Arsen Ademian was not in the least superstitious. Old tombs and dead bodies held no terrors for him: if he had lived and fought in proximity to too many corpses to consider them anything more than what they were—dead meat, sometimes stinky, but in no way harmful to the living. Therefore, he felt none of the atavistic terror that Simon Delahaye had experienced on his own descent down the stone steps of the ancient crypt.
Arsen Ademian was not in the least superstitious. Old tombs and dead bodies held no terrors for him: if he had lived and fought in proximity to too many corpses to consider them anything more than what they were—dead meat, sometimes stinky, but in no way harmful to the living. Therefore, he felt none of the atavistic terror that Simon Delahaye had experienced on his own descent down the stone steps of the ancient crypt.
The smoky fire sputtering on one of the steps gave precious little light to the interior below, but errant beams of sunlight which filtered through the trees above and about the glade also entered the doorway. Although he could see no other people down below, Arsen still stalked down the steps with light, cautious tread, the big knife he had taken from off the shaggy, smelly man held close by his right hip, as they had taught him in the Corps, pointed forward, its sharpened edge up, ready to either stab or lunge or slash at any surprise attacker.
Edging around the opened, coffin-sized silvery chest at the foot of the steps, Arsen meticulously reconnoitered the whole of the crypt before returning to examine the unusual find more thoroughly.
Only a brief look inside it told him it was probably not a coffin at all, but neither did it look like anything else he ever before had seen.
It was a bit over six feet long, inside, and closer to seven in outer dimensions. The metal was not silver, it looked and felt to the touch very much like a good grade of aircraft aluminum, but his tentative experiments with the point of the knife left no slightest trace of a scratch upon it, yet it was far too light, he thought, to be stainless steel.
“Alloy of some kind,” he muttered to himself. “But the big question isn’t what it’s made out of, but what the hell it is and what it’s doing down here in a goddam old tomb.”
A sheathed broadsword caught his eye, so he laid the knife within easy reach, took the sword from its case, and hefted it. “Hmm, looks like a real damascus blade and all, but it’s no better balanced than any of the one or two others I’ve gotten my hands on recently. A good foil or epee fencer with a modern sword would skewer anybody armed with a thing like this, and that damned quick, too.”
The next item he took from the silvery casket was a foot-and-a-half-long wheel-lock pistol. Holding it up in a beam of sunlight, he could see that the thing was spanned, the spring wound down tight, so it probably was loaded, though he could find no powder flask or bullet box or even the spanner for it among the jumble of things in one end of the casket. Nonetheless, he laid the pistol beside the big knife; one shot was better than none, and if that one missed, well, the ball-butt would make a damned good skull-cracking club.
He found a suede bag of silver coins of two sizes, a smaller bag of assorted-sized gold coins, and a third bag of what looked to him like large, square wafers of glass with tiny wires poking out of them.
There was a dirk that was better balanced to his hand than the big knife, so he replaced the one with the other. There were a pair of matching daggers, shorter than either dirk or knife, double-edged, thin-bladed, deadly-looking things. There were also a half-dozen other knives of varying sizes and shapes.
When everything loose he could see was out of the case, Arsen began to feel about in the interior to find anything he might have overlooked in the uncertain light. Probing up near the opposite end from where the artifacts had been stacked when he came down, his fingertip struck something which went click, and then a whirring sound commenced. When it had ended, there was a soft, greenish-white glow emanating from both outside and inside the long casket, and he noted that the interior lining had somehow rearranged itself so that it now looked like the mold for the body of a slender man of average height, no bigger or smaller, seemingly, than he.
While he watched, staring in silent wonder, the casket arose from its place on the stone floor, rose lightly until its highest edge was a bit below his waist height, then stopped. Then the voice began speaking.
It took him a moment of confusion to realize that the voice was not really an audible sound, that whatever it was was not speaking words to him but was projecting—somehow—thoughts into his head. He stood shaking, terrified, yet piqued, intrigued, at the same time.
Then, putting himself in order, taking a few deep breaths, exerting the self-control he had worked for so long and hard to acquire, he began to really “listen,” to comprehend just what the whatever-it-was was “saying.”
It required his every ounce of available self-discipline and courage, but he did it. After tucking one of the thin daggers into his belt for insurance, he climbed into the casket and laid his body down, fitting perfectly into the hollows of the padding. He gulped when the lid descended and clicked on closing, but his frantic shriek did not come until he felt a cold, hard thing suddenly come from somewhere to encase the top of his head down to eyebrow level. And then, for all he could ever recall of it, he must have lost consciousness of pure terror.
