We spent some time shopping while still stuck on the station, picking up protective clothing for Gurgeh and Sayah just in case of another corpse attack. Sayah also restocked on opor.
Gurgeh took the hair samples that Sayah had retrieved from Jinna's room, and compared them with the samples he'd taken from Lavim Tamm's corpse in the cave. Definitely not the same person. He then compared them to samples from when Lavim had been on our ship, being treated for radiation poisoning. The hair samples had clearly got mixed up with hair from Jinna's roommate, but he was confident that the Lavim who'd been there was the same one we'd had on our ship, and the earlier samples didn't match the corpse. No identical twins here. One of them was a fake.
The adjudicator dropped by again to let us know that with no evidence of a connection between us and the death of Merez, we were free to leave. Gurgeh felt that there was no sense flying an empty ship down to Kua, so while Sayah negotiated a good price for the delivery of supplies to the other dig site, he put out an advert and got some passengers. A Coriolis guard and a civilian.
Sayah looked up the civilian based on facial recognition, and found out that he was a witness in a Syndicate case. She passed that on to the rest of the crew, then went to hide from the guard in her cabin for the duration of the flight, only emerging after we'd dropped off the passengers in the nearby coastal city. After a meal of gumbo, we returned to the valley.
Tahir once again made a perfect landing at the dig site, and we unloaded the supplies. Professor Ilhana invited us to stay for dinner, so we had a pleasant meal and a chat about the local conditions.
Some of us had concerns about the local wildlife. The river was reputedly full of big toothy reptiles called nahangs, the place was known for the semi-sentient primates known as Ekilibri, and even worse, there were supposedly djanna out there - spirits that would use glowing lights to lure people away into the forest and then feed on their fear as they died.
Lila, still not able to use her new arm, made the sensible decision to stay on the ship for the moment. Hamsa also stayed behind, to do some running repairs. So it was Tahir, Gurgeh, Sayah and Alqadi who set off together into the jungle. Gurgeh lead the way, using his environmental scanner to watch out for dangers. He successfully avoided leading us through a nest of fire ants or a hive of macro-wasps, and stopped us just in time to avoid falling down a massive hole.
Somehow we had managed to forget about the massive worms that also inhabited the jungle. It was obvious from the damaged foliage that it had been here recently. Tahir wanted to investigate the hole, but everyone else insisted on pushing on towards the stone towers.
We reached the towers shortly before dark, and had a quick look. They appeared to be constructed of giant rings of sandstone, and were covered with glyphs. They were similar to the ones we'd already seen on the amber cylinder, but more rounded, as if they'd been carved in a different way, or came from a different time period. The one thing we were sure of was that they definitely weren't the work of the first-come.
Looking around the base of the towers, we found footprints that doubtless belonged to Zhar Baghram on his previous visit to the site. They lead into a shrubbery, dotted with small stelae. Tahir used his jetpack to fly to the top of the towers. On top of the right hand tower was a dip, and inside it a large cube of a different type of stone, much harder than sandstone and also slightly cooler to the touch. The stone at the top of the tower was damaged and unstable, so he didn't hang around for long.
We made camp near the base of the towers. Gurgeh set up some motion sensors around the camp, and we kept watch in shifts. There we passed an uneventful, if noisy, night.
In the morning we investigated the footprints again, and after clearing away some of the shrubs we found a large octagonal plate in front of the tower. It was divided into triangles, alternately marked with scimitars and large gemstones - red, blue, white and black.
Gurgeh examined the stones. He found that the triangular segments looked like they could fold downwards, and that there were residues in the recesses around each gem. The red one appeared to be blood.
We looked again at the poem in Zhar Baghram's journal. He'd found enough clues here to get this door open.
One war took, led to his death
One a bird lifted over the high sea
One the hoary wolf broke with death
One, bloody-cheeked, a warrior hid in a hole in the ground.
Four keybearers. Surely this had to match up to the four stones? And one already mentioned blood. Tahir applied some of his own to the red stone.
Blue must be the sea. Would plain water do, or did it have to be salty? Gurgeh thought it might, and managed to get himself to shed enough tears to apply to the blue stone.
Sayah spotted the mention of the hoary wolf, possibly referring to frost. An ice pack from the first aid kit supplied that easily enough.
But what about the black stone? The first line of the poem was not particularly enlightening. Did black mean ash? Did we have to burn something? There was plenty of wood around, but wood ash did not have any effect on the plate. Did the mention in the journal of fighting a flying demon mean we needeed something with wings? Nobody fancied chasing down the macro-wasps. Alqadi thought it might be necessary to use one of the Ekilibri, and headed into the trees to catch one. The general party feeling was that we were morally opposed to killing these creatures, however, and we should at least try something else first. Surely there would be evidence left behind of how Zhar Baghram had opened the door?
We searched, and found the decayed remains of some kind of rodent that was missing one leg. We weren't sure entirely which part of it was required, but applying the remains to the black stone did result in the eight segments folding down to reveal a shaft with a platform some way below us.
Gurgeh sent down a drone. It looked fine - just some furniture. Tahir immediately climbed down, and found himself in some kind of ancient storage room, lined with shelves. Footprints on the floor showed the presence of the previous team.
On the wall was a control panel. Gurgeh and Sayah had joined Tahir, and Gurgeh tried pressing buttons to see what happened. One started closing the door. He quickly pressed it again, and the door opened again. Another button caused a wheezing noise, that appeared to be to operate the platform as a lift, although the platform itself didn't move. The last button did nothing.
Alqadi cleared up the remains of our camp and joined the others down the shaft. Leading off the room was a corridor on one wall and a metal door on the other. It looked old, yet the design appeared modern. There was a button beside it, but pressing it didn't open it.
The wide corridor led into a room full of workbenches. We saw the remnants of strange looking instruments. Were these some kind of ancient computer? We also found white stone cylinders and metal cubes, and a lot of stone and metal chippings. They put us in mind of the carved cylinder and cube that we knew were used to operate the frame in the other cave. Prepared blanks, perhaps?
There were also canisters. Inside was something grey and moving. These were quickly closed up again. Sayah wondered if that was what Zhar Baghram had meant in the video when he mentioned 'hot dust'. There was also the worrying prospect that this stuff might be responsible for the extra limbs we'd seen on Islir and Lavim's corpses.
The next room we found had a ring of eight pillars with a ninth in the centre, some of which had figurines on them. It wasn't exactly what any of us thought of as a temple to the icons, but nevertheless that was what it felt like. We looked cautiously at one of the figurines. A black monkey with wings.
Zhar Baghram had been on a time limit. There were doors here he hadn't opened. We were going to try to take a look. However, knowing that there was a fake Lavim Tamm on the loose, and that we'd potentially come into contact with the mysterious grey stuff, we agreed that none of us could be alone from now on. The idea of one of us being replaced by a clone seemed far more plausible than anyone was comfortable with.
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