Grand Vizier of Krar
Page 31
Memwin was already running around charred tables to get to the nearest light source. She pulled and pushed on a heavy table which was on its side against the inner shell of the dome.
“Help me move this! There’s light behind it.”
Despite aching muscles from several days of striving against river currents, the twins helped Blan to swing the table around using one of its corners as a pivot. The wall behind it seemed to be glowing.
“I need some cloth,” Blan said.
Aransette gave her a spare strip of bandage from the kit she had brought from her canoe. Blan used it to rub the inside of the dome shell. What seemed to be burnt paint or soot soon came away and a curious picture emerged.
As though the inner shell were made of glass, they could see the crack in the outer shell through which they had sought refuge that previous night. The crack was about one pace wide at the bottom but quickly narrowed and closed a fathome above the ground. The outer shell appeared to be about one pace thick and made of crumbling brick or stone. The ground outside was still in the shade of the dome, so they saw only the shadowy forms of the leaves and branches of the bushes that hid the crack from outside view.
“The inner wall of this dome is made of glass,” Pretsan exclaimed. “Won’t our pursuers be able to break it with ease?”
“I don’t think that it is glass, nor do I think that it can be broken by any device known to us or to the enemy,” Blan replied. “If the front entrance has been blocked with ordinary brick, stone and iron beams, our pursuers might enter that way, but not through this inner shell. We were lucky that the side door was open when we arrived, otherwise we would have been stuck between the inner and outer shells with no way of coming inside.”
For the next hour they removed rubble from a number of other sources of light around the base of the dome. All exposed a view of cracks in the outer shell, though smaller than the first and not even large enough for Memwin to squeeze through, although there was evidence that the gap between the shells had been used as a home by numerous small animals. All cracks confirmed that the inner shell appeared to be transparent, at least from the inside, once scrubbed clean. All added to the light within the dome. It was not long before everyone could clearly see the structures above them.
“There are beams, stairs and ladders still holding,” Pretsan noted. “Perhaps I could climb up to investigate the light coming from the higher levels.” He was aware of Aransette standing very close to him.
“You can’t do that with your leg and shoulder as they are,” Aransette admonished him.
“Don’t worry. I will be the one to go up there and no one else,” Blan asserted.
All the others opened their mouths to complain. However, they realised that there was no other solution. Apart from Pretsan, Blan had by far the longest reach and, despite her ordeals, was still the fittest and most athletic. Reluctantly, they all watched as she climbed from post to beam, from the remains of one floor to the remains of the next.
Blan had no great difficulty climbing, although it was a time-consuming process. She had to check the remains of every stairway, ladder and beam to see if they would support her weight. Sometimes, where a ladder or stair to the next level had been too badly burnt away, she would have to use a rope. What did worry her was that she felt sick. She succeeded in concealing this, so as not to alarm the others. She put it down to the stress of her escape.
Near the top, when she had climbed up almost twenty fathomes, Blan finally looked down. She could just make out her companions waving to her frantically below like tiny, shadowy blotches rapidly changing shape. It was easy to see the main light source from here. She was on a broken platform which concealed the direct sunlight from the bottom floor. It seemed very bright to her here. The outer shell must have cracked very near the top of the dome.
Blan scrubbed away at the inner surface of the shell just above her head until she had created a large clear window. Just like the sky ship in the orbears’ cave, this giant sky ship provided a complete view of the outside as though the hull were made of clear glass. She could see that the outer shell had cracked here. Through it she could see the cloudy sky and the suggestion of low scrub growing around the edges of the crack.
“This is surely the original sky ship which carried the Vanantii and Chanangii to Earth,” Blan muttered. “This is the technology of the Vanantii, although it was too damaged for them to take off again. The small sky ship I saw in the cave at Pitpet Brook must have been an attempt by the Chanangii to copy this technology.”
“What did you say?” Pretsan called up from below.
“Just talking to myself,” Blan conceded. “I have found one of the sky lights. Do you notice the difference?”
“Yes, it makes a big difference.”
“Then keep looking for any sign of an entrance to a lower chamber, any crack or unusual mark in the floor,” Blan called.
Just then, Blan saw a soldier step across the crack above. Astride the crack he suddenly stopped and looked down at Blan with shock on his face. Instead of ducking out of sight Blan just stood there frozen to the spot. The man crawled down into the crack and stared at Blan.
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The soldier smiled, took off his helmet and combed his hand through his hair. Then, oddly to Blan, he turned his faced to one side and then another, all the time his eyeballs fixed on hers. He then took out a knife, reached down, and started to chisel around the edges at the bottom of the ditch but soon gave up when he found no edge to the glassy surface. Then he finally brought out a handkerchief and started to wipe first his eyes and then a dirt mark from his cheek, but he became confused when he kept putting his kerchief to the wrong side of his face. A look of alarm came over him and he lurched backward, got up and quickly disappeared from view.
Blan almost laughed, although she could not help feeling a bit sorry for the soldier who was clearly better equipped with vanity than with intelligence. It had taken her a fraction of a second to realise that the soldier was not looking at her but at himself. Just as with the sky ship in the orbears’ cave, anyone looking at the outside of the inner shell of the dome would see a reversed mirror image. The reversal effect had spooked the soldier, causing him to run off. Perhaps he would not mention it to anyone until years later when he would finally find courage to relate his experience to someone he trusted. Blan would have liked to set his mind at rest but she had more urgent matters on her mind.
So far, her hypothesis was that the inner shell of the dome was the hull of the Vanantii sky ship. The outer shell had probably been built much later by humans who did not feel secure in a giant dome which appeared to be transparent from inside and yet a reverse mirror on the outside. The Visitors would not have needed to cover their sky ship. However, it must have been they who removed the original fixtures and fittings from the upper chamber, possibly to provide materials for smaller sky ships. Blan speculated that humans later decorated the inside of the dome and, in due course, built the Great Library of Belspire in it. Much later, Praalis had come here to study the ancient records of the Illumen. In folly, Black Knight destroyed those records by conflagration; a fit of pique as the last war went against him.
“If the small sky ship is copied from this, there must be a lower chamber here too, and it must surely have remained hidden from Black Knight or he would have had his Earth Wizards crawling all over it,” Blan deduced, speaking her thoughts aloud to clarify them above the mental noise coming from waves of nausea.
She tried to remember exactly where the entrance to the lower chamber had been on the smaller sky ship. She remembered that it was not far from the middle of the floor, so she called on the others to search around the middle of the floor far below. However, she was well aware that the smaller sky ship could be based on the mother craft and yet its dimensions might be based on a more complex formula than a simple scaling down.
The top of the dome was no more than thirty paces away and not much higher than where Blan stood. It would be
a good place from which to view the whole of the chamber now that there was sufficient light, so Blan headed for it.
The top level of flooring had been much less affected by fire and destruction than the lower levels. The destroyers clearly could not be bothered climbing up to finish their job, or maybe they were worried that they would not be able to get down again. Blan believed that she had found the answer when she saw a structure at the edge of her platform. She decided that it was the iron frame of an elevator shaft; although she had not seen such a thing before, it was not difficult for her to guess its use. It had vertical guides for a cabin and there was a large block and tackle at the top, just under the roof of the dome. The double tackle was rove to disadvantage with an anchor cable secured to a cleat and coiled nearby. It all seemed to be in usable condition; except that the elevator cabin was missing, probably burnt after the enemy soldiers had used it to get back down.
A narrow bridge crossed the top of the atrium right beneath the apex of the dome. Blan’s first thought was about how convenient this was. It would give her a better view of the chamber below. Her second thought was to wonder why the bridge was there. Before the lower floor levels had been destroyed they would have obstructed the broad view now available from the bridge and, to walk from one side to the other, a person need only walk around the atrium which merely presented a big hole in each annular floor, not an obstruction to movement from one side to the other. It worried Blan that she could not think of a good reason why the bridge should be there, so she edged out on it to see if some reason would make itself apparent.
The bridge seemed strangely different from the rest of what remained of the internal structure, as though it were part of the shell itself rather than something that had been built by humans. Then Blan realised that it was the middle section of a long arch which grew out of the shell from one side to the other. All the levels of the library were as much hung from this alien arch as they were supported by the framework of iron girders built from the ground and the steel cables strung between them. The internal levels of the library had concealed the original arch, except for the exposed section crossing the top of the atrium. The distinctive skyhull material of the arch had been painted over with various resins and paints to give it the appearance of being made of the same material as the rest of the library’s fixtures. Blan used Memwin’s dagger, which she had borrowed before her ascent, to confirm this by scraping the floor of the bridge and discovering skyhull material.
The bridge was not the best place for a slightly nauseated person to stand. Although the sides curved up half a fathome on each side to provide a kind of guard rail, Blan felt more comfortable kneeling, especially when she looked down to see her comrades searching the floor for signs of a door to a lower chamber. The centre of the dome’s roof was just a fathome above the bridge.
The smaller sky ship had no such structure as this arch, so Blan started to doubt her hypothesis, that the smaller ship was a miniature copy. That threw into doubt her guess that the door to the lower chamber must be near the centre, and it did not help her to form a view as to why this arch existed. However, it did jolt her into considering alternative ways of looking at the problem.
“Change of plan,” Blan called down below. “Search ten to fifteen paces from the edge.”
“That could take forever,” Pretsan called back. “This is the size of an arena. The edge must be a thousand paces long.”
“Do you see how this bridge is part of a greater arch?” When four voices acknowledged that they saw what she referred to, she continued, “Start at each end of the arch. If that doesn’t work, then go a quarter-circle around and try there.” Blan was hoping that both the arch and the hidden door were positioned in some simple geometrical relationship to each other. At least it seemed to be a logical place to start, as did her guess that the hidden door in the smaller sky ship should be viewed as being about twelve paces from the side rather than in the centre of the ship.
Blan felt that she was trying to think of too many things at once. Everything she looked at seemed to demand thought and to distract her attention. She needed to resolve just two issues at the moment: how to get to the lower chamber; and how to get the others to Arnapa and company without attracting the attention of seventy thousand enemy soldiers now camped nearby. She lay down on the bridge, closed her eyes, breathed deeply in and out ten times and tried to let go of all thoughts that entered her mind.
It seemed like a long sleep, although it had lasted just five minutes. Blan opened her eyes and gazed up. There was something odd about the ceiling above her. The ceiling seemed to be slightly flatter than the surrounding shell. Then she remembered something about the side door she had closed last night. When it closed, it had seemed that the closing door had started as a thin sheet of skyhull which had been extruded from the edges of the doorway, and this thin sheet had then thickened until its surface was one with the wall and the edges of the doorway were no longer visible. However, the closed door had been flatter than the surrounding wall.
“Is there another door above me? Is that why the arch is here?” Blan muttered. “More to the point, how do I open it? People have passed over this bridge for thousands of years without opening it or indeed realising that it was here?”
She stood up and placed both her palms on the ceiling above her. She wished that she still had Actio 28 with her to consult.
She stood there for several minutes, thinking about codes and sequences, until she felt or thought she felt a faint vibration against her hands. Then, into her mind came a question, “Who seeks access?”
She thought purposively, “Dualfield Resonation Displacement Component: Actio 28.” It was all she could think of as a reply.
“Access level, experimental control and communication device: access allowed.” It was her own voice echoing in her head. Having experienced Actio 28, she realised that some similar device had managed to detect the signals generated by her brain and to interpret her thoughts.
Her elation at making contact with another Actio-like device was quickly cut short when the ceiling suddenly sucked in and opened up. It did this so quickly that it looked as though the lid of a large, square eye had suddenly opened above her. A rock or piece of masonry crashed down, narrowly missing Blan’s head and then her foot, followed by a pile of waterlogged dirt which fell mostly in her hair and then splattered her from head to toe.
“Aghhh!” she cried as she wiped the mud from her face and shook her hair. The dirt was full of vegetable matter, not to mention bugs and worms. Above her a small patch of daylight had replaced the chunk of masonry that had fallen. Fortunately for Blan only a brick-sized piece of the outer shell had fallen in on her, although it had been covered by a generous layer of earth.
“What’s wrong?” the others called up in unison.
“I just got covered in disgusting wormy mud,” Blan called back. “But I think I have found another means of escape.”
“And Memwin thinks she has just found the door to the lower chamber,” Aransette called. “But we can’t open it.”
“I’ll be right there,” Blan called.
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Just as Blan had noticed the slight anomaly in the surface of the ceiling under the top of the dome, Memwin had noticed a patch of floor where light was reflected differently from the rest of the floor. At first, the others could not see what she meant; however, when they cleared the soot and ash away, they all agreed that the floor seemed to bulge up very slightly, perhaps as much as half a finger in the middle of an area a fathome squared. This was directly below the arch and about twenty-seven paces from the side of the dome; not the twelve paces that Blan had guessed, but suggesting another mathematical relationship between the dimensions of the large and small sky ships.
After letting herself down with the block and tackle, Blan immediately knelt down and laid her hands on the centre of the prospective door. She hoped to hear, as before, Access level, experimental control and communication device: acces
s allowed.
What she heard instead, very quickly, now that the controlling device already recognised her language, was, “Experimental control and communication devices do not have access to Master Control Room: authorisation required.”
Disappointed, Blan sat on the floor, closed her eyes and thought hard while the others watched her expectantly. Then it occurred to her that the Visitors had been the only advanced beings on planet Earth in their time; they probably did not need sophisticated security measures. The languishing Vanantii might have simplified their procedures to permit the Chanangii to help them repair the sky ship. It was a hopeful theory, so Blan laid her hands on the door again and said, “Chanangii,” forgetting that she need not say it aloud.
“Access level, Chanangii Repair Detail: access allowed.” She guessed that it was her own voice again. None of the others heard it. All they noticed was that the floor seemed to sink slightly in response to Blan’s word. They could then see a frame etched around it, just as Blan had seen when the door in the ceiling had started to open.
The others jumped back and Blan leapt up as a gap appeared at one end of the frame and then grew as the door was sucked horizontally into the floor at the end of the frame opposite the gap. A shiny stairway descended into a chamber. There was light coming from below. Blan needed just one quick look to know that the glow was coming from stationary devices of some kind.
“I believe we might be the first humans ever to see this, unless our primitive ancestors were brought here for tests,” Blan announced. “We are dealing with a power that we don’t yet understand; one that could be very dangerous in the wrong hands. You must all swear to keep this secret.”