I was about to ask it to expand a little on that alarming notion, but Cherubael suddenly surged forward in the blackness ahead of us. I saw the flash of its light, a laser discharge.
It came back, blood steaming off its talons.
They're hunting for us/ it said.
I have seen wonders in my life. Horrors too. I have witnessed vistas and spectacles that have cowed my mind and dwarfed my imagination.
None of them compared to the mausoleum under Ghiil.
I cannot say anything about its size except to use inadequate words like vast, huge…
There was nothing to give any scale. We came out of the black tunnels into a black abyss that was to all intents much the same except that the blackness that had been walls was now immaterial. Tiny, scattered specks of light, dozens of them, illuminated small parts of the face of some impossible structure, as dark and cyclopean as the eternal wall ancient philosophers used to believe surrounded creation. The edge of the universe. The side of the casket an ancient god had wrought to keep reality in.
Which god, I wouldn't like to say.
It was warm and still. Not even the air moved. The dots of light showed small parts of a vast design etched onto the face of the mausoleum. Hints of spirals, lines and swirling runes.
This was where the warped ones had laid their dead king to rest.
This was the tomb of Yssarile, over which Ghiil had been raised in the strange eons before man.
The sight even stunned Cherubael to silence. I hoped its lack of comment was down to awe. I had a nasty feeling it had more to do with reverence.
Or dread.
Gustine lost it for a while. His mind refused to deal with what his eyes were seeing. He began to weep inconsolably, and fell to his knees. It was a dismal sight to see such a robust, fearless man reduced in such a way.
I let him be as long as I dared, but the sounds of his weeping carried in the dark and seemed alarmingly loud. Some of the tiny lights on the face of the mausoleum began to move, as if descending.
I took hold of the sobbing fighter and tried to use my will to calm him.
It didn't work. No persuasion could anchor the edges of his sanity where it had come adrift.
I had to be harsher. I numbed his mind with a deep psychic probe, blocking his terror out and freezing his thoughts but for the most basic instincts and biological functions.
We approached the mausoleum across a plain of lightless stone. The further we got, the further away I realised the structure actually was. It was evidently even bigger than I had first realised.
I had Gustine switch off his lamp pack. We simply followed the dots of light up ahead. I suggested that Cherubael might like to warn us if the darkness around us became anything other than a flat table of stone. A chasm, for example.
The only advantage in the mindless scale of the place as 1 could see it was that the enemy would have a hard job finding us. There was so much space to search.
After what seemed like an hour, we were still a very long way from the tomb. I checked my chronometer to determine precisely how long it had been since we accessed the interior of Ghiil, but it had stopped. Stopped isn't right exactly. It was still running and beating seconds, but the time was not recording in any way.
I recalled the clock in Aemos's suite, chiming to mark out times that had no meaning.
As we closed on our destination, I was able to make more sense of the lights. Tiny dots, they had seemed, casting little fields of light.
They were massive lamps, high power, of the sort used to light landing fields or military camps. Mounted on suspensor platforms, they floated at various points in front of the face of the mausoleum, lighting up surface details in patches of glare the size of amphitheatres. There were forty-three of the platforms, each with its own lamp. 1 counted them.
There were men on the platforms, human figures. Glaw's men, I was sure, some of them mercenary guards, most of them adepts of arcane lore enlisted to his cause.
As we watched, some of the platforms drifted slowly or adjusted the sweep of their light.
