He did not crawl the last thirty feet to the door, but he walked hunched over, face lowered, palms down and extended, ready to crawl.
Inside the single huge room under the dome, marble steps rose to a series of mezzanines—each in turn connected to the next mezzanine by another marble staircase—that lined the interior of the inward curving dome for a hundred levels, a hundred stories, until mist and distance above obscured the apex of the dome itself. What had appeared like tiny apertures in the dome from the cablecar during the approach and from the eiffelbahn tower—hardly more than decorative elements in the white marble—now proved to be hundreds of perspex windows that sent shafts of light down to illuminate the rich-bound books with slowly moving squares and rectangles and trapezoids of brightness.
“How long do you think it would take you to sigl all that?” asked Prospero, leaning on his staff and turning in a circle to take in the many mezzanines of books.
Harman opened his mouth to speak and then shut it. Weeks?
Months? Even moving from book to book, just setting his palm in place long enough to see the golden words move down his fingers and arms, it might take years to sigl this library. Finally he said, “You told me that the functions didn’t work in and around the eiffelbahn. Have the rules changed?”
“We shall see,” said the magus. He moved deeper into the dome, his staff tapping the white marble and the sound echoing up and around the acoustically perfect dome.
Harman realized that it was warm in this place. He pulled back the thermskin hood and gloves.
The interior of the domed building was broken into discrete spaces, if not actual rooms, by a maze of white marble screens that rose only eight feet high and were not a complete barrier to sight because of their latticeworked, filigreed construction and countless elegant oval, heart-and leaf-shaped openings. Harman noticed that the walls around the base of the dome up to a height of forty feet or so, where the first mezzanine began, were completely covered with carved designs of flowers, vines, elaborate and impossible plants, all brightened by the presence of inlaid jewels. So were the marble screens. Harman set his hand against one of the marble partitions as Prospero led the way through the maze—and it was a real maze—and he realized that anywhere he could set his hand, it would cover two or three of the designs at once, that there would always be several precious stones under his fingers. Some of the flower designs were less than an inch square and looked to contain fifty or sixty tiny inlays.
“What are these rocks?” asked Harman. His people had enjoyed wearing precious stones for decoration, baubles always fetched by the robotic servitors, but he’d never wondered where they came from.
“These… rocks …” said Prospero, “include agate, jasper, lapis lazuli, bloodstone, and cornelians—there are more than thirty-five varieties of cornelian in this simple little carnation leaf where I set my hand on this screen, do you see?”
Harman saw. The place made him dizzy. Trapezoids of light moving on the west wall below the books made the marble sparkle, gleam, and shimmer from the thousands of precious stones inlaid there.
“What is this place?” asked Harman. He realized that he was whispering.
“It was built as a mausoleum… a tomb,” said the magus, sweeping around another junction of white marble screens and leading the way to the center of the great place as if the maze had yellow arrows painted on the floor. They stopped before an arched entrance to an inner rectangle at the center of the maze of hundreds of screens. “Can you read this stele, Harman of Ardis?”
Harman peered at it in the milky light. The letters in the marble were carved strangely—they were swirly and elaborate rather than the straight lines he was used to from books—but it was written in Standard World English.
“Read it aloud,” said the magus.
“ ‘Enter with awe the illustrious sepulchre of Khan Ho Tep, Lord of Asia and Protector of Earth, and his bride and beloved Lias Lo Amumja, adored by all the world. She left this transient world on the fourteenth night of the month of Rahab-Septem in the year of the Khanate 987. She and her Lord dwell now in the starry Heaven and watch over you who enter here.’ ”
“What do you think?” asked Prospero, standing under the elaborate arch where the center of the maze opened to the yet-unseen interior.
“Of the inscription or this place?”
“Both,” said the magus.
Harman rubbed his chin and cheek, feeling the stubble there. “This place is… wrong. Too big. Too rich. Out of scale. Except for the books.”
Prospero laughed and the noise echoed and then re-echoed. “I agree with you, Harman of Ardis. This place was stolen—the idea, the design, the inlays, the chessboard design of the courtyard outside—everything stolen except for the mezzanines and books, which were placed there six hundred years later by Rajahar the Silent, a distant descendant of the feared Khan Ho Tep. The Khan had the original Taj Mahal design enlarged by a factor of more than ten. That original building was beautiful, a true testament to love—nothing remains of that structure because the Khan had it slagged, wanting only this mausoleum to be remembered. This place is a memorial to wretched excess more than anything else.”
“The location is… interesting,” Harman said softly.
“Yes,” said Prospero, pulling up his blue sleeves. “That bit of wisdom is as true about real estate today as it was in Odysseus’ day—location, location, location. Come.”
They walked into the center of the marble-screen maze, an empty patch of marble perhaps a hundred yards square with what looked to Harman to be a bright reflecting pool in the center. Prospero’s walking staff made echoing taps as they walked slowly to the center.
It was no reflecting pool.
“Jesus Christ,” cried Harman, stepping back from the edge.
It seemed to be empty air. To the left, just visible, was the vertical north face of the mountain, but beneath them—perhaps forty feet beneath the level of the floor—a steel and crystal sarcophagus seemed to be floating in midair, high over the jagged glacier six miles below. Inside the sarcophagus lay a naked woman. A narrow, white marble spiral staircase snaked down to the level of the sarcophagus, the last step appearing to hang out over that empty air.
It can’t be open, thought Harman. There was no blast of the jet stream, no roaring of high-altitude wind up and through the opening in the floor. The sarcophagus had to be resting on something. By squinting, he could make out facets, a multitude of nearly invisible geodesics. The burial chamber was made up of some incredibly transparent plastic or crystal or glass. But why hadn’t he seen this sarcophagus and stairway during their ascent in the cablecar or…
“The burial vault is invisible from the outside,” Prospero said softly. “Have you looked at the woman yet?”
“The beloved Lias Lo Amumja?” said Harman, not all that interested in staring at a naked corpse. “Who left this transient world on whenever the hell it was? And where’s the Khan? Does he get his own crystal chamber?”
Prospero laughed. “Khan Ho Tep and his beloved Lias Lo Amumja, daughter of Cezar Amumja of the Central African Empire—she was a stone bitch and a harpy, Harman of Ardis, trust me on this—were dumped overboard less than two centuries after they were entombed here.”
“Dumped overboard?” said Harman.
“Perfectly preserved bodies unceremoniously dumped over the same wall you peered over thirty minutes ago,” said Prospero. “Tossed overboard like yesterday’s garbage from a tramp steamer. Successors to the Khan—each one more minor in his or her own way—liked to be buried here for all eternity… that eternity lasting until the next Khan-successor wanted the best possible mausoleum space.”
Harman could picture it.
“That is, until fourteen hundred years ago,” said Prospero, returning his blue-eyed gaze to the glass and wood sarcophagus four stories below them. “This woman was truly the beloved of someone in power and she has rested here for fourteen centuries, undisturbed. Look at her, Harman of Ardis.”