by Sam Ferguson
He knew that he was on the right path. The young chief was fulfilling his destiny and would soon set right all the wrongs over the years caused by his father’s neglect of Akuhn. Whatever people had driven the Tarthun off would rue the day they had ever set foot in the Sacred Valley, for Halsten was coming with a mighty vengeance and a powerful goddess at his back.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Kamal never ceased to be amazed by just how large the temple site was. It wasn’t like most shrines people built that had only one building. Instead, it was an interconnected complex that sprawled over five acres of land. The whole complex created a sort of triangle shape if one looked down from a hill or were able to fly over it and see it from above. There was a main entrance hall, which was by far the largest section of the temple. From there there were corridors made entirely of stone that ran out east and west to other chambers as well, and another central corridor that led directly to the south. It was a curious structure to be sure.
When the Krilo had first come upon it shortly after their arrival in the valley, the temple had been in utter ruins. Even now, after forty years, the temple was still being repaired and new areas excavated and cleared of rubble and waste. Still, it was beginning to look like the grand structure the Krilo wanted it to become. Kamal was certain that in time, it would become a beacon of knowledge, and a perfect shrine to properly extoll the virtues of the Way of Wisdom, and reverence Interis Aruhat.
Of course, that assumed they would ever actually complete the work in Kamal’s lifetime. The first task of finding a quarry suitable to use for repairs and rebuilding had take more than two years for it had not only been a matter of locating the quarry, but enlisting the aid of the dwarves to protect the quarry site from Tarthuns. It was another year after that before the Krilo learned enough from the dwarves about working stone to adequately work the site and produce the kind of stones they could use in the temple.
Unfortunately, the quarry was located several miles to the west. This meant all the stones had to be brought to the temple and stacked here for use. As there were no horses or beasts of burden in the valley, that left the Krilo doing the heavy lifting.
The mind of a Krilo was vastly stronger than their arms and legs ever were. Give one of them a complex mathematical equation and they will work it out faster than any other race, except for perhaps the oldest and wisest of the elves who lived far off upon the first continent. However, set a group of Krilo to a handcart loaded with hundreds of pounds of stone and you may as well ask them to push a mountain out of the way using their hands.
To say it was a slow process wouldn’t even begin to describe it.
Then there was Greeves. He was an old man, in his early nineties in fact. He had been there when the Krilo first found the temple, and he was put in charge of the reclamation project from the beginning. He never left the temple. He slept there. He ate there. He lived for the work going in inside the complex. On top of that, Greeves was extremely meticulous in his work. Instead of allowing all of the rubble to be cleared from the site at once, and then ordering repairs, he insisted that every single item found inside had to be catalogued, studied, and archived. Even just working on the central building of the complex took more than fifteen years to clear and rebuild structurally.
Up until last summer, Kamal could still see the scorch marks on the stone walls from some sort of fire that had consumed the original wooden pillars inside the main hall and caused the roof to collapse. Those pillars had been replaced by columns of stone that the Krilo hewed from the quarry to make sure the structure wouldn’t be so vulnerable to fires again. The roof had been entirely rebuilt. The floor had been finished two years ago, and the walls had finally been repaired and had the defaced stones replaced last summer.
It had taken that long because inside the collapsed room, Greeves had found numerous items and trinkets. Each of them were now archived as he wished. There had also been several skeletal remains in the rubble, and the proper burial process took additional time. Still, even after all of that, the workers were only now being allowed to set their chisels to the stone walls inside to carve the words of the Krilo prayers and other symbols as Greeves deemed necessary.
Beyond that first chamber, the other rooms and corridors were in varying stages of excavation. Those that had been filled with more curious items took longer. As far as he knew, the western-most corridor was still untouched even now.
Still, Kamal enjoyed being here better than working on his Taish handwriting. Excavating was a work his hands could do without cramping or failing, and Greeves wasn’t all that bad as long as he wasn’t in the same space you were working in.
Kamal nodded to himself as he scanned the outside of the temple complex once more before continuing toward it. Today was going to be a good day. He could feel it.
The main building would have been an impressive structure all by itself, even without the other corridors and chambers. It was set up from the ground with a sturdy foundation of stone so that a series of stone steps led from the ground up to the entrance. Everything was made of white stone that sparkled in the sunlight and seemed to almost glow in the light of the moon. The apex of the peaked roof over the top was taller than any oak tree Kalam had seen in the valley, and easily could have fit ten Krilo men stacked atop each other inside with room to spare. The entrance itself had no doors as such, instead it was an opening in the stone wall that stretched wide enough that even when Weys and Kamal stood side by side with their arms stretched out, only one of them could touch the side of the entrance. Outside the entrance there were six massive columns that held up the overhang of the roof so that there was a kind of stone porch between the stairs and the entrance. Three columns were evenly spaced to the left of the entrance, and three more to the right.
If Kamal and Weys both put their arms around one column, they could just barely interlock their fingers together. To say they were massive wouldn’t even begin to describe them. Four of the columns were actually new. The previous ones had all cracked during an earthquake that the dwarves had said occurred about a year before they arrive.
Cutting the stones for the new columns had taken a lot of work from the Krilo. Greeves rejected the first two sets of columns because they were not a precise match to the existing two columns that had survived the quake.
The seven stairs leading from the stone patio to the front entrance had been repaired as well, and cleared of noxious weeds and thick tree roots that had wormed through the slabs lain into the ground. Now it almost looked like a proper temple, except for the fact that there was nearly a quarry’s worth of stone stacked fifty yards in front of the building. Many Krilo worked the stones here at this site, cutting them and shaping them to fit into holes, or polishing them to Greeves’ satisfaction before they could be used to build new walls entirely.
Kamal was always impressed by how large the main chamber was as well. Not only was the ceiling incredibly high up, requiring scaffolds and ladders to reach and work on, but the area of the hall was enough to fit perhaps five or six hundred men in. Three long corridors branched off from the back of this hall. One went straight back, while the other two stretched out to the sides. Each corridor connected with a chamber much like the main hall, except the auxiliary chambers were roughly half the size of this hall, and each one uncovered so far had been filled with various tribal items, and some had carvings along the walls. Additionally, none of the other chamber had outer doors, or columns except for the second cahmber at the end of the southern corridor. It had a doorway that opened into the interior of the triangle formed by the temple structre. The grounds there looked as though once there had been a garden space, with some stone planters and a well still visible today, but it was terribly overgrown with all kinds of vegetation. Many Krilo were working on recreating the garden inside the temple grounds, trying to beautify the space and make it a more appropriate temple for Interis Aruhat. This was still an ongoing process that Greeves was as fastidious about as any other area of t
he temple, but it was starting to come along nicely.
From the garden space as well as from the outside, one could see that the other chambers also had carvings on the outer walls. They were still being cleaned and repaired or remodeled to fit Greeves’ vision for the temple, but they were fascinating finds. Whoever had built this complex originally had spared no effort in creating it.
As the central corridor to the south ended with the chamber that led to the garden, that meant that only the two corridors that stretched back from the eastern-most and western-most chambers went all the way back to the final chamber which stood at the pinnacle of the triangle in the southern-most point of the temple. From the looks of the outer wall of the final corridor, it was a size between the smaller chambers and the main hall, but there would be no way to measure it for sure until the Krilo could reach it.
However fascinating the outside of the temple was, the inside was even more intriguing for Kamal. Inside, he had found many symbols of a wolf. Often times the depictions were of a mother wolf giving milk to young wolves, or sometimes to a large human baby, and other times the wolf was depicted as just a face and eyes. Kamal had always found it interesting, because the wolf was not a symbol for any of the Old Gods. He had often pondered who might have built such an elaborate temple to a wolf, but he had never uncovered the answer to that mystery.
He knew it couldn’t have been the Tarthuns. Though it was certain they had interest in the building, the temple had been abandonded when the Krilo arrived. Furthermore, not only had he read in his books that Tarthuns were irreligious heathens, but he never observed any of them perform any sort of religious ceremony either, nor had the dwarves.
Whoever had so painstakingly created the symbols in this temple must have been gone long before the Krilo arrived, but no one seemed to know who they were for sure because the pagan symbols of the wolf and the tribal artifacts found inside the temple did not seem to match the complexity and intricacy of the other symbols that seemed to be dedicated to the Old Gods.
Kamal went into the temple and looked around at the main chamber, as he always did, admiring the work that his people were doing to make this building something that Interis Aruhat would be proud of. Etchings in the wall were being carved even as he watched. Some of them were pictures, but most were written passages of Taish runes. His fingers started to twitch just looking at one of his fellow Krilos carving the runes. He couldn’t even master the runes on paper. He dared not imagine how difficult it was to carve into stone. At least a mistake on paper could be thrown away. A mistake on stone… well either it was chiseled out, or a new stone had to be brought in.
“Ah, Kamal, come here,” a familiar voice called out to his mind.
Kamal turned to see Greeves, a tall man in his early nineties with a gray beard that framed his mouth and rather bright yellow teeth. He was waving emphatically, which was about as close to being ordered around in the temple as a Krilo worker could get unless, Kamal supposed, he made a mistake while archiving some found artifact or perhaps carving Taish runes into the stone wall.
“Yes, Master Greeves, what can I do for you?” He asked through the mental connection as he approached him.
“Not for me, my dear boy, for Interis Aruhat.”
“Yes, of course,” Kamal said. Along with the yellow teeth came a distinct, foul odor of decay whenever Greeves opened his mouth. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue for telepathic people, but Greeves had a habit of breathing through his mouth. So, even though his words came to Kamal’s mind, his breath came out hot and rancid. It was highly uncharacteristic of the Krilo to neglect proper hygiene, but Greeves seemed not to care in the least. He directed the work at the temple, and was there day and night. He was a pleasant enough fellow, if not a bit odd, but Kamal always had a hard time supressing the urge to pinch his nose and make a scene of it to get the point across when around the man.
After all, what good was higher intelligence if one didn’t have the wisdom to employ it properly?
Kamal always managed to refrain, however. For the sake of not dishonoring his elder, he put on a polite face and managed to nod and smile, albeit turning his nose away from Greeves just enough to guarantee at least a hint of fresh air. After all, the work he was accomplishing on the temple was nothing short of spectacular, so a small amount of oddity or eccentricity was to be expected, especially at Greeves’ age.
“We have made a breakthrough, quite literally, actually. The western corridor leading into the final chamber has been cleared enough to send in a worker. I was going to send Olmin, but seeing as you have arrived—”
“I’ll go!” Kamal exclaimed before Greeves could even finish the sentence.
“Excellent. The tools are on a wooden box in the corridor. You will also find an oil lamp there as well. Do be careful with the lamp. Serifous Bogmar dropped a lamp last night and set us back a whole day in the eastern corridor. He made it out all right, no injuries, but it marred the stone terribly and cracked one of the slabs in the floor.”
Greeves shook his head and turned around as he began to talk out loud to himself, berating Serifous for being so clumsy.
Kamal smiled that the old man would choose to think to himself out loud, and talk to others through the mental connection. Yet another one of Greeves’ eccentricities. He then walked through the main chamber toward the western corridor. He passed by several workers polishing stone here, cleaning spaces for carvings there, and some who were laying new stones in the floor.
In the first smaller chamber he came to, the floor was almost entirely dirt. There had been stone here before, but Greeves had ordered a mosaic tile inlay depicting the stars. Apparently, the entire room would be painted as if one stood in the vastness of space and was looking at Terramyr from the outside. Terramyr would be painted in a mural along the northern wall, with stars and the sun to go around that and stars everywhere else. Currently there was a ten square foot section of floor that had small pieces set inside a frame of wood. Kamal looked down at the work and smiled.
Two Krilo women were busy laying in more small tiles of many different colors. Only one of them bothered to look up and acknowledge him as he walked by and then exited the room.
The next stretch of corridor was like the first. Several workers were busy with their tasks. Some were setting sconces into the stone in order to give light later on. Others were replacing stones that had fallen out of one wall due to a large oak tree growing into the wall and splitting it with its roots.
The next chamber was mostly cluttered with piles of rubble. No workers were in this room yet. They would get to this after the other spaces leading to it had been finished. For now, it was enough to organize the rubble in such a way that there was a path leading to the back of the room where the final corridor was.
The light was dim here, as there weren’t any lamps in the last chamber and only a faint glow ahead of him. Kamal let his eyes adjust to the darkness while keeping the distant orange glow in view ahead of him as he walked. He snaked through the corridor, slowly skirting by piles of rock or broken timbers that had fallen from the ceiling above. However, the deeper he went, the more the rubble began to change. Instead of broken wall and ceiling fragments, he started to see rough stones caked with dirt, heaps of gravel,hunks of cut logs and branches, and other bits of rubble. It almost looked as if the last half of the corridor had been purposefully packed to close it off.
He saw only one worker at the end of the corridor, a young man by the name of Hermt, who was busy trying to make the opening into the final chamber a bit wider. This was made difficult by the fact that there were large piles of stones and what looked like bits of mortar, as if someone had tried to make a wall. This, coupled with the kind of rubble he saw earlier told him that his suspicion was correct. Whoever was last in this corridor had sealed it off for some reason. To make matters even worse, a pair of cedar trees had grown up from the floor just behind the new wall of stone, and blocked off the entrance except for a skinny space
between then about half way up to the ceiling.
“You’ll have to climb up and then slip between the trees,” Hermt said telepathically. “It’s a bit of a squeeze, but it’s open in the inside.”
Kamal nodded. A bit of a squeeze was an understatement. The space he was supposed to go through was not even a foot wide.
“I’ll hand you the lamp after you are through to the other side. Anders already cleared the first little bit on the inside. He said there is a lot of stuff in the last chamber, so just take it slow. You know how Greeves’ likes his lists and catalogues. Also, once you’re in, you’ll have to shout to talk with me. I won’t be able to see you so our mental connection won’t work.”
“All right,” Kamal said aloud. He climbed up the pile of rocks and then reached his hands around one of the cedar trees as best he could. He stopped suddenly when he realized there was a carving in the bark facing him. It was a symbol, or rune perhaps, that he had never seen before.
“That’s why Greeves is letting us go in the last chamber without clearing this wall and cutting down the trees.” Hermt said. “No one knows what the symbols on the trees are. Also, it appears as though they grew far too fast, given that they have pushed through a solid stone floor and formed a nearly perfect barrier to the final chamber. Greeves thinks it might be some sort of pagan magic, so watch yourself in there.”
Pagan magic. Just what he needed to hear. Then again, if Anders had gone in without any harm, then perhaps he would discover something new. That would make his father and mother happier than if he had perfect Taish handwriting, not to mention he was still intrigued by secrets. As he pulled himself up, he slipped once when the bark came loose, but he regained his footing and then reached around for a better hand hold. He went in leading with his left arm and then his head. He slithered in, worming his body back and forth to gain leverage until he was through up to his rump. Then he realized that there wasn’t anything immediately on the other side. Just a drop down several feet to the floor. He angled himself up and then slipped his rump through while counterbalancing with his legs. Then he pulled in one leg and slid down the other side of the cedar. His hands got a bit roughed up, but not enough to break the skin, so he counted it as a successful entry.