Jean met Artyom at the airport in Zurich. All problems at customs were quickly settled, and the guys moved forward towards the village house of our blacksmith, where, gloriously "pogudev", fell into a coma deep deep in the morning. And you thought that such a worthy and enthusiastic history of the guys will start right away to the point? Too bad. The guys at us have appeared romanticists, and to what romance the champagne of vodka in the company of the friend is alien? So it turned out that only by the evening of the second day they were able to walk, in an embrace with a terrible headache, to the place of excavation. The next ten days it is especially meaningless to describe, since the time dragged on quite monotonously, and represented some kind of organic symbiosis from alcoholic discussions, excavations and comatose dreams. By the end of the eleventh day they shoveled the quite impressive pit and were able to completely open a small building, which, apparently, was the entrance to a certain underground hall, as the ceiling of a more massive structure said, which turned out to be two meters deeper. Judging by all the external signs, it was some sort of medieval family crypt. We decided to enter the next day.
"Why? I needed a quiet place to work.
- And we have that, so you were prevented from killing the cuirass?
- Yes, they interfered. Do you remember how I ran around the authorities for the last year?
"Of course, only I still do not quite understand what exactly happened there. "
- It's simple - I tried to legalize to get a bank account and work normally with clients from countries of rotten capitalism.
"I remember that you left here almost immediately after that fuss. "
Right? Just there, legalized as an individual entrepreneur, I got a terrible amount of hemorrhoids and serious losses in finance, that is, I realized that now I'm working for food. You understand it's funny.
"So they tore it up? "
- Yes, exactly, and these clever men turned out to be so weak mind that they tore more than they could. But now they are on horseback - they do not get anything from me at all. And if they had smaller appetites, they could continue eating.
- I had orders from Germany and Britain, and customers wanted guarantees, as the amounts were rather big. It was absolutely wild to them that some master in far-away Russia is engaged in the manufacture of such high-quality handicrafts on the sly.
- Okay, let's not talk about sad things. What do you think of our find? I, frankly, find it difficult to comment on it. According to the style of architecture, it should refer to the early Middle Ages, maybe even to the Viking Age, and settle much further north. And then - no family vaults were built in those days, it was not accepted.
- Yes, I am also completely confused - no understanding of where it came from here. Especially since there were no locks and large settlements near those times. Okay, let's sleep. Tomorrow will be a hard day.
When they neatly opened the door in the morning and entered the room, they almost squealed with delight - judging by the thick layer of dust on the floor, this room had not been stepped by a man's foot for several hundred years. Can anybody imagine? The center of Europe and such finds! Wearing gas masks, taking flashlights and neatly descending the spiral staircase of stone, the guys got into a spacious hall with an area of about a thousand square meters. It was evenly studded with completely marble columns that were not decorated, supporting the grid of arched vaults. Between them the entire hall was filled with granite tables on which corpses that had been drained by time were lying in full parade. Almost all of the deceased were dressed in armor, and only a few are wrapped in pieces of decayed rags. It was embarrassing. The fact is that in the Christian tradition to bury with weapons is not accepted, and judging by the symbolism, this crypt was just that. In general - a completely incomprehensible and inexplicable phenomenon. At the far end of the hall was a free platform with a round bronze table of a strange kind in the center. While Jean was interested in picking chain mail on the nearest corpse, studying the shape of the rivets, Artem moved to this strange place. The table was in diameter of all centimeters thirty and had in the center a round support with a small notch in the form of an inverted pyramid. Through the dust, some letters appeared, so he gently cleared the pad and was able to read a passage of the phrase in Latin: "Animus intra manium ", the rest of the edge is destroyed along with the inscription, probably from time. A completely strange meaning, which, apparently, was some esoteric formula, alas, partially destroyed, in Russian it could be read as: "A living soul inside the soul of the deceased ". In general, it is completely incomprehensible, as, actually, and in general the purpose of this strange structure of cast bronze. After thinking about it, Artem began to circumnavigate the table, examining it for advice or other interesting details. Something rolled beneath the foot. He bent down and pulled out of the thick layer of dust a pretty decent polished piece of lapis lazuli or a similar egg-shaped stone. From one end this piece had a ledge in the shape of a pyramid. The first thought, as you guessed it, was to put this stone on a stand and evaluate the composition. Artem blew dust from the stand, looked back, looked at Jean's watchful and interested look, who, after neglecting the study of chain mail, watched Artem's actions, and inserted the stone into the hollow. Then he took three steps away from the stand, smiled and, momentarily frozen, collapsed to the floor. And the stone on the stand behind him sprang to the bronze surface of a handful of bright blue dust. Jean ran to Artem, felt his pulse and began to convulsively massage his heart. But it was too late - our hero left for the country of eternal hunting with a smile on his lips.