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Vasily and Luka shifted back to their human bodies while she was still giving instructions and clambered up the stairs after her.
“Luka, can you read the Sousa writing?” Evora asked.
“Some. Not as well as Sam, though.”
Evora grunted and pulled out one of the phones. “Vasily, you’re on camera duty. Take pictures of all the symbols on the walls and of the platforms. They can give Sam something to work on until we can determine if it’s safe to bring more people down here. Luka, you’re with me. I may need help figuring out these platforms and their technology.”
Vasily accepted his phone from Evora and pulled up the camera app. “You don’t think Sam would sneak off and try to come down here alone, do you?”
The mage said nothing. She just stared at him, one arched eyebrow lifted.
Luka choked on a laugh. “You mean the same guy who sneaked into our room in the middle of the night and sat at the foot of our bed waiting for me to talk in my sleep?”
Vasily shook his head and raised the phone to start taking photos. “You’re right. He would.”
The ceiling of the cavern was nearly two stories tall, the space wide enough for a full-grown dragon to completely extend its wings without brushing the sides. And all along the walls, symbols were either painted or carved into the rock. Though, most seemed to have been painted. There were even a few where it seemed as if the message had started out carved and then changed to paint, as if whoever had been working in there had run out of time.
Vasily dutifully snapped picture after picture, making sure to zoom in here and there to get the fine details. The language was unlike anything he’d ever run across, and he spoke at least half a dozen. Luka was fluent in even more thanks to his endless folklore studies. Sam was going to have his work cut out for him. They were still working on the translations from village. To translate what was on the walls would take another few months.
Unless they could wake up some of these people on the slabs.
As he finished with the left wall, he walked over to where Luka and Evora were studying a long stone slab with people laid out side by side in similar dress, with swirling tattoos all over their bodies. It was hard to tell if they’d aged, though he thought it was unlikely since there were several children mixed in with the older adults. At a glance, it appeared as if most of the people were older or children. And among the adults, the majority appeared to be women.
“How many are here?” Vasily asked as he rested a hand on Luka’s tense shoulder.
“Just eyeballing it, I’d say over four hundred.” Luka reached over and grabbed Vasily’s phone. He flipped on the flashlight to get a better look at the device that was resting on the forehead of each person. “My guess is the little device is what’s keeping them asleep.”
“So they are alive?”
That earned Vasily a dark look from Luka and Evora.
“What? I can’t see their chests moving. How do you know the Sousa didn’t have a more advanced form of mummification than the Egyptians?”
“This is not a crypt,” Evora snapped. She grabbed Luka’s wrist and redirected the light to a second device resting on the person’s chest over their heart. “They are alive and in a state of suspended animation. They don’t age and probably don’t even dream. These people are completely unaware of the passage of time.”
Vasily rubbed his jaw and narrowed his eyes at the line of slumbering mages. “They’re going to be in for a hell of a shock when we wake them up.”
“Assuming we can,” Evora mumbled under her breath. She shook her head and turned her gaze to Luka. “Can you read any of the writing around the slab?”
“Not really. Some of it appears to be warnings, but I don’t know what they’re warning against. We need Sam or one of the Jaeggi archaeologists to take a look at it before we go messing with things.”
Evora nodded. “Agreed. It seems a logical guess that the device on the forehead keeps them unconscious while the one on the chest probably monitors or controls body function. But I wouldn’t know how to deactivate either. At least, not without risking harm to the mage.”
Vasily snatched his phone back to take some more pictures of the symbols on the slab as well as the people and devices they were wearing. “How was this powered for five hundred years? I thought you said in the past that a magic spell decays with time.”
“It does,” Evora replied firmly, as if the very idea that any spell had lasted five hundred years was an affront to all she believed. “By the look of these devices, I would have guessed the spell contained in these wouldn’t have lasted more than a month or two. Six at most. I don’t know how they—”
