Of Machines & Magics (24 page)

There was more than one doorway, all but one of them closed. The three crowded through and the bats stayed outside, disliking the confined space within. Calistrope was covered in bats clutching at the shoulders of his coat though only one had managed to find anywhere to bite into—just beneath his ear.

Roli—perhaps due to his smaller stature—had largely escaped notice and helped to work the animals free from the other’s flesh. Ponderos had suffered most, blood ran in half a dozen streams from bites and lacerations.

Free at last, they looked around the tiny cell into which they had rushed. It was square, small enough for Ponderos to touch opposing walls with outstretched arms, and the roof was low enough for him to touch. The interior was smooth and grey, featureless.

When they had dressed their wounds, they ventured outside to examine the other doors reasoning that one or other of them should lead into a passage away from the cave. The closed panels, like the interior of the cubicle, were smooth; there were neither keyholes nor handles. Apart from a dark grey circle on the lighter grey panel, they were blank. They pushed and thumped and tried to slide the panels without success and it was not until Calistrope accidentally placed his palm against the dark grey circle that the door at the other end suddenly opened. It opened onto a dark pit for a fraction of a second and then was closed again.

They tried the other doors but Calistrope’s hand seemed to be the only one with whatever quality caused the doors to open. There were four doors in all, the permanently open one, the two central inoperable doors and the other end one which opened fleetingly on to the pit where the light that Ponderos held could not reach the bottom.

They experimented with the functioning door which, they found, neither swung in nor out, nor slid to one side. It seemed simply that it ceased to exist.

Above them they could still hear the restless movement of bats in flight. Roli’s call was a considerable relief. “Here’s another way out,” he had walked farther along the wall and found another door, a narrow panel let into the rock face. There was no magic grey circle; he pushed, it swung inwards with a creak. “Like a regular door,” he laughed and from inside, there’re steps here.”

Chapter 19

The steps spiraled upward, upward, upward, turning in a broad circle, gritty with dust, and small gravel and rock fragments which had fallen from the ceiling onto them. They continued to climb the steps, the tall risers making climbing a strenuous business. At length they reached a small landing where another door opened to one side before the steps carried on. There was dust and debris here as well, which had been disturbed by small clawed feet that had crossed and recrossed the floor space, leaving tracks.

Ponderos pointed the tracks out to Calistrope who nodded. “Yes. Both animal and insect, I think. I wonder if it’s the proximity of the atmosphere plant, the air is thicker here than we’re used to.”

“And warmer, too,” added Roli. “I’m just going to look through that door there.”

He was back a moment later.

“Like down below. Four more doorways although I can’t open any of them, do you want to try, Calistrope?”

The Mage’s hand opened each one in turn. The two outer doors opened only for an instant onto gaping shafts, the two central ones were inactive. They returned to the stairs and began to climb again. Signs of animal and insect activity decreased as they went and soon there were only occasional tracks, a very rare pile of bones or a dried up insect casing.

Everything they saw attested to the great age of the structure. The stairs were blocked here and there by roof falls and these they had to file around or squeeze past or climb over. They reached a second landing identical to the previous with the four doors exactly like those below, they came to a third landing and here they sat on the top steps to eat some of their meager food supply.

“Shall we check the doors outside?” Roli asked when they had finished.

Calistrope pursed his lips. “I suppose we had better, assuming there are some.”

There were and they yielded exactly the same result as those on the lower levels. The fourth level though, was different.

One of the central doors opened into a cell similar to the one they had sought refuge within, this one was illuminated by a flat glowing panel in the ceiling. On one of the wall panels was a dimly illuminated rectangle enclosing a ladder-like grid, one line of the grid was illuminated about a quarter of the way from the bottom.

While Ponderos stood in the doorway to keep it open, Calistrope touched a finger to the lower grid marking just below the bright one. An angry buzz sounded from somewhere. Ponderos, step inside would you?”

With the doorway empty, the door materialized and Calistrope repeated the action. For the briefest of moments, there was a sensation of extreme cold. The grid was now illuminated at the line where Calistrope’s finger touched it. He nodded, as though some thought had been confirmed. “Roli, would you go to the stairs and tell us what you see there?”

Roli nodded and went outside while Calistrope stood in the doorway and watched him disappear through the access door. He returned, breathless. “It’s where we stopped to eat. We’ve come down a level.”

“Just so.”

When the door closed, Calistrope put his finger on the top bar. An icy sensation enveloped them leaving them feeling slightly clammy. The door dematerialized and the air pressure fell noticeably. Outside, the walkway and the landing beyond were similar to those below except that the layer of dust on the floor was unbroken; nothing had come this way for decades, perhaps for centuries, longer.

A second difference was the fact that there were no more stairs leading upwards.

“Can you smell something Ponderos? Roli?”

They took deep breaths.

“The air is fresher here. Easier to breathe,” decided Ponderos.

“It’s thinner,” added Roli.

“What you say is true but there’s something else, something faint.”

Ponderos drew another breath of air. “I don’t know what it might be.”

“Nor I, though it’s familiar,” Calistrope looked towards where the landing ended at an arched passageway. “I suppose we go that way.”

“Hadn’t we better check the other doors first?” asked Roli. “There may be more levels above us.”

“Indeed,” Calistrope touched the adjacent door panel, it remained inert. The door at the right hand end revealed the shaft below it momentarily. The leftmost door stood open. The shaft which they expected to see was blocked an arm’s length below.

A cubicle box-structure was canted to one side, jamming itself tightly against guide rails. From its top, thick heavy rope, twisted from metallic fibers led slackly to a winding drum set further up the shaft.

“A mechanical lifting machine,” Calistrope was lost in admiration for long seconds as he took in the great loops of steel cable and the device which somehow passed torque to the huge winding drum “Mechanical. And I’ll wager the one at the far end is the same. The two central ones you see,” he turned to Roli, his voice assuming a lecturing quality, “alter the spatial co-ordinates directly. Whatever occupies their interior is translated to a new location while the devices at each end haul their cargo from one place to another.”

Roli was frowning. “We were moved instantaneously, as when we step from the hallway at your manse to the workshop?”

“Exactly, or so I believe. The workshop is actually some way from my manse, as you remember. Yet it requires no more than a step from the hallway to reach it.”

Ponderos asked, “Then why the lifting engines?”

“They were the main method of transport I’d say but they have broken down, no?” Calistrope nodded. “I think we have used the alternative ascending system, the fail-safe system.”

“Or vice-versa,” suggested Ponderos. The three walked across the landing, leaving footprints in the virgin layer of dust. At the passageway, Ponderos looked back, a slightly puzzled expression on his bronzed face. “Roli, hold the light down near the floor,” he pointed to the faintest of indentations running across the landing, it stopped just short of the lifting system. Ponderos wiped a thick layer of dust away. “Do you recognize this Calistrope?”

The Mage nodded. “Down at the subterranean lake, before we were captured.”

“Exactly. A track, a metal marker, whatever you wish to call it.”

“Should we follow it? The other led us into the ants’ nest.”

“I hardly think it was a trap, Calistrope. As we thought then, it is likely to lead us to something constructed by men.”

“Then let us go.”

They marched off, Calistrope in the lead with Roli at his shoulder and Ponderos bringing up the rear. The track, now that it had been discovered, was plain to see; it ran along the center of the passageway as straight as a die. The passage itself was semi-elliptical in section, it had been cut through the rock with the precision of a machine although, like the stairs they had climbed earlier, nature had spoilt the exactitude of the original work with rock falls and cracks.

They traveled in a straight line for almost an hour before the passage turned left through a thirty degree angle and an hour or so later it returned to its original direction with a right turn. Just around this second corner, they came to a region where a great deal of movement had occurred within the mountain’s core. They were faced with a pile of broken rock which had fallen from a great rift across the ceiling and had to spend a considerable effort on moving enough of the heavy blocks to allow them to climb over the barrier.

The way beyond this point led up and down and it twisted and turned—all due to movements and tilting of mammoth blocks of living rock. At one point, Calistrope stopped and spoke to Ponderos. “How long ago do you think this passage was cut?”

Ponderos shrugged. “A hundred old years? A thousand? Who can say?”

Calistrope pointed to a curtain of stalactites which hung down and joined with several stalagmites growing upward from the floor. The metallic rail continued under the deposition. “Say ten or twenty thousand, perhaps one or two million”. The rock here is quite dry, wherever the water came from to form this structure, it is no longer active.”

The stalactites formed a massive barrier and an impassable one until Ponderos retraced their steps to collect a sizeable piece of stone to use as a hammer. They broke through the stalactites and one by one, squeezed through the opening only to find successive walls of natural stone bars erected against their progress. When they finally won free of the obstacles, they sat down and ate the last of their provisions.

“Wherever we are going,” said Ponderos, contemplating his last piece of dried meat, “I hope we arrive soon.”

Later and further along the twisting passageway they came to a gaping fault in the floor. The metal track had been pulled out like taffy into a thin strip across the ravine. Roli, quick to exhibit the skills of cat burglary, casually walked the tightrope to the far side.

“Now you Calistrope.”

The far side of the fault was two steps higher and it was necessary to walk up hill on the metal strip as well as across it. With somewhat less confidence than Roli, Calistrope stepped out. He took three steps and then found that the hard sole of his boots would not grip the smooth metal, he began to slide back, his boot slipped off the track, he fell.

Ponderos reached out to catch at his friend’s coat but was far too late. So heightened were their senses that Calistrope seemed almost to float down to an impact on an outcrop a few ells below. Horrified, Ponderos and Roli waited for him to move and look up at them, but he did not. He lay there, belly up, spread-eagled over the spur; they could not even be sure that he was breathing.

Ponderos placed the light on a flat rock at the edge of the chasm and climbed swiftly down. Clinging to the rock wall, he bent over Calistrope, placed a finger against the other’s neck and remained in that position for a time before finally straightening up. “He lives,” Ponderos announced and Roli, who had forgotten to breathe, suddenly sucked in a lungful of air.

“Thank Fate for that,” breathed Roli with relief. “Though we don’t know what injuries he might have suffered, there may be spinal injuries.”

“I think he’ll be all right. A mage rarely dies by accident or even suffers any great injury. Luck, you see. It takes only the tiniest measure of magic to sway chance if the force is applied at the right time. Sorcerers learn to apply that force by instinct.”

Ponderos chafed the Mage’s wrists. “Of course, it might be the talisman I gave him. It was once efficacious against weapons of bone or stone…”

“All motions are relative,” said Roli seriously. “If we consider Calistrope to have remained stationary then the world has struck him a vicious blow. A considerable weapon, your sigil must be a powerful instrument indeed.”

Ponderos looked up at Roli and away again He continued to massage the others’ hands and slapped his cheeks and was at last rewarded by movement. “Take it carefully old friend. Does anything hurt?”

“Hurt? No I don’t think so.” His manner was slightly confused. “Strange dream I had.”

“You dreamed you were falling? Or perhaps you dreamed of flying? Eh?” Roli laughed though the circumstances were not amusing. Relief made him react a little inappropriately.

“Mm? No, no. About this place.” Some memory seemed to come back to Calistrope. “Did I fall?” he looked down into the Stygian depths of the chasm then up to where Roli knelt. “Down there?” he swayed where he was sitting and Ponderos steadied him with an arm around his shoulders.

Ponderos told him what had happened and as Calistrope seemed to sway again with vertigo, distracted him by asking about the dream.

“It was about this place, I think,” Calistrope said. “That smell I mentioned? You remember that smell? Magic. Somewhere near here, the ether must be thick with power.”

Ponderos concentrated, trying for various magical effects. “I cannot draw any power whatever. Not an iota, which is a shame because we have to get you up there again.”

“But the source is nearby. Very strong. And I know we shall soon be out of here, very soon.”

“We have to get him up there,” Ponderos said slowly and took off his coat. He bent and carefully worked Calistrope’s coat free and tied the two together. “Yours now,” he said and a moment later was tying Roli’s coat to the chain. He let out the impromptu rope and looked at it. “It’s not long enough. We’ll have to take off shirts—and our breeks if necessary.”

In the event, breeks were not necessary and they hauled Calistrope, still unable to fend for himself, up to the edge of the cleft. When Roli had gone once more to the far side, Ponderos took off his boots and put his socks inside before throwing them across; he carried Calistrope across his shoulders, balanced his way across in six long steps.

And once he had recovered enough to walk, Calistrope found his forecast had been perfectly correct. Two hours later, they reached the end of their tunnel, a portal into a huge cathedral-like space which in spite of the damage that had occurred, was still unmistakably
made
. The roof was a single vault completely spanning the width, there were two huge walls at either end which had once been flat and vertical but were now visibly leaning and furrowed with fissures and bulging from uneven pressure behind the surface.

A dim illumination came from long strips of fluorescent material set into the roof and the light reflected off a maze of narrow gleaming tracks running from scores of tunnels which pierced both the end walls.

They entered and across the wide shadowy floor there was an uneasy shuffle of half seen forms, a half heard whisper. Afterwards the lights brightened, status boards shone, colored signals blinked. Now they saw that the movement had been the lifting of the hundreds of flat bedded transports which hovered a hand’s breadth above the shining metallic track ways where a knee-high pall of repelled dust still hung in the air. The changes left an air of expectancy behind, a waiting, a readiness.

When the companions walked from the tunnel mouth into the hall, there was an awareness. Waiting cranes shifted as they walked past, transports bobbed, insect-like maintenance machines scurried away from their feet.

“This makes me nervous.” Ponderos skirted a low box with a half dozen articulated arms that were making adjustments to a carrier’s control box. “Where are we going, anyhow?”