The air deep in the inner galleries of the ancient temple was thick with humidity, while being cold enough that Beatrix's breath was actually leaving condensation on the onyx carved wall of hierogyphics she was currently reading. She'd been working at this for almost three hours, trying to locate the key phrase that would give her the last sigil for the mechanical stone lock. God alone knew what Allan was doing to fill his time; she couldn't imagine it was particularly exciting for him, being kept in one place, on a backward world, while his fiance read feet of old carven writing, occasionally squeaking with excitement and jotting something down on her own wrist.

Allan mostly dozed against walls or watched the play of light on the dusty old surfaces of the temple. It was not exciting for him, naturally. All the ancient text meant to him was that someone had lived there once and didn't live there any longer, and that's all that mattered in his eyes. Still, he kept his boredom to himself and did well to feign interest whenever she would make one of her exclamations whenever successfully translating the old runes on the walls.

There was a clank from the direction of Bee and her torch, and the wall she had been studying was plunged into darkness. "Oh, bugger buggering bugger bugger!" A thump suggested she'd stamped her foot as well. "I almost had the damn thing, too!" There was a pause, accompanied by the sound of her boots shuffling around the overgrown roots that littered the temple floor. "Allan' Don't suppose you have a torch on you?"

Light shone brightly and quite suddenly in the darkness as he stepped over, angling the beam over the wall she had been inspecting. "Yeah, what?d you do, break yours?"

She blinked in the brightnees, peering back toward the wall once again. "I dropped it," she admitted reluctantly, tracing the glyphs with one finger. "Shock-proof, my arse ....Oh, here it is." Out came her pen, and she very carefully copied one of the sigils from the wall onto her hand. "Right. That should be the c*cking mechanism sorted. Mind you, there should still be traps in there ..." She looked over at Allan with a faint smile. "Fancy a little adventure, Mr Driskol?"

"My legs are falling asleep," he replied, gesturing with the beam of light. "Lead the way."

Scooping up her bag and now broken torch, Bee led the way back through the dark winding tunnels of the temple, to where a large carven relief of the gods of this ancient civilsation dominated one wall, In the centre of the relief was a large circle, carved of different stone to the rest, on which was marked out many different sigils and signs. Hooking her bag onto her shoulder and tucking the broken torch into her belt, Bee checked the line of sigils on her hand, and began to carefully depress the corresponding signs on the relief. From somewhere behind the wall, there came the wrenching groan of ancient stone grinding together.

"Doesn't sound stable," Allan pointed out warily, glancing around the dark room as though expecting the walls to begin crumbling around them. "Find out who this place used to belong to yet?"

"Seems to be an old treasure house for the wealth of the Tyrants," she told him thoughtfully, putting her full weight behind the last sigil. It just wasn't budging for her. "From what I can gather, the Tyrants were the Fargoan equivalent to Ancient Egyptian Pharoahs, but elected by democratic means and not connected with religion at all. Which means that anything stored here ..." She gave the unyielding sigil another push. "Should be the horde of the century. If I can get this damn thing open."

"Horde of the century?" he arched a brow at her. "How well compensated will you be for this?" Allan peered over her shoulder. "I hope it's quite a bit, 'cause, you know, starship fuel is pricy, and this is risky. I can't shake the feeling that the walls will fall down on us." He scratched his jaw and handed her the torch. "Lemme see yours, maybe I can fix it."

"Well, Fraxilon already paid out a deposit to Rum to get an expert here in the first place," Bee explained, handing over her torch and tucking his between her chin and shoulder as she struggled with the ancient lock. "But he's got the mazumas to pay for anything we manage to salvage from here twenty times over, from what I've been told. Trust me, you'll get paid, Allan."

He chuckled. "I'm just making sure you get paid. You're doing the work."

"To be honest, I'll settle for getting off this planet without becoming a nesting sac for alien insect eggs personal - oh!"

Without warning, the sigil suddenly slid inward with a deafening crash. There was a moment of absolute silence, before the entire structure seemed to vibrate around them, the low groan of stone cogs and wheels louder now than before. Bee stumbled backward, drawing a pistol from the back of her shorts as the relief seemed to split evenly down the centre, opening like a pair of ornate elderly doors.

He tapped the flashlight while she spoke and wiggled it around before it finally flickered to life, then jumped and dropped it again with a crack when he heard the crash. The lense cracked and the light died once more. "Son of a-" he stepped back beside Bee and drew his own firearm, training it on the opening as it widened.

With the light of the torch trained along the barrel of her pistol, Bee peered into the space behind the slowly opening doors. It seemed to be huge, but oppressive in some way, the air roiling out to them dank and stale. No one had opened those doors for centuries, it seemed. The dissipating beam of light from the single torch glinted from golden shapes in the darkness, unseen treasures that seemed to fill the chamber beyond. "Bloody hell ..."

Allan's eyes narrowed on the opening before stepping forward. "That what I think it is" Or is this some kind of crazy space-illusion-trap?"

The archaeologist frowned curiously, taking a cautious step forward. She trained the torchlight onto the threshold of the chamber beyond, and let out a quick curse, grabbing Allan's arm before he could take another step forward. "Well, yes, I'd say it's a trap. Go and crouch down next to that wall."

She gestured to the glyph covered wall beside the now open doors, moving to crouch on the other side. Aiming carefully, she fired her pistol at a seemingly innocent part of the raised threshold. With a staccato sound that caused a minor sonic boom, dozens of bladed darts came shooting from the chamber beyond to embed themselves in the solid stone wall opposite.

"I'm talking about a delivery fee, basically," he said, turning to grab the statue's arm and gave it a good tug. "There's no reason we can't take it to a museum, and there's no reason we shouldn't make a little profit off of it, too."

There was pregnant pause as the statue's arm moved under his touch, and the stone Bee had been standing on jerked downward, knocking her off her feet with a yelp. Sitting up, she peered at the space where the flagstone had been; where now stone steps led down into heavy darkness. "Huh."

"Huh?" He turned and blinked at the newly appearing staircase, stepping forward and turning to look down into the darkness.

"I wasn't expecting that," the archaeologist admitted reluctantly. "I thought there'd be another door, not a staircase." Crawling forward, she leaned her head down into the darkness, groping for the torch on his belt rather than one of the flaming sticks. A sweep of the beam showed nothing untoward, although the snake skins and skeletons that littered the ground below suggested that this culture had been a firm believer in the power of nature when it came to protecting their most treasured belongings. "Looks safe enough."

He chuckled. "Is this a bad thing?" he asked, edging past her to take the first step down into the darkness. "It's just stairs."

"Need I remind you about the darts?" she said pointedly, collecting her own torch to follow him down.

"Yeah, well, now I know what to look for."

"Oh, so my seven years of studying and field experience just got distilled into one encounter with one kind of trap, did it?" Behind him, Bee was peering over his shoulder, scowling at the ground and walls ahead of him as their boots crunched tiny bones underfoot. "Not that I'm saying there will be more traps down here, but it never hurts to be careful."

"Yeah, pretty much," he replied with a cheeky grin. "Besides, look at all of these skeletons" It'd be hard to set up traps that wouldn't go off without one of the critters here accidentally triggering it, right' Like you said, this culture seems mostly primitive, so, they'd probably just throw a bunch of big nasties down here that have all died out by now."

"Alright, alright, so this one is a little obvious," she conceded. "Is that an archway up ahead?" She laid her free hand on his shoulder to pause, peering ahead with a curious frown. "Hang on ....that's sunlight up there."

"How far down are we, do you think?" he asked, glancing over his shoulder at her before turning ahead to peer at the light.

She drew in a slow breath, nudging him to continue on as she considered this. "I'd say ....maybe fifty feet below ground level, but that puts the top of the walls over seventy feet above us now. This chamber ahead is either very big, or that sunlight is an astonishing illusion."

"I'm going for big. It's easier to do than an illusion," he replied, hopping down a couple of steps before continuing at a more measured pace.

"Easy doesn't mean it's going to be done that way," she mused thoughtfully. "Look at the pyramids at Giza. They were back breaking to create, and highly complicated with all the traps and triggers inside, and they were still built within the lifetimes of the pharoahs they were intended for."

"Yeah, well, still simpler than an illusion, aren't they?"

"The pyramids are an illusion," she told him with a snort of laughter. "They're built to look steeper and smoother than they actually are, especially from ground level. That is illusion, Allan."

"I'm sure this is all very amusing for you, knowing more about a things that don't exist where I'm from," he stuck his tongue out at her. "But this is light, it's harder to fake than how steep or smooth something is."

"With highly polished metal like bronze, angled in the right direction, light is easy to direct. The Ancient Egyptians used that trick all the time. It's cleaner than burning torches in a confined ....space ..."

Her voice trailed off as they came to the archway. Allan had been right; there was no need for an illusion here. The arch opened out into what had once obviously been a dramatically cultivated garden. Narrow paths set with polished gemstones wound between now wild bowers in which were kept the greatest treasures of the Tyrants of Fargo Seven. Bee was speechless.

"Wow ..."

"That's not really an illusion though, is it' The light's real, you're just directing it from somewhere else, so even if it were from a mirrior, it'd still be sunlight."

Thoroughly pleased with himself, Allan smirked and turned to look ahead after mistaking her awestruck look for one of surprise at his own deductive reasoning, and instead blinked several times, squinting across the garden.

After several minutes of simply standing and staring, Bee finally spoke. "I take it all back, you're a genius, Allan." She patted him gently on the back, lowering her torch to stick it into the ground, and began to move toward one of the overgrown bowers. Stepping up onto the raised platform, she counted them.

"Six ....Six great treasures. So the Crown of the Gods will be one of them," she said, almost to herself but for the way her voice carried across the artificial glade. "The Gift of Tharden ....The Sceptre of Peace ....Bloody hell, what else was on that stone?" She paused, rummaging through her bag hurriedly.