Beyond the statues, we came to a ledge. There, before us: an enormous rift in the land.
Looking upon it, it seemed that I looked down at jagged mountains that were pointing away from the sky, toward the earth.
There are great canyons in the earth that I have seen since, in the Americas and within the African continent, but in that century I had never seen such a thing—it looked to me like a pit that was hundreds of miles long, and deep as an empty sea.
Ophion crept to the edge, crouching on his hands and knees to look across to the deep gorge.
“There,” he said, and something in his voice betrayed a kind of pride and hope. “The red towers of Myrryd.”
4
The moment before he said the name, I saw the shapes of the giant towers below—miles down in the gorge—they looked small from that distance, but I could guess how enormous they must’ve been.
The kingdom seemed the richest on Earth, and far grander than the kingdoms of the Saracens or of the Romans or of Aztlanteum, which seemed poor by comparison.
I caught my breath as I looked at the red towers, and those of ghostly white, and the darker monoliths that rose as if carved from the mountain wall. The moon-cast light painted opalescence across the shining towers, the statues of gods and goddesses that rose, the temples, the basilicas.
The streets were laid out on a huge grid that was off center, and for every intersecting street, there were circles with temples and statues. It seemed the fires had been lit there as if heralding our arrival.
“It is our energies, stolen from us,” Ophion whispered as I peered across the great chasm that held this endless kingdom. “It fuels these fires. Myrryd knows we are here.”
Chapter 8
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TEMPLE OF THE FALLEN
1
This was an advanced civilization beyond any other. The architecture alone seemed confusing in its variety and magnitude. It was like looking at the greatest treasure and feeling the shock and shiver of knowing that few of my century had ever gazed down upon its grandeur.
“All this,” I gasped. “What could destroy such a place and leave it like this?”
“In one season, all vampyres were wiped clean of this place and the gods cursed it,” Ophion whispered. “Mortal rats tunneling here, and not many, I am certain. For how many thousands of years could they breed here with so little food beyond beetle and worm and eel and with so little hope? Friend, this was a magnificent citadel in those times before much was forgotten. A kingdom of undead kings, and priests who held magick in their words, and in their blood.”
“It’s not just a city,” I said. “It’s a civilization. Gone.”
I was impelled to bow down before the great kingdom below me. Merod, and the Priests of Blood and of Nahhash, and the great kings of this land, I am here to honor you and those who have come before me.
“What are you doing?” Ophion snapped at me.
“I am praying for the blessing of this place,” I said.
“Vampyres do not pray,” he said.
“You told me this was a sacred place.”
“Anything sacred here,” he said, again glancing about the ledge as if expecting something to appear, “vanished, my brother.”
2
Without our abilities of flight, we had to take rock steps, carved into the rock wall and through caves, down to the city. There were miles of such steps, and at each landing, a doorway into a cave opened up to us. When the night began to wane, Ophion drew me into one such cave.
It was a chapel of sorts, this to some unknown god, with drawings of his form upon the walls—an underworld creature with the long horns of some native deer, and all around this, paintings of various priests of this god.
Ophion lay beside me, although his stink had grown intense on our journey—yet I could not deny him friendship or comfort, and his fear seemed greater now than even among the Laughing Ones.
In a deep recess of this carved chapel, we slept, and I heard echoes of the Laughing Ones in my head as I drifted off for the day’s rest. I dreamed of my doom at the hands of the white-robed Myrrydanai.
3
It took another quarter-night of climbing downward to reach Myrryd’s base.
We stood on the flat rooftop of some outer chambers, and before us, the city gates were broken and fallen. Beyond this, a series of galleries and courtyards, and we crawled down from the roof and stepped onto the road toward the city’s center.
Beneath the overhanging rock of the cliffs above, an entire city of many such flat-roofed buildings arose, created in a labyrinthine series of zigs and zags, a puzzle of public buildings and houses beneath. As we moved across the rooftops, crouching until the rock face above us widened and arched upward, I began to see farther and farther along, until the sky seemed to erupt from beneath the earth.
The city rose in the gloom of night, tower upon tower of shining red. These shot straight upward, built no doubt through sorcery, for I did not know an engineer so great as to design and implement this. Strange angles of the towers jutted to the left and right, like the claws of eagles, and these connected to new towers, born from these dark claws, shooting upward toward the stars.
“The ancient sorceries brought much knowledge,” Ophion said, as I drank in this fantastic place. “The architects of Myrryd were many, though their wisdom did not pass into the world of mortals. These are designed to reflect what is around them, as a mirror might. Mortals who stumble upon this place do not leave, nor do they live long. I was a captive of this city before its fall, and even I could not find it by sight, nor would I wander its boulevards as dawn approached, for there are dangerous creatures here that have not found their ways into the world above.”
Waterfalls spilled from the heights of cliffs surrounding the many leagues that defined the ancient city, and poured into pools and lakes that were surrounded by many temples.
These were not ruins, but looked as if they had been abandoned only recently by a population of millions of people. The temples of the Serpent dotted the landscape—reminding me of Alkemara’s walls and its Temple of Lemesharra—but each temple was larger in scale than Alkemara itself. Carvings of muscular youths bearing swords and spears and strange clawlike instruments were carved in relief along the smooth pillars of these buildings; and maidens, too, naked with full breasts, carrying darts and arrows in their hands, with serpents entwined in their hair.
It was as if it were many great cities drawn together by its interconnected walls—and it had the look of no city of my time, or those that existed before. It was more like the great cities I would see more than eight hundred years later, with skyscrapers that seemed to reach the heavens when viewed from below. These shiny towers had been built on the grandest scale of any in the world, and in remembering this, I felt then—as I know now—that there were great civilizations long before mortals built farms and cities and came out of the caverns and hillsides and into the valleys to begin the first mortal cities.
As we passed one ruin of a temple, its walls fallen inward, its pillars broken, I saw a wide and long crack along the stones of the floor. When I crouched, I saw beneath the floor what seemed another building—even more ancient. Glancing about the dark chamber below, I beheld broken stones piled along the edges of the floor, leading to yet other chambers under this one.
Beneath this city, another—and beneath that one...still some other depth. I remembered Pythia mentioning a deep place, below the kingdom of Myrryd.
“Yes, you see the chambers beneath? Myrryd has resurrected many times,” Ophion said. “One city was built atop the other. Even before there was Myrryd, there was the Asmodh.”
“Asmodh? Another city?”
“Nameless. The beneath, not a city at all. The Old Kingdom was built before the vampyre, when Medhya ruled in her flesh. Only after her fall did the New Kingdom grow from the ruins of the Old. Flood and fires destroyed much, and when it was rebuilt, again roads rose above the old city. Far
beneath, it was called dark earth—the ruins of a city far older than all memory. The elder vampyres who survived the rule of such terrible queens as Namtaryn the Pestilent and kings such as Sarus the Immolator and Athanat, the Lord of Slaughter—these remembering ones spoke of Asmodh in the quiet and gloom before dawn, at the burial chambers of the ancient ones. It is covered over by the vaults built of the Old Kingdom, and those that support the New. At best, it lies beneath the sewers that flooded underground lakes and flowed to the river beneath the rock called Aranzas. In the caverns and the old vaults, the dark earth ruins still exist, far below the deep nests of those mortal rats that shun both midnight and noon. Nameless it remains—as are the things that move along its trenches and wells.”
“Beasts?”
Ophion nodded. “Creatures that have not yet crawled into the upper world, and those who were banished in the wars before time. Some still are there. Fire creatures, and slimy white salamanders the size of cats that devour mortals if they stray too far below the city roads. In the crags and crevices, down the inverted rock towers, through the halls and passages formed by eons of subterranean floods, they live. Infinite tunnels cut through the rock and filth, below the subterranean canals, into which the waste and water from old Myrryd flow. Beneath this city, built upon the Old Kingdom, there lie the deep places. Some of these monsters wriggle and crawl, and others...others may be like men, but without the faces of men, on all fours, white people as none you have seen.”
“Have you seen such men?”
“Seen them? Seen them? I was thrown down among their filth!” he shouted suddenly, as if anger tore through his bones. “I looked into their wormy faces! I survived the foul canals and swam across the black flood of filth! Escaped the clutches of the faceless men, although men they may not be, for their jaws are like crocodiles. The priests of Ghorien took me deep into the Asmodh Well—seven wells beneath even the deepest well of the city—in those nights before they filled it in with rocks and ruins to keep others out. Ghorien told me that I hunted—the hunchbacked stair—a stair of spiked steps that rose across a stony arch from the lowest of the deep to heights within a mountain cliff that could not be reached from above. I had no more than this as my goal, for they would not tell me of markers or paths—they did not know where to seek it, and their sorcery fell mute before it.
“Ghorien whispered—before I was released to the well—that I would sense the stair when I neared it. ‘Do not linger there, nor steal the treasure for yourself,’ he warned me with that whisper that was like steam escaping a boiling pot—with his red eyes and narrow lips, his long fingers at my mouth as if he would tear out my tongue in a moment if I spoke to him. ‘Find what we seek, and you will be set free, Maz-Sherah.’
“They tossed me, and I plummeted into sludge and offal. Down through the Asmodh filth I went, thrown beneath the old city. Dead was I to the world above, and dead I felt in the world below. The stink of mortal rat and the smothering stench of the infernal gas that permeates the canals nearly suffocated me. Fires of a deeper kingdom burned there. These flames—ignited from stone and vapor—gave off blue light and no heat, cold as ice to be near such fire.”
“How far is this place?” I asked. “For it sounds as if it would take you many months to reach such depths.”
“In the deep, a year is a month above, and a month is a week above, and a week below is one night lost on the earth where we now stand. Nowhere else upon this Earth does time shift as it does in this underworld. I will tell you how long I stayed, for though it seemed a month, only six nights passed before I returned to the New Kingdom far above. How far is it? It is quick to descend, but easy to lose one’s way, for there are no guides for such a journey. I followed the stink of mortals, who would know of the treasure though none would touch it.”
“What treasure did you hunt?”
“When I am done, I will tell. I will not tell of all I saw, for no language have I for it, nor the stomach, no, my friend, my brother. Unspeakable and unknowable, without fathom and without understanding that nameless place is. Into wormholes I crawled, and saw the eyes of demons in the great spaces that opened beneath the earth. The bones of the mortal rats piled along subterranean streams that smelled of death and mortal waste. Lost I was, in the dark earth beneath the Asmodh Well. As I crept through a ribbed cavern, I heard the growl of one of these tenebrous creatures and saw its slick pale skin as it moved toward me.
“I had stumbled upon their colony, and the larvae of their offspring, formed like huge fly maggots along the gully and trough of the cave. Wriggling children, head to belly, wrapped in fish-pale skin, waiting to be born. This unspeakable man—yet not man at all—leapt upon me, for he was guard of these monstrous progeny. His jaws snapped and spread, and I felt the terrible wind of his breath on my face. My last moments, I was certain, and I knew the smell of oblivion. Yet I fought him, and scarred him—drawing his puslike blood from deep in his skin. I lifted up one of the squirming larvae and threw it into the mouth of the canal below. The other creature dived into the water to rescue the child, and I escaped—but not before I tore into many larvae that they might not be born. When I found a passage upward, I scrambled toward it.
“Yes, I had felt the tug of my prize—and saw the footpaths of mortal and monster here, for the stair was known to these denizens. The hunchbacked stair, the Myrrydanai called it, though they would not deign to venture up its many spikes. Yes, these steps were like spines of a lizard, carved into the arch of umbric rock by the underworld sea that had worn away the inner hills before time knew light. I thirsted much for blood. I dreamed of the taste of the mortal rats in my teeth, dreamed as I slept on the ragged teeth of that stone stairway. Slept, but did not know dawn from dusk, for all was dusk. Slept and prayed, my brother, to Ghorien himself—for I had no other god then.
“Over long nights, I scaled that arch with its spiky stair that seemed to go to a greater height than the red city itself. At its highest peak, there a statue stood, formed from brown amber.
“A knight in amber, a lord of some old kingdom in ancient armor, and this barely covering his naked form. What infernal sculptor had made this statue I cannot say, though it was an expert craftsman, no doubt, my brother. His shield leaned at his knee, and round it was, with spikes and claws carved along its curve. His helm lay at his feet. A sword, broken below its hilt, clasped in his right hand. The head of a Gorgon in his left, grasped by her snaky scalp, her eyes wide and terrible. There, I found the treasure the priests sought. A treasure that stung me as I touched it.
“It was this treasure that drove me into madness, and began to tear at me, my beautiful flesh, which was once as comely as yours. It stole the glamour I held, and left me this mirror of death, my brother. It is a terrible treasure, a cursed treasure. I was certain I would extinguish there, upon that pinnacle of steps that went all the way to Hell’s height. In the nights to come, as I scrambled through damp holes and crusted windows of rock and filth, I came upon one of the slick white salamanders as it tore into mortal flesh. Mortal rats had come here, and I knew I could sniff their trails. When I found a nest of them, I drank deeply from three, draining them to a flat pulp. I followed the stink of those who ran from me up into the blue fire caves. I felt the stream of our tribe as I rose again through the great lakes of sewage. From there, the Asmodh Well’s great bottom curved and rose at a crooked angle from the depths. I climbed up its rough-hewn stones with the treasure in my mouth—at my teeth, my brother, stinging what little flesh remained at my lips—that I might leave the depths forever. I desired too much to please the Myrrydanai, who I believed then would release me, my brother.”
“Did they?” I asked.
He shook his head, his bony hand reaching up to cover his eyes. “The treasure I brought them was stolen even from their grasping claws. Who was blamed for that? Ophion! I, who had risked all to find it for them.”
“What did they do to you?”
He shivered, looking out from between his
fingers. “To tell of these things is to live them. Do not ask, my brother.” He pointed down into the crevices. “What lies beneath us is Hell itself. All legends of Hell come from this place. All men know of it, though they do not find it. But I have known Hell in the grasp of the Myrrydanai priests, and in the creatures they called from the Veil.”
“What was the treasure Ghorien desired?”
He turned away from me and began hobbling over to the steps of a temple nearby. He pointed to its marbled black and red statue of Datbathani. She rose thirty feet into the air, a girdle of serpents at her waist, her wings at full spread, her breasts small and high, and her face broken as if some king of this city had taken a cudgel to the statue in an effort to obliterate this sister of Medhya, the Lady of Serpents. “It was hers once. And you have seen it. It is the golden mask upon the face of your Pythoness.”
4
“Do not ask me more, my brother. I do not know what thief took it. Stolen by someone who had gained Ghorien’s favors, and through many centuries was bought by Nezahual in trade for some other sorcery,” Ophion said. “But do not ask me more. My memories bring pain. I know so little of these things.”
“You went to Aztlanteum to retrieve it,” I said.
“Foolish of me,” he said. “For who am I to these gods? To these priests? I was Maz-Sherah. I had a fire in me to seek my destiny. I believed it, as you believe it—even when my youth and flesh had abandoned me. Ghorien told me he would find and destroy me if I did not get it back. Nezahual worked strong magick, and held me fast in his prisons. There I languished, until his sorcery failed. Until I knew the mask left his kingdom.”
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