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“Bats!” he called out, shouting to be heard over the din.
“I can see that!” Ellie retorted, flinching back as a few members of the disturbed colony swept closer.
She knew that bats were not objectively interested in humans. Somehow, the knowledge was less comforting when eighty or so of them were flailing around her head.
The stream of animals poured through the passage that she and Bates had just navigated. The colony moved as one undulating body of tiny claws and fluttering wings until at last the space around Ellie and Bates quieted.
“I believe you can remove yourself from me now,” Ellie noted, still pressed to the floor by the bulk of Bates’s body.
“Right,” he agreed and rolled away from her.
He came to his feet, retrieving the lantern.
“At least we know they’ve already cleared out of whatever’s next,” he offered.
“Very comforting,” Ellie agreed as she brushed a chunk of clay off the front of her shirt.
They picked their way along a steep, smooth slope that grew gradually higher and broader until they stepped through the entrance to another chamber.
The ceiling was high and lined with dripping rock formations. The floor formed a wide, smooth bowl. The lantern immediately revealed the whole extent of the chamber, which was roughly the size of Ellie’s drawing room back in Canonbury.
What she saw there struck her dumb with horror.
The room was a disaster. The ground was covered in a trampled carpet of pottery fragments and other debris. Larger pieces of earthenware lay against the wall where they had been deliberately smashed.
Nor had this destruction taken place centuries before. As Ellie moved closer, she could discern mineral deposits on some of the pot fragments.
The broken edges, however, were clean.
More than broken artifacts lay in the mess. The shards were thickly intermingled with shattered fragments of bone.
A pair of skulls lolled a few feet from her boots. One of them was cracked almost in two.
The sight struck her with both horror and a feeling oddly like grief.
“What happened here?” Shock stripped Ellie’s words raw.
“Looters,” Bates replied flatly from behind her. He looked out over the room with an expression of grim resignation.
“But they’ve… they’ve simplydestroyedall of it,” Ellie protested in a strangled voice.
“Probably looking for amuletos,” Bates said as he crouched down and carefully lifted up the curved edge of a skull fragment. “Jewels and trinkets interred with the dead. Jade panels. Masks, polychrome vessels. Anything portable they can hawk on the black market.”
Ellie thought back to Bates’s oddly solemn hesitance to enter the tunnel.
“Youknew,” she accused. “You knew it would be like this.”
“I knew it was a distinct possibility,” he replied as he set the skull fragment down.
“Because you’ve seen it before,” she filled in.
He met her gaze.
“Yeah.”
The ruined remnants of over a hundred vessels were scattered across the floor. Ellie could vividly imagine what they might have looked like had she and Bates arrived here first—a carefully stacked pile of jars, their interiors still glossed with fragments of the offerings they had once held. She might even have discerned a faint whiff of incense or spotted dried kernels of maize. All of it would have been a loving tribute to the dead—to the people carefully interred in the heart of this virtual underworld in order to bring them closer to the gods.
Had the bodies been intact, Ellie could have carefully and respectfully sketched out the arrangements of the bones, noting any indications of the age and health of those who had been left there.
