“A long time ago,” Wat said, pointing to the shallow grooves in the floor. “A hundred generations of Soleri walked these corridors before they sealed themselves behind the Shroud Wall. Now only the Ray may gaze upon their likeness,” he said, reaching another door and pushing it open. “Come.” Wat beckoned. “The people await their new steward.”
Arko followed the old man through a warren of long corridors—some brightly painted, others flecked in silver and electrum—keeping his eyes on the lamp that Wat held the way he had kept his eyes on the lamp the emperor’s blind women had used. It was unexpected to learn that so much of life in Sola was lived underground. This was the city of the sun, and yet since he had arrived, he was constantly in darkness. Could he possibly get used to it? Living buried in the earth like a mole? These brightly colored walls were no substitute for the sun. As king of Harkana he had lived entirely in the open, his successes and failures all perfectly clear to both his friends and his enemies. This was something new; now he would have to get used to the shadows.
Down they went, into the bowels of the earth far below the city of light, far below the city of darkness even. They walked in a place beyond the Hollows, journeying past caverns of glittering black stone and dried-out caves of water. Stalactites dripped stone from the ceiling, forming little hillocks and hollows and tunnels, sometimes narrowing to dark passageways, sometimes opening up into great halls many stories high. For hours they journeyed in near silence, only their sandals breaking the quiet.
After a time, the rough stones gave way to a smoothly carved floor.
“Above us, on the surface, it is afternoon and the sun is low in the sky and this part of the mountain is cloaked in shadow. Time to begin the rite,” Wat said without explaining himself any further. Listening to the old man speak, Arko barely noticed that he had stopped walking. They were in front of a door, one that appeared black at first but as the two men came closer and the light fell across it, it bloomed into a glossy amber, the color of the sky at the edge of morning. The stone was veined with white and brown streaks, polished so that the flames, and the men, were reflected on its translucent surface.
“Here’s where I leave you,” Wat said. He reached down and lifted the bronze ring, and the door swung open easily, as if it had been opened just yesterday instead of half a lifetime ago. “Your passage starts here. You will do as all have done who have taken the Ray’s seat, you must walk alone, deep into the mountain. You must find the Ray’s staff and fit it with the glowing citrine that Suten Anu pressed into your hands. The Eye of the Sun.”
“Then what?” Arko asked, but Wat would not explain further.
Sighing, Arko took a lamp from the wall and pushed through the door. It shut behind him with a barely audible click.
When he was alone, Arko took a moment to take stock of where he was. The chill he had felt outside the door seemed to dissipate almost immediately, replaced with dense, humid warmth, making him break out in a light sweat along his hairline and across his upper lip. The floor was smooth and worn, the space dark, though he could see a hint of light on the edge of the wall along the chamber, a fleeting glimpse like a shooting star, a spark caught by the lamp and winking back at him. The echo of his footsteps and the eddies in the air gave him the feeling of being inside a great space, though the dark pressed in, pressed down, until he almost felt as desperate as the blind men who begged at the gates of Harwen, except instead of food and water all he sought were answers and a sense of purpose to this journey.
He was meant to find a staff, of all things, in which to place the great jewel. Then what? He knew the answer as well as the old servant: then he would be the Ray of the Sun, the most powerful man in all of Solus. Arko had come to the city expecting to meet the divine, and instead of seeing the face of god he was shown his own face in the mirror. This is all that is left of the Soleri, Suten had told him, and so the First Ray of the Sun continues the tradition; we serve an absent emperor, and with our service we preserve the peace of all the kingdoms.
Arko wandered the dark passageways until he found the door of a small anteroom, a tiny chamber carved into the stone at the far edge of the cavern. He bent down and ducked inside. In a narrow space, a small round room carved with the names of the dead Rays—Ined Anu, one said; Heruhirmaat Anu, said another—and at last he found the staff, bronzed and polished and balanced upright in the middle of the floor. At its head was a golden circle carved with symbols he could not read, and in the middle of that, a small recess just big enough for a single yellow jewel.
He laid down the lamp, took the jewel from his pocket, and placed it in the hollow, but nothing happened. He picked up the staff from its resting place, but when he closed his fingers around it, he was not transformed. He was alone in the dark with a staff and a jewel and no idea what he was supposed to do with any of it.
Arko muttered a curse, frustrated. Picking up the lamp once more, he spied a pair of doors at the far end of the cavern, their surface cast with images of the rising sun, a radiant landscape soaked with the golden light of Mithra-Sol. He pushed open the doors and stumbled forward, but still there was darkness, nothing special about it except for a ray of light that came in from someplace up on the surface, a pinprick really. He eyed the staff. Perhaps I’m supposed to use it as a blind beggar uses his cane. Another thought occurred to him just as quickly: lift it up. Taking the staff, he raised it high above his head. The Eye of the Sun seemed to seek the shaft of light of its own accord, grabbing the light as a lodestone grabs a lump of iron.
With a flash—
The light exploded from the Eye of the Sun in infinite multiplication. Out and out and out it flew into the vast blackness that surrounded Arko Hark-Wadi, gathering strength and growing in intensity until it was so bright that it seemed Arko stood inside a flame—a bitterly cold flame that made him want to shiver. The room was full of crystals, great yellow crystals of the same shade as the Eye, the finest quartz and citrine in the entire world. When at last the light seemed to peak, Arko lowered the staff, sensing the glow would not fade, and indeed it did not. Light continued to shine all around him, twinkling and pulsing.
The passages he had walked had taken him deep within the heart of the mountain. He had sensed that the cavern was large, but now that he could see it clearly, the cave was so vast that any notion of size or scale was subsumed by the space. The crystal formation captured the single ray of light that had come from above and multiplied it endlessly. It was like witnessing the beginning of the world, the birth of the universe, a thing so new it did not cast shadows.
The light that reflected in the cave could be seen through a breach in the shadow-drenched mountain, sparkling like a star in the heavens. When the people of Solus saw the cavern’s light shoot through the twilight sky, they knew that the Ray of the Sun was dead, and a new Ray of the Sun had been chosen.