Samakarantha spent some time contemplating the strangeness of the house. In his mind, he turned over various vestiges of old magic he had come across in his travels, places of old forgotten charms, and lingering powers of the old earth. The feel of this place did not precisely match anything that he had met before–though there was an air to the place that reminded him a little of lonely stone circles and faer creatures, slinking about in the twilight. After about an hour spent looking out the windows, thinking, watching the afternoon greys slide gracefully to the first reddish ambers of early dusk, he came to a decision. Before attempting anything else, before sending a message to the king, before announcing himself to the city, before even organising his chests and crates from the ship, before all of this, he must explore the house. There were secrets here, and he needed to understand a little of its uncanny nature if he were to remain under the roof.
So, with this in mind he left the great window-lit room, bathed in its evening glow and passed into the hallway without, his robes hem-whispering behind him as he walked.
At the doorway, he stood for awhile, before turning right, away from the main staircase. This took him down a long hall. Just a few hours ago the walls had been yellowed with peeling paint, but the corridor was now built of richly carven timbers and painted a heathery purple pattern on its panelling. He paused to examine the carvings and found that they were scenes of local foliage, thistle, heather, beech, fir, alder and thorn. There were hills and standing stones in the carvings too, and from behind many of these stones peered hairy faces with protrudent lips and huge, round boiled-egg eyes. These faces were only ever just barely visible, and they had a notable ambiguity to them too. On closer examination, each faces turned out not to be a face at all: but rather the illusion of a face, made of leaves and thorny tendrils, birds nests, eggs and clusters of acorns. They were tricks for the imagination–like a glimpsed shape seen out of the corner of the eye that looks like a face, but is not.
“H’mmm,” said Samakarantha, thoughtfully. He kept walking.
The hallway turned several corners–seemingly at random–and passed by so many closed doors that he lost count. At its farthest end, he found a tall glass-and-brasswork frontage and a spiral staircase that twisted its way both up and down. An unpleasant sense of chill air groped its way up from below. So that is the direction he took. He was surprised to discover that the stairs made silvery metallic ringing noises as he walked on them.
An uneasy feeling started to grow in his stomach, and creep around in his heart. It felt too much like walking in an overwritten bogey-tale for children. The magic was ornate for want of a better word. It wanted to be looked at.
This made him uncomfortable.
He descended for several twists of the stairwell, and did not pass any landings or doors. Instead, the stairs went ever down, deeper and darker. After about a minute of descending, the walls changed. Stone decorations appeared: statues of ancient-looking peoples, most half-naked, or dressed only in scant war-gear. At first Samakarantha thought they were reclining or lounging, but it did not take him long to realise that the statues were all wounded, and were either dead already or dying. It was not before time that the staircase finally ended in a deep circular room, lined with rough stone. He looked up. The shaft gave the overall impression of being something like a well of enormous size. He wondered if that perhaps was precisely what it was: a well dug deep into the earth to draw up… what? Not water. Something else. Power? Darkness? In one wall, stood a small plain doorway that opened into a marl-pit black. As he stood, he noticed for the first time a voice drifting in tiny fragments from beyond the doorway, small, sad and lost. If there were distinct words, he could not make them out clearly, or else they were not in a language he knew.
Samakarantha spoke to the shadows and the chill air. “There was once a man who went wandering in the dark places of a house, and the man was a fool for he had not brought light, nor flame. But then, as luck would have it, he found both torch and a device for the striking of sparks.”
No sooner had he said the words, than he noticed a slight reflection of light. Going over to investigate, Samakarantha discovered a torch and flint-box laid carefully out on an oilskin. He took the torch and snapped the lid of the box until the heatless sparks caught and erupted into a guttering flame. Red light fell over everything.
Slowly now, he progressed, passing into the dark portal. Although he strained to hear the voice that had caught his attention moments earlier, it had now fallen silent.
This next room that he entered made the magus stop and draw himself up, craning his neck, looking around in wonder. The magic he had worked in the chamber above had seeped down here, and what this room had looked like before, he could not guess. He had no doubt though that this was the heart of the magic in the house.
The room was circular, similar to the well-shaped staircase but larger. Instead of plainly cut and fitted stones, this room was lined with what appeared to be at first glance massively oversized stone columns and lintels. It was only on a second, more careful examination, that Samakarantha realised that the stones were not a part of the house, but that the house had been built around the stones. This was a stone circle, old and primeval in its aspect. The circular wall that stood behind the stones was made of a polished black stone, onyx perhaps or volcanic glass. The black sheen of the surface was further made to look like a night sky by thousands of bright white stars made from nodules of dim-twinkling silver. Over all of this, up above in the gloomy distance, great white marble branches spread, twisting and interweaving. Beyond those branches stretched a dome of that same black rock, and this too was decorated with a hundred-thousand stars of silver. The whole edifice of black stone and white stone and silver stars gave out the illusion of a stone circle under a perpetual sky of starry night-time dark.