They returned to the temple. They posted
the parrots as look outs while the rest of party began searching for any clues
to the whereabouts of the naga. They’d all hoped that Viola would know what to
do once they were inside the temple, but this time it was clear very quickly
that she didn’t.
Hardacre was able to
confirm that the rest of the temple matched very closely the Temple of all Gods
at Kinspit, except for the caryatid and the other ‘statues’. In the niches where, in the Kinspit temple, exquisite
statues of the gods sat, here there were only untouched blocks of marble,
eighteen of them. They inspected one closely, but it refused to be anything but
plain pure stone.
‘Unfinished?’ asked
Dom, squinting up to the top of the niche.
‘More likely, not
started’ said Hardacre, glancing up. He had taken a piece of paper out of his
pocket and he was studying it. He pulled
out a stubby pencil and wrote something on it, using one of the big pillars to
lean the paper on.
‘I think this whole
temple is a testament to what was to come’ whispered Kath, running her fingers
over the surface of the marble block ‘it seems that this is one of the places
where our world was fashioned’
‘They made the whole
world?’ asked Potentilla, ‘how did they do that?’
Viola gestured
towards the Quiena statue. Her voice was strained with fear and haste.
‘With a bit of help
from her and some extraordinary mage-craft, I suppose. Maybe they are one and
the same thing’
‘Nineteen gods and
only one of them identified’ said Dom, looking at Viola, ‘is that significant?’
‘…and nineteen
steps…’ said Kath
‘And that inscription
on the ruined building mentioned “Prime Nineteen”…’ said Dom
Viola nodded,
realising that she had forgotten all about the inscription. She supposed this
wasn’t surprising given the events that had crowded around her subsequently,
but she was annoyed with herself. Hardacre permitted himself a fleeting smile.
He held up his piece of paper and showed it to the others. It was the paper
that he had scribbled his Macrocephalos notes on. Under the circle labelled
‘nineteen’ he had, just a few seconds earlier, written ‘Klethropolis’ in his
neat hand.
Viola took the paper
from him and stared at it for what seemed to be an age. Then she handed it
back.
‘So, the naga here
guards prime nineteen, but I’m not sure that takes us any further. We still
don’t know what the primes are or where the guardian serpent is…’
‘Except’ said Dom,
eagerly, ‘it almost certainly has something to do with the number nineteen…’
There was a murmur of
agreement. Potentilla raced over to the
caryatid.
‘The nineteenth big pillar
is here… Maybe that’s what it means?’
‘It can’t just be the
caryatid’ said Kath, making a sceptical face, ‘wouldn’t that be too obvious?’
Potentilla pushed it
and prodded it, tried to twist it and tapped it all over. All she got for her
trouble was her friends tutting and murmuring, ‘don’t damage it’. She looked
mildly pained.
‘I think it was worth
a try’ she said, folding her arms. Dom murmured his support. He placed his
hands on her shoulders and guided her away from the caryatid. Her body was pleasantly
hot from her exertions and her irritation.
‘I wasn’t going to
damage it’
The others couldn’t
help but share a silent moment of amusement.
Even Potentilla could sense their gentle ridicule.
‘I’m sure there’s
something odd about that statue…’ she muttered
Viola smiled at her. The
lieutenant couldn’t help but smile back, even though Viola was, in effect,
telling her to shut up. Her annoyance flooded out of her. She shrugged and gave
Dom a squeeze. Viola could clearly see this but decided to let it pass.
They had all had
enough of the temple and so they walked out to the top of the steps leading up
to it. Viola sat down on the top step and stared back down across the city. One
by one the others sat down next to her, first Kath, then Hardacre, Dom and
finally Potentilla, furthest away.
‘Perhaps it is
somewhere obvious, though’ suggested Dom, ‘perhaps no-one cared about covering
things up in those days?’
‘If that were the
case then there’d just be a door somewhere, I suppose’ said Hardacre, ‘I’m
guessing that the one hand they had no desire to hide the entrance explicitly,
because it was no great secret, but that
on the other hand they were happy if it remained concealed from merely casual
visitors’
Dom got up and walked
along the step.
‘Could there be
something here on the nineteenth step?’ he asked
They searched for a
little while but there was nothing obvious. Progress was slow, however, as
Hardacre was very wearied and could only cast the simplest diagnostikos spells. After that the most logical thing seemed to be
to search the pillars along the colonnade that ran around three sides of the
outside walls of the temple.
They counted from the
first pillar on the left hand side. They stopped at the nineteenth pillar and
were surprised and delighted to find that it was less robust than the others and
that it rang faintly hollow. Potentilla pushed against it from all possible
directions and it shifted slightly. She pushed a lot harder but it didn’t seem
to want to move. She glanced quizzically up at Kath who came over and inspected
the pillar very closely. Eventually, having combed every inch of it that she
could reach, she found something. She pointed at a tiny hole at breast height.
‘It’s a key hole, but
I don’t think we have the key.’ She couldn’t help but stare at Viola, who frowned
and shook her head emphatically.
‘I don’t have it. Where would I have found it?’ Realising that
these seemed a bit peevish, she continued, ’ Perhaps you could try your Dwarven
Magic rod?’
Now it was Kath’s
turn to be mildly irritated. Her hand had gone automatically to her bag, but
she stopped herself with a little sigh.
‘What do you think it
is… some sort of all-purpose cosmic screwdriver? All this stuff pre-dates
Dwarven Magic by thousands of years ’
‘Same fabricator,
though…’ said Hardacre, ‘so maybe…’.
They all waited for
Kath’s next move. After some more wordless grumbling she opened up her bag and
fumbled for the rod. Once she had found it she held it up in front of the
keyhole. She knew what they wanted her to do next, but she really didn’t want
to do it. She feared the effect of saying those names in this ancient place.
They waited, with no-one
willing to say anything. Bit by bit the suspense became unbearable; Kath held
the rod next to the dark hole and whispered as softly as she could the trigger
words: Ophia, Quiena. She was right about the words –even here, on
the outside of the temple, they filled the space like a huge yell. Dom jumped involuntarily. However, nothing
happened.
‘Wow, that was
amazingly loud!’ he said, ‘is that part of the trigger spell?’
Kath shook her head
sadly, and slid the rod back into the special pocket that she had had sewn into
the bag. She took three steps away from the pillar. Her voice was back to
normal.
‘We need to find the
key’
‘But where should we
look?’ asked Hardacre
Potentilla grinned.
She gestured back into the temple.
‘It must be in that Quiena statue’
Before anyone could
stop her she rushed back into the temple. No-one moved; they had all felt
slightly discomforted by the force of Kath’s incantation and seemed to be
temporarily rooted to the spot. Before they knew it Potentilla had returned
clutching something and grinning even more widely. She gave her discovery to
Kath.
‘I did try to tell you
– I knew that there must be something hidden somewhere inside it…’
There was a
collective noise that could have been interpreted as contrition. Potentilla was
too delighted to notice such unimportant things.
Kath held the object
up to inspect it closely. It was a green straw, less than a half a finger’s
width in diameter and no more than two inches long. It was hollow in the middle
and it felt to Kath like a tiny stub of a bamboo pole. On its side was written,
in a substance of a much darker green than the rest of the straw, the Archaic
Elven numeral ith. It looked like an extremely
easy thing to lose. It was obvious that
it would fit snuggly in the keyhole.
‘Shall I?’ she asked,
but didn’t wait for an answer.
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