“No pun intended.”
“Ah, no sir.”
He moved forwards a short distance, lowering his gun and moving his flashlight around, following the edges of the doorway. “Teal’c’s on his way down. I told Daniel to stay up top. If there’s only one way into and out of this place I don’t want us all here at once.”
That was wise. Although Carter would have felt more comfortable with all four of the team together, she could see the wisdom of keeping at least one person up at ground level. Putting all your eggs in one basket was never a good idea. Especially when the basket had a habit of killing the eggs you put in it.
She moved past O’Neill, still not trusting the dark enough to lower her weapon. Instead she put her shoulder to the side of the doorway and peered around it. “Bet he didn’t like that.”
“Yeah, I kinda got that impression.”
Carter scanned the flashlight around, trying to get her bearings. Past the doorway, the space opened out a lot further, its echoes and the unnatural coldness giving her the impression of cavernous space. Once again, she found herself very glad of the jacket. Her breath was a pale vapor in the air.
The beam of her flashlight was catching random edges as she scanned it around, but if she moved it too far up or to the sides it vanished, its glow fading into the solid black of deep shadow. The interior of the structure was complex, she could see that, but at the moment she couldn’t grasp its layout, even its true dimensions.
She brought the beam up past the base of the ladder and up over the doorway, saw a glimpse of boots at the end of the ladder, and then she was looking up at a shallow angle of stone, sweeping over her head before reaching an edge and disappearing into the dark. “It slopes,” she whispered, unwilling to speak loudly here. “It’s wider at the base.”
“Pyramid?”
“I think it flattens at the top, but yeah.” She moved the beam again, towards what looked like a vast rectangular wall up ahead. The wall didn’t seem to reach the ceiling or the walls on either side — her light found its edges, but nothing beyond. Maybe there was a smaller, box-shaped structure inside this larger one.
It didn’t make sense, but nothing about this place did.
There was a soft sound behind her as Teal’c landed at the end of the ladder. She risked a glance back, and saw that he had somehow climbed down the unstable construction of links and rungs with his staff weapon still in his right hand.
He walked slowly past her, his gaze sweeping the shadows. Carter watched him pause, frown slightly, and then move to the wall. He spread a hand over it, let his fingers slide across, then down. He was feeling for imperfections just as she had in the shaft.
“There was once writing here,” he said finally. “Carved into this wall. The coloration is gone, but I am able to identify the characters.”
Carter aimed her flashlight at the wall, but saw nothing. “What does it say?”
“There are exhortations to Ra, and instructions for those who enter the Pit of Sorrows.”
“Instructions for what?”
“Preparing oneself for death.”
Carter thought back to Daniel’s initial translation:
a deep hole, weeping or lamenting
. It wasn’t a huge leap from that to an ominous title like Pit of Sorrows. Even translating from one human language was an imprecise business. Trying to convert Goa’uld to English must have been especially fraught, even if most of that species did appear to be completely bilingual.
I guess sometimes you just need to see something written down.
“At least we know we’re in the right place,” said O’Neill. He walked to the corner of the wall and peered around it, aiming the flashlight. “Whoa…”
“What do you see?” Carter asked him. She trotted across the gritty floor to cover him, wondering why the writing couldn’t be more easily seen. As Daniel had said earlier, System Lords tended to like their statements to be obvious. It didn’t make sense that they would be subtle, not with such a message.
Perhaps time had worn the coloration away, although that didn’t seem very likely either. The System Lords, immensely long-lived, built to last.
She reached the corner, brought the gun and the light up again. Past the edge of the wall, the structure opened out in a strange way, and it took Carter a second or two to realize quite what she was seeing. But once she had the spatial relationships fixed in her mind, it became simple.
The inside of the structure was a flat-topped pyramid, maybe twenty meters across. There were four walls set around its centre, not meeting at the corners, but free-standing, so that she had a clear view from one corner of the pyramid to the other, or would have done had the darkness not been so intense.
Within the four walls, something tall glittered dully in the flashlight beams.
O’Neill was already moving forwards. Ahead of him was a squat dais, square and stepped, and vast shapes loomed out of the shadows to overhang it. Carter brought her light up and saw statues, hawk-headed and utterly black, their arms raised in supplication. Each of them was three or four times her own height.
Between them, at the top of the dais, was what looked like a waist-high column of shining gold.
The sight was mesmerizing. Carter could see that the column was ornate, ridged and fluted in a design she couldn’t quite grasp at her distance. There was something about its shape that was half church font, half communion goblet, but the proportions of it were oddly disturbing. In the midst of this frightening darkness, surrounded by four granite titans, the golden thing sparked nothing within her but unease.
She moved the light around, unwilling to fixate on the column while the shadows could still conceal horrors. As she did so, the sound of dust shifting echoed back to her from the far corner.
She froze. “Colonel!” she hissed urgently.
He knew her well enough to recognize the tone of voice, as did Teal’c. The Jaffa dropped to one knee, his staff weapon snapping open with a whine of barely-restrained energy. O’Neill was off the steps in seconds, taking up position to cover Carter as she crept forwards. “What is it?”
“Possible movement, northwest corner.” She paused halfway along the strange inner wall, and as she did the dust ahead of her moved again. There was another sound, too, very faint, like something trying to breathe.
She still couldn’t see the source of the noises. Her flashlight beam tracked left and right along the floor, picking out random piles of dust, and clusters of what looked like burned sticks, pieces of curved pottery or stone. She felt one of the objects beneath her boot as she moved on, but it gave no resistance to her weight, merely crumbled to nothing beneath her.
Reflexively, she swallowed. Her mouth was still dry from the dust she’d breathed in, and it was hard not to cough.
At least it didn’t taste bad. It didn’t taste of anything.
She had reached the corner. The piles of powder were higher here, as if some breeze had caused the stuff to drift. Carter aimed her flash at the floor, completely baffled.
A human skull leered back up at her.
Carter suppressed a jolt of shock, swallowed hard, and then dropped slowly into a crouch, running her light up and down the length of the corpse. “I’ve got a body here,” she called.
“One of Miles’ people?”
“I don’t think so. Looks like it’s been here a long time.”
“No real surprise there, Carter.”
Something wasn’t right. “Hold on…”
Despite her unease, she forced herself to look more closely at the body. At first she had thought it ancient, a tattered, mummified thing, little more than pale bone and papery, patchwork skin, half-buried in dust. But now she could see it more closely, there were details that didn’t add up. The few scraps of fabric that still adhered to the corpse looked modern — there was a Levis label near the hip, a button half-sunk between two ribs. A sad little pile of fragments near one hand that might once have been a watch.
Strands of white-blonde hair around the skull.
Carter took her hand off the MP-5’s grip, reached out, and tried to lift some of the hair, but it simply went to powder between her finger and thumb. She grimaced, tried to wipe the stain it had left against her jacket, but the movement caused her gun to swing free on its strap. The barrel tapped the corpse’s shoulder.
There was a soft, soughing noise as the entire ribcage sank into itself, collapsing into a pile of gray ash and powdery, gritty dust. The same stuff, Carter noticed, that was all over the floor.
The same stuff that still clung to the inside of her mouth.
She jerked to her feet, gagging, running her sleeve hard along her open mouth, desperately trying to get the awful stuff out of her. She heard O’Neill running towards her, boots crunching over the remains of countless human beings, of limbs and skulls and hearts and minds all rotted to powder in this frigid darkness, and the realization of what she was surrounded by made her stomach flip. A wave of nausea washed up from her feet to her head, and she bent forwards to steady herself against the wall, using the feeling of cold, hard stone against her hand to steady herself.
That was where she was when a skeletal hand reached out of the shadows and grabbed hold of her ankle.
Greg Kemp had been a good-looking man, Carter remembered from the faxed file she had read on the C-130. Twenty-eight years old, pale sandy hair, a kind, pleasant face that suited spectacles. Almost handsome.
He wasn’t handsome any more. Whatever had turned Laura Miles’ left arm into dust had chewed this man up and spat him back out again.
The arm was the only limb he could move. One of his legs looked largely intact, but there was a portion of his hip that had probably taken some major nerves with it when it had crumbled. There was no way he could have moved out of the corner, not even by crawling. If he’d even tried to stand, Carter thought despairingly, he’d probably have crashed apart like an ill-made scarecrow.
What hadn’t been turned to ash looked ancient, shriveled and dry, as if he had been buried in hot sand for a thousand years.
If there was any mercy to be found in this situation, Carter reflected, it was that Kemp didn’t actually seem to be in any pain. Distress, certainly — after all, how many hours had he remained in this Pit of Sorrows, staring out at the ashy corpse of Anna Andersson? Thirty? More?
Even the thought of it made Carter want to close her eyes and run. Instead she focused her attentions on the stricken man sitting with his back against the black stone wall, and tried to make out what he was saying.
He had been trying to talk ever since he had grabbed at her, but none of the sounds he was making sounded like language. She wondered if he was irreparably brain-damaged by the assault, or if the mechanisms of speech had been lost to him physically. In either case, she decided, giving him a little water probably couldn’t make things worse.
When she reached for her canteen, O’Neill put a hand out to stop her. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“No, I’m not.”
“It might kill him. He doesn’t look like he could handle a coughing fit right now.”
“You’re right, sir,” she said. “But he’s been down here a long time. I think I’d want something to drink, even if it did, you know…”
He took his hand away, and nodded. “Sure. Good call.”
Kemp spilt most of the water she gave him; his mouth wasn’t the right shape any more. But what little went down his throat didn’t seem to cause him too much pain. He coughed at first, but thankfully Carter’s worst fears were not realized. The man did not shiver apart in front of her.
Teal’c appeared around the corner. “There are no other survivors,” he reported. “I have appraised Daniel Jackson of our situation. He has contacted the airbase for medical assistance.”
O’Neill opened his mouth to speak, but Kemp got there first. “Arra,” he said.
His voice sounded like two dry surfaces being scraped together. “Mr Kemp, don’t try to talk.”
“Arra,” he said again, his withered hand coming up. “Deh.”
“Yeah, buddy, she’s dead,” said O’Neill quietly. “I’m sorry.”
Anna.
Carter gave the man a few more rivulets of water from the canteen. He nodded his heavy head in thanks.
“Mr Kemp?” she began. “Did something attack you?”
Another nod. The hand came up again. “Tha.”
Carter looked back. He was pointing, vaguely, at the golden column up on its dais. Somehow that only confirmed her suspicions about the thing. She hadn’t liked the look of it since she had first laid eyes on it.
“What is it?”
“Doh no. Blac stah. Wanned ow hee.”
She threw a glance at O’Neill, but he only shrugged. “I’m not sure I understand,” she told Kemp. “Wanted your…?”
“Heat,” said Teal’c.
Kemp nodded.
Carter got up, turned to look back at the column. It seemed innocent, inanimate, but if what Kemp was saying made any sense at all, the body heat of three people — Anna Andersson, the mercenary Lucas Harlowe, and himself — had been enough to activate it.
There were four people in the structure now. “Ah, Colonel?”
“Way ahead of you,” O’Neill told her. He stood, and keyed his radio. “Daniel?”
“Right here.”
“We’re coming up. The survivor’s in a bad way — we’re going to need a rope sling.”
“I’m on it.”
He reached down to Kemp. “Okay, fella. Teal’c and I are going to lift you up and get you over to the door. Ready?”
Carter stepped back to give her companions enough room, and held her light steady on Kemp’s ravaged body. They lifted him out of the dust with a horrible ease. He must have weighed little more than a child.
They carried him slowly, and with infinite care, across the dust towards the base of the shaft. Carter could have stepped in and freed O’Neill’s hands, but he wore an expression that kept the suggestion from her lips. She wondered if, when Kemp was safely on a helicopter and away, Jack O’Neill would feel any better about the lives that had been lost on Sar’tua.