Doctor Stone was gone! The bank of computers was gone! The console remained, but it and they were surrounded by walls of dark, roughly dressed stones and at their feet lay a decomposing corpse clad in dirty woolens and ill-tanned hide. With a quick bound, Emmett O’Malley was before the console and had thrown a lever and turned two knobs as far to the left as they would go, then he sighed gustily and wiped the back of his hairy hand across his damp forehead.
“Whew, that was far too close, Ken. Sweet Jane would have had us, had I not put the device on automatic. . . .” He shuddered, then said, “You’ve been hypnoing more history than I. Does that . . . that thing’s clothing tell you anything?”
Harold advanced as closely as his churning stomach would permit to the stinking cadaver. “Probably Northern European, dead three, maybe four, days. Skull crushed and neck broken, likely in a fall from up there, somewhere.” He gestured at the flight of unrailed stone steps that mounted upward along two of the four walls.
“But his clothing, the way he’s dressed?” said O’Malley. “Can you tell what period, what area?”
Harold shook his head. “Emmett, this kind of rough clothing was normal cold-weather wear for peasants from Scandinavia to Sicily, Poland to England, for close to two millennia. As for the architecture of this place . . .” He glanced around the rectangle of stone walls, finding the stones really massive—some of them looked to be four or five feet long and at least half that measure in thickness, and nowhere was there a trace of mortar in their interstices. Here and there a few iron bolts had been sunk into the stonework, and thick, hand wrought iron rings were affixed to them; long streaks of rust stains ran down the face of the damp stones from these, and the floor seemed to be of hard-packed earth.
“I think we’re in a keep, Emmett, probably in the cellar, but. . . but there’re no windows, so it should be dark as pitch down here. Where is the illumination coming from?”
O’Malley chuckled. “From us, Ken, and from the console. This effect has been noted before. Creatures and objects brought back by the projector have a glow of varying intensities—how bright and how long it lasts seems to depend upon the amounts of metal said creatures or objects incorporate. The console may remain that bright for weeks, our own lighting will likely fade in a few days, quicker if we are exposed to sunlight for a while.”
With the tall, broad-shouldered O’Malley in the lead, they started up the steps, which proved to be steep and slippery with seepage from the walls. The landing at the corner where the stairs made a right-angle turn to the left was less than a meter square and slightly concave, centering a puddle of icy water. After making the mistake of looking back the way they had come, Harold negotiated the last half of the second flight on hands and knees.
At the top was another landing—this one no wider than the one below but at least twice as long—and at the end of its length was a low, wide door of some dense, dark wood studded with the broad heads of hand-hammered iron spikes. Emmett pushed the door, pushed harder, finally put his shoulder against it and heaved with all his strength, but the portal remained as firm as the very stones of the walls. Stepping back, he checked the power crystal of the heat-stunner, switched the weapon to full heat, and began to play the invisible beam upon the damp, rust-stained wood. Within the blinking of an eye, rotten-smelling steam wreathed about the glowing, cherry-red nailheads and bent-over iron points; then, with a sudden whoosh, the face of the door became a single sheet of flame.
Prodded by Emmett, Harold backed gingerly down a few steps and the two men remained, O’Malley standing nonchalantly on the bare foot-width of slimy stone, until the tinkling sound of metal dropping out of burned-through wood told them that the way was clearing.
The two men used the blades of their broadswords to lift the charred beam that had barred the door, then passed under the archway. Before them lay another flight of stone steps; on the.right hand was a blank stone wall, on the left, another door, seeming as heavy and solid as the one they had just destroyed. Harold was for climbing the steps, getting as high as possible in order to get a wide view of this countryside, but before he could speak of this to O’Malley, two sounds came from beyond the door—the first a hoarse, guttural scream of agony, the second a chorus of demonical, cackling laughs.