Galen had walked away from his ship, picking a direction that he and the tech sensed the most likely to be the source of the energy. For a moment, he had only seen what was to be expected, an incredible multitude of trees, bushes, flowers, all kinds of vegetation, and running or creeping among them, animals of all sizes and shapes, insects, reptiles, birds. It was a wonderful place purely from the scientific point of view, likely to be full of new species unknown and undocumented to the rest of the world. But that was not his reason for being here.
He had not been going on for long when he had found something. With his human eyes, it had been only a glimmer of gold among the leaves and tree-trunks, deeper in the jungle, but with his sensors, he had seen that it was a large complex of some sort, built not of gold, but of golden-yellow stone, and something else. The energy was emanating from it, or from some part of it.
He had made his way closer, slowly and cautiously, looking for any signs of fields or shields. He would not fall to the same trick twice. And he hadn't, for there weren't any, as far as he and the tech could tell. When he had reached the golden stone wall and the high doorway opening into a hall within, he had still been able to reach his ship without any hindrance.
He could still reach his ship easily, with a passing thought. Again, he was acting the fool. He should call the ship, and at least try to escape. Perhaps no one would try to stop him. Yet, perhaps he would only run away to certain death. Finding and facing the killer's creator might be the only way to stop it. Also, he was afraid to do anything at all. Moving might speed the invading poison. Conjuring might do the same, or something worse.
The stone floor he was sitting on was cold. His back rested against a pillar. His right hand was gone, the poison had reached the tips of his fingers. He tried to move his fingers and saw them respond, but he felt nothing - he could just as well have been watching someone else's hand. The numbness was nearly complete, and still not complete enough: some of the pain remained, a pulsating echo, almost drowned by the more intense pain in his wrist, where the death was moving ahead along his arm.
There had to be something he could do. Certainly there would be something. Simply sitting here dying was sheer stupidity. Still leaning on the pillar, he pushed his feet beneath him and stood up. His balance was still there, and he didn't feel too bad. Only a minor part of the tech was dead. He could live without his right hand. He took a few tentative steps towards the doorway.
The pain shot up his arm, leaping to his elbow. He stopped, and the poison stopped as well, returning to its earlier, maddeningly slow progress.
Of course Galen had entered the complex. Of course he had known that was exactly what he was supposed to do, taking another step into the trap. Still, he had done so, seeing and sensing no other way into the complex anywhere in the area he could survey.
The hall was huge. From the doorway, a few steps led down to the floor, which was lower than the forest floor outside. Along the hall stood eight large pillars, creating a lane down the hall. They were engraved with symbols, as were the walls. He recognized them: they were ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, clearly from Earth, and a system that he could not read. He might have found a translator program from his ship, if only he had turned back. But he had not deemed it important. Yet another idiotic mistake.
He had walked down the lane. Higher up on the pillars, he had found signs that he could read: the seven runes of the Code, engraved in the stone but shining fiery with an inner light. On the eighth pillar, the last one to his left at the end of the corridor, he guessed he would find the name of the mage who had built this, for a mage it had to be. He had found not a rune but a set of hieroglyphs set inside a circle, a cartouche. There were two identical pairs of a flame-like symbol and a bird, then a head, an owl and a cross with a loop at the top, an ankh.
A strong notion of the builder had formed in his mind, one that had first occurred to him when he saw the hieroglyphs. It was an idea that made little sense, and he still couldn't be sure of it. One thing he was sure of: this was the place of power of a techno-mage. The energy coming from it matched well enough, and he could think of no other explanation to the runes in the pillars. Had he been a romantic, he might have thought that this was an ancient mage-temple, but that did not add up, as the writing was not in an alien script, but a Terran one.
At the end of the lane of columns, there was a smaller doorway, and a closed pair of doors, made of iron, with a pair of ankh-crosses as the handles. He had scanned it for any sign of possible traps, but found nothing unusual about the doors themselves. There was something odd, though. He could not sense anything through the doorway. There had to be a dampening shield blocking his sensors.
Unwilling to touch the suspicious doors, he had raised his staff and sent a beam between the doors, wedging them apart. What he had seen behind them had been a complete, slightly shocking surprise. There was a smaller, darker hall, a chamber with black walls, silvery veins running through them. The walls were covered in Shadow skin. This was the explanation to the strange energy readings, the thing that was not quite mage-energy.
Gazing at what he had found, the awful implications of it running through his mind and the tech, he had been caught at unaware. He did not even know where they had come from - perhaps a trap door in the ceiling high above, or a niche in the pillars. All he had noticed was that suddenly a swarming mass of small, dark snakes had fallen upon him.
At the first sign of danger, the tech responded faster than he did. If only they had chosen the right thing to do. The tech's response, which he had instantly approved, was a normal mage shield, transparent, shimmering blue. As he blamed himself, he blamed the tech. They should have conjured a Shadow-skin shield. It would have been impenetrable. But what they had just seen, the idea that here might be yet another mage who had fallen to the Shadow's seducing power, even allowing Shadow technology in his very place of power, had made them reluctant to use a shield so reminiscent of it.
A normal shield was a powerful defense against nearly anything. It could keep those within it alive in extreme temperatures and hazardous atmospheres, and it would keep away fireballs and plasma shots for a long while. It had seemed to work well enough. The snakes, unable to hang on to the slippery surface, had simply glided down on it, towards the ground. Most of them had disappeared, the illusions that they were dispelled.
One of the snakes had not been an illusion. More likely, it had been an artificial creation all along, perhaps related to the Shadow-tech as well. It had opened its mouth and struck its minute teeth to the shield covering his hand, and they had penetrated the shield, and the skin of his thumb.
He had been such an idiot. How his friends on the Excalibur would laugh if they found out how easy it had been to trap him. Matthew and Dureena. And he had went on carrying on the idiocy. He might have stopped the poison altogether if he had simply cut off his thumb, when it had not spread any further. It would certainly have been a painful and difficult thing to do, but much easier than what he faced now.
His right arm was nearly disabled, the venom halfway up from his elbow to his shoulder. Cutting off his entire arm was not an option, and now that the death was so wide-spread, he was not even sure it would help.
If he could not walk away, perhaps he could fly. With a thought, he and the tech conjured a flying platform beneath his feet.
The effect was instantaneous: a searing flash of pain traveled all the way up his right arm, along the lines of the tech across his shoulders, and started down his left arm. His legs gave way, the platform dissolving before it had completely formed.
Again, as he slumped down to rest, his back against a column, he marveled at the way the killer worked. Where it could have finished its work instantly, making its way through the tech down his spine and up his brain, it had not. It had chosen the slower, more torturous way instead, taking his left arm first. Then, he could guess, it would start down the spine, and only when he would be completely incapacitated, unable to move normally, it would finally head up to the brain, where he and the tech were more entangled and combined than anywhere else.