Chapter 19

"Men attempting to prove their own cleverness built this place. Keep alert," McAllister encouraged the stick talisman in the silent way, "we may need to react, quickly." McAllister had the definite sense the strange piece of wood anticipated what might come, eager to face whatever challenges might appear. Shaking his head for the thousandth time over the puzzle the stick presented him, McAllister turned his attention to the door.

"There is a bolt here, and here," McAllister said, after pushing on the heavy wooden barrier. Bound with two-inch wide iron straps on two-foot centers holding the massive wooden timbers together and riveted through, the door looked as if it were intended to secure a powder magazine. For a moment, McAllister entertained a fantasy of blowing the door into flinders.

"Can you turn it to dust, like the mages in the poems?"

McAllister stopped his inspection to turn and stare at Aditya. "No," he said flatly. The stick talisman gave an impatient flex, then, and McAllister's face froze for a moment. "Maybe," he said, then, slowly.

Quickly, he untied the stick, and drew a rectangle in the air before the door. "An area this size, then," he suggested aloud.

The face carved on the curious wooden object was turned toward the door. McAllister felt a flare of resolve as a spark leapt from the base of the stick, and quickly traced an outline of a rectangle between the iron straps, racing around and around the outline, trailing what looked like a glittering mist behind it.

"What is it doing?" Aditya asked in a hushed voice.

"Aging the wood where the mote touches," McAllister responded, equally quietly. "I have no idea how long it would take to render dense wood into dust, though I should think it would be tens or hundreds of thousands of years. When it finishes, we should be able to withdraw this plug, and determine how to open the door."

The spark faded, and the stick talisman relaxed its concentration. Quickly, McAllister stole a glance at the figure carved on the small stick. Detail in the weave and pattern of the clothing the figure depicted wore appeared where none was before, and the hints of a library shelf with scrolls filling it began to emerge behind the figure's shoulder. McAllister gave it a brief nod, and the figure appeared to return it. McAllister had a haunting sense of recognition, then, that in some way he knew the figure depicted, though how or why, he could not say.

Turning back to the door, McAllister quickly restored the stick to its position on his blouse. He slipped his saber through the gap on the right edge of the cut. With the tips of the fingers on his left hand, he worked the block backwards, until he could pull the block, six inches thick, from the door.

After quietly setting the nearly twenty-pound block of wood on the floor, McAllister turned to see Aditya with his arm through the door, grimacing. "Just a little..." the smaller man grunted, and with a grate and squeal of long-unoiled metal, he succeeded in freeing the bolts on the door. Aditya stood, then, and with an elegant flourish with the right hand, and a seemingly negligent push with the left, opened the door before McAllister and waved him through.

The door opened into a passageway that ran past the opening in both directions. McAllister proceeded down the hallway to the right. With his saber in hand and the ball of reddish light floating behind his shoulder, he led with Aditya following behind. The rough-cut blocks of stone at this bottommost level of the Palace of Architecture were massive dark granite things, slick and damp with the sheen of subterranean moisture.

The floor pitched to the left, where there was a shallow gutter, though there was no more moisture in it than on the walls. McAllister wondered if the entire palace drained rainwater to this level, or if there were other drains to the mud flats below the upper city. Still, he reasoned, there must be a drain to the sea from even this bottommost level, and that was worth keeping in mind if there needed to be a desperate escape.

According to the plans that Aditya somehow obtained, the passage they were in should curve around the outside of the sixth level, and yet this followed a straight line, as near as McAllister could tell, though the curvature was likely too subtle to detect in the small pool of light the globe he sustained cast.

"We should have found a passage to the left," McAllister muttered, and Aditya nodded, eyeing their back trail.

McAllister drew his notes from his pack then, and shook his head. "I mistrust proceeding blindly."

Aditya seemed worried to McAllister. "The only thing I can say about the accuracy of the sixth-level plan is that I trusted it enough to be here with you."

McAllister nodded. "Let us proceed another hundred paces."

After fifteen paces they came upon an intersection where six-inch-square columns of the same black granite as the block walls barred the left-hand leg. Between the columns were four-inch wide gaps, which ran the height of the passageway, down to the level of the gutter on what would surely be the inside edge of the circle the passage described. Clearly, this was a drain, and the columns a crude sieve. What it might filter ... McAllister thought again of the forest of spikes at the bottom of the shaft they'd descended, and the body of the man impaled on them.

"Give me your arm," McAllister said, and when the other complied, McAllister grasped his forearm with his left hand. "I did not understand the how of the thing before it was done to me. The one who showed me this knew I could do it after. It is a thing of Hell, and will darken and erode your soul every time you use it. No matter the temptation to do this in your line of work, you must resist. If you cannot, you shall become less than human."

Aditya swallowed at the intensity of McAllister's words, and then gasped silently, as McAllister stretched and slipped their forms just as Sable had first done at Auben's church in Danane. McAllister turned and watched in grim satisfaction as he pulled Aditya by his arm through the gap between two pillars.

The new passageway was smaller. McAllister had to walk bent slightly causing him discomfort. Shortly, the passageway ended in a black opening, through which nothing was visible.

"It is like a curtain," Aditya whispered, and reached out to touch the sheet of black. McAllister grabbed the man roughly by the shoulder, and yanked him backwards.

"We know nothing about it," he cautioned, as he undid his pack for another rope.

While showing Aditya what he did, McAllister knotted the end of the rope quickly, about three inches from the end, and then gently swung two feet of the end through the flat-black darkness. The rope end swung through, unimpeded, seeming to end at the surface of the blackness, though it swung as if the mass of the knot were still attached. A quick tug back, and the entire rope came back, knot included. McAllister showed it to Aditya.

Aditya's eyes widened, as he understood the knot indicated the blackness had not cut the rope. He watched as McAllister drew his saber again, with a slight whicker of steel on brass. Gently, McAllister probed beyond the inky blackness with the tip of the saber, and when he felt the solid floor beyond the curtain, probed further. Satisfied the floor continued beyond the black wall for at least enough room for them to stand, McAllister sheathed the saber and mimicking Aditya's earlier grandiose wave, indicated the smaller man should step through.

Visibly shaking, Aditya gathered himself and stepped through. McAllister followed...

... And stepped into a brightly lit hallway. A moment's surprised reconnoiter showed McAllister he stood in a deep gutter, the outside wall constructed of the familiar cut black stone blocks, but only to the height of the inside wall. The inside wall was of a gray granite, constructed of even larger blocks. A staircase was built alongside the inner wall, starting at the doorway, and rising eight feet or so to the top of the wall. Craning his neck, McAllister saw the ceiling was a great arching roof of the gray granite, twenty or more feet over his head. Along the walls at what appeared to be sixty-foot intervals were large sconces holding massive oil lamps.

Shrugging, McAllister turned to climb the stair, Aditya following behind. At the top, McAllister found he stepped onto what would pass as a roadway if it were on the surface of the world, made of the gray granite blocks, with twin deep gutters running along the sides of the road, made of the black granite. Seeing this, McAllister understood the gutters would carry water to the center of the palace ... and sudden understanding came.

"The gutters, the last two passages ... is there a river dammed uphill from here, do you know?" McAllister asked of Aditya, lightly.

"There is," Aditya admitted, giving an uneasy glance to the gutters. "This is the straight corridor to the nadir, and if the dam were struck, I guess much water would flood this level ... quickly."

"Would it drain as quickly, is the question," McAllister asked. "No matter. We must proceed with caution, more caution than we have shown yet. There is sorcery all shot through this place, not the least of which is in those wall-lamps."

Aditya nodded grimly. "With the exception of the present company, I mislike sorcerers and mages more than I dislike mystical architects."

McAllister turned so the other should not see his smile, and walked down the corridor, his reddish ball of light following tamely behind his left shoulder.

"Hold," McAllister said, after two minutes. "I feel strangeness just ahead, here."

Aditya froze in place, regarding McAllister curiously while the taller man knelt.

"There..." McAllister said, as his fingers encountered the sorcery he felt, and began to absorb the fine stuff. After a moment, McAllister grew impatient, and pulled the ethereal substance from where it was bound. Drawing it to his hand caused a soft golden glow around the extremity, casting new shadows in the hallway.