Chapter 25

Ellerie shined her lantern over the fallen stone and dirt. “This one’s blocked too,” she said with a sigh.

It was the third tunnel they’d found leading away from the southern area of the city to what they expected would be another section on the east side of the mountain, but just like the first two, it was blocked by a cave-in.

Boktar rapped on the tunnel wall, then shouted and listened for the echoes. “This one’s man-made, so it sounds different, but I don’t think there’s any point in trying to dig it out. It feels like the collapsed section goes on for quite a distance. If we try to move any of it, I suspect more will fall.”

“Let’s go back then, and see if we can find another way,” Ellerie said. “Bobo, were there any other routes that would get us to the eastern side?”

“Not that I remember, but we haven’t explored any of the tunnels on the upper colonnade levels. Some of those might bypass the cave-in.”

“I don’t want to go back to the colonnades today. Let’s stay on the southern side for now, and we can try that tomorrow.”

“Maybe I can see the colonnades on my next trip,” Boktar said.

“Why not tomorrow?” Ellerie asked. He’d said he planned to give the mules and drivers a two-day break before leaving again.

“The wagons need work, especially our two,” he replied as they returned the way they’d come. “Nothing too serious, but I do want to replace an axle with one of the ones we took from the wagon we disassembled. It’ll all take some time.”

Ellerie grimaced. She was depending too much on Boktar again, like she always did, but he was the best choice for leading the drivers back to Livadi. Maybe after they had the routine down, Josip could handle the trips on his own.

It was a quarter of a mile back to the chamber where the tunnel began. Four other corridors led away from there.

“This one, right?” Corec asked, checking the chalk marks Bobo had left.

“That’ll get us back to the southern junction room, if that’s where we’re going,” Bobo said. That was what they’d named the chamber they’d found directly south of the central junction. It had a dozen tunnels leading to all corners of the southern portion of the city.

“Where do the others go?” Boktar asked.

Ellerie said, “The one to the south leads down to part of the aqueduct system. I don’t know what it was used for, but there were dozens of rectangular ponds carved into the stone. There must be an underground river or lake feeding into them.” She suppressed a shiver. That immense, dark cavern with the sound of dripping water had been more eerie than any other part of the ruins. “North was ... I’m not sure what it was, but we didn’t find anything interesting there.”

Boktar pointed to the last tunnel in the room. It led west, like the tunnel Corec had indicated. “What about that one?”

“We haven’t gone that way yet,” Bobo said. He held his map up in front of his lantern. “Although, that might take us back to tunnel five in the southern junction room.” They’d numbered all the tunnels at the junction to help keep track of which ones they’d followed. “Should we try it, so we can cross that one off our list? If it doesn’t go back, we can return here and take tunnel four instead.”

“We might as well,” Ellerie said.

It didn’t take long to discover that the new tunnel wasn’t leading them back to the junction. It sloped downward instead. Soon, they were in a new chamber they hadn’t seen before. It reminded Ellerie of the junction room, but it was smaller and only had eight tunnels leading out instead of a dozen.

Treya spun in a slow circle to take it all in. “Where are we? Why haven’t we seen this spot before?”

“And how far down did we go?” Ellerie asked. “Where’s the southern junction?”

“We’re just below it,” Leena said.

“We’re on a new level, then?” Bobo asked. “Seven more tunnels. The one to the north looks interesting.”

The only tunnel along the northern wall was larger than the rest, twenty feet wide, with an ornate stone arch at the entrance.

Ellerie glanced around at her companions, but it was still early in the afternoon and it was clear that everyone wanted to continue. Even Nedley’s smile had returned. He’d been excited about his first chance to visit the ruins, but had grown discouraged when they hadn’t found anything interesting all morning.

“Let’s go, then,” Ellerie said.

Corec took the lead again and headed into the north tunnel, the rest of the group following behind. At regular intervals, they passed alcoves along the right wall and rusted metal doors on the left.

Boktar stopped at one of the doors. “Should we try to open it?” he asked.

“Try this one instead,” Corec called out from up ahead. “It’s in better shape.”

They joined him, Boktar using his hammer to pound off the worst patches of rust sealing the door shut. When he pulled it open, it made a horrible screeching noise.

Inside, they found a tiny room piled high with rusted metal and other detritus.

Bobo poked through the mess with his cudgel. “Is that wood?” he asked. There were pieces left that hadn’t completely rotted away yet.

Ellerie said, “We found the remains of wooden furniture back in Tir Navis, too. It must have stayed drier down here.”

Bobo nodded. “Unfortunately, there’s not enough left to say what any of it was.” He marked a note on his copy of the map.

They tried three more of the doors before Ellerie put a stop to it. Some of the rooms were larger, and sometimes there were several grouped together, but none held anything particularly interesting.

“We can come back to the rest of these later,” she said. “This corridor is obviously going somewhere. Let’s follow it and see where it takes us.”

Soon, the tunnel, which had continued almost directly north according to Ellerie’s compass, turned abruptly to the northwest. It remained just as wide, but several ranks of four-foot-tall metal walls had been placed along either side, leaving a narrower walkway in between.

“I think those are shields,” Boktar said. “Like a small defensive wall.”

Corec nodded. “Archers or pikemen could stand behind them and hold off advancing troops.”

“All the way down here?” Ellerie asked. “Who’d be attacking them here?”

Corec examined the nearest of the barriers. “They’re curved to deflect arrows and spears, and the curve is facing the way we came in, from the city, but they look like they’re permanently fixed in place, not portable. They might just be the Ancients’ version of the defenses you’d see around a king’s palace.”

Bobo said, “Or it’s like a fortress. You build it, then a village grows up around it. You build a wall around the village, but then the village becomes a town and grows beyond the wall again.”

“So we’re heading toward the fortress?” Ellerie said. “Or the palace?”

“We’re just guessing,” Bobo said, “but it seems logical.”

“Is that a light up ahead?” Treya asked.

Ellerie followed her gaze and saw a faint blue glow outlining the corridor. Nobody needed any prompting to continue on.

Beyond the last of the metal barriers, the tunnel opened out into a larger area. Corec summoned mage lights overhead to make the chamber easier to see. It was roughly in the shape of a diamond, and spacious but not nearly as large as the colonnades—perhaps forty yards across at its widest point. The tunnel had brought them to the southern tip of the room, and there was another tunnel leading away from the eastern tip. Three doorways lined the wall in between the two tunnels, though one of the metal doors had, at some point, fallen off its hinges and now lay on the ground.

The western side of the room was misshapen, appearing as if the stone of the walls had melted and flowed into distorted shapes before becoming solid again. It was similar to the blocked tunnel they’d encountered at the central junction room. Was this where that tunnel had led? There were two doors along the southwest wall before the melted section began, but the one closest to it was hanging open, a crack down its middle.

Blocking the view to the north was a wide basin holding a ten-foot-tall metal sphere. The metal gleamed, reflecting the mage lights.

“What do you suppose it was?” Bobo asked.

“A sculpture?” Ellerie suggested. “It’s perfectly round. How did they make it without any seams?”

“Not quite round,” Corec said, craning his neck up. “There’s something at the top. A flat section, or maybe an opening?”

Before they could look more closely, they heard Nedley’s excited shout. “I found the lights!”

They followed his voice around the orb to find him standing by seven more of the animal statues, this time constructed from marble rather than metal. This group wasn’t mounted on pillars, but even standing on their own, the statues were over eight feet tall. A blue light shone from the ground in front of each one, illuminating it. Like the statues outside the cave, they were arranged in two rows facing each other, with the fox statue facing an empty spot at the far end.

“Those are mage lights,” Ellerie said. “They must have made them permanent somehow.”

“Hildra said the Chosar and the first peoples could create permanent enchantments,” Corec mentioned.

“But which of the two groups lived here, and how were they related?” Bobo asked. “I always thought of the Tirs as belonging to the first peoples, which might or might not include the Chosar. But you said she called them Chosar cities?”

“She said the Chosar drove the other tribes out of the Tirs.”

Bobo shook his head and sighed. “I’ve never read anything like that. What I would have given to have seen her library. It’s a pity it was lost.”

Ellerie followed the pathway lined by the statues to the northern tip of the chamber, where she found a set of ornate double doors more than twice her height. They were made from wood, but showed no sign of rot or disrepair. There was a small metal plate affixed to the stone wall left of the doors. It looked like a plaque but there was nothing written on it.

The group gathered around her as she tried the vertical metal handle on the left door. It didn’t budge, so she tried the right side, with the same result.

Muttering, she stepped back and waved toward the door. “Could one of you... ?”

Corec and Boktar didn’t have any better luck, even when they both pulled at the same time.

“It’s not moving at all,” Corec said. “There must be something holding it closed.”

“Do you want to get an axe from camp and break it down?” Boktar asked.

“Wait,” Ellerie said, and cast her arcane sight spell. A white haze descended over her vision, but in front of her, the door lit up with an intricate defensive warding.

She turned to tell the others but stopped in surprise. The blue mage lights near the statues glowed to her sight, as she’d expected, but so did the massive sphere. Its entire surface was lined by an enchantment more complex than she’d ever seen before.

She banished the arcane sight spell and her vision returned to normal. “The door is warded,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll be able to open it. And the orb is enchanted.”

“To do what?” Bobo asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe Hildra could tell us,” Corec said. “She said she has a knack for enchantments, and she wanted to see this place if we found anything.”

Ellerie shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t want to bring anyone else in right now.”

“I meant that we could tell her about it on our way back, and ask her to send us a letter if she learns anything.”

“I suppose that would be all right. People are going to show up here as soon as Varsin puts the word out—I guess it’s better if it’s someone we know. But let’s make sure we learn everything we can before we leave. I want to make sure our book is the first.”

“Can you get us through the door?” Boktar asked her.

“I have a banishing spell, but warding spells can be tricky, especially if you don’t know what they’re warding against. If it’s warded against spells, it’ll be dangerous to even try, and if it’s lasted this long, I don’t want to risk it unless there isn’t any other choice. Maybe we can get around it through one of these other doors or that tunnel.”

“We’ve still got a few hours before we need to head back,” Corec said. “How about you take the doors and I take the tunnel?”

“More cots,” Corec said. The rusted furniture had mostly collapsed, but it was apparent enough what it had once been. “That’s ten of these rooms so far, two dozen cots per room. This is a barracks.”

“For an army?” Treya asked.

“Yes, for new recruits or maybe for young soldiers who didn’t have a family yet. Older soldiers and officers were probably housed elsewhere in the city.”

“We’ve skipped more doors than we checked,” Bobo said. “That’s a lot of recruits for an army.”

“How big was the kingdom?” Corec asked. “Not the city, but the rest of it?”

“We don’t really know. We don’t even know if it’s all one kingdom or separate kingdoms or an empire that spanned all of them. Each Tir was a city-state, like Tyrsall once was, or like Circle Bay is now. I imagine the surrounding lands looked to the nearest Tir for governance. If Aencyr was the next closest Tir, then I suppose Tir Yadar must have been quite large. Bigger than Tyrsall, perhaps.”

“Big enough to support an army the size of Larso’s, then. Tir Yadar could have been where they trained the recruits and housed most of the soldiers. Those smaller rooms have got to be bathing chambers, and the empty rooms we found before we reached the barracks could have been used for training. Practice yards and the like.”

“Why is there so much more furniture left down here than up above?” Treya asked.

Bobo said, “Maybe what was here wasn’t worth hauling away, or maybe they just preferred wooden furniture up in the colonnade sections. There was a lot more dust up there; it might have simply all rotted away.”

“Or it could have been more deliberate than that,” Corec said. “What was up above belonged to the people. These cots belonged to the army, the government. Maybe everything on this level did. Perhaps the army wasn’t able to take everything with them when they left.”