding it obscurely, disturbingly familiar.
Between the columns were the tombs, arrayed in earnest now. Where Garmoth Atennar, whoever he had been, had kept a lonely vigil, here were an even score of great stone sarcophagi interspersed with the grotesque carved pillars.
The eerie light leapt and dwindled on them, these sleeping statues, the ranks of the forgotten, the Masters of Khanaphes. She saw their names: Hieram Tisellian, who Raised the Temple and brought Life to the Parched Land, Lord Architect of all Time … Killeris Jaenathil, the Beautiful, the all-Knowing, Lady of the Utmost Sorcery … Iellith Quellennas, Bringer of Death, the Harvester of the Old Lands, the Chariot of War …
'How many hundreds of years,' Che wondered, 'since anyone last saw this?'
'Always assuming you don't count the lamp-lighters.' The sense of awe and reverence had passed Thalric by, and he was becoming increasingly unnerved, looking up at the hybrid visages of the carved abominations and shuddering. For impossible monsters, they had been rendered extremely lifelike.
They were crude, however, compared to the likenesses that the Masters had decreed for themselves. Each one of these was an individual, as recognizable and distinct as they must have appeared in life. The white stone flowed smoothly over their musculature, each curve of gut and jowl and breast. Theirs was an alien aesthetic, but one that seemed to overrule all others. They were not delicately beautiful as Spiders were, or Dragonflies or Beetles or Moths, or any other kinden. They were simply beautiful de facto, commanding and magnetic. Even their stone facsimiles confirmed it.
'No wonder they are still revered as they are,' Che said in wonder.
'Oh, true,' Thalric snapped. 'They'd be able to give our Slave Corps a few lessons: how to keep an entire population under your thumb for a thousand years after you've died! How about that? The greatest slavemasters in the history of the world lie here, and I'm glad that, beyond this stinking piece of sand and stone, nobody even knows about them.'