Part One
Ftangu looked out the window of the airship at the unbroken expanse of forest, half-listening to Sgensar as he went over their plans once more. They’d already reviewed their plans for this archaeological expedition so many times while waiting for permission to explore the Thornwood, and then again while waiting for a day of clear, windless weather, that she could recite them in her sleep. But it wouldn’t hurt to review them once more… She turned back toward Sgensar and listened to what she already knew by heart.
A few minutes later, she glanced out the window again. There – at the edge of her vision, she could finally see a change in the forest. Moments later, it was clearly a break in the trees, and she called out; the others rushed over to the windows. Sgensar, the leader of the expedition, had seen the palace from the passenger seat of a biplane before, but none of the other team members had ever seen it. Slowly the roof of the palace came into view, then its courtyard and outbuildings. It was nowhere near as ruined or decayed as it should have been after so many centuries. The last contemporary reference to the summer palace of the Thosai Dynasty was in a document of the second century, and the first reference to the Thornwood dated from late in the third century; so it had been there and inaccessible to then-current magic or technology for about a thousand years, give or take fifty. The roof should have caved in, at least in spots, after all this time. The mortar holding the walls together shouldn’t have lasted so well. And the bodies scattered in the courtyard should have long ago been dust.
A short time later, they were hovering over the courtyard as motionlessly as an airship could do, with all the aid of machinery and magic. They had no mooring infrastructure or ground crew to help hold the airship in place, but with the latest improvements and windless weather they didn’t need them here. One of the airship crewmen began lowering the rope ladder, and once it was dangling just above the flagstones of the courtyard, Sgensar began climbing down. Once he was on the ground, he waved and Ftangu followed him.
Although the ship was hovering as motionlessly as possible, it wasn’t really motionless. Even on a windless day, the ladder oscillated as she descended. But it didn’t frighten her nearly as much as whatever might be waiting in the palace. Or the Thornwood; nobody who had gone in had ever come out again. Still, nothing had killed Sgensar yet.
She reached the end of the ladder and dropped a couple of feet. Sgensar steadied her with an arm on her shoulder, and they both waved at the people in the airship. Moments later, Mysen, their sorcerer, started climbing down, followed by Dripota, their philologist and Sgensar’s wife; she wore men’s clothing like Ftangu, not by predilection but because it was more practical on an expedition like this.
Then the crew lowered the first of their crates of supplies and equipment. The first crate contained cameras, tripods, film, flash powder, and flares, and some archaeological tools. The second contained more such tools, Mysen’s brazier, spell books, spell ingredients, and the radio. It seemed unlikely that they’d be able to pick up any stations, or communicate with the airship crew for very long; people living on one side of the Thornwood couldn’t pick up stations broadcasting from the other side. But Sgensar had wanted to test it to be sure. As the airship returned to the aerodrome, its radio officer would be in constant communication with Dripota until and unless the magic around the Thornwood cut off reception.
As soon as the first crate was down, Sgensar and Ftangu started opening it, and by the time the second crate was lowered, they were unpacking the tools and picking out the things they would need for their first foray. Dripota set up the radio and started cranking it, then spoke into the microphone, addressing the radio officer of the ship above. When he replied, even from scarcely a hundred feet away, there was far more static than there should be on such a clear day.
Sgensar took a camera from the crate and handed it to Ftangu. “Start taking pictures of the courtyard,” he said. “Close-ups of the bodies, the artifacts, and the entrances to the buildings. And anything else that looks interesting. But don’t touch anything yet.”
Ftangu nodded and moved off, heading for the nearest body. She might as well get this over with. With four mysteriously undecayed bodies in the courtyard, there were probably dozens in the palace itself. This wasn’t Ftangu’s first corpse, but all the bodies she’d seen on her first archaeological expedition were long since mummified or reduced to skeletons.
As a grad student studying under Sgensar, she felt lucky to be included in this expedition. It was necessarily a small one. The University of Kosyndar felt the Thornwood was too dangerous a destination and didn’t want to lose two professors and however many students Sgensar persuaded to volunteer to help out. But Gysar, a moderately wealthy sorcerer and Mysen’s mentor, had heard about Sgensar’s intentions and offered to fund the expedition, hoping it would unearth valuable secrets of ancient magic. His pockets weren’t as deep as the university’s, however, so they couldn’t have as big an expedition team as Sgensar had had for the excavation of the tomb of Saiwo over the previous couple of summers.
Ftangu set up the tripod next to the body of a curly-haired young man and took a photo including some context – the wooden bucket that seemed to have just fallen from his hand, the paving stones and the stalks of grass growing between them. He was wearing a reddish-brown kilt and sandals – both of which should have decayed long ago, too. It was probably warm weather when the catastrophe fell upon these people, as most of the ones she could see were bare-chested. She moved the tripod a bit, adjusted the lenses and angles, and took a close-up of the man’s face, which wore a calm expression; he hadn’t died in pain. She looked around and headed toward the next body, a middle-aged woman who seemed to have just come out one of the outbuildings when she succumbed to… whatever had happened. She was wearing a blue ankle-length skirt and sandals, but again nothing above the waist.
By the time Ftangu had taken photos of the woman and her surroundings, Sgensar had unpacked the other camera and was doing the same at the other end of the courtyard, while Dripota carried on a conversation with her interlocutor on the airship above, and Mysen unpacked his brazier and case of spell ingredients. Instead of painting a spell circle on the pavement and marring an archaeological site, he unrolled a tarp with a spell circle painted on it, then inspected it carefully to be sure no crucial bit of paint had flaked off, and touched it up as necessary before putting tinder in the brazier, lighting it, and starting the spell. Divination spells cast from outside the Thornwood had never revealed much about it, but perhaps he would be able to learn more from here.
Once Ftangu had taken photos of the guards lying by the main doors, their spears fallen from their hands, she decided to photograph the gateway next. It was open, revealing a few feet of ordinary grass followed by the dense underbrush and trees of the Thornwood. Every single plant out there had thorns, long, deadly ones that seemed to be poisoned in some way, although chemical analysis of thorns cut off at the edge of the forest showed no known poison. No wonder no one had ever made their way to the palace on foot.
There must have been a road leading out of the palace toward a nearby village; a palace like this couldn’t sustain itself without neighboring farmers and craftsmen. But nothing beyond the outer walls seemed to have been preserved by whatever magical effect had kept the palace and its people from decay.
When she’d photographed everything interesting she could see in the courtyard, she waited with Sgensar and Dripota while Mysen finished his spell. Gradually, the air inside the spell circle began to blur, then darken, and a whirl of colors appeared – all darker colors, blues and deep purples and an occasional thread of blue-green. Mysen continued chanting for another minute. When he fell silent, the colors vanished, the air went back to normal, and the flame in the brazier went out. The sorcerer turned to the others and said:
“The bodies… they’re still alive.”
Ftangu hadn’t seen them take a breath in all the time she was setting up the tripod and camera and taking photos. They must be breathing incredibly slowly.
“Yes!” Sgensar cried. “Some sort of suspended animation? What can you tell us about it?”
“Not much,” he said. “I’ll do further divinations using hair from some of the people. I can tell you that they all fell into this enchanted sleep at the same time the trees in the surrounding forest grew those unnatural thorns, but you could probably already guess that, and I don’t know what caused it or how to undo it yet. It seems to be very different from the magic I’m used to, but whether that’s just a matter of ancient mages having access to more spell ingredients than modern ones, or something else, I don’t know yet.”
During the trip from Kosyndar to Huresh, and the wait while Sgensar and Dripota had negotiated with the government of Huresh for permission to explore the palace in the Thornwood, Ftangu and Mysen had talked a lot, and Ftangu had learned more about sorcery than she’d picked up before. Many spells that used to be possible no longer were because they required ingredients derived from animals that had been hunted to extinction – unicorn horn, for instance.
“Any reason we shouldn’t go into the palace?” Sgensar asked.
Mysen shrugged. “The structural integrity is still good. It’s not going to collapse on your head. And I’m pretty sure any animals in the area, ordinary or magical, are also in an enchanted sleep. But since I don’t know what caused this, I don’t know whether it’s going to start affecting us after a certain amount of time or if we do certain things. If you start feeling the least bit sleepy, yell out and hurry back.”
“All right. You and Dripota stay here. If you hear us screaming, or if we’re not back in an hour, evacuate. And don’t touch the bodies or take hair samples until and unless we get back.”
“Of course. Good luck.”
As they walked up to the big double front doors of the palace, Ftangu could hear Dripota telling the radio operator that they were going in.
The doors weren’t locked, and swung freely on their hinges. They stepped carefully over the guard who had fallen across the threshold.
“Whatever magic is keeping those people alive after all this time must be keeping things from rusting and decaying, too,” Ftangu remarked as they stepped cautiously into the hall.
“Clearly,” Sgensar said. “Hopefully Mysen can figure out more about it soon. Maybe they have books, just as well preserved as anything else…”
Sunlight came from seven high windows on each side of the great hall; the lights from their helmets lit up the spaces in between. It looked as though the servants had been in the process of setting the table for a meal when the sleep struck them. There were wooden spoons and platters, pewter bowls and cups at all the places along one side of the main table; halfway down the other, just where the set places ended, a man and woman in blue skirts lay still, several utensils scattered on the floor between them. Another man in the same garb had apparently been in the process of strewing fresh rushes on the floor, while a fourth servant had been sweeping up the old ones. As Mysen had speculated, animals seemed to have been affected the same way; two dogs were sleeping in a corner near where the man with the broom fallen from his hands had been sweeping up a pile of filthy rushes, which smelled as ripe as though the dogs had peed in them five minutes ago. Tapestries lined the walls, the ones on the west wall depicting men hunting or fighting and the ones on the east depicting women engaged in domestic occupations; the art style was similar to certain tapestries Ftangu had seen in the Kosyndar Museum of Antiquities, but the colors were as fresh and vibrant as if they were newly woven.
“We’ll take photos of the tapestries on the west wall tomorrow about eight,” Sgensar calculated, “when the sun from the east windows is on them, and the tapestries on the east wall about four. Let’s see what’s through those doors there.”
They passed through a corridor that connected to the kitchens and the servants’ quarters. Four cooks and scullions were lying asleep in various places around the kitchen. The food in the pots and baking pans seemed as well-preserved as the people, their clothes, and everything, although the fires had gone out, and the ovens were cold.
Some of the people they’d seen so far looked somewhat malnourished, and more than half had facial scars from some sort of pox – Ftangu wasn’t sure what diseases were endemic to third-century Tupaska. But one of the scullery maids lying here was strikingly pretty. She reminded Ftangu of a Hureshan girl she had secretly dated in her first year at the university. Her family had had financial troubles and she’d left without a degree, breaking off the relationship, and since then Ftangu had dated more guys than girls, although she hadn’t dated anyone since she got busy with graduate studies.
Nobody was in bed in the servant’s quarters except one old woman. “She must have been sick,” Sgensar said, “judging from the fact that she was in bed at a time of day when all the other servants were up and working.”
“If you look close, you can see some nasal mucus plugging her nostrils, and her mouth is open,” Ftangu pointed out.
Exploring further, they came to a sitting room occupied by some of the royals and their noble hangers-on, identifiable from their more elaborate garments.
“Pretty sure that man wearing purple is King Taisko IV,” Sgensar said. “He looks a lot like the bust we saw in the museum while we were waiting for the Bureau of Antiquities to make up their mind.”
Ftangu nodded. The ill-fated monarch’s sudden disappearance along with his brother, wife and daughter had led to a war of succession among his cousins, which had arguably weakened Tupaska and made it an easier conquest for Huresh a few centuries later.
Ftangu took photos of all the ones who were positioned so as to be illuminated well by the sunlight from the window. Not far from the king was a maidservant, lying beside a platter and three goblets. The rushes beside the goblets were still damp from the spilled wine.
“We’d better head back,” Sgensar said, consulting his chronometer. “There’s plenty more to explore, but we don’t want Mysen and Dripota getting worried and evacuating.”
So they returned the way they’d come and emerged out the big doors to the courtyard. As they approached, Ftangu heard Dripota saying over the radio:
“Yes, they’re back… They seem unharmed… I repeat, UNHARMED…”
“Still a lot of static?” Sgensar asked.
“Yes, far too much for such a short distance… Everything seem safe enough?”
“No obvious dangers, no obvious anomaly that would cause this. But we didn’t have time to look into every room of the main palace, much less any of the outbuildings.”
“Ready to unload the rest of the supplies, though?”
“Yes.”
Dripota repeated that over the radio, and the crew of the airship started lowering the rest of the crates. Once the last of the crates was down, the airship left, and Dripota, staying on the the radio while Ftangu and Sgensar took turns cranking it, lost radio contact less than ten minutes later. After that, they were busy unpacking the crates and setting up the tents until near sunset, and Sgensar decided they wouldn’t try to explore any more that night.
“I’d like to do more divinations with locks of hair from some of the sleeping people,” Mysen said as they sat down to eat. “The man in the purple robe you think was the king, for instance.”
“I think we should finish looking into every room of the palace and outbuildings before we disturb anything,” Sgensar said. “It’s possible we’ll find something obvious that could explain the enchanted sleep, the thorns, and the perfect preservation of everything. A sorcerer interrupted in the middle of a spell with a spellbook open beside his brazier, for instance.”
“Yes,” Mysen said, “I suppose it’s possible that a benign spell gone wrong could have caused this, but I think it’s more likely to be the result of a hostile spell – or most likely of all, a hostile spell interacting with a defensive one. The former would explain the thorns cutting off the palace from the rest of the kingdom, the latter the perfect preservation. The attacker wanted everyone dead, and the defender modified that into a sleep spell instead.”
“If we could wake these people up,” Dripota said, “think what we could learn from them. So much about the customs and language of third-century Tupaska…”
“So much about ancient magic,” Mysen added. “Most of them will know nothing first-hand, of course, but a court like this should have at least one sorcerer or alchemist, maybe both.”
“Even if we figure out how to wake them,” Sgensar cautioned, “we must make preparations before doing so. If they all wake at once, we will be greatly outnumbered, and depending on how much warning they had of their doom – probably not much, given the positions we found people in – it may seem to them as though they dozed off for a moment and suddenly woke to find intruders in outlandish garb among them. The guards may attack us, and while we can’t do much about their numbers, we can remove their weapons before waking them. And we should all be armed first.”
Ftangu nodded somberly. At Sgensar’s insistence, she’d learned to shoot a rifle and a pistol and spent over a hundred hours at the target shooting range outside Kosyndar before the tomb of Saiwo expedition. They’d encountered bandits once during that expedition, and Ftangu had, after several moments of terrified paralysis, shot off several bullets, but never knew if hers were among the ones that killed some of them. She hated the idea of killing these people who had slept so long, but recognized that if they turned hostile, it might be necessary.
