The air in the room was thick and dead. More of the carpet’s colours were visible as his eyes adjusted, and the carpet even seemed to increase in magnificence, clearly reaching to the walls. Any rich person would pay a fortune for such a carpet if Hamar could only carry it out of there! He stepped toward its center.
Strangely no dried leaves had blown into the place, no tendrils or tree roots had taken over, – there were no spiderwebs threading his face. The damp scent, though, could be the crushed cucumber smell of a viper nest, – he checked out the dim walls for anything weaving up them!
The walls were further apart than he’d expected, or was that because it was too hard to make out where they joined? He looked up and now could see the dome above him and saw how the tiles swirled in a busy pattern like writing, but not like any writing he’d ever known.
How odd that he could see the mosaic so clearly, in there, – did the building trap light in some special way? The tile pattern made an illusion so that it was hard to tell how high the dome’s center was. With the little bit of reading he knew how to do he tried to mouth out the mosaic letters, but it was no use, and it made him go strangely dizzy when he did it. He looked down.
A lump was on the floor.
Some kind of stone as big as a pot was sitting there in the center of the carpet. He nudged it with his foot and it scraped along like metal, man-made, with decoration running along its sides. It proved to be an old rusty helmet, the wavy grooves along its sides those of a lion-mane. He kicked it over.
A skull-face grinned back!
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