Chapter 29

“By the gods, this tunnel looks unhealthily dark,” the governor said. “Now, I am certain I should not have let you convince me to abandon my security detail. Surely, this is the entrance to the path of demons and sorcery.”

The bottom of the stairs had not changed. The round door bound in steel stood closed while across from it, the maw of the secret way beckoned. Aden traced the secret code to the laboratory with his eyes, comforted that he could understand how these long dead mages thought. He belched as the coarse bread roiled in his stomach.

The governor shot him a dirty look. Aden shrugged and advanced to the opening. Flicking his finger for a flame of phyzeec, Aden reached his arm into the darkness, keeping his feet firmly planted in the light. He had been zapped too many times in this building to step into any unexplored space hastily.

“Oo,” Aden said with momentary surprise. He bent down and picked up two torches, staunch devices made of a thin metal, crowns and stuffed with rags, pitch and straw for a long, careful burn. He thrust one towards the governor’s hands.

“Impossible,” the governor said. “This straw looks fresh.”

“Another spell to rediscover,” Aden said, trying to change his repetitious lament of lost knowledge into a more positive statement. He was a Lord High Mage now and had to make a better presentation. The governor gave him another dirty look.

Aden flicked phyzeec in both torches and stepped into the tunnel. The walls were roughhewn even though the floor was smooth. Moving the torch from side to side, Aden saw no openings on the sides, only more rock and the way forward. They began to carefully tread down the passageway.

“Why didn’t they use their magic to light the tunnel as they did upstairs?” the governor asked. “Carrying this torch is a nuisance.”

“All-natural rock more than likely cut with tools instead of phyzeec,” Aden said. “My best guess is that even the most sensitive practitioner standing on the ground above would not be able to detect this tunnel because there is nothing of phyzeec available to find.”

“They were strategic,” the governor said.

“They were paranoid,” Aden said, “with good reason. Can you imagine confronting a king who devoured his own army, his own lands? Could you imagine training for generations for just such an encounter?”

“The generations weighed on them though and their potency waned,” the governor said. “Even if their earliest books mention this ancient silver evil, they had lost direct access to the answers. They panicked, failing to fully defeat the mad king. They had great confidence in their abilities and no proof that their confidence was warranted.”

Aden grimaced. The flickering lights did not reveal his face to his companion though. Aden forced the frown from his face. He nodded his head and continued to monitor his steps. “I think this tunnel is sloping downward.”

“The humidity is rising,” the governor said. He cocked his head and thrust his torch forward. “I hear water.”

The tunnel wall on their right faded into the darkness. The torch lit up a receding wall that began the gentle curve of a circle. Yellow tile appeared on the wall. The edge of a white stone fountain appeared, dark water moving in the raised bowl. As they drew near, the fount rose from the middle of the bowl and spread open like a flower in bloom. Water quietly poured from between the stone petals to the bowl below. A gurgle of water falling and then draining away at the bottom of the bowl filled the space. The simplicity was striking.

“Why?” Aden mumbled, as he waved the torch in a circle, hoping to find a clue on the wall. The tiles held no patterns, and the floor was still plain rock. After tracing a circle around the fountain three times, Aden gave up and returned to the tunnel proper.

Only a few steps beyond where the wall curved back to the right side of the tunnel and the tiles stopped, a carved opening appeared. The two men stepped into a changing room, with open wardrobes above and sliding drawers below. Benches were lined up down the center of the room. Britches and jackets were a mix of brown leathers and strategic patches of chain mail. The metal reflected blue in the torchlight.

Behind the changing room were sinks and a communal shower. Aden caught his haunted reflection in a huge mirror as the flames of the torch made shadows dance across his face. The governor’s voice made Aden start. “The fountain outside must feed the plumbing in here.”

“This was an elite army,” Aden said. “We were children playing at being battlemages in my temple. All of this,” he said with a sweep of his torch, “was deadly intent, well-practiced too.”

“Good to hear,” the governor said, as he thrust his torch in a room full of carved stone commodes. “These battlemages failed. We don’t need a battlemage but something else entirely. Let’s find the storeroom.”

Back in the tunnel, the men turned right and continued to explore. Another doorway emerged from the darkness but when they looked inside, it was empty.

Twenty paces later, another doorway appeared, and it was doublewide. Both men looked at each other. With a nod, they pushed their torches through the doorway and stepped over the threshold.

“Of all that is holy and sacred!” Aden exclaimed, biting back his desire to curse a blue streak.

“It’s a shithole,” the governor said, stepping further into the room. “Everything is thrown in piles or tossed without regard to, well, anything. How are we to find what we may need in this mess?”

Aden shook his head as gloom settled over his thoughts. He climbed over piles as he slowly wended his way towards the middle of the room. “These are ore crates,” he said as he pointed towards his right. “Ceramic molds are there. Bolts of a cloth I’ve never seen are in that one. Back here is ... oh my.”

“What?” The governor was trying to negotiate his way between piles of a black wood.

“Machines,” Aden said with a hushed reverence in his voice. “The entire back of this room is mechanical things, sitting on wood planks. I have seen several of the ancients’ things in my day, but nothing like this. The black machine certainly came from here, but it is only one of a hundred?”

“What do these machines do?” the governor said as he came abreast. “I can see tubes, barrels, screws and gears; they make no sense to me.”

“Nor to me,” Aden said. “This is a different world, one so far distant that it is only known in legend. These things should not exist and yet, here they are.”

“I owe you an apology,” the governor said, as he climbed atop a mound of blocks. “I thought your pronouncements of our fading glory and slide to ignorance were blatherings of a pompous ass. If this is our past, we have lost nearly everything. I understand none of this, yet humans built these things.”

“Apology accepted,” Aden said, not meaning a whit of his words. “However, if we cannot decipher what these machines do or how they are powered, then they are useless to us.”

“The mages did not use them either,” the governor said as he clambered down from his perch and began to pace down the aisle. “They may have been guardians, conservators even of this glorious age, but with no more insight than us.” He stepped close to one machine and hoisted his torch high.

“Look!” Aden called out. “The wall. There is writing on the wall above the machine.”

“So, there is,” the governor said, as he leaned over the machine, bringing his torch closer to the wall. “It looks like charcoal scribbled by an unsteady hand. Is our writing so ancient that I recognize these letters? I see common letters, but these words make no sense.”

Aden stepped on the wood plank to get closer. “EM nanometer,” he read aloud. He shrugged. “Qint Inhibitor.” He scratched his head with his free hand. “What are these words?” Aden swept the torch over half a dozen machines and mouthed the words chalked on the walls without making a sound. He turned around to face the rest of the room. “Surely there is a manifest somewhere in this mess that lists these things and what they do. How else did Wayturn figure out which machine to grab for the salt mine?”

“Yes, but they were not thinking of future adventurers coming down here to seek more,” the governor said. “The last High Lord Mage was dead and no one else was coming to kill the mad king. They took what they were instructed to take and tossed everything else. No one was ever supposed to come here again.”

“Were they so virtuous that they would ignore the riches that lay in this room? A few items could purchase a lifetime of fortune,” Aden said. “Wayturn became a name of great misfortune, still passed down in some form today.”

The governor began inspecting the middle of the room. “Perhaps they planned to return and pilfer these piles. After all, these items are doing no one any good down here. We have not tested the key. The key could be good for one entrance and no more.”

“We should look at the front wall,” Aden said. “If they scribbled on the wall back here, then perhaps they laid out the room on the front one. Without something more permanent, all of this material would have been unusable within a generation or two.”

“People are stupid,” the governor said. “I was fearing a demons’ nest and instead, fell into a human’s garbage heap of forgotten memories. Only if we know specifically what we need, we might have a chance. We don’t know but if we did, we would need a small army of curators and secretaries to catalogue this hodgepodge to locate it. We would probably lose a number of them to fatal mishaps, handling material we don’t understand. A fortune, you say? A fortune in grief, I dare say.”

Aden held the torch up as high as he could as he turned in a complete circle. He could hardly see anything beyond the meager glow of the flames, and he was loath to use phyzeec when everything about this hidden way indicated it was unacceptable. Danger was above them, somewhere lurking. He nudged a closed crate with his boot, but it barely moved.

“These people were entirely too deliberate to make such a gaping mistake,” Aden said. “Chalk on the wall is a mark of organization, making sure that the correct piece was placed in the correct spot. Row upon row should be seen to be some form of organization, like a foreman with his list or a librarian with his catalogue. There was a catalogue; there had to have been one.”

“We don’t have the time, mage,” the governor said. “If we were to find this list, would you be able to understand the words. What is a qint? If there is something here you recognize that would be of use, take it and be done.”

Aden lowered his torch in defeat. He could recognize that wood was wood, but not why that black wood was unique and worthy. To touch anything was folly really. Before him was a wealth of nations and none of it had any worth to him.