by Max Anthony
Viddo shook his head and set off down the steps. “Don’t accuse me of not warning you, that’s all I’ll say.”
They walked down the steps in silence for a while. They seemed to go on forever and neither had any doubt that they were now deep beneath the earth. The light bobbed and jumped in time to their footsteps, but did not allow them to see the bottom.
“We must be hundreds of feet below the surface,” Rasmus said. “This is all quite excellent, isn’t it?”
“It wasn’t what I was expecting to be doing when I woke up this morning,” said Viddo. “Any idea what could be down here?”
“Haven’t got a clue,” said Rasmus to Viddo’s surprise. The wizard didn’t generally admit so readily to his ignorance. “But this area of Frodgia apparently had civilisation long before anywhere else. Even earlier than Gooticus.”
“I’m going to wish I had two loot sacks, aren’t I?” asked Viddo with a childlike hopefulness.
“If it comes to it, I can levitate a considerable quantity of gold and gems using my magic. I’d prefer it if I didn’t have to, since those spells tend to expire just when you don’t want them to. And for some reason, casting a levitate spell makes my ear lobes itch, though I’ve never got to the bottom of exactly why that might be so. It’s definitely infuriating sometimes.”
“I think the steps are coming to an end,” said Viddo, choosing to ignore the wizard’s mention of his itchy ears.
Viddo Furtive was correct – the steps ended, not at another corridor, but at three corridors, which branched off to the left, the right and also straight ahead.
“We’re definitely on to something here!” spoke Rasmus, dropping his voice into the loud whisper again.
Viddo had already gone several paces down the left-hand tunnel. He was not a man prone to indecision. Rasmus hurried after him.
“Perhaps we should take a bit more care now,” the wizard said. “We don’t know what could be wandering along these passages.”
“Are you expecting there to be something dangerous?” asked Viddo.
“Someone’s gone to a lot of effort to craft all of this. I don’t see why they’d just bugger off and leave it for any Viddo, Dock or Yarry to come along and claim it for their own.”
“Perhaps there was an ancient civilisation that lived down here,” said Viddo wistfully. “And something came along and wiped them all out, leaving nothing behind but piles of beautiful, gleaming treasure.”
“And spell books!” added Rasmus, strangely concerned that if he didn’t get in his own request, he’d be somehow diddled out of his share of the hypothetical loot. “And a smattering of tungsten staves!” he said as an afterthought. I’m not greedy. A couple of spell books, a new staff or three and I’d be happy, he said to himself. As it happens, Rasmus didn’t habitually travel with a stave, finding them to be an encumbrance which he didn’t need. Many wizards swore that a well-made stave acted as a conduit for their magical powers and never left the house without one. Rasmus suspected it was all just for show, in order that these wizards could look a bit mightier than their fellow man. He’d never found a staff did him much good and the lack thereof had never prevented him from destroying whatever he’d fancied destroying. When it came down to it, he didn’t exactly know why he was so keen to find a new staff here. Perhaps it was just too galling to think that Viddo Furtive would have all the fun.
The left-hand corridor continued for a hundred yards or so without deviation. Then, it ended at a wall, though there were left and right turns available to compensate for the loss of a straight-ahead option. Viddo took the right-hand turn without hesitation. Rasmus considered suggesting they flip a coin in order to determine who should have precedence in selecting their preferred choice of direction, but quickly decided that it wasn’t a battle worth fighting.
“Left-right-left never fails,” said Viddo over his shoulder as he took an almost immediate left after the right.
“It only has to fail once and then we’ll be lost forever,” said Rasmus.
“I’ll take it over left-left-left any day of the week,” Viddo responded. “I mean, which bumbling idiot thought that would be a good idea? You’d be walking in a circle for an eternity. Like a man with one leg shorter than the other.”
“Not quite an eternity,” corrected Rasmus. “I’m fairly sure you’d die of thirst or starvation long before you reached an eternity.”
“Precisely,” said Viddo. “Now let us say no more about your left-left-left folly, lest our skeletons be found here a thousand years hence.”
“I’ll bet we’d be rich skeletons,” said a rebellious Rasmus. “For I’m certain that we’d have discovered wealth unimaginable. Nevertheless, I am willing to trial your unusual left-right-left method on this one occasion.”
It wasn’t long before Rasmus was put in the position of having to metaphorically eat the hat that he denied stealing. After two more jinks of left and right, the passageway ended, or rather it opened out into a cavern. This wasn’t a tiny cavern of the sort that they’d found at the end of the cave far above. Instead, this was a vast, underground area, hundreds of yards around and filled with a variety of peculiar-looking stone structures. These structures were mostly square in nature, with openings in the walls that looked suspiciously like windows. High above them, stalactites festooned the cavern roof, though it is certain that the pair would have argued over the correct nomenclature.
The two of them stood staring for a time, like a couple of bumpkins confronted by the sight of a village with more than a dozen huts. Rasmus dismissed his light spell on the basis that it was no longer needed – someone else had already illuminated the majority of this cavern, by casting permanent light spells upon what looked like glass balls. These balls were everywhere – mounted on stone posts, standing in the window-like apertures and lining the roofs. In addition to the fact that Rasmus’ light spell was no longer required, he had suddenly become painfully aware of the possibility that his light was a different hue to the others, and it made him and Viddo stand out like sore thumbs. Both wizard and thief had been around long enough to realise when there was potential danger ahead.
“This looks to be a bit of alright,” said Rasmus, using a phrase that he’d once used to describe an attractive lady wizard, though his clumsy phrasing had earned him a slap across the chops.
“I’ve never seen the like,” admitted Viddo truthfully. “I’ve seen caves and I’ve seen caverns, but this is like a whole city underground. Or a very large town at least.”
“Something’s ringing a bell in my head,” said Rasmus. “I’m sure I should know what this place is. It’s not as if somewhere like this could go unknown forever.”
“It’s the lost city of Turgle-Turgle,” said Viddo without hesitation. “I read about it when I was a lad.”
“You couldn’t read when you were a lad,” said Rasmus dismissively.
“Well maybe someone told me about it and it stuck in my head,” said Viddo. “Either way, I’m sure this is the lost city of Turgle-Turgle.”
“I was just about to say that,” said Rasmus, who’d never heard of Turgle-Turgle before, but didn’t like to give up his claim to being the more academic of the pair. “In fact, now that you’ve reminded me, I have no doubt whatsoever about its provenance.”
“Or maybe it’s the underground hive world of the Death King, Chunkos,” said Viddo absent-mindedly, rubbing his chin in thought.
“I’m not sure the architecture is consistent with the tales I’ve read about the Death King Chunkos,” said Rasmus speculatively, in the hope that he might sound learned on the subject.
“Perhaps we should explore,” said Viddo. “I’m not sure it’s relevant which of the two it is, since the place looks deserted.”
“Some important facts have temporarily slipped from my memory,” said Rasmus. “Can you tell me what happened to the citizens of Turgle-Turgle?”
“Oh, the same thing that happened to the citizens of the Death King Chunkos, if I
recall it correctly. Legend has it that they lived peacefully for thousands of years, albeit every first-born child was sacrificed in honour of their gods and all the men had their genitals sliced away after they’d fathered four children. Then, they delved too deep and some calamity befell them and they all died. Or at least they vanished somewhere and somehow.”
“That sounds like your standard lost city myth,” said Rasmus, nodding sagely to himself.
“Yet here stands a lost city,” said Viddo. “Before our very eyes, it awaits our exploration.”
“And without knowing it, it also awaits our rampant burglary,” said the wizard.
“No,” said Viddo firmly, as if his professional honour had suffered a besmirchment. “You can only burgle a house that someone lives in. If everyone here is dead, then what we will be doing is absconding with unclaimed goods, which is entirely legal.” He looked slightly disappointed at his own conclusion, as if he’d robbed himself of his rightful illicit activities.
“Whatever,” said Rasmus, making an irritated gesture with a hand. “Let us find these purloinables first and then tell ourselves whatever words we need to, in order that we can live with our actions.”
Viddo looked like he was about to belabour the point, but decided not to. “We shall proceed in this direction with caution,” he said, pointing towards the closest of the building-like structures.
Without a better plan, Rasmus dutifully trailed after his companion. He looked around him in wonder, taking in the unique sights offered by this underground city. The closest buildings were mostly only a single storey in height – wide, squat and ugly. Deeper into the city, he saw others which were two and three storeys tall. Much further into the distance, there was something that loomed taller than the other buildings, reaching up to the ceiling of the cavern which was at least a hundred yards high. It wasn’t entirely clear what this building was, but something about it had the air of a temple, or similar place of worship.
“I don’t like the look of these buildings too much,” said Viddo Furtive. “They’re not very pretty, are they?”
“You’ve not got a romantic bone in your body, have you?” asked Rasmus. “Just look about you – the amount of effort required to build all of this so far underground must have been monumental. I’m three hundred and something years old and I’ve never seen the like of it.”
“It’s not so much that I am lacking an appreciation of the hard work that has gone into the construction of this city, so much that I’m wondering why they bothered. It would have been much easier to have made it on the surface, I should imagine.”
“It’s not for us to wonder at their motives when we are making a qualitative assessment of the merits of the end product,” said Rasmus with the tone of a man who knows what he’s talking about, even when he might not actually have the faintest of clues.
They reached the first of the stone dwellings. It appeared to have been hewn from solid stone, and had no marks or blemishes on the surface of its walls. Wizard and thief exchanged a glance. The implication was clear – whatever had built this place had removed an almost inconceivable quantity of solid rock in the process of doing so. The effort must have taken thousands of people decades to accomplish, if not hundreds of years.
Viddo didn’t hesitate and vanished through what was undeniably a doorway into what was undeniably a house. Rasmus hurried after him, keen to be an equal partner in their exploring endeavours. Inside it contained only a single, large room, with what may have been a fireplace. The ceiling was only six feet high – not low enough to catch their heads, but sufficiently close that they had to keep looking upwards in order to be sure. The light was dim in here, provided by a glass ball embedded into one of the walls, which provided a modicum of illumination. Viddo crossed over and pried at it with the tip of one of his daggers.
“I wouldn’t bother trying to steal it,” said Rasmus. “Any hedge wizard could make one of the same for a handful of low denomination coins of your choosing.”
Viddo instantly gave up the effort. Sometimes the simple pleasure of stealing a single coin from a miser’s shoe could give him more enjoyment than taking a thousand coins from a wealthy merchant’s iron-bound coffer. It was the thrill of the chase more than the end rewards that drew this particular thief.
“No furniture,” said Viddo. “Either they couldn’t be bothered with furniture, or this place was abandoned so long ago that everything’s rotted away to dust.” He didn’t need to mention that it would have taken a considerable amount of time for such a thing to have happened, assuming the atmosphere in this cavern was suitable to allow organic material to disintegrate completely.
“There’s probably not a lot of wood down here,” said Rasmus. “And I know that’s what I’d make my tables out of.”
“There’s wood up on the surface,” said Viddo.
“We don’t know if there were any trees back when this place was made. The surface might have been so barren that the people who built this city were forced to live under the ground. Maybe there’s more water here,” responded the wizard.
“Anyway,” said Viddo, “if there was nothing to make furniture out of, why didn’t they carve themselves stone chairs or something? They look to have been reasonably competent stone masons to have dug themselves a whole city.”
“Perhaps they all sat down to eat,” ventured Rasmus. “Not that I’d fancy it myself. I get stiff five minutes after I sit cross-legged. I wouldn’t want to eat a juicy steak out of my lap.”
“There probably wasn’t much in the way of cattle down here, either,” said Viddo. “I’ll bet that there’s loads of stuff that’s rotted away that would have given us a clue.”
They were both playing guessing games as to why anyone would have bothered to build such a city so far beneath the surface. Though they had no way of knowing if they were even close to the truth, they were both very excited at what they had found and were enjoying their discussion as they tried to fathom out what they could, using a mixture of logic and guesswork. Rasmus had already concluded it was likely that any spell books or wooden-handled staves would have rotted away. He was slightly morose, but it didn’t dampen his enthusiasm to the extent that he lost interest in what other goodies might be in this city.
“There’s no toilet,” observed Rasmus, putting aside thoughts of personal gain. “I wonder where they went to do their business.”
“Communal privies,” said Viddo. “I’ve been to a town that had them. There was a big, long trench that you stuck your arse over.”
“Urgh!” said the wizard. “Did you not feel a little bit uncomfortable going right next to a stranger?”
Viddo shrugged. “When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. And it’s amazing what local rumour and gossip you can find out in a communal toilet. Sometimes it was a wrench to take myself away. There were a few familiar faces present every time I went, as well. I reckon some of the locals practically lived there.”
Rasmus opened his mouth to speak, but Viddo got there first. “And before you ask, no I didn’t get used to the smell. At one such place, there was a man at the entrance who made his living selling nose pegs. I seem to recall them being somewhat overpriced though, so I simply breathed through my mouth.”
Rasmus closed his own mouth, having had his unspoken question answered, but also having been provided with considerably more information than he’d really wanted to know.
“Thank you for the…education,” he finally said.
“Let’s move on,” said Viddo. “It doesn’t appear as though this particular family of stone-dwellers had anything valuable for us to take. I’ve never known a precious metal or gemstone that crumbled into dust, so their lack in here is all I need to know.”
Rasmus had a sudden, worrying thought. “What if these people didn’t value the same materials that we do? They must have turned over a mountain of stone to hollow out this cavern and they’ll have surely found a lot of gold and a few thousand gems amongst it all. Maybe the
se things were so common that they just threw them away.”
“No,” said Viddo, his face set. “They will have kept them and it is our job to locate them.”
“Let us be on, then. And find these precious substances, that we may greatly enrich ourselves!”
Three
They exited the stone house and re-joined the street. The rock underfoot had been left in a fairly smooth condition - wizard and thief had both seen much worse in the towns and cities they’d visited on the surface. Certainly, this street here was much harder-wearing than a cobbled lane and they could make out patches where the stone was smoother, suggestive of the passage of feet or carriages over an extended period.
Their vision was limited by the surrounding buildings, but the streets looked as if they’d been laid out in a logical pattern, with a series of main spokes leading directly towards the centre, joined by numerous side streets. Here on what was the outskirts of the city, they looked into another couple of the single storey buildings and found them to be similarly featureless to the first one they’d entered.
Viddo Furtive was not fond of having his desires thwarted and had already started to lose hope. “These people must have been truly poor,” he said. “With not a single bauble to their names. If they were still here, I would pull one of them aside and have a word with them.”
“You’re seriously suggesting to me that you’d chastise someone for not being wealthy enough to own any property for you to steal?” asked Rasmus in disbelief.
“It’s just not right!” said Viddo. “How is an honest thief to make a living if there’s nothing to steal?”
“You told me that we weren’t stealing,” said Rasmus. “You told me that you can only burgle someone when they’re alive.”
“I am not claiming to be perfect,” Viddo retorted. “And I have fallen into a habit where I use certain words interchangeably. Words like burgle, rob, thieve and pilfer. They all have subtle nuances in how they should be correctly used, though the semantics will be lost on someone who isn’t a practitioner of the arts.”