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“You brought a chemlight!” Pietro said.
“I remembered this part from my last trip,” Cody said. “This time, I wanted to be able to see.”
They carefully felt their way down the curving path. The air felt thin and dusty, as if very little of it filtered down through the layers of heavy stone. Maybe that was why Pietro was having trouble breathing. Maybe there was another reason.
The tunnel abruptly ended in a cramped well of space guarded by a heavy wooden door. “If I remember right, it’s not even locked,” Cody murmured, and pushed on the handle. The door creaked open, swinging inward. Cody hesitated for a second before stepping through, Pietro at his heels.
Just across the threshold, they stopped and looked around. They were in a dim chamber faintly lit by three more of those iridescent disks. It was approximately rectangular in shape, maybe eight feet high, twelve feet lengthwise, eight feet across—but the walls were so rough that outcroppings and protrusions destroyed any sense of symmetry. Pietro could almost imagine that the chisel and hammer marks were still visible in the stone, that the work of hacking out this small cell was still in progress. It would be a relief if it was wider, taller, more open; it felt too narrow, too confined.
In the middle of the room, skulking under the unnatural light, squatted a stone structure a little more than knee-high—a solid base topped with a wide, shallow bowl. The basin was largely obscured by a spoked metal wheel that lay flat across it as if it had fallen from a passing carriage. An ancient pitcher sat on the floor in front of the base, completely black from tarnish.
“So here we are,” said Cody. “What’s so important about this place?”
Pietro stepped close enough to touch the wheel, though he didn’t. A plain metal handle had been welded to one spot on the rim, clearly inviting someone to wrap his hand around it and tug the circle into motion. “That’s the question, of course,” Pietro said. The thin air or the close walls robbed his voice of any resonance; he sounded strange to himself. “What exactly is this shrine used for?”
“Don’t you know?” Cody asked. “You seem to know a lot of other things.”
“This is still mysterious to me.”
Which was true. To some extent. Mostly because what he thought to be true was unbelievable.
Cody crowded up next to him. “I wonder what would happen if I spun the wheel.”
“My guess is you would find it impossible to budge.”
Cody curled his fingers around the welded metal handle. When Pietro didn’t protest, Cody pulled gently—and when that had no effect, pulled harder. In a few moments, Cody had wrapped both hands around the handle, braced his feet against the uneven floor, and was straining with all his weight to force the wheel to turn. But it didn’t shift by a fraction of an inch.
“Might be soldered in place,” Cody panted. “It doesn’t give at all.”
“That’s what I expected.”
Cody gave up and began wandering around the small space, inspecting each of the disks of light and running his fingers down a few of the raw scrapes visible in the stone. “Hey, look at this,” he said, fitting his palm to a spot on one of the shorter walls. “This looks like a hand print. See this? Like someone put his hand to the stone andpushed,and it left a mark.”
Pietro came over to see for himself. His own hand was too large to fit inside the mold, his fingers too long and his palm too broad. “The story I heard was that Cordelan and Dar were arguing. She was so angry that she slammed her hand against the mountainside, and she left behind a perfect imprint.”
“Well, I suppose a goddess can do anything.”
“Except stop a god,” Pietro said. “Dar ruled Chibain and Marata until Cordelan showed up.”
“But then she married him,” Cody said. “So it worked out all right for her in the end.”
“I suppose.”
Cody was looking around again. “There’s nothing else to see. How long do you want to stay down here? I’m starting to feel like the place is haunted or something.”
“I agree,” Pietro said. “I’ve observed enough. Let’s see if we can get out of here with as much stealth as we employed to get in.”
The journey upward seemed both faster and less perilous, though they faced the same hazards and checkpoints. No one challenged them at any turn; Cody meticulously locked every door behind them; and they stepped with relief back into the gaudy confines of the temple.
“It seems easier to breathe up here,” Cody said. “Probably just my imagination.”
“Maybe,” Pietro said, “but I’m imagining the same thing.”
“Not even the guard seems to have noticed where we went,” Cody said with satisfaction. “I told you we could pull this off.”
“I will feel more like a success once we’ve left the temple and no one has come after us to arrest us,” Pietro said.
Cody laughed, but they wasted no time crossing to the main door and exiting. After the time spent in the dark underground and the vivid sanctuary, the overcast skies outside seemed both dull and soothing. Once they were a block away from the temple and no one had challenged them, Cody and Pietro paused to suck in several deep breaths. Pietro still felt like his heart was racing, and he wasn’t sure it would ever again resume its accustomed pace. But he smiled as if everything was fine.
