Tyrion studied their surroundings. It would be an excellent setting for an ambush. The jungle and the ruins of ancient buildings provided so much cover. The sound of the rain would drown out any stealthy approach made by aggressors, aided and abetted by the natural noises of the jungle itself – the chattering of the monkeys, the screaming of the birds, the distant roar of the big predatory carnosaurs as they sought prey.
He did not like this place.
It had an atmosphere to it that made him uneasy and there were very few places in this world that had that effect on him. He was an elf; he was used to living in places that had an aura of antiquity. But they had been built by his own people.
This was more ancient than any place in Ulthuan and it had not been built by anything remotely like the elves. Minds, alien almost beyond his comprehension, had conceived the strange geometry of the architecture. He could look at structures created by humans and dwarfs and he could see that they were the product of a sensibility at least close to his own. Such was not the case here.
These buildings have been created by beings that thought in a very different way, according to a very different system. There was a pattern here but he could just not tell what it was. He doubted that he ever would be able to.
It had something to do with numbers. The builders had obviously been obsessed by them. If he counted the number of statues on the sides of each building, as he found himself unconsciously doing, he got the sense that they fitted into some numerical pattern, although he could not tell what that pattern was. He suspected it had something to do with basic mathematical formulae, but he could not tell what that formula was.
Perhaps Teclis could; he had a gift for solving such puzzles. His mind was more flexible. Perhaps he could gain some insight into the minds of the alien creatures who had built this place.
Looking at his brother, he was sure that Teclis was gnawing away at the problem. He had a look on his face that Tyrion recognised; he was confronted with something that he did not understand but he was determined to do so. If anyone could get to the bottom of this mystery, Teclis could. All it would take was time, and, being elves, they had plenty of that.
The humans’ expressions were very revealing too. Leiber resembled a man on the verge of religious conversion. He was very close to achieving some long-held dream. He looked excited and intense. His gaze darted around their surroundings, seeming to take everything in, as if he wanted to memorise every single detail of every single building and every single object that they encountered.
The other men simply looked scared and greedy and torn between those two emotions. They too were excited to be here, but would have preferred to be somewhere else. They were dwarfed by the sheer scale of their surroundings, by these monumental, crumbling ruins emerging from the sticky humid jungle.
If he felt out of place here, Tyrion thought, what must these humans be thinking? Their civilisation was much younger than the elves and they believed the ancient slann to be daemons, in the same way that they believed almost every race but themselves to be daemons or descended from them. They thought that this was a place in which they could lose their souls if they died here. Maybe they were right. Who knew what was possible with the magic of the ancients?
Tyrion was astonished by their bravery. He never usually gave much thought to courage. He never really felt much fear himself, merely some prodding instinct which told him that his survival was in question and that he had better do something about it.
What must it be like to live with an emotion that could leave you paralysed at the moment of maximum danger?
He knew he was unusual even among elves for his inability to feel fear. Teclis certainly knew what it was and his friends back home in Ulthuan did too. He sometimes felt that there must be something missing in him, when he could not share in so common an emotion.
Perhaps it was all part of the curse of being descended from Aenarion. Perhaps this was the legacy that his great ancestor had passed on to him, like the killing rages that sometimes overwhelmed him