Page 176 of Tomb of the Sun King

They moved through the lines of pillars, the blocky towers of stone pale in the muffled glow of the firebird bone. The quarry felt as mummified as the bones of a pharaoh. Neil suspected that if he stopped to conduct a proper survey, he would quickly stumble across frozen remnants of the lives that had passed through this space before—an ancient length of rope, a lost sandal, the point of a tarnished copper chisel. In this stable underground environment, those objects would likely look much as they had the moment some quarryman had dropped them thousands of years before.

He was looking for signs of any such artifacts when the pillars abruptly stopped.

Where the next row should have been, Neil faced a wall. It was not the smooth, even-cut stone that had framed every other side of the quarry. This was a ragged, tumbling avalanche of crushed boulders—the debris of an ancient, long-forgotten collapse.

Neil regarded it in the flickering light of the firebird bone with a growing sense of horror.

“This is it, isn’t it?” he choked out. “This is the entrance to the quarry.”

Sayyid stared at the barrier, looking pale. “I think… that it is very possibly the entrance to the quarry,” he agreed weakly.

A subtle fear had been stalking Neil since they fell into the dark. In the face of the piled stones before him, it tightened, gaining focus. “But is there a way through it?”

Sayyid glanced from the collapse to the dimming sock in Neil’s hands. His expression was grim. “I know how we might find out.”

“How?”

“Let the light go out.” Sayyid met his eyes uneasily.

The notion of plunging back into that utter, complete darkness filled Neil with dread—but Sayyid was right. If they eliminated their light and gave their eyes time to adjust, they might pick out any cracks or openings to the moonlit night outside.

Swallowing thickly, Neil turned from Sayyid to face the blockage. The firebird bone flickered, sputtering like a guttering candle—and then snuffed out.

Midnight, thick and oppressive, closed around him. Neil forced himself not to panic as he steeled his eyes at the pile of boulders… and waited… and waited.

The darkness remained complete, an impenetrable wall that wrapped him up like a blanket.

“Do you see anything?” Neil asked hopefully. His voice sounded like it came from somewhere else, disembodied in the dark.

“No,” Sayyid replied tightly after a moment.

Neil closed his eyes. It made not the least bit of difference. He could feel the vast, dry expanse of the cavern lurking behind him with a weighty, patient silence.

“Perhaps we should bring back the light,” Sayyid finally suggested, the words small.

Neil absorbed them with a chill, then vigorously shook the bone. Light boomed to life behind the argyle of his sock. It spilled across the impenetrable barrier of rubble that lay before him, and he felt dizzy.

“Maybe there’s…” He stopped, his throat dry. “Perhaps there’s another…”

Sayyid wasn’t listening. He frowned down at something on the ground near his boots. It was the base of another pillar—one that Neil could see lying in pieces beside the squarish, stubby protrusion from the ground.

There were more of them, marching along in parallel to the thick-packed boulders of the collapse—tumbled columns of stone resting by their truncated stumps.

“Did those all fall down?” he asked.

“They did not fall down. They were removed.” Sayyid looked along the length of the butchered row. “They wereallremoved. Someone did this deliberately to compromise the structural integrity of the quarry.”

“You mean theywantedit to cave in?” Neil demanded, aghast. “But how would they have even known how many to take?”

“I very much doubt that they did,” Sayyid returned. “I imagine they simply kept going until it fell.”

“But then how would whoever had done it esc—” Neil cut himself off as his throat closed with horror. “There were bones—in the room where we fell. There was a… a skull… on the floor…”

He desperately looked to Sayyid, hoping that he would find some hint of reassurance in his expression—somethingthat belied the terrible conclusion Neil was rapidly coming to.

He didn’t.

“We’re going to die in here,” Neil blurted out. “We’re going to die in here and dry up like old sandals. Aren’t we?”

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