Our walk ended earlier than we expected: the passage was blocked by a pile of rocks rising up to the ceiling.
The colonel glanced at me ominously, as if I was guilty of the rockfall.
"There was nothing here before!"
"Can there be a bypass?"
"There were some."
When the mine was active, many of its underground tunnels ran parallel and were connected at many points for miners' safety.
"Show the way!" the "cleaners" cheered up a bit.
I gave up using the deceased guy's memory and now relied solely on my logic. We bypassed another rockfall, but we could not return to the initial tunnel. Reich ordered a halt.
"We'll sleep here. It's night already." Indeed, my watch showed half past nine p.m.
The remaining two flasks with water started changing hands; it turned out that one of them was filled with moonshine, and we emptied it in no time. Life immediately became more cheerful, despite minor misfortunes. Under the thick layer of rocks, surrounded by rubble, the "cleaners" quarreled as usual, settling in for the night.
Rustle came to me puzzled: for the first time in the monster's life his carrier descended so deep down under the rocks. I asked if he would help me find a way out - he sheepishly admitted he didn't know how…
I envied the "cleaners" who used to sleeping in respiratory masks. I couldn't relax in them: my face skin itched and it was difficult to breathe. So I took the mask off and, satisfied, finally fell asleep.
Chapter 32
Larkes didn't talk to Satal for over half a year - since his predecessor had left his job - and almost forgot about him. The senior coordinator was unpleasantly surprised with the sudden visit of his unwelcome guest. Satal burst into his former office after symbolically knocking on the door, jealously looking around, and then pulling himself together. "Have a spare minute?"
"Of course. Have a seat!"
The former coordinator flopped into the chair and snuffled for some time, coping with his unhealthy instincts. "Listen, have you heard anything recently about my former student?"
Larkes bowed his head. "As far as I know, he works under the contract with Ronald…"
"Not that!" Satal cut him short. "I was tipped off that he got under a rockfall in the mine and was stuck deep underground. Is this true?"
"I will find out," the coordinator said very calmly, frantically clenching his fists.
"Check." Satal sat in meditation for a while, then abruptly stood up and left the office without saying goodbye.
Larkes cast a look at the wall of portraits. Underground? The senior coordinator reached for the phone. "Hello, my friend," his voice was deceptively placid. "I'd like to speak to Colonel Reich. He's not in? And where is he?"
* * *
We found a new tunnel purely by chance. Reich kicked me for sleeping without the respiratory mask and, still groggy, I threw a weaving that knocked out the rocks from the ceiling, revealing another passage above. Three expanded the hole with two curses, and we immediately climbed up there. The new tunnel was quite narrow - just enough space for two people to pass clear of each other, and it was built without frills: the pale-blue light of our mining hats snatched from the darkness its circular arches, flat even floors, and sides without any trace of timber or finishing.
"Could it be a supporting tunnel?" someone asked.
Reich threw a closer look at the sides (the new tunnel curved gently) and said, "No, it looks like we have broken into another mine. It belongs to a different epoch. There should be an exit to the surface. Let's hope it's not blocked. Five, the necromancer, and I go to the left, the rest check the opposite direction!"
The "cleaners" pertly moved forward, but I recalled stories about all sorts of traps in legendary underground treasuries and stayed behind their backs. In a hundred steps white enamel symbols appeared on the floor, and soon the tunnel brought us into a hall, so spacious that our lamps couldn't light its walls.
"Wow!" Five exclaimed.
A column seven feet in diameter, made of black glass, pierced the hall through, up and down.
"Cool stuff," the colonel agreed. "Now look for something more useful."
And we were found at the same moment. After a short rustling at the far end of the hall, an age-worn ghoul, barely able to move its feet, appeared in the crossed rays of our lamps. Judging by its look, it had no flesh left, just rags of cloth. I thought the ghoul came out to die, but my impression was deceptive - when both "cleaners" thrust standard curses into it, the zombie just shook himself a little and continued to wallow in our direction.
Oops. Reich hissed something through his teeth and began to look over the amulets hanging on his belt.
The massive column in the center of the hall allowed for moving backward in circles, holding the ghoul off at a safe distance. My teammates methodically tested their weavings (I admit, they knew quite a few of them) on the undead. Five even managed to draw a warding sign before the ghoul, but the zombie calmly stepped over it - the "cleaner" only thinned out its threadbare rags. Perhaps, it was the zombie of a dark mage; there were rumors that echoes of their Sources provided them with some immunity to our curses.
I tried to recall a deadly spell from my necromantic arsenal, when a pissed off Five kicked the ghoul in the chest with his heel, screaming "kiai." The atypically light-weight zombie flew away like a bird. We shone our hat lamps in that direction: the undead fell onto a strange construction of glass disks and was being shred into metallic noodles.
"Good job," the colonel praised Five. We approached the "shredding machine": its glass disks, chipped at the edges, were emitting gleaming light. Mosaics on the floor around it strongly reminded me of magic seals; wide yellow stripes glistened on the wall behind it. It was a spooky place.
"Gold!" Five reached for the shiny stripes; the colonel slapped his wrists.
The impressive black column in the centre wasn't like anything I had seen, read, heard, or borrowed from the memory of Messina Fowler. It was caulked into the rock without any clearance in between and palpably smelled of dark magic. Another civilization's layer? I thought for a minute of the multitude of civilizations that rose and vanished in our world. What a pity that I couldn't interrogate the shredded ghoul! I picked up a piece of the glass disk from the floor as a souvenir.
Alas, we found no other exit from the hall and turned back to catch up to the other team. We had already passed the hole, from which we climbed into this mine, when the out-of-breath "cleaners" of the second group swept at a gallop past us. There were only two of them.
"Coluber!" they shouted from afar.
Reich turned around and rushed after his subordinates from the second team. I raced after them, too. The "cleaners" jumped into the familiar hole like circus acrobats, making me wonder what animal spooked them so seriously that they developed such agility.
"What happened? Where is Chris?" (Chris was Three, but the colonel forgot his own order to use the uniform number as a name.) Reich bellowed, when we landed in the tunnel, where we spent the night. Two "cleaners" from the second group trembled, staring at the ceiling hole in a panic, but eventually told their story. Going in the opposite direction, they came to a very big hall with no second exit, and its guardian - the notorious coluber snake - appeared suddenly, nearly blocking their line of retreat. The men reacted predictably and attacked the strange object, but from their curses the creature seemed to become stronger and move faster. Two displayed prudence and ordered a withdrawal.
"You needed to bury it with rocks!"
"Chris did exactly that: he hit the ceiling hard and made a rockfall, but the coluber redirected the rocks with a shield back at him."
"Non-living beings don't have shields!" Five argued.
"Go and tell the coluber about it."
A staccato sound came from the tunnel above our heads, as if the monster, hurrying to us, had a hundred legs. The strong smell of necromantic magic seeped through the ceiling's breach. A rock medley spilled from above
- our enemy sought to expand the hole.
While the "cleaners" argued whether to pile up rocks and block the tunnel or make another attempt to destroy the coluber, I examined the creature with the lightest of my weavings and became ecstatic as a madman. The coluber was an alchemical construct with magic control - like my bike, but by an order of a more complex magnitude. The construct was the product of a genius mind! A super sophisticated ensemble of gold-embedded curses procured energy for the creature, directed its movement, and cared about its integrity. A tiny push was enough to light up and revive its dormant contours, which absorbed and assimilated the energy of magicians' attacks. It was an immortal killing machine, whose deadly protective systems had slept for millennia and now awoke to keep their watch again. How could they think of breaking such a miracle?
"We must not hurt it!"
"Wait until the monster hurts us?" Two replied sarcastically.
"It won't, I will stop it."
"How? Our curses for this creature are like a bolt for an elephant."
"I'll try to intercept its controls. The monster is not much different from my zombie!"
"You have a zombie?!" Reich asked gently.
I ignored his egging on.
"This is an alchemical construct. I do not understand how it defends itself, but its control contours are quite readable."
They were enormously more complex than anything I had designed so far, but simpler than the human mind. For a few seconds the "cleaners" kept silence, and we could hear as the coluber crumbled rocks.
"I had no idea that you guys could do such things," the colonel said at last.
Those lame magicians who went through Empowerment under the restrictor, of course, couldn't do "such things."
"You dealt with retrospective animators, and I am the Master of Necromancy!"
They did not dare to comment on my statement."Do it, if you can, but you go first," Reich agreed.
Chapter 33
On NZAMIPS payroll, Dan Lemar was listed as a specialist in public relations, and usually he didn't participate in law enforcement actions. Who knew that Chief Brian would be placed so unfortunately under quarantine!
'And I can't quit,' Lemar said to himself, desperately searching for options after suddenly becoming the acting head in Brian's stead.
Undegar's wrecked roads slowed down excavation work at "Object One Thousand". The speed of the earthwork was a compromise between two conflicting goals: the need to collect evidence to understand what had happened and the desire to rescue people.
Lemar approached a group of "cleaners" with caution. The mages reacted to the sudden tragedy with hatred addressed to any white.
"What's new?" a grim magician, whose face was badly damaged by a blow of watertwist, asked Lemar.
"Protective amulets are all gone. The exact time of the rockfall is unknown. People who were on duty at the mine's mouth have not been found yet. Up to a third of the shaft is filled with rocks, and the sides of the other two-thirds are not stable enough to hold out if we excavate the rocks."
"Start digging anyway."
"Sir, if the group was in the shaft at the time of the rockfall…"
"Do you hear me? Dig! The senior coordinator called me in the morning. He knows that there is someone alive at the bottom, and he wants to see this guy on the surface. If he dies, Larkes will put me down there."
The news about Mr. Larkes' attention made poor Brian's replacement shudder.
"We'll do our best!"
"Any heavy equipment we need we can expropriate from cotton growers."
"No need to use force. They've already given us all we need. The machinery will arrive any minute now. They have a friend down there, too."
But three hundred feet of rocks! Experts told Lemar that the earthwork could take over a week.
"Can we dig them out through a neighboring mine?" Lemar asked cautiously. Reich's subordinates knew the local mines better than anyone else.
"No," the "cleaner" with scarred face crinkled his nose. "This mine's tunnels are the deepest in district. The other mines are much closer to the surface. With solid rock between them. The colonel went down with our best people, my close friends!" the dark mage clenched his fists, and Lemar involuntarily moved back.
The unstable shaft presented part of the problem; another half was otherworldly that occupied countless gloom-filled underground voids. When ore layers were depleted in one place, ancient miners chiseled out tunnels in another, leaving previous passages to the otherworldly. That's why the work of a miner now was like a lottery; you never knew what would fall on your head - the rocks or the phoma. Only the involvement of combat mages made any underground work feasible near old abandoned mines - they cleaned up caves and ensured the minimum safety of work.
Lemar needed to convince his rescue team to work without rest, hour after hour, knowing about the proximity of otherworldly and the lack of people to replace them.
"The chief, that bastard, got in the quarantine right on time!" the acting second-in-command felt almost hatred for his superior. "Whatever happens now, he is not responsible." Lemar thought with horror about his gloomy career prospects after the tragic death of six valuable mages, whom he failed to rescue.
The first sad finding was made soon after the start of earthworks - they dug out an unidentifiable human body, grinded by the rocks. Lemar hoped the victim would be someone from the colonel's group - it would give him a reason to stop digging.
"Hey, chief," one of the local volunteers approached Lemar. "You'd better move the corpse out of here. It could become a problem!"
Lemar turned around: among the workers scurrying to and fro there was a local white, a kindhearted old man, who searched for the missing with a proven miner's method - a dowsing rod. The old dowser had to be removed immediately, for his own safety, while the "cleaners" were busy inspecting the corpse.
"Hello, Mr. Malek," Lemar grabbed the old man's arm and stared into his eyes, knowing that such behavior would demoralize the white. "Luckily, you're here! We urgently need your help. Only you with your unique method can find survivors on the other side of the hill. Please go there as quick as you can."
Encouraged by the trust placed in him, the old man sped away. Just in time! The "cleaner" with the scarred face (Lemar recalled his name - Dargad), walked towards the shed, looking for the head of rescue operations. The angry magician shoved a huge boulder under everybody's nose.
"Sniff!" he demanded, and Lemar meekly took a sniff.
The rock smelled somewhat unnatural.
"Is it a sort of chemical?"
"Explosives! I told you that the rockfall was prompted. I'll kill the one who did this! I'll raise and kill him again and again!"
It would be nice to know who did it. Lemar sighed and courageously asked, "What if explosives were in the mine for emergency situations? Could your boss take them along?"
The gaze of the "cleaner" was glowing red, like a bull's; he lacked only smoke from his nostrils.
"I need your help, Mr. Dargad," Lemar began his speech with tragic doom. "The tracks around the mine's mouth are hopelessly trampled down. Your people were first at the crime scene; they are our only witnesses. I'll appreciate it if you'll question them as to whether they have seen any strangers, anything unusual…"
Contrary to Lemar's expectations, this rational request reached the consciousness of the "cleaner"; Dargad pulled himself together, as if he were a dog taking to the trail, and he rushed off somewhere at a trot. Alas, the mage didn't find the "cleaners", who came for night duty to replace the previous watchmen. They were already at home.
Evening crept in unnoticed. Exhausted beyond his limit, Lemar couldn't speak; he expressed himself in interjections. The truck with a reserve generator got stuck on the road; they sorely lacked timber. Miners heated water on rocks from the wreckage, which were pieces of evidence! No wonder that Lemar totally forgot about the old white.
Mr. Malek gleefully dragged his feet to a canopy where gloom
y combat mages discussed something. The old man seemed to be set on talking to Dargad. It could cost the elderly white his life! Lemar hastened to stop the killing.
"I've found some people!" Mr. Malek announced, beaming with joy.
"What people?" Dargad asked deceptively gently.
"I do not know," the white got confused. "They didn't say. They wanted me to bring someone to help. They need help!"
"Where are they?" Lemar whispered, afraid to scare luck away. There remained a miniscule chance that another group of cavers was down these damn mines at the same time.
"There," the white waved his hand. "There is a pit in the ground. They asked for a rope at first, but then for sandwiches, for some reason…"
"Gerry, look who's there! Move, move!" Dargad was not listening any more. "Hey, assholes! Grab a rope and follow me!"
"Thank you, Mr. Malek," Lemar was torn between the desire to take care of the white and to run after the "cleaners". "You've helped us a lot! If you don't mind, my driver will take you home."
The tired old man gladly agreed.
* * *
I did manage to get the alchemical construct under control! It brought us to Chris. Three got fractures in both legs and couldn't walk. He moaned and cursed, moaned and cursed. I wasn't the only one regretting that the coluber hadn't finished him off.
I lost my sense of time. At some point, we came across a slit, at the top of which there was another tunnel. To get to the higher level, we needed to climb a fifteen-foot-long wall. What a stupid mine design that was! Rather a bunker than a mine!
I clung to the rocks, standing on the shoulders of Four and Five. They were at the bottom of the pyramid made from our bodies, and Reich with Three on his back was about to climb my shoulders. Two stood aside as our insurance against falling down. The colonel climbed up our pyramid like a drunken bear, leaving bruises on my back and shoulders and crushing my toes. Two climbed up after him. It was a miracle that Four and Five did not break their spines! Reich and Two began pulling out the rest of us, and I started worrying about spraining my joints.
My Path to Magic 2: A Combat Alchemist Page 28