The magician touched a long thread. “If the light hadn’t hit it just right as I turned, I wouldn’t have either. Sophisticated little death trap.”
They continued on, much more wary of what lay before them. Simon and Nick walked slowly ahead of the compass-wielding Hogarth. Simon waved his walking stick and used it to prod the snow. Nick sent bursts of flame out to intercept any other hidden triggers. They encountered none, but it was nerve-wracking.
Finally, Simon struggled over a lip of stone to find himself at the edge of a plateau where a crumbled wall stood. He peered through a jagged gap in the masonry. Kate came up beside him and gasped. Stretching out before them was an incredible city of temples. Some of the structures were rubble, while others retained their grand beauty. It appeared to be a ghost city.
Simon cautiously passed through the wrecked wall. Their footfalls crunched over the icy ground. They saw endless grey stone structures along grand avenues and huddled over narrow alleys. The walls and fa?ades were peopled with countless carved figures, crowded bas-reliefs of dancing deities and fantastical creatures. Thick snow drifts clutched columns and slouched over domes and high spiked minarets. Scattered around the complex were numerous pools, temple tanks, some with water, some ice, some empty.
As they slowly rounded the corner of a collapsed shrine, they came to the edge of a courtyard. It was littered with dead bodies. Half a dozen men, monks by their bright red and yellow robes, lay in horrific positions. Each had been killed in some grisly way. One impaled by several metal spears. Another one lay in pieces, dismembered by the same saw trap that almost killed Hogarth. Coiling steel tendrils crushed yet another monk’s broken and twisted body.
In the chilling silence, they heard voices. One sounded strong and threatening, and the other was broken with cries of pain. They seemed to be coming from farther ahead along the central avenue they had been skirting. Hunching low, they crept up, keeping hidden in the shadows of the scattered ruins. Simon settled behind a broken staircase to a pagoda and pulled a telescope from his pack.
Through the blowing snow, about a hundred yards away, he saw a great temple with several towers layered like stepped minarets, and festooned with sacred carvings and spires reaching up to rival the mountainsides in the background. Those towers sat atop a monumental palace of dark stone with a fine long veranda. At the foot of the steps up to the terrace was a large temple tank.
A man, or what had once been a man, stood in the center of the veranda in the blowing snow. His attention was directed at something lying at his feet, obscured by a bonfire. The man’s face was badly scarred and his eyes were covered, or perhaps replaced, by gogglelike protuberances. Atop his head, he wore a multicolored turban of the sort often adopted by military officers of the Company. Long blond hair tied in a queue draped down his back. He sported the blue tunic of the Honorable East India Company fastened tight as if for inspection despite the fact that it was stained and its gold piping was torn. Beyond the frayed cuffs of the tunic, his hands were unnatural; they appeared to be composed of four metal claws not dissimilar to the grasping arm on the Baroness’s monstrous machine in London. Below his waist, the wide trousers couldn’t conceal his increasingly strange nature. He stood tall upon wide metallic pads that appeared to be his feet rather than shoes or boots. His legs bent backward at the knees and moved in an unusual way that revealed them to be metal. He held a massive bow, far too large for a normal person to wield. Strapped onto his back was a quiver full of arrows the size of javelins.
Several small shapes hopped about him. Monkeys. They appeared to be normal little simians except their eyes were replaced with jutting cones, like small telescopes. No doubt minions of the Baroness. Simon handed the spyglass to Kate.
“My God, it’s Emmett Walker,” she breathed with shock. “At least I think it is.”
Simon glanced at her. “Your father’s old hunting companion?”
“We’ve believed him dead all these years. At least my father said he was dead.”
“He looks spry enough,” Nick noted.
“Though hardly whole,” was Simon’s response. “It appears he fell afoul of the Baroness.”
Simon took a telescope provided by Hogarth and studied the area around the distant temple. He spotted an odd pile and, tightening the focus, saw more bodies all wrapped in torn red cloth. There were at least twenty dead monks in the heap, and perhaps more. “Not shy about killing.”
Kate leaned her elbows on a broken stone tablet and peered out. She made a variety of angry and disgusted noises as she scanned the scene. “Wait, there’s someone with him. Tied to a column on the terrace.”