However Looks Away shook his head. “Not a chance, old sport. See there? And there? Those rocks are held in place by loose dirt and some quartz splinters. It’s all as fragile as a house of cards.” To emphasize his point he picked up a fist-sized rock and walked backward, guiding Grey with him by an outstretched arm. “Stand back.”
He tossed the rock to a midpoint on the pile. He didn’t throw it very hard, but the rock struck one of the crystal splinters and suddenly the whole wall began to vibrate. Chunks of broken stone ground together and a dozen boulders as big as cooking pots bounced down toward them. Both men dove for cover as the whole gully shook and grumbled. Dust belched out from between clefts in the stone. They waited until it subsided before they stood up again.
“Damn,” murmured Grey. “You’ve got a good eye.”
“For rocks, at least,” said Looks Away with a shrug. He turned away from the blocked trail and looked back the way they had come. “Well… there’s nothing for it. Come on, dear fellow, quick march.”
With that he set off down the left-hand trail. Grey followed. They reached the point where they’d fallen and Grey glanced covertly up, still looking for that pale face. Now, though, even the firelight was gone. He wasn’t sure if that was a comfort or not.
The left-hand trail wormed its way through the shattered landscape for miles. Grey figured they walked two or maybe three miles down there in the fractured gully. He was exhausted and the walk seemed to be draining what little reserves he had left. There was almost nothing left in the canteen, and neither man wanted to drink from the infrequent lines of water running down through mossy cracks in the wall. The water smelled of rot and sickness.
Then, with a start, Grey realized that one of the reasons the journey seemed so tiring is that they were no longer walking along a flat bottom. The ground had begun to tilt upward. Looks Away nodded when Grey pointed this out, clearly having reached that conclusion already.
Within minutes the incline became more pronounced and within another quarter mile was rising sharply. It was slow and ponderous work to climb that hill, and they had to press their palms against the nearly smooth sides of the cliff to steady themselves and push their weary bodies upward.
Time seemed to lose all meaning.
The blue fungi grew thicker and its light intensified until it was as bright as a cloudy afternoon. Grey could have read by that glow. It made it easier to pick out their trail and to find what few handholds were available, but Grey was sure he would have preferred less light. The glow revealed one of the terrible secrets of this cavern.
The path was littered with bones. Many of them. Some were clearly ancient and had withered to dry, cracked relics; others were far too fresh for comfort and still glistened with scraps of meat and strings of tendon. Some of the bones were those of animals. Grey saw fish skeletons and the skull of a horse. They walked between the curved ribs of some vast thing that must have been as tall as a house and as long as a locomotive.
“What the hell is this?” he demanded, slapping his hand against one of the huge ribs. “I’ve seen elephants and this is ten times bigger.”
Looks Away shook his head. “I’ve seen drawings of bones like these,” he said, “but I don’t recall the name. Look, see there? That line of vertebrae? Lord above what a neck it had. And there, the skull? How delicate for so ponderous a beast.”
Grey saw where he was pointing and shook his head. “No way a brute like that had a head this small.”
But the skull lay there as if to mock him, positioned in perfect alignment to the remnants of its spine. Worse still were the marks on both skull and neck bones. Deep groves that could only have come from some savage claw. Not even the hulking saber tooth could have made cuts that deep.
Clutching their weapons, they hurried on. Then the path whipsawed through a series of switchbacks, and in the third section there were many small boulders that had tumbled down from some quake. They appeared haphazard at first, but as the men approached it became immediately obvious that this was far from the case.
“Look,” whispered Grey, “those are stairs.”
Stairs they were indeed.
Although rough-hewn and covered with moss, they were far too orderly to have been the work of anything but a deliberate hand. The steps led upward for a hundred feet and then vanished around a sharp turn.
“You’re a rock expert,” whispered Grey, bending to examine the rocks, “how old are these stairs? Is this some ancient passage, maybe cut by Spanish missionaries or—?”
“No,” said Looks Away decisively. He ran his fingers along one edge and the moss peeled off easily. “Not a bit of it. This is mostly marble and it’s cut from the living rock. See there? The chisel marks haven’t had time to completely oxidize. No, old boy, I’d say these steps are less than ten years old.”
“Ten years, eh,” mused Grey. “And how long has it been since Aleksander Deray and Nolan Chesterfield set up shop hereabouts?”
Looks Away grunted, and then grinned. “Eleven years,” he said. “Give or take.”
“Give or take.”
They straightened and Grey put a booted foot on the bottom step. “Don’t know if you’re a gambling man, Looks, but I’ll give you twenty-to-one odds that I know who lives at the top of these steps.”
“That, my friend, is what I believe they call a sucker’s bet.”
“It is.”
They smiled at each other.
“Shall we pay our respects?” asked the Sioux.
“I believe we should,” agreed Grey. “It would be the neighborly thing to do.”
Without a further word they began climbing the stairs.
PART THREE
A Man of Wealth and Taste
Fear not death for the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal.
Chapter Sixty-Four
They went slowly, taking time because neither of them wanted to arrive at Deray’s door out of breath and unable to fight.
But the steps did not lead directly to a door.
It led instead to a gate.
They emerged from the stairway on a flat plane that Grey presumed was on the same level as the underground sea. The roof here was not as high, however, suggesting that they had reached one end of the massive cavern. The stalactites reached down like fangs above their heads, and stalagmites rose around them to complete the disturbing illusion. There was a rough natural wall of some dark stone that ran all the way across this end of the cavern, broken only in one spot. This gap, clearly the result of the same earthquake that had destroyed most of California, was bridged by a stout wall of blocks fitted neatly together and fixed with lines of cement. In the middle of the blocks a gate made from tall crystal spikes stood on end and was bound, turn and turn around, by massive iron bands set with huge rivets.
A set of new-looking steel railroad tracks ran past the gates and then curved away to run along the distant underground sea, heading opposite to where Chesterfield’s house lay. Halfway to the black waters sat a still and silent locomotive to which was coupled ten hopper cars laden with some cargo they could not identify and then twenty empty flatbed cars. No steam rose from the train’s chimney.
Grey ducked down behind a boulder and pulled Looks Away into the shadows beside him.
The crystal gates stood open.
But the gateway itself was not empty.
A line of men were walking in orderly lines from beyond the gate. Dozens and dozens of them.