“I want to see it,” Sarra said, and so she climbed, her fingers and feet navigating the tiny niches, scaling the rocky cliff. Head pressed to the stones she saw now that the inner face of each toehold was made from a smoothly polished stone. The rock was translucent, and unlike anything she had ever seen. Sarra guessed the shimmering surface was angled to catch the sun’s last rays. The footholds would glow for a moment each day, then vanish.
The light had nearly died when she reached the ledge; darkness was upon them and they lit torches. The fire, brighter than the failing sunlight, illuminated an opening in the cliff where moments earlier she had seen nothing more than cracked rock. For an instant it appeared as if the passage was just another trick of the light, but Dasche sent his footman forward and the boy disappeared between the rough stones. The ancient builders were said to possess exceptional skill; perhaps they possessed long-forgotten techniques—tricks that could make an entryway appear as if it were just another fold in the ridge. Sarra waited for Ott to scale the cliff, the soldiers half carrying him up the precipice. When he stood once more at her side, she slipped through the curious opening—not an arch or a passage, but a breach, a wound, she thought, as she slid between the carefully hewn stones.
Inside, by the glow of Dasche’s torch, she found an arcade. Dense carvings covered the walls, inscriptions similar to those she had seen in the map chamber. The columned hall opened onto a round-shaped room with a vast dome. Crumbling frescoes covered every column and alcove: a jungle, a forest, a panorama depicting wild beasts of unimaginable shapes—tiny exotic birds, gray-winged kites, a horned panther, the eld. Sarra pressed onward, she was close, she could feel it. There was something here—but what?
In a far alcove, Ott found a spiraling stair. They stumbled down the sand-covered winders, Dasche’s torch extinguishing as cool air whistled from the stair’s depths. Sarra reached the chamber floor in complete darkness, her hand clinging to the rail. Dasche dripped oil on the smoldering torch head, making the flame burst back to life. The room came alive with the crackle of fire. The spiraling stair had deposited Sarra and her party at the center of a round space, a disk encircled by arched openings. Sarra gazed through one after another of the arches. Darkness, nothing but darkness. She glanced from arch to arch. Which opening led forward? Which way should they go?
At the far side, through a distant archway, she saw a faint yellowy light. Sarra stepped toward the light and motioned for the others to follow. They passed room after room, a bridge between, a pit below. Cobwebs filled the passages and the bridge’s wood planks crumbled as she dashed across the narrow channels. One chamber folded into the next, each passage wider than the last. Arrows littered the floor; tables sat overturned atop smashed urns and dented shields. Through archways she glimpsed towers and walls, a city beneath the mountain. Sarra urged the men onward, her heart quick, her breath short.
They drove through a small chamber, then a larger anteroom, another and then another, a long series of rooms that led to progressively larger ones, each one growing in size and grandeur. Gone were the tight corridors and narrow bridges; they were inside a palace. Flower-topped columns flaked in gold formed glistening archways. Alabaster slabs adorned the floor and everywhere there was gold, in the walls and in the columns, in the ceiling and floor—an opulence she had seen only in the Waset, in the Golden Hall, and the temple of Mithra at Solus. Here there was furniture left intact, tapestries and urns. The air was cool and moist, a light wind brushed her face. The sun had nearly set, but there was light ahead, the same illumination she had seen in the archway—a dim light leading her forward. This is it. The map leads here. As the light grew more intense, as Sarra’s eyes adjusted and the walls of the chamber became visible, she saw the same dark soot she had found in the underground passage. The fire must have been more intense here. The damage was hideous; the stones were wrinkled and warped.
Passing beneath a crumbled arch and out into a grand chamber, soaring in height, with a light reflected through long tunnels in the encircling rock—Sarra entered the final chamber. A grand solar, a throne room. Buried within the Empyreal Domain, in the forbidden palace of the gods themselves, there was said to be a chamber of pure light, the grand solar of the god-emperor. Could this be its twin? Was this the hidden palace of the Soleri, the place where they sheltered in times of war? No living man, save for the Ray, had seen the solar, but the room matched the descriptions she had read in the repository. The throne of the god-emperor. A place that only the ancient Soleri could have crafted, its dome so tall and thin that no craftsmen, save the gods of old, would have dared attempt such a structure. So smooth were the walls, so glorious was the height of the structure that Sarra imagined herself standing within a space made from nothing but the sun’s light. A chamber of rays.
In an instant, everything was light and they could see what remained in the chamber.
Ott gasped and the soldiers stepped back, mouths gaping. Only Sarra stood calmly, her face a mask of tranquility. “It’s them,” Taig blurted out, staring at the still, silent figures in the room. “It’s them, just as the old words described.”
Every child in the empire was told: Before time was the Soleri, and after time the Soleri will be. The phrase referred to a story about the Soleri’s creation and destruction—a myth that linked the two events. The story described the birth of the Soleri—how, after the gods plummeted from Atum, they forged earthly bodies from the same elements as the stars, the same grains that made the rock beneath their feet. They were made from things so primitive, so pristine, that the Soleri could not die, they could only revert to the elements from which they were made—that once the Soleri perished they would become the stones, the stars, the fabric of the world.
Truly this was the House of Stones and Stars.
In the middle of the room stood a ring of glistening statues, figures contorted in grotesque postures, figures that stood as if cowering from some unseen force—fire, she guessed, but what fire could kill a god? The room was burnt black; soot covered the floor. A flame as hot as the sun had scorched this room, as if Mithra Himself had reached out and filled the chamber with His searing light. The statues—which seemed not like statues at all, but like living beings frozen in place—were obsidian in appearance, like the black, glossy stone that came from a volcano—glistening like stars, hard like stones.
This was death. The end. Twelve figures crouched in a circle, arms raised, burnt black, scorched till their forms became rock—twelve monoliths poised in their death throes.
“The Soleri,” Ott said.
Noll gawked.