by Ellis Knox
It was Cosmas.
“One mouthful,” he said. “Wait one minute, then another. Drain the cup, so.”
I was having none of that. I wanted the whole cup and then another and a third. It turns out, however, that an ogre is very much stronger than one poor human debilitated by thirst. I got exactly as much as he allowed, when he allowed it. By the end, several minutes later, I felt much better, and I’d not thrown up. I thanked the ogre.
“All right, Cosmas,” Nik said from somewhere. “We’ve all had our turn. Now drink some yourself!”
Drink. It was real. We had found water and would not die. For the first time, I heard it—the sound of water flowing over stone. I lay back, smiling widely. I didn’t even need to see it yet. I only wanted to savor the delicious feeling of not being thirsty.
Bessarion had found water; had been listening for days. Henrik explained that dwarves had an ability to hear water even through stone.
“I knew of it as a rumor,” the professor said, “no more than that. It seems so unlikely; yet, now we know it to be true.”
Beso had gone off, down that side passage that was little more than a crack, and had returned with a few drops of water in one hand. It had taken some work to widen the opening enough to let through an ogre. I’d slept through it all or, more likely, had fallen unconscious. Once I had my strength back enough to follow on shaky legs, we all went into the opening, to follow a crevice that looked more like a fault line than anything dwarf made.
The crevice opened abruptly into a tall chamber. Our lamps illuminated its breadth and length, but not its height. A waterfall tumbled out of pure darkness from an unknowable height. The lamps cast their rays upward until they seemed to fail from the effort.
The effect was of a white sparkle of a braid falling out of nothingness, descending like some goddess into the world of mortals, shimmering as she fell into a crystalline pool. All five of us stood still, entranced by the sight and sound.
“Miracles,” Professor Queller said at length. “We clomp around on the Earth while there are miracles beneath our feet.”
The professor’s words broke the spell of the waterfall. I looked around and saw still more wonders.
The waterfall fed a stream that ran off down a narrow canyon dizzying to regard, for it was lit up like a Parisian boulevard. Scattered here and there, above and below the water, were crystals that took our light and amplified it a hundredfold. One was nearby, on a small outcropping of stone. It looked like a large drop of water—my two hands could not encircle it—if the drop had emerged upward from the stone. It was perfectly clear. Tiny cracks and some impurities at the base were the only things that kept it from being completely transparent.
This teardrop in stone caught the light from our lamps, seeming to hold it in its depths. I touched the crystal, half expecting it to quiver and vanish. The surface was damp—water in the air, no doubt, from the waterfall—but it was solid enough.
“Crystals,” Nik said as he appeared at my side. “Pure quartz. Look at them.” He swung an arm downstream. “A king’s treasure.”
“A wizard’s treasure, rather,” said Professor Queller. “Phlogiston content would measure twenty-five percent, at a guess. I can only guess because I had to leave the Lavoisier behind.”
“Please, Uncle,” Nik said. His tone was long-suffering, but he grinned at me while he said it.
“We would’ve had room if you’d only left all the food.”
They bantered like this for a while. I left them to it, to study our surroundings further. I did not want to forget this scene.
The crystals went down the gorge as far as I could see—some miles, at least. We had not seen so far since entering Lamprecht’s Cave. My eyes felt like they were stretching.
The water was utterly clear, even more than the crystals. Once past the turbulence of the waterfall, the water nearly disappeared. Crystals lit up the sides of the canyon so that at times there seemed to be no water at all, and we looked over the side into empty air.
Then Cosmas refilled the first of our water skins. He plunged it into the water, sending out ripples, and it was as if the water had suddenly reappeared. I had not merely entered a world magic; I was immersed in it.
“Best write it down while it’s fresh.”
Professor Queller stood next to me, smiling.
“Even the miraculous acquires a haze with time. Make your notes now, journalist, or what’s a journal for?”
I did so, on the spot. Including Queller’s advice.
We moved down the canyon, and for the first time I took full notice of its depths. Every detail was perfectly visible as the crystals caught and reflected our lights.
“If I didn’t know better,” I said to no one in particular, “I’d say that was a road down there.”
“It is well you don’t know better,” came Professor Queller’s voice ahead of me, “because it is indeed a road.”
I made no reply. I was learning the professor would continue with a prompt or not—a habit formed from years of lecturing.
“What you see in those clear depths is none other than the main route of the Long Dig.”
“Oh, but that’s impossible. The Long Dig is only a legend.” I couldn’t help myself.
“Yet we look upon it. Quid est demonstrandum, Miss Lauten.”
He returned to his measurements, and I couldn’t get any more out of him.
I stared into the crystalline depths. The way certainly did look too regular to have been shaped by natural forces, yet it was hard to believe a legend had appeared before my eyes. The implications staggered me, and I realized I knew little about the myth. The first dwarves had left their world, for reasons I could not recall. Absurdly, they tunneled their way into our world.
As if he could hear my thoughts, Professor Queller spoke.
“Digging from one world to another,” he said. “Surely the strangest of the origin myths isn’t it? But not if that Second World lies within the first.”
“It’s incredible,” I said. Not a profound observation, I admit.
“Not only credible: it is the only explanation possible.”
“Miss Lauten.” Bessarion had joined us. “Here is the ancestor road. The way has been shifted, buried, flooded.” He motioned with his hand. “But the road exists. What is made by the First Dwarves cannot be unmade.”
His conviction was complete, almost childlike. He was going to go to the lands of his First Ancestors. He was going to his Lyonesse, his Atlantis, his Olympus. Except this was real.
His attitude was as alien to me as the surrounding landscape. Conviction is not a substitute for planning; faith is not a synonym for thought. I looked down the narrow canyon. The stone showed fissures, ledges, occasional outcroppings, but the road lay under twenty feet of frigid water. Bessarion meant to lead us into the canyon based solely on his faith in legends.
One cannot walk on faith any more than one can walk on water.
When I said as much to Henrik, he dismissed my concerns.
“Fournier came this way,” he said. “Therefore so may we.”
“How can you be sure he came this way?”
“Two reasons,” Queller replied. “One, that expedition, like ours, is led by a Firster, so they would follow the Long Dig. Two, there is no other way.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Who would build two roads out from the heart of the world? One is effort enough!”
I had no argument to present. In his own way, Queller was relying on faith just as much as Bessarion was. Cosmas was devoted to Queller, which left Niklot my only ally.
I wanted to ask him what he thought of the professor’s mental state, to see how far Nik was prepared to go in risking our lives, but the expedition set out again. Soon we were scrambling over boulders, edging along ledges, trying to keep from falling into the water. We had not gone far before Queller cried out triumphantly. He stood at a wide whitened section of a rock shelf, lantern held high in one ha
nd, pointing with the other at the wall.
“Look ye, o skeptic, and see!”
I looked.
“I see marks.”
“Ah, you disappoint me, Miss Lauten. The marks are not significant in themselves. Bah. Nik, you take a look. What do you note?”
“The marks are new. Fournier’s been here.”
It took him little more than a glance to see it: debris at the base—chips and dust, certainly not natural. Queller gave me a look that made me resolve once again to be more observant. I was supposed to be the keen reporter.
Though Queller was entirely too smug, Nik was not.
“Easy to miss it,” he said. “Almost as easy as missing your footing. Careful there, Uncle.” He grabbed Queller by the shoulder as the man took one step too far and teetered at the edge of the stream. I may have missed a crucial sign, I thought, but at least I didn’t need rescuing.
We followed the stream for over an hour. It fell away down a dark hole, twisting into a ferocious whirlpool as it did so. Anything that fell into it would be pulled into a dark, terrible death.
The stone around us had also changed. The granite yielded now to the yellow and brown tones of sedimentary rock, and our narrow passage had widened into a cavern of shadows and dim proportions, for the crystals had vanished with the river.
Professor Queller was all but attacking the walls. He darted forward and cried out, “Trilobite!” Dashed elsewhere and shouted, “Brachiopod!”
This much, at least, was familiar ground for me, for I had read Smith and Cervier and our own von Alberti, as well as others who had peered back through aeons to read the history of geologic time.
“Those are Cambrian fossils,” I declared, loud enough to have Queller hear me. “We stand at the bottom of an ancient sea.”
“We do indeed,” Queller said, “and we shall astound the scientific world when we return with our findings. Cosmas, find a place for this one, and fetch out the aneroid barometer. I would know our depth. Miss Lauten, kindly mark the time.”
City of the Ancients
The Long Dig stretched away into the darkness. After the chasms and rockfalls and traps, I walked the flat, gently sloping ground almost cheerfully. Our water was replenished. Food might prove to be an issue but I didn’t even ask about it. The only thing I could do about that was worry, and I was getting tired of worry. The walls of the tunnel rose smoothly vertical. The floor was a little rutted—I kept thinking I could make out wheel tracks, but they never went on long enough to be sure. I pictured whole families trudging along, pulling handcarts, larger wagons towed by exotic creatures my imagination supplied. It was a whimsical creature, my imagination, for it also dressed all the dwarves in the manner of the western pioneers of Columbiana, as seen in popular magazine illustrations. It passed the time, anyway.
Initially, Professor Queller fussed over the level grade. More than once during the next couple of days he muttered, “we aren’t going down,” and he stopped much too often to take measurements. The compass was starting to get temperamental, but this we expected. True north was more and more becoming not a direction forward but a direction up. The poor needle did its best, but after a while we stopped checking. It was the aneroid barometer readings that most interested Henrik, anyway.
Then we reached another portal.
This one, too, had a kind of community attached to it—a series of stone buildings that might have been anything from warehouse to school to family home. All were quite bare. On the far side, the black opening that instantly took us to a place hundreds of miles deeper into the earth. The second portal cheered Henrik.
“We’re on our way now,” he asserted, as we recorded our measurements. “I see the entire plan. The only unknown is whether they placed the portals or found them.”
The only unknown. I could give him an even dozen unknowns, most of which were matters of life and death, but I let the professor have his moment.
More portals followed. We were indeed on our way, and having plenty of water cheered us all greatly. But a current of unease followed us, for we were now running out of food. When Cosmas handed me a single piece of way bread to break my fast, my stomach growled at him.
“This is all?” I said, knowing it was. “It’s not enough.”
Cosmas merely went on to Nik and then Bessarion.
“We’re running out of food, professor,” I said. Henrik raised a hand to silence me, but my stomach cramped violently, and my anger boiled over. “You said we would find food.”
“I did and I do,” Henrik replied, hardly acknowledging me. “We shall find food, as we did water.”
“Saying so doesn’t make it so!” I managed to keep my voice this side of a shriek.
“Gabi,” Nik said, in tones one would use on a sick person, “we’re being careful. We’re getting enough food each day; it’s just not what we’re used to. The hunger pangs you feel, we all feel. Our bodies will adjust.”
Reason rarely defeats emotion.
“But we shall run out, eventually,” I said. “I want to hear from the learned professor why he’s so sure we’ll find food before we starve. Or does he think Bessarion can hear food in the walls, too?”
Henrik began to reply, with an exaggerated show of weary patience, but I wasn’t done.
“And don’t try to use poor Étienne as evidence. Maybe he got this far and maybe he didn’t, but there’s been no trace of him since the iron door. If we stood in the midst of the Kalahari Desert, you’d look a fool sitting there predicting food. Well, we do stand in a desert, a desert of stone, without even an oasis, only these endless gray walls.”
My stomach clenched again. I took a bite of way bread, chewing through my glare to show that now I was done.
Henrik sighed mightily. I wanted to slap him.
“As you have already rejected both reason and evidence,” he said, “I shall not attempt persuasion, for I am no rhetorician.” He took his own bite of food.
We glared at each other, chewing and scowling ostentatiously. I had the stray thought that we looked like two angry cows and had to look away lest I burst out laughing. I wondered at the quick change of mood; that wasn’t like me.
Nevertheless, the image was enough to make me feel slightly better, enough so that I was able to stay silent as Nik and Henrik spoke quietly with Cosmas. Discussing the supplies, no doubt. Bessarion busied himself with his morning rituals, leaving me with my thoughts. They were unpleasant company.
When I thought solely of the supplies or of our progress, I soon despaired. If I considered Professor Queller, I passed quickly to fury, for I blamed him for all that had happened. The confidence that had initially won me over now looked like overconfidence bordering on megalomania. He had snared all of us with his obsession—all, that is, save Bessarion, who was already obsessed.
Thinking of Cosmas, with his steadfast nature, calmed my anxiety somewhat. I was aware I was thinking of him rather like a good horse—reliable and faithful—which was most ungenerous of me.
Only with Nik did the fist of my thoughts begin to unclench. He was experienced, had been through trouble and had brought others through it. If he said a thing, I instinctively believed it as his best assessment of the situation. He might be mistaken, but if so, he’d be the first to see it and to admit it.
Nik said we had enough food. I noted he did not say for how long we had enough, but tomorrow was tomorrow. For today, the bread in my hand was sufficient. For today.
I finished what I had in my hand and resolved to go steady on. Every morning for the past three days had been much the same: hunger, anger, resignation. A little later, Nik took a moment to speak with me.
“Every expedition has these stretches,” he told me. “The way might be hard or easy, but it is always dull. Nothing happens. You feel like you’ve walked forever, and you’ve got forever yet to go. Your legs move by themselves, you no longer feel your feet, and the only thing worse than going on is stopping because stopping only means you’ll have t
o get up again.
“The only way past is through,” he went on. “Keep going. Stretches like this is where the others turned back. Those are the people you’ve never heard of. Nobody remembers the ones who turn back.”
That was Nik’s speech of encouragement. It didn’t work very well. It sounded stale even before he finished it. I wanted to tell him the ones who kept going weren’t only the James Cooks, the Wallaces and Bates. They were also the ones who disappeared without a trace. They were those who had to be rescued, like Étienne Fournier and, very likely, ourselves.
I said none of that. We packed up and set out in silence, in the darkness pushed back by our lamps, buried deep in the grave of the world.
I had a little game I played. Some period of time along the morning march, I made an estimate of how long until we stopped to eat. It was time measured in footsteps: a thousand steps to lunch; or, whimsically, a thousand two hundred and fourteen, or some other number. It didn’t really matter. I did the same for the end of day. Thus you will understand how utterly trivial my adventure had become: counting footsteps, waiting for food.
I was somewhere in the five hundreds when Beso spoke the first words of the day.
“Portal ahead.”
This was our first portal in days; indeed, the first of anything of interest in days.
“That’s odd,” Henrik said. His voice crackled from disuse.
“What’s odd,” Nik said. “is that it’s bigger.”
“It is more difficult to see what is not there,” Henrik said. It had taken him but a single sentence to recover his sardonic tone.
“No buildings,” Beso said.
Then I saw it too. Every portal thus far had had attached to it a kind of settlement, or whatever purpose the huddle of buildings served. Here, there was simply the big tunnel that ended at a portal, with scarcely any space on the sides. Tunnel and portal, but no buildings.
“It’s something different,” Nik said.
“Different is welcome at this point,” I said.
We hesitated. I, for one, had yet to become accustomed to the unpleasant sensation of stepping through that black curtain. It was too disorienting to step forward through a hole. It felt like falling, like being swallowed, like nothing describable except that the sensation penetrated to my blood and bones.