Naturally Sly was no way ready to leave. As hungry as he was – and by then he’d not eaten for more than a couple of days – and as keen as he was to see the sun again, he wanted nothing so much but to explore all the shelves, one by one.

  Alas, he lacked much energy to do more than sit. Now he had light, he decided on another goal, to spend time with the strange pearls in his satchel.

  He brought them out onto a surface under the lamp. The spheres were blue-grey and opalescent like ice on a lake, but he started no experiments. Messing with them now was a waste of time. He was beyond hungry – he suspected he was starting to starve. That put a hard limit on exploration of any kind, since he was unlikely to find food on library shelves.

  Even if I stumbled across some scholar’s sandwich, it’d be stale now.

  The humour in the thought, as dry as the dust on every shelf and surface, made him want to cough, not chuckle.

  Rather than spending any longer in the library, he reluctantly committed to come back one day soon. He returned the pearls to his satchel, and left the map where it was under glass, checking Gus’s digital recording of it one more time. Then he repaired the secret sliding door as best he could. No one had discovered the library in hundreds of years, but he broke it, so he should fix it.

  Naturally he wanted to take the lamp with him. He was astonished by the device, which glowed without electric wires, an obvious bulb or any heat. If the alien technology could operate indefinitely, it would be invaluable. If on the other hand it required a power-source, it would eventually fade, and probably when least convenient.

  “Any ideas, Gus? There’s no sign of a battery. It’s not tech I’ve seen before. There are symbols around the edge. A maker’s mark, or instructions?”

  On the left side of Sly’s vision, Gus highlighted one of the squiggling, swirl-like symbols from the rim and transferred the shape’s outline to a search area, like a luminescent glow-worm in a box. It revolved twice before the AI found a match.

  Gus had seen it before, not once, but two separate times.

  ‘This sigil is in Greyhair’s notebook and on the obelisk.’

  Sly sat back, puzzled.

  “Gus, if the notebook, the lamp and the obelisk all openly carry the same symbol, what are the odds of Greyhair’s notebook containing a military code?”

  ‘Logic dictates the symbol may be representative of a novel language, one new to us, but otherwise many hundreds of years old. It may also be a form of general notation, like Arabic numerals. While neither of these possibilities precludes the use of a military code, it is now much less likely.’

  The second symbol Gus sought was a hieroglyph, but the AI found no matches. Sly thought it might be a symbol highly specific to the lamp’s function, akin to the play button on a tape deck or video recorder.

  “Gus, I want your take on the symbols we’ve seen since arriving at Area 71,” he said aloud. “I want you to break the code, if there is one, to understand what the notebook symbols mean, and to translate any new ones we see.”

  ‘Do you want a word-vector analysis, or a transformer?’

  “Sure, one of those. Um… what’s the difference?”

  ‘In short, word-vector analysis tries to find the relevance of a set of unknown symbols from their context. From this we could create a simple translation tool. Transformers are more sophisticated. I’d deliver a gen-AI chatbot capable of generating new text, but it would need a lot more data.’

  “Either way, we need a treasure hunt for more symbols?”

  ‘Codebreaking needs data we don’t have, yes.’

  “First, translate the notebook, your choice how you get it done. I’ll try to get you more text, if I can.”

  Sly tried taking the lamp from the library, but it switched itself off before he managed to leave the anteroom. When he took it back into the library, it automatically switched back on.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “This one doesn’t want to leave,” he said to Gus. After a dozen similar attempts he gave up, put the lamp back, and unenthusiastically returned into the darkness.

  Once out of the library, Sly used Gus’s new enhanced map to navigate the palace halls. He quickly found the first stairwell marked on the map, but the steps were blocked by rubble, broken flagstone and shards of blue-green tile. Short of spending years digging, that way was impossible. Sly didn’t bemoan the setback. He mapped his way to the next exit and walked the distance in less than forty minutes.

  That stone staircase was also blocked solid, this time by an assemblage of brick, wood, powdered glass and ceramic – a mosaic of three dimensions. It looked like the contents of a building had crashed down the stairwell.

  Perhaps that’s exactly what happened.

  “Two exits blocked, so far apart,” Sly said, his stomach clenched. “Whoever attacked this place bulldozed or bombed the upper floors into rubble.”

  The next hike wasn’t as easy as the first and he stopped to sleep. When he eventually arrived at his destination, he saw exactly what he had dreaded: another rubble-filled shaft where a staircase ought to be, this time next to more steps leading down.

  “Going up is impossible,” he murmured to himself, looking at the descending steps. While these were strewn with detritus, they were passable. He stared into the depths dubiously. It seemed that the only way out of the huge palace complex was down, further into its guts.

  Taking the satchel and one rusty knife that had survived the years, he pulled the warm cloak tighter and gingerly started down. His foot struck an object which toppled and clattered from one stone step to the next, until it stopped far below. Sly paused, but there was no answering noise.

  “No drums in the depths,” he said out loud, then snorted and continued down.

  The steps eventually opened out into a passageway with a lower ceiling. He found the object he had kicked. Judging by touch alone, it appeared to be a ruined helmet, half caved in and rusted through. Disgusted, he tossed it back to the floor.

  Sly picked a direction and began walking through the oppressive corridors, wondering if he’d see the sun again.

  “The library map doesn’t show this service level in detail,” Sly muttered to himself and to Gus, “but going back up now is pointless.”

  ‘Agreed. You may need to leave the palace through sewers.’

  “Or utility tunnels,” he said. “Wading through sewers or storm-drains sounds nasty, but there’s one alternative I never want to try. Dragons aren’t vegetarians, and they’d need to leave the palace to find prey, so there must be a way out. But trying to escape through the great hall sounds like a quick suicide.”

  ‘That side of the palace is a closed ecosystem, and the dragons must have a way out if they are to feed themselves. You would need a diversion. Even so I don’t think it would end well. The exit might only be a hole in the roof. Unlike you, dragons can fly.’

  Sly chuckled on reading Gus’s turn of phrase, which sounded less robotic than usual, then cautiously continued into the dark. Eventually he found a new passageway, its far end invisible to sonar, and began walking. He was famished and thirsty, the trickles of water from the surface had dried up, and he reckoned he had another day before feeling drastic signs of physical decline.

  He trudged on, taking increasingly frequent breaks.

  Eventually the service corridor opened out into a natural cavern, chill and breezy, and to his relief Sly heard the authentic sounds of flowing water. He was about to pursue the sounds when he saw an unusual sonar echo near the exit from the passageway. The reflections were somehow simultaneously soft and hard.

  It took only moments to find the stack against the cavern wall. Uncertain what the shapes were, he reached out with a cautious hand.

  “Aagh!”

  To his disgust he felt the brittle, cold steel of rusted plate and the insubstantial give of chainmail, much of it disintegrating into dust.

  His fingers found and flinched from the rag wrapped bones with distaste. The corpses were no doubt ancient, bones as desiccated as seasoned firewood. The heap wasn’t limited to two or three bodies lying where they died, but ran along the outer wall for a dozen yards, three or four yards high.

  A hundred bodies disposed of in the cold dark.

  This was no catacomb with recesses for tombs, nor even an ossuary for bones: it was nothing less than a mass grave, and not one where the bodies had been shown any respect. Bodies were arrayed for mere convenience.

  He recalled the dented helm he’d kicked down the stairs and had an unsettling thought. Did they die in the palace? Did someone drag the corpses out and dump ‘em here, like so much trash? No way someone living here permanently would leave them outside their backdoor indefinitely. What happened?

  Unnerved, he hurried on and away, pursuing the sounds of water to the river, a wide, fast-flowing torrent fed from high above. Going upstream of the bodies he thoroughly washed his hands, then drank straight from cupped palms.

  “I’ve learned my lesson,” he told Gus with relief. “Whatever else I do now, I’ll follow the water. But which way should I go?”

  He looked both ways, upstream and down.

  ‘Upstream looks like a difficult climb.’

  It did. Under sonar, water gushed and seeped as if from nowhere, a confusing brassy crash of white noise and shiny black rock. At best he would need to stoop, perhaps even crawl through freezing water before climbing a slick, wet waterfall. He was so weary, the sight chased away all lightness of spirit.

  “Downstream is easier,” he said softly. “The water’s slower, and the banks are better defined. But downstream goes down, the one direction I don’t need more of.”

  Still, he turned left, following the river down further into the depths.