by Ellis Knox
The walls were the same dark granite as before, but now were decorated with carvings of animals of fantastic design and dimension, none familiar. Some had too many legs, some too few; some had two or three heads while one at least appeared to have none, a long worm like thing that wound among barbed trees. A two-headed creature reared on four legs, pawing the air with arms or perhaps legs, though these ended in something like gloved hands. Further on, a whole pack of cat like animals the size of horses were in the act of killing a bird of some sort, twice their size and seemingly flightless, for it was running on tall, skinny legs.
We passed dozens, then scores of animals as in a parade, but the carvings showed plants as well. If anything, these were even more fantastic. Those tiger-like creatures ran through grass shaped like clubs. Flowers bloomed in elaborate shapes rendered in such detail there was no need of color. I felt sure I would recognize the plant that flowered in a burst of knives. I stopped to examine stylized warriors fighting some beast. The world depicted here surely lay ahead. I thought of the tigers and the spiked plants, and I could not help but wonder about the Fournier Expedition, and about our own.
“The flight.” Henrik spoke, standing at my shoulder. I never even heard him approach and jumped a little. “Don’t you see?” He ignored my startle. “They’re all going that way.” He waved an arm behind him. “To the portal.”
“Keep up,” Nik called, sternly, and we started walking again.
The professor was right. All the figures seemed to be progressing down the boulevard, toward the town and the portal. Into the Long Dig. I couldn’t tell from the carvings if the people were going toward something or fleeing something. All the shapes were stylized, almost geometrical. I couldn’t even tell if the figures were human or dwarf or gnome. They didn’t look elf or orc.
In any case, here was proof indisputable. A whole people had dwelt here once. Maybe they still did. This should have been exciting and encouraging. In other circumstances we should have been studying each carving, exclaiming over the exotic figures, madly taking notes. Instead, every animal seemed it might have been the one responsible for the bloodstains in that room. Every figure could be their master. We walked through a hall of potential horrors.
Nik and the others had got some little way ahead, as I had slowed again to examine a particular carving. Even Henrik had got ahead of me. Now I heard cries that could have been joyful, but in that place they sounded like alarm. I rushed forward, gripping my lantern firmly. It was the closest thing to a weapon I possessed.
The hall was coming to an end, ramping upward rather sharply. Nik and Cosmas stood, holding high their lanterns. Professor Queller was just beyond, his own lantern swinging wildly as the man himself appeared to be suffering seizures.
“Come on, Gabi,” Nik called, “you’ve got to see.”
It wasn’t seizures. Henrik was capering. He was dancing about like some drunken farmer at a tavern. The cries I heard were his laughter.
“I’m coming,” I called back, and broke into a trot. “Is Beso there?”
I reached Nik and Cosmas. “The dwarf is yonder,” the ogre said, “at his stones.”
“Miss Lauten!” Henrik stopped his mad dancing. He executed an equally absurd bow, of a sort not seen since the days of the Empress. He completed his flourishes, unbent himself, and gestured grandly.
“Welcome to the Second World,” he said.
The Second World
“Or, I should say, welcome to Urland.”
Henrik looked as proud as a new father, but all I saw was more stone buildings on either side with the boulevard stretching away in front, as it had before we entered the tunnel with the carvings.
I frowned. Nik saw it.
“Look up,” he whispered.
Sky.
Such a tiny word for such a vast entity. To be sure, above me was no trace of blue, neither sun nor stars, but likewise there was no stone. Instead, our lights blended into a vague red-gray ambient glow that appeared to stretch to infinity. The glow seemed to come from some very distant place away to my right, almost like a sunrise. Directly overhead, though, was only dimness fading to darkness. Somewhere up there, hundreds or even thousands of miles above, were blue skies and white clouds, cities and oceans and mountains. From where we now stood, no one could guess they existed, that there was ground above the sky.
A wave of vertigo passed through me, and I looked down.
“How do we know this isn’t just a very large cavern?” I asked of no one in particular. Naturally, Professor Queller answered.
“But it is a very large cavern. The largest in the world. Inside the world. Ha, ha!”
We gathered up Bessarion once he finished his reverence ritual and moved on down the street. Its smooth surface soon became uneven, then broken, then gave out altogether, and we found ourselves walking on a wide stretch of smooth, round stones, none larger than an apple. The ambient glow was just dim enough to require the continued use of our lanterns. Professor Queller was muttering again, tugging at his shaggy beard. I couldn’t make out the words, but the tone spoke of exasperation.
“He’s trying to work it out,” Nik said to me in a quiet aside. “The absence of life bothers him.”
“It bothers me, too,” I said. The city itself could be dead, but we were outside now. Could the entire Second World be dead?
“We’ll find food,” Nik said. As ever, he understood the practical implications.
“Maybe the dwarves left,” I said, “because their world was dying.”
“How does a whole world die?” Nik said.
“We have only known one world, up till now. Perhaps this one was more fragile.”
Our speculation was cut off by Cosmas from up ahead.
“Water,” he said. “A lake, or ocean, could be.”
We hurried forward and there it was, an expanse of water stretching away into the darkness.
“Water!” Henrik was delighted. “Don’t you see? Where there is water, there is life. We are not in a dead world.”
“You are forgetting the Dead Sea, professor,” I said.
“I am forgetting nothing, Miss Lauten,” Henrik said. “I am proceeding from the preponderance of evidence, not from the exceptional case.”
I did not retort. I was proceeding neither from preponderance nor exception, but from hope: I wanted there to be life, even if it was fanged life that ran on six legs.
“It is possible this city was a port,” Henrik said.
“Doesn’t look like one,” Nik said.
With any Surface town, there would have been buildings right down to the water, but here was only the rocky beach.
“Maybe the water level was higher in the past,” I offered.
“No docks farther back, either,” Nik said. “But that whole town was strange.”
“We are in a different world,” Henrik said. “We can use our own world as a starting point for ideas, but not as an end point for conclusions.”
“What about the light, professor?” I asked. “Do you suppose there is a second sun here in the Second World?”
“I do not,” Henrik said. “If there were a second sun, where would it be?” He pointedly waited upon an answer.
Nik sighed, and pointed upward.
“Precisely,” the professor said with a nod. “It must necessarily be at the very center, at the focus of gravitational forces. What we are looking at, though we cannot see it, is the interior of a sphere. In a true sense, there is no up or down as we understand those words on the Surface. Here, there is only inward and outward. If there were a sun, everywhere in Urland would be at eternal high noon. Since that is manifestly not the case . . . .” He was in full professorial mode, prompting his students.
“Look ye and see, the sun is pulled down by the Enemy.” Bessarion intoned.
“Yes, er, quite. A curious passage, to be sure. Might I be allowed to continue?” Queller glared at the dwarf, who returned the stare without blinking.
“There, yo
u see?” I said to Nik. “Some ancient disaster destroyed the Second Wor . . . Urland . . . and so the dwarves fled. Fled a dying world.”
“I think it’s a metaphor, Gabi,” Nik said.
“Hmph,” Queller said. He was not a man who was patient with interruptions. “At any rate, the only light we see now is on yonder horizon. Somewhere. If there is no sun, that leaves but one possibility: the light is artificial. Manufactured. The glow comes from a great city no more than a day or two distant, and that is our goal.”
“Really now, professor, that is too great a leap,” I said.
He laughed at me. “Is there a limit now to the distance a deduction might cover?”
I managed to keep myself from railing at him. It would do no good. The good professor was riding high, vindicated on all counts. He was unassailable just now, at least from direct disagreement. I tried a new tack.
“No limit,” I said, “so long as the reasoning is sound.” I caught a glimpse of Nik watching the two of us with just a trace of a smile at the corners of his mouth. “I agree that the light has to be our goal. Whatever it is, it’s more promising than a march into darkness.” I pointed away up the beach.
“As I said, the light must be artificial,” Henrik began, but I interrupted before he could leap over the first gap.
“Not necessarily. The glow might be a volcano, or some vast surface collection of phlogiston-rich minerals, or it might be from a source unknown on the Surface.”
“As to the first, I reject it on the evidence. We’ve seen no trace of active vulcanism.
“Your second hypothesis is unlikely, though not impossible, on much the same grounds. If such a deposit were in one place, it ought to be in multiple places, but there’s no indication of that.”
“There might be deposits, or even volcanoes,” Nik suggested, “but so far away we cannot see them from here.”
“I remind you we are on the interior surface of a ball,” Henrik said. He leaned forward; he was enjoying this. “Most of Urland is within sight, were it not so dark.”
“Urland could be thousands of miles across,” Nik said.
“Now you see why I am so disappointed in our instruments. Measuring the extent would answer a number of questions. The extent, or I should say the diameter, of Urland must await further expeditions and perhaps even the invention of new devices.”
Nik only nodded and shrugged.
“The third point raised by Miss Lauten is more possible,” Henrik said.
I noted that he had slid right past the possibility that other volcanoes might simply be hidden from view. Where science fails, I thought, rhetorical tricks must serve.
“An unknown source?”
“Precisely. Which leaves us the Lauten Theory and the Queller Theory. Unknown, or metropolis. Either way, going there will answer.”
We pitched a camp soon after, out in the open this time, Nik reasoning that the buildings hadn’t helped the other expedition much. None of us discussed it, but we had all resigned ourselves to the likelihood that Fournier and all his party had met with some violent end. As we settled in, I kept glancing at the water, hoping to see some movement, but there was none. The water was smooth as a forest pond on a windless day.
We were all worn out and hungry, but Henrik insisted on trying our measurements once more. The calibrations, readings, and recordings had become a ritual of familiarity for him. Crouched within his numbers and notes, he felt safe. I admit to feeling something of the same myself. The instruments and our notebooks were a shell of science, of reason, shielding us from this eldritch world of lost civilizations and incomprehensible places. We would give them another chance; perhaps the city itself had interfered.
Cosmas laid out the instruments for the professor, his big hands moving carefully, like a butler laying out a dinner service. Henrik took up the compass first as I opened my notebook and used my pen knife to trim the point of a pencil. I waited for the reading, then glanced up when it did not come. The professor was normally brisk and efficient.
He was frowning at the compass. He tapped it, frowned again.
He handed the compass to me. “It is not broken,” he said, “but it is useless.”
I looked at the instrument. The needle swung the way it does when a compass is moved. I held it steady, but the needle wouldn’t settle. I set it on the ground and waited. Rather uncertainly, the needle steadied until it pointed SSE.
“That’s got it,” I said, and gave the reading.
“Now move it just slightly, in any direction.”
I nudged the compass along the smooth stone. The needle swung past South, made a full circuit, and ended at WSW.
“Move it as you please,” Henrik said, “you’ll not get a true reading. The magnetic poles are somewhere up there, and down here are new forces that make nonsense of a magnetic compass. It is well we have no other instruments dependent upon magnetism.”
The compass was useless, probably for the duration. The thermometer reported what we sensed for ourselves: seventy degrees or so Fahrenheit—the mercury seemed a little temperamental. The aneroid barometer, though, gave us fits.
“Four hundred feet,” I reported.
“That’s impossible. You’ve read it wrong.” Queller said.
I gave the tube a shake, prompting Henrik to sniff that it was not a thermometer, but I ignored that. I looked again.
“Four thousand feet.”
“Give me that.”
I handed over the device, suppressing a smile when Henrik, too, shook the device before taking a reading.
“Now it says seven thousand four hundred and a half.” He glared at it, trying to make the thing behave, as if it were an unruly student. Then the lines on his face eased.
“It is useless now. Other forces are at work; a possibility I considered, though I did not think likely.”
“What possibility?”
“Phlogiston. It is possible there is so much of it, it interferes with our modern instruments, most of which contain at least some of that element. One theory is that the center of the earth is the source not only of peoples but of phlogiston.”
“So much for measurements,” Nik said. “It’s a pity; that was to be our independent confirmation.”
“So be it,” Henrik said, then repeated his earlier statement. “Wir haben was ist.”
We have what we have. An unusually phlegmatic statement from the Herr Doktor Professor.
Our chronometers continued to function, however, so at least we recorded date and time. I was oddly comforted by knowing the time. Our days would continue to follow the clock, a small piece of order.
“Enough,” Nik said, “let’s enjoy our evening meal. Roast boar with potatoes, isn’t it? No? Ah, well, way bread, then.” His wan smile did little to help.
After we ate, Nik insisted we set a watch, taking turns through our artificial night.
It sounds a simple, ordinary thing, to stand a watch, but the words hide an array of anxieties. Unless you have first watch, you are awakened from sleep, whether fretful or profound makes little difference. Your comrade is eager to sleep and is snoring almost as soon as you sit up. Darkness surrounds you. The air, even if warm, is colder than your bed, and the shivering helps wake you further.
And then you watch. Silence plays tricks on your ears even as darkness plays tricks on your mind. One moment you dismiss the lies of your senses as foolishness, but in the next you believe everything, for death in the dark is exactly why you sit there awake. Twice I was a breath away from crying an alarm. I saw shapes, heard footsteps, saw eyes or the gleam of metal, heard growls and whispers. And when I was not pulling myself back from the edge of panic, I was teetering at the edge of sleep.
Thus it is to stand a watch. When I spoke to Nik of this the next morning, he nodded and said mine was a common experience. It made me feel a little better, but it did not make me look forward to the next night’s shift.
Meanwhile, food was still our first order of business. We could
drink our fill of the brackish sea water, which was less salty than Surface oceans, but we broke our fast with hardly more than half a biscuit of way bread. My hunger pangs had subsided to a chronic, aching emptiness that the way bread did little to dispel. The thought of food hung at the edge of my mind like a wolf at the edge of a campfire.
As we ate our sparse morning meal, we considered how we might proceed.
“That light may be our goal,” Nik said.
“It is,” Henrik muttered.
“But,” Nik ignored his uncle, “the more pressing issue is food. We might not have enough to get there, and once there we may not find food. We can’t just wander about, and I’m not going to risk splitting us up, so here’s what we’re going to do.”
Henrik arched an eyebrow at me.
“Unless anyone has their own suggestion,” Nik said, having caught his uncle’s look. No one spoke up.
“We’ll spread out. Go along the coastline in the direction of that glow, but we’ll move in a line spread inland. Gabi, you stay closest to the water. Watch for fish, or anything washed ashore. Beso, you walk thirty yards or so inland. Then Cosmas, then Uncle, then myself. We don’t even know what we’ll find inland. There might be nothing but this beach, there might be cliffs, but there might be something else.”
“What happens if we find something?” I asked.
“Give a shout,” Nik said. “We should stay always within line of sight to the person on either side, but we can’t be always looking at each other, so sing out. We’ll always be in earshot.”
I nodded. It was as reasonable a plan as could be expected, given our limited means. I realized I’d pictured exploration as a kind of opening up an area of a map, but the business is far more constrained. The explorer sees only what is immediately around him. If he gains a vista, he loses detail. Mostly, he’s limited by trees or mountains or is plunged into a valley. Exploration isn’t the map; it’s narrow trails on a map.