"No. But the Collector isn't there." The disappointment was written plainly on Javin's face. "I want you to go in and draw before anything else is disturbed. One of us needs to remain up here with the ropes," Javin replied.
He shaded his eyes with his hand and watched the last of the workers leave the site. "You know what to do, and I'll be right here. Muni will go in with you to hold the torch. Be careful. That body got in there somehow, and likely not by magic." / hope, he added silently.
"What about you up here alone?" Cheyne glanced around at the suddenly vacant site.
"I'll be fine. Just do your job and get back up here fast," said Javin.
Cheyne signaled for Javin to lower him and Muni with the plaited fiber ropes, which always looked too flimsy to take any weight, but had, for centuries, helped move the entire Sumifan civilization.
Inside the room, it was much cooler than on the sand, but the air was stale and thick and smelled of limerock. A fine layer of dust covered the several inches of sand on the floor, except for the wide stain of dark, fresh, dried blood. Cheyne carefully examined the sand around the stain, but found no disturbance. Muni stood exactly where he had first touched down, holding a lantern as Cheyne went over the room. Following the dim glow of the lamp, Cheyne sketched a window and a wide doorway, but they were packed with sand. The whole room, thought Cheyne, had likely been filled with it. A dark scar ran along the walls about head level, where the wooden frame of a roof had been. That structure had perhaps fallen into this story, a possibility that would explain the several roof tiles scattered on the floor. Dust became visible in the air as Muni moved the lantern around, swirling in thick currents and eddies with Cheyne's movements, but otherwise the place looked completely undisturbed.
Muni pointed to one corner of the room, where a three-foot-wide hole had been hacked in the wall, proba4 6
Teri McLaren
bly centuries ago. Looters had obviously excavated the room long before them, taking everything of value, but at least removing most of the sand as well. No footprints marred its smooth surface. Cheyne resisted his first urge to explore the hole and where it could possibly lead, instead placing his measuring stick down by the wall and then drawing the shape of it to scale. He touched the stone, its coolness soothing his sunburned hand.
"Marble," he muttered. "Always eleven hagon degrees cooler than the room temperature." The wall was smooth and polished, hardly snowing its great age at all. One large crack, directly over the hole, ran from ceiling to sand, but the other large slabs still stood straight and square.
"Workmanship of the highest order," Cheyne said softly. "It must have taken some doing to break through that."
Not given to idle chatter, Muni only nodded. He held the lantern out toward the broken wall until Cheyne had drawn a texture sample and gotten a quick sketch of the details of a collapsed set of marble shelves.
After a long look around the room, Cheyne decided they could move on to the tunnel. As Muni knelt beside it, something bright caught Cheyne's eye and he held up his hand.
"Muni-look. Broken glass. Looks like it was a mirror."
Muni waved the lantern over the fragments again, and Cheyne set down his stick, drew them, and then picked up one of the longer pieces. Its silvering had gone black long ago, but the front of the glass was uniform in thickness and had few scratches. Fine work, again. Cheyne started to place the jagged glass in his pack when Muni touched his arm.
"Let me have a look at the edge. I think I saw something else."
Cheyne turned the fragment over and, sure enough, a dark brown substance filled some of the hairline cracks in the glass. When he touched the edges, the powder flaked away and fell to the ground.