The next passage spat them out into a space that stole the breath from their lungs. Not even the magelights reached the vault overhead, lost somewhere in the endless dark above them. Stalactites the size of cathedral spires hung unseen, glimpsed only by stray reflections, pale as broken fangs in the mountain's maw. Beneath that bottomless dome of underground sky the temple looked like an impossible toy of the gods, a black mass stretched along the cave's axis, its sloping roof stepped like frozen lava. Rows of reliefs crowded the facade. Women with many arms, garlands of severed heads, crowns wrought from stylised tongues of flame, and above the entrance gaped a bas-relief of a monstrous, headless, many-armed figure frozen mid-slaughter.
"That's a goddess," Jones murmured, peering at the defaced relief above the entrance.
"You think it's Kali?" Jean asked.
"Looks like it."
"And what's this?" He laid his palm against smooth white marble. "This stone isn't local. Someone added it later."
Opposite the entrance stood a monument of white stone. A rounded, bowl-shaped base from whose centre rose a smooth column, polished to a matte sheen, with a rounded crown. Against the black basalt of the temple it stood like a shard of ice driven into coal.
"That's a cock. Somebody put up a statue of his cock. Now there's self-regard for you."
"Lady Sophie." Jones reddened. "Though I won't deny the resemblance."
"'Lady Sophie,'" she mimicked, running a finger along the ruined face of one of the many-armed figures. "Cum-stain! Piss-flaps! Cunt-rag!" she shouted into the darkness overhead. "'Such language, young lady, underground temples are no place for you, young lady,'" she went on, imitating someone's nagging voice.
"I recognise Izabella," Jean chuckled. "But go easy on your mother."
"This, ah... stele was clearly added later. Same time they knocked the heads off the statues, I'd wager," Jones observed.
"If Mother had her way, I'd never have set foot in the Academy. I'd be bouncing babies by now," Sophie muttered.
She leaned closer to the base of the monument. Cold radiated from it.
"'For this is not the spring of love, it is the winter of discontent, standing at the shore of lake of fire.'"
Sophie winced as though she had a toothache.
"Why did the ancients have to put every word backwards? My brain boils before I get halfway through."
"All the same, that gave me gooseflesh," Jean said.
"Speaking of which," Jones said quietly, still studying the ruined heads on the frieze. "When we get back, I want to introduce you to some people. They're not afraid to poke around where 'decent folk' won't go either."
Sophie smiled, just the corner of her mouth.
"The less decent, the more delightful, Monsieur Jones," she said. "I can hardly wait."
"The entrance is here, I think. Come on." Jean waved them forward, and they followed him inside.
The expedition entered the hall. The first thing the magelights picked out of the darkness was bone. Thousands of human bones carpeting the stone floor. Ribs, vertebrae, femurs lay in heaps, pale in the half-light. Clothing had rotted to nothing long ago, weapons had crumbled to rust and dust in the damp. Only the remains, polished smooth by time, gleamed against the stone.
Luis, walking ahead of Sophie, recoiled.
"My lady..." His voice broke to a whisper. "That's..."
One of the porters dropped to his knees, clutching the amulet at his throat and whispering words that made no sense. Another pressed a hand to his mouth, gagging.
The head porter crouched, picked up a femur, turned it over in his hands, and flung it aside, snatching his hand back in superstitious dread.
"Not a single skull," he whispered.
In the centre of the hall, where logic said a statue of Kali ought to stand, a strange object turned slowly in the air. A vast crystalline torus, faceted like a gemstone. Thousands of flat, mirror-bright planes covered its surface, each one catching and refracting the magelight, creating the illusion of infinite depth. Now and then something flickered inside the torus, shadows and reflections of things that were not in the hall.
The object floated at the height of a man, rotating around an invisible axis. With each turn the mirror facets shifted into new configurations, and for an instant vague shapes surfaced in their depths. Sometimes a face. Sometimes something like a landscape.
The air around the torus shimmered with heat that wasn't there, though the hall itself remained cool. The magelights cast strange shadows on the walls. The shadows moved on their own, reaching out from the deep toward the expedition as the darkness itself began to wake.
Jones approached the pedestal beneath the torus and brushed centuries of dust from an inscription. He squinted at the ancient glyphs, and his voice faltered as he began to read.
"'I have harnessed the stars...'" he read softly. "'The end and infinity... I am, become death, the Destroyer of Worlds.'"
A chill walked Sophie's spine. Jones strengthened the lights, letting them open up the bone-strewn floor as far as the eye could reach.
"Damn," she breathed, looking around the hall. "What happened here?"
Luis backed toward the entrance, unable to tear his eyes from the bones.
"We shouldn't be here, messieurs," he swallowed hard. "This... this isn't right."
The magelights began dying, one by one. Something unseen was devouring their magic.
And then they heard the Voice. It pierced straight into consciousness, into the marrow, turning bone to jelly.
"More have come... More skulllsss..."
Darkness took shape. Something intangible but lethally real crashed down upon the expedition.
"Everyone back! To the exit!" Jones barked.
The porters bolted for the entrance, but the darkness had already sealed it. A wall of black stood between them and escape.
"Berit, barrier around the people!" Jones snatched a fistful of coins.
The familiar flung his hands wide and rushed to the huddle of porters. A glowing dome flared around the group. Jones crushed three coins, pouring energy into the shield.
The dome blazed brighter. The men pressed together inside it, staring at the darkness surrounding them on every side.
But the shield was cracking. The darkness bore down on it like water on thin ice.
"Professor, she's too strong!" Berit was holding the dome by main force.
"Hold!" Jones grabbed coin after coin, fourth, fifth, sixth. "Sophie, Jean, to me!"
The crystals flared and crumbled to dust. A wave of cold white light surged from the professor, shoving the darkness back a few paces.
But the darkness was moving. It flowed across the floor, up the walls, around the dome of light. One of the porters standing at the edge screamed and vanished.
"No!" Jones poured in more energy.
Useless. The darkness wormed through the barrier and out the other side. Another man vanished. Then another.
"This won't work, Henry!" Jean shouted.
"Run!" Jones spun to face them.
"Run where?" Sophie said quietly, looking at the darkness closing in from every side.
Jones crushed his last handful of coins. The crystals flared and crumbled.
"Then I'll give you a chance!" He hurled everything into one final blast.
The flash blinded them all. A wave of light drove the darkness back for a heartbeat.
In that single second of silence Jean turned to the obelisk. The inscriptions glowed in the dying light.
I am, become death.
And then the darkness returned. It swallowed the remaining porters. Berit. The dome collapsed.