The Lost Era: Well of Souls: Star Trek (37 page)

Yet Jase knew this was something he had to do. Something was beyond that door, calling him, tugging at his mind. It had brought him this far. Maybe it would be satisfied with Pahl. Probably would. But then Jase would have abandoned his friend.

Jase shouldered his tricorder. “Let’s go.”

Together they crossed the threshold and stepped into the chamber.

At first, nothing happened. Then Jase heard what he thought was a faint but audible click. Impossible. He frowned. They were in vacuum. Probably all he’d heard was the pop of static that sometimes played as background on an open comm channel. Then he became aware of something else: a rushing noise, like water.

He turned to Pahl. “Do you hear that?”

“Yes.” Pahl gave a slow, puzzled nod. “But how ... ?”

Groaning, the panel before them slid right: metal scraping rock.

Sound. Jase let out his breath in a surprised exhalation. There were sounds, and if there were sounds ... Quickly, he whipped his tricorder around, activated it. “Pahl, it’s air. There’s air! And it’s getting warmer,” Jase watched as the ambient air temperature rose: now zero degrees, ten degrees. “It’s an airlock and ... Pahl, do you see that?”

Pahl’s tricorder burbled. “Yes. I read a power source, about three kilometers ahead, almost straight down. Looks nuclear. Probably a generator of some kind, only down deep where it’s been shielded.”

“Or maybe our tripping the airlock turned it on. Except,” Jase aimed his flashlight, its beam stabbing the darkness, into the tunnel, “there’s nothing. Just more tunnel.”

He was disappointed because he’d expected something spectacular: a room heaped with piles of gold or jewels. Something. Why else an airlock? A metal door? The sensors, and shielding? Then he noticed something. Fanning his light over the tunnel walls, he caught a glimpse of color. Squinted. “I think there’s something here. Written on the walls. Paintings, maybe.”

He consulted his tricorder again. “I’m reading more tunnels, but they don’t branch off here. There’s ...” He did a double take of his readings, and his disappointment evaporated. “This is really strange. There’s another larger tunnel about a kilometer to the west, and then more ... wow, at least
ten
more tunnels branching off that. But, dead ahead, there are rooms.”

“How many?”

“Four.” Eyes bright with excitement, Jase looked over at his friend. “You know what? I think this
is
a tomb. I think the tunnel we found was some sort of secret entrance, that the bigger tunnel I’m reading to the west is the main entrance that was probably sealed off.”

“But why?”

“Grave robbers, maybe. They did that in Egypt. Sealed up the main tunnel after they moved the sarcophagus down and then left a different way, so no one would know how to get in. I’ll bet that if we walked down that main tunnel, there’d be the stuff you’d find in Earth tombs: booby-traps, pits, stuff like that. But I’ll bet that when we step out of here, that panel’s going to slide shut, just like any airlock.”

“And evacuate the air inside to equalize the pressure.” Pahl’s pale blue eyes looked almost silver in the glow of their flashlights.

“Yeah.” Jase aimed a significant look at his friend. “Probably we can get back out. At least, there’s air: oxygen, nitrogen. A little helium.”

“Like someone’s expecting us.”

“Yeah.” Jase hesitated, then reached up with both hands and thumbed the seals on his helmet. There was a hiss as the seals released. Cautiously, Jase lifted the helmet a few centimeters and sniffed. Instantly, he recoiled. “Ugh. Smells old, kind of stale. Thick. Like,” he made a face then turned and spat, “tastes like something ...”

He stopped as he recognized the stench of death. And what else was he expecting?
It’s a tomb, you jerk.
Jase worked out another mouthful of foul-tasting spit.
Of course, there’s something dead.

“Come on,” Jase said, clipping his helmet to his waist. He hoped he would get used to the smell. Otherwise, he would be forced to put his helmet back on; the smell of decay was that strong.

As Jase predicted, the panel slid shut behind them when they stepped away. Through the metal, they heard the swoosh and hiss of air being evacuated.

As they walked through the tunnel, Jase swung his light over the paintings on the wall. They were done over what looked like plaster, almost exactly the way he remembered tomb paintings from the Valley of the Kings, but the plaster here was very different: textured so that the images were arranged within outlines that were diamonds and trapezoids. Many of the patterns overlapped and intersected along diagonals, like—Jase groped for a comparison—like glass that had been shattered into a spider’s web of individual panels but not fallen out its frame. The paintings were probably of gods, Jase thought, or demons. He recognized one animal: a plump, ashen-white bull with long, pointed horns. He couldn’t quite place it; the name was on the tip of his tongue, and he knew he’d seen the painting before, someplace with his dad, some collection. He just couldn’t remember where.

There was one recurrent image: a great woman-snake, or maybe it was a dragon, Jase couldn’t tell. The thing had green scales, curved talons, and batlike wings; her eyes were set within ridges of scales and the same rhomboid- and diamond-shaped scales ran down the sides of her neck. Her neck wasn’t exactly straight either; it flared, so her shoulders and neck inscribed an arc, not an angle. In some of the paintings, the woman-snake hovered over figures that were clearly worshippers; Jase spotted humanoid figures carrying baskets of offerings—jewels, coins, food—and other figures that played upon piped instruments or harps. But in other paint
ings, the woman-snake formed the background for a figure that Jase thought must be the king: a jeweled diadem nestled on his forehead.

Playing his light over the walls and ceiling of the tunnel, Jase saw irregular, glittery white streaks of calcite, the end result of water having seeped through the rock over time.
Probably from that big, dead lake.
And he noticed something else. At first, it seemed a trick of the way the light from his torch spilled along the walls. But, no—he blinked—the tunnel was getting brighter.

He tapped Pahl on the arm. “Do you ... ?”

Pahl nodded and stared at his tricorder. “There’s light. Just ahead.”

The tunnel dipped left then right, took a last turn, and there was an arc of light straight ahead: the end of the tunnel. They hesitated an instant just beneath an arch, and then they crossed the threshold into a room.

In the room was a man with golden skin. Staring at them.

Jase flinched back with a cry. His heart thumped against his ribs, and his legs went watery with fear, and then he made himself look again. Almost at once, he wanted to kick himself for being so stupid.
No, jerk. It’s not a man. It’s a statue. Jeez.

The statue was gold, its features inlaid with colored stones: rubies for the lips, coal-black obsidian eyes outlined in some dark blue gem, black crystals for nostrils. A green faceted stone (an emerald?) centered on the forehead: the king’s diadem. The statue stood before a stone altar that was a triangle three meters high; each side was flanked by a flight of three stone steps. Chiseled carvings of chimeras roiled along the altar’s three stone faces.

Everything in threes.
Jase took a few steps toward the statue, and then turned to inspect the rest of the chamber. Jase saw that the tunnel they’d traveled came in from the side of the chamber, at a diagonal. The room was a rhomboid and studded at equal intervals with three curving stone
pillars that arced from floor to ceiling. In each of the chamber’s four walls were three arched niches spaced at equal intervals, and within each were gold statues of women with peculiar diamond-shaped scales that ridged their eyes and long hair that spilled over their shoulders and breasts.

“An altar,” said Jase. He knelt on a step and his gloved fingers played over white smooth humps of material clinging to the rock. “Melted wax, like from candles. They probably did something religious here, prayers or something, before they left.”

“This way,” said Pahl, indicating a small passageway to the right of one statue. “There’s another room, much bigger.”

Once in the room, which was lit with a dim glow that seemed to have no source, they stood for several seconds, mouths open. Just staring.

“Oh,” said Jase, releasing his breath in an astonished gasp. His gaze traveled along the vaulted ceiling. The ceiling was painted a rich, dark blue and studded with glittering yellow stars.
Like the sky at night, and there are two bigger than the rest, probably those binary stars.
He saw at once that the paintings on the walls of the elliptical room—a dizzying array of red, blacks, and greens—were divided into three registers, with figures contained within intersecting rhomboids and trapezoids.
Probably telling a story.
Yet the story didn’t unfold in a straight line; the mural swirled along the walls. Jase spotted serpents, jagged bolts crashing through skies studded with blazing stars, the arcs of arrows curving in the air. The paintings felt organic and alive but suspended in time, in that instant between life and death every child knows but does not remember: the moment before he draws its first breath. Instinctively, Jase understood that the mural told a story of the hours of a single night. The story seemed to end with an image of a huge golden disc at the far side of the room.

Jase took another step into the chamber. That disc had to be a depiction of the rising sun—maybe the neutron star before it had
become
a neutron star. Just beneath the disc, he saw the woman-snake again, with its angry blood-red eyes, its shimmering green-scaled reptilian body. Those black wings.

He felt Pahl touch his arm. “Look,” said Pahl, pointing toward the center of the room.

Jase’s gaze followed. A red-stone, rhomboid slab stood in the center of the ellipse. Unlike the stone altar in the other room, however, this was carved with scrolls of ivy twisting around arcing columns incised out of the rock. Scattered on the floor were heaps of gold; dark wooden chests with latinum inlay and the rich green of jevonite; the crumbling remains of candles long since burned to nothing. And there was a body.

Jase and Pahl exchanged glances, and Jase saw Pahl’s throat work in a hard swallow. Without a word, they crept toward the slab and fanned their lights over the body. The skin of the dead man—and it had been a man, Jase saw
(the king!)
—was drawn tight as old black leather. As the skin had mummified, it curled and drew back; the lips were parted in a horrible rictus, the teeth startlingly white. As the soft tissues had decayed, the face had fallen in, and Jase stared into black, eyeless sockets. The cheeks were so taut the bones of the skull had torn through. Gold rings hung loosely on bone fingers; jeweled pendants and latinum chains dangled in the clefts between the dead man’s ribs where the flesh had rotted away, and the rich robes were reduced to shredded tatters. A deep, forest-green emerald glittered in the center of the dead king’s forehead.

So this is what his dad had been searching for. But was
this
what he and Pahl had been meant to find? No. Jase felt as if there was still more ...

“Over there,” said Pahl, echoing his thoughts. He nodded toward the far end of the chamber. “Through that arch.”

Unlike the burial chamber, this next room was pitch dark. The boys teetered on the threshold, and then stepped together into a thick, inky blackness. As if by unspoken agreement, they left their flashlights off for a moment and just absorbed the feel of the room. This room felt smaller, more dense. Jase had the impression of a diamond-shaped room, and his tricorder agreed. But the air was thick. Jase sniffed. Not musty but
crowded,
almost as if the darkness were filled with people jostling one another.

He felt Pahl at his elbow, searched for his friend’s eyes in the glow of their tricorders. “Do you feel it?”

Pahl nodded. “They’re here.”

They’re here.
Without warning, all the hackles along the back of Jase’s neck rose. He shivered. Something was watching. Quickly, he flicked on his light; the blue-white halogen beam punched through the darkness. Jase whirled about on his heel, trying to catch whatever was there in the light. His beam cut the blackness. Stone walls. No paintings. Nothing else. No one.

No, thought Jase, there
was
something—someone—there. He felt it. Jase took a step back and then another, and then his heel caught. Crying out, Jase threw his arms up. His flashlight cartwheeled through the air. Jase fell back, hit something that rustled and chattered like icicles dangling from bare branches after an ice storm. Gasping, he rolled to one side, away from the sound, just as his nostrils were assailed with the musty odor of dust and decay.

Pahl’s torch flared to life, stabbed through the black, and Jase turned. Screamed.

The desiccated, mummified corpse of a boy slid out of the darkness.

Eyes bulging with horror, Jase scuttled away like a crab. He’d touched it; he’d fallen against it! And that clattering sound, his bones, the boy’s
bones!
Jase rolled to his knees, gasping. His skin was clammy with icy sweat.

Calm down, he’s dead, he can’t hurt you.
Jase tried corralling his addled wits. Now that he was further away, he saw the body was slumped against a wooden triangular stand of some kind. Jase stood slowly, gulping air, heart hammering in his chest. There was movement by his elbow, and he almost screamed.

Pahl handed Jase the flashlight he’d dropped. “Look at his
face
,” Pahl whispered.

Despite his fright, Jase leaned forward. He frowned. “What
is
that?”

Pahl knelt by the dead boy’s side. He reached forward, his fingers trailing along the contours of something that glinted and shone. “It’s a
mask
.”