For A Few Minutes More
Page 22
Frustrated, I leaned over and put my eye to the keyhole, but could see nothing. Well, I can fix that. I concentrated for a moment, feeling out the lock through the Gloves of Monkey Grip, which seemed to make the lockpicks a part of my own hands; I could feel the cold, smooth metal of the shaft, and the worn edges of the old tumblers. I summoned the magic inside me, sent it down to my palms, through my fingers, and past them, into the picks...
“Shaziri!”
[Daily Mana Cast: 1/3]
I withdrew the tools and light poured out of the keyhole, courtesy of the brightly lit fourth tumbler now illuminating the entire inside of the mechanism. Temple to temple, Ramsey and I gazed inside, and made simultaneous “Oooohhh”ing noises of comprehension.
“There’s a ward and then another tumbler,” he explained while I sprung the latch at last. “Clever!”
[Skill expanded: Trapsmithing (training now includes locksmithing)]
Voice cheered, and the door swung inwards, revealing a room stuffed full of bookshelves and cubbyholes, which themselves were stuffed full of rolled up scrolls, books, and the occasional tapestry. Unlike the corridors there were no torches or lanterns in this room, so I pushed the door open further until the keyhole light spilled inside, over a large table almost in the middle of the room with a giant atlas sprawled on top of it. I wedged the door open with a convenient doorstop, and then, unable to resist, Ramsey and I climbed on top of the table and took a look.
The world of Cerulea lay open before us. I found the city of Triport, ringed in by the Stormshade Mountains, and beyond to the west was the vast Elkylar desert. To the east, the Miahan Sea ran off the edge of the page, touching on the northernmost shores of the huge, cartographer-devouring continent of Southwind. Taking up the northeastern part of the map was the looming northern continent containing the Great Forest, and the peninsular offshoot of Leon, densely populated with cities, towns and villages. I thought Leon would be bigger.
“Do you still have the illusi-frame?”
Ramsey handed it to me, and, holding it close to my face to get the whole view in, I took a picture, then turned my attention to the shelves. “So where are these maps of the undercity?”
“Ahh...” Ramsey temporized. “When I said I knew where they were, I meant, I knew which room they were in. Which is this one. And... here we are!”
I looked around the Coal Bunker. The stonework showed the same precision and attention to detail as the lock on the door. Dwarven made. And dwarves tended to like things that were logical and low-maintenance. “There must be some kind of system to this.” I thought aloud. “Ramsey, take the shelf over there and start reading off the contents. I’ll start with this set of drawers over here... oh.”
The massive chest of drawers was long, low and did not contain maps of any kind, but instead sturdy paper cards with titles and numbers on them.
Voice identified, somewhere between amusement and disbelief.
Following Voice’s instructions, I was able to send Ramsey not to the Triport section, but to Engineering, and from there to the water works, and then, on a bottom shelf out of the way, we finally found a map titled: A Historical Overview of the Architecture and Watershed of the Triport Basin, Gnomish and Modern Eras.
Ramsey held it open while I took a picture. “Wait,” I said, “what’s that?”
“Err, a superimposition of the city buildings over the sewers? Or do you mean this little illustrated legend up here in the corner...”
“No, that sound! Shhh!”
There were voices coming down the corridor towards the Coal Bunker, accompanied by the distinctive clopping of polished black boots.
“Hel’s retrieval team.” I muttered, low. “They’ve got the same idea we did about the maps.”
Ramsey quickly rolled up the heavy paper, but then hesitated before putting it back in its slot. “If we’re trying to beat them to the lair, the smarter thing to do would be to take this with us so they can’t find and use it.”
He was right, but I also knew what adventuring tended to do to defenseless pieces of paper. I hated to risk all the work and effort and possibly now-forgotten knowledge that went into this map.
I grabbed the map from Ramsey and stuffed it into a dusty cubbyhole along with a copy of Eddies and Downdrafts of the Leeward Stormshade Tradewinds. “There! That’ll slow them down.” Ramsey nodded, and we ran to the door, but it was too late, and the faint sounds of the retrieval team rounded the corner at the far end of the hall.
Ramsey clapped his hand over the brightly glowing keyhole while I grabbed the doorstop and quickly scuffed away the lock picking diagram. “The light!” he hissed at me. “Turn off the Light spell!”
“I can’t!”
“What?”
Instead I reached into his pocket, pulled out the piece of chalk, and crammed it into the keyhole, pulverizing and powdering bits of it around the mechanics, including the conspicuous tumbler number four. I turned my attention to the other doors in the hallway, thinking we could maybe dart into one if we hurried, but Ramsey shook his head and pulled me back inside, carefully closing the door behind us.
“If this door was locked, those will be too.” he explained, and we looked for a place to hide. Temporary respite was found in the form of a small alcove between two shelves, but it wasn’t going to last if anyone, say, happened to glance over in this direction. A thin twilight lit the room from the gaps around the door, though I assumed the retrieval team carried lights with them.
“Maybe we can bolt for the door once they come in.” I suggested in a whisper as voices outside the door indicated they had found the correct Coal Bunker.
“And outrun them in the hallways?” Ramsey whispered back, doubtful. “I know the city streets pretty well, but humans have damn long legs when they know where you’re headed...”
Where are we headed, anyway? I pulled out the illusi-frame and looked at our map. It was amazingly detailed. The legend in the corner showed little circles that marked the entrances to the sewers, and a handful of other shapes representing non-aquatic subterranean features. Scuffing noises from the doorway sounded like a key trying to push its way through crumbled chalk. The voices turned annoyed.
“Where are we right now?”
Ramsey looked over and pointed out a geometric shape sketched over the undercity map. “There. That’s the Port Authority, no mistaking the octagonal shape, set right on top of the old fortress remnants.” On the other side of the door, the annoyed voices turned suspicious, and then increasingly impatient. “Any minute now they’re going to figure out that the door isn’t actually locked...”
“There! This little triangle here indicates—” I glanced at the legend “—a mineshaft?”
“Makes sense. The old lighthouse was powered by coal from the mines. I suppose they just had a direct delivery.”
“According to our map, it terminates right here in—”
“—the Coal Bunker.” Ramsey finished for me. I looked around the floor for a secret entrance to a mineshaft, but Ramsey looked up, and then pointed to a rusty old winching system hanging from the apex of the arch at the center of the room, directly above the card catalogue. From the doorway came the sound of a latch scraping as the sus
picious and annoyed voices discovered its unlocked state.
“Cummon!” I grabbed Ramsey’s hand and dove forward under the card catalogue just as torchlight spilled into the room from the opening door, heralding stomping black boots and gruff, authoritative demands.
“...and find out why that door is unsecured.” a male voice growled, unfamiliar. “If it’s a bunch of damned kids again, they’re in for ten lashes from my belt, and I don’t care how they holler!”
“Yes, captain.” said Hel, in a tone that indicated this was one of many long standing disagreements between her and the growling voice. “But you know their parents will complain.”
“Then they can have ten lashes for raising the brats wrong!”
“I’ll write it up in a report.” Hel replied dryly. “Now shall we find the documents we’re looking for?”
“Don’t you use that tone of voice with me! I know what we’re here for, I will not be distracted! Uppity tones of voice are a distraction! Jory, Yashira, go find me whoever buggered up that lock! Hel, Gremp... where the hell is my map...”
Quietly, I scouted about the floor underneath me, looking for an escape, and felt a thrill run up my spine as my hands found the wooden edges of a trapdoor. I picked at it, but it was flush with the floor, and the ring that allowed it to be lifted assumed the user had room to stand and haul it upwards. The low clearance of the furniture above us gave us very little room to maneuver. I pulled out one of my daggers to see if I could lever it loose, but Ramsey, silently watching, stilled my hand with a light touch and pulled out his set of thieves’ tools. Of course!
The crowbar was perfect for the job, but then it was my turn to motion him to hesitate. Rising up on my fingers and toes so as not to scrape against the ground, I deftly snagged the vial of grease from the toolkit and applied a few drops to the hinges on the far side.
[Stealth check: Success]
Hoping the guards couldn’t smell our nervous sweat, we waited an agonizing minute for it to seep in, and then went for the crowbar again. I wasn’t strong enough to lever it up, and neither was Ramsey, but together we managed to brace our backs against the bottom of the catalogue, grip the crowbar as hard as we could, and shove one end downwards while the other end slowly, silently, miraculously, lifted to reveal a pitch black opening beneath the semi-circular trapdoor—the gaping grin of the abyss.
Keeping one hand on the crowbar, I reached into my wraps with the other and took out the wedge-shaped doorstop, which I deftly kicked into a corner of the black gap. Ramsey’s eyes widened in appreciation, as if he had only just now wondered how we were going to keep the trapdoor open. I nodded back at him, and we silently coordinated a move and another leverage of the crowbar, while I used my toes to keep nudging the doorstop further into the ever-widening wedge on the other side of us. The trapdoor opened by degrees until the leading edge bumped the bottom of the card catalogue above us: it would open no further.
Ramsey carefully pulled away his crowbar, but my doorstop held. The abbreviated opening was narrow. No one but a halfling or a really determined raccoon would be able to fit through it.
I poked my head through the aperture. I could see nothing, but the air beneath me had a stale, damp smell to it, like an unoccupied grave.
A grave with a ladder carved into the side of it.
Recessed into the stone were evenly spaced cavities, clearly meant to allow emergency access to the shaft without interfering with whatever might be hauled up and down. Grasping the edge, I swung my feet in and down, finding the gaps with my toes, and crawled carefully in. After a moment, Ramsey followed.
The cavity’s spacing was as regular as a metronome, but they weren’t always empty. Some of them had rubble inside, which I carefully cleared out, and after the first time of almost stepping on my head, Ramsey learned to listen for the faint sound of swept debris. We didn’t talk, wary of our voices echoing upwards, but I could hear Ramsey’s breathing through the sirenstone; shallow, and faster than it needed to be. I guess if you’ve never done it before, climbing into a pitch dark, forgotten hole in the ground, trusting your life to an unseen, untested, ladder-like device to keep you from slipping away forever into immeasurable depths is actually kind of scary.
[Climb check: Success]
I had to give it to Ramsey, though, he had guts. When at long last we made it to the bottom and I lit up one of my daggers with my second Light spell of the day, he was shaking from adrenaline and grinning like a maniac.
“Whew!” he whispered, even though I didn’t think we had to. “I hope we’ve got another way out of here when this is over, because I sure don’t fancy going back up that thing.”
The tunnel around us was not the fitted masonry of the sewers I was used to, but natural stone braced with wooden beams. It was surprisingly dry, given that we must be below the level of the harbor by now, but there were runes carved into the beams, surrounding embedded chips of gemstone: white sapphires, sometimes pale blue, around which very soft eddies of air curled and kept fresh. I blessed dwarven engineering yet again, and consulted the map.
“Don’t worry.” I told Ramsey. “Up isn’t the direction we have to worry about for a while. For now we go...” I turned in a circle, trying to orient myself, while Voice muttered something about getting the little arrow to point the right way. “That way.”
I insisted on going first, to check for traps, and open the occasional door we came to, all of which were unlocked.
“Do miners always leave the tunnels unlocked?” I asked.
“Maybe they do, in case of an emergency. Wouldn’t want people trapped during a cave in.”
“That’s pretty cool of them, to worry more about safety than people sneaking in and stealing stuff.” I poked my head around yet another such doorway, then motioned the all clear to Ramsey.
“Nah, dwarves lock up anything worth stealing. They’d never leave it lying around random passageways.” He shut the door carefully behind him. “And the stuff they do lock up, you can bet is protected by some seriously uncompromising security systems.”
“What about the little sapphires? Aren’t they worried someone will take those?”
“My guess is, the miners don’t figure anyone would pry gems out of a support beam. And if they do, they deserve what’s coming to them.”
“Hah, they haven’t met—” A gleam ahead of me was too low to be a sapphire. “Goblins!”
“Oh, I dunno.” Ramsey continued conversationally. “I think natural selection would take care of—”
I tackled Ramsey to the ground as a prehensile tongue shot at us out of the corridor ahead. “No!” I told him, lying on the ground underneath me, “Goblins! Are here!” I bounced to my feet and then bounced again, off the heels of my sandals and into the midst of the pack.
<’Malignity’.> Voice corrected.
My daggers flashed in my hands as I slashed my way through Autumn Leaf Drifting. The one that shot its tongue at us recoiled it with a snap and an “ulp!” witch turned into an “urgle!” as my lit dagger cut its throat. Green blood washed over the weapon, bathing the walls with an eerie emerald glow. Spinning around, I planted my other dagger in the eye of a goblin raising its claws for an attack.
[Race for the Cure: Quest Update!]
[Slay the scavengers: 2/6]
Two of the other goblins jumped at me, swiping claws at the ready, but I spun as nimbly as a leaf in the wind, distracting one with a kick to the midsection before I sliced them both to ribbons.
[Race for the Cure: Quest Update!]
[Slay the scavengers: 4/6]
The last two goblins went after Ramsey, just getting up from the floor. Grinning at their less adroit prey, the spread out to flank him. One dodged in and slashed at his legs; he j
umped, but not fast enough, and its dirty little claw left a long gash in his leg. No!
I threw him the lit dagger as I bounded towards the fight. “Ramsey, catch!” And to my amazement, he did, reaching up and snagging it out of the air as the second goblin jumped at him. He swung the dagger wildly, like he’d never stabbed anyone before, and the goblin easily dodged his attack. Now both goblins were lined up in front of him, with me coming up from behind them, but too late; by the time I dispatched the closest one, the other would do what it was doing right now, going for Ramsey’s throat...
I sucked in a breath to scream something, anything, as Ramsey fell backwards into the dust, but as he went down he reached into his vest, pulled out a wand—and the rising hairs on the back of my neck, connected directly to my hindbrain, were all the warning I had before a bolt of lightning shot in a straight line from Ramsey’s hand to the distant dark of the tunnel somewhere behind me.
The cracking noise it made as it shot past—
[Evasion check: Success]
—sounded exactly like being inside a giant glass vase as it was dropped onto a stone floor. Carefully, I took my hands off the top of my head and got up. Ramsey was lying on his back, eyes wide, tie askew, and magic wand held in front of him with both hands. The fried remnants of the goblins smoked gently in the still air, scorch marks running the lengths of their scaly, skinny bodies.
“Cor.” he said, in a small voice. “So that’s what this thing does.”
[Race for the Cure: Quest Update!]
[Slay the scavengers: 6/6]
“You mean you’ve never tried it before?” I wiped off my dagger, and the emerald light went clear once more. Ramsey, however, still looked a little green.
“I got it cheap off some adventurer. For, you know, self defense. And anyway it only has three charges. I mean, two charges now, I guess.”
“Oh?” I walked over and helped him to his feet. “How does it work?”