The Stone Key

by Isobelle Carmody

  Belatedly, I sent a probe back to Rawen promising my return and asking her to tell Golfur that I had not forgotten my promise to send him to Rolf.

  Dell turned into a long street, which brought us to a labyrinth of broken and tumbledown walls. After wending our way through them, we reached a doorway that was almost intact and was in a bit of wall that, when I looked closely, appeared to have been rebuilt. It had been done subtly so it would not immediately be obvious to passersby. Through the door was the great pile of rubble that I had climbed with Pavo so long ago. At the top was the trapdoor that had led us to the Beforetime library. We had simply come to it from another direction.

  At the square opening in the ground, I looked down at the metal steps I had last seen with Pavo. I looked up to find Dell watching me. But instead of speaking, she again made a slightly peremptory gesture, and I climbed down the steps.

  Only when out of the daylight did I realize that some eldritch light source was illuminating the stairs. They led to a passage with smooth white walls extending in both directions. I knew from the last time I had been here that the passage led in one direction to vast vaults of books. Pavo, Kella, Jik, and I had gone that way, but Dell turned in the other direction, passing me to take the lead. I followed, remembering with a shudder the bones we had found. Pavo had speculated even then that the complexity of the locking mechanism we had released suggested the building’s use as a refuge for the Beforetimers. From what Orys said, that had been the building’s true purpose. Obviously, the people whose bones we had found had not managed to enter the refuge before it had been locked.

  Quite suddenly we came upon the others standing together in a group. At first I thought they had stopped to wait for us, but as we drew nearer, I saw their attention was fixed on a metal door set into the side of the passage. It met the edges of the wall so smoothly that I might not have noticed it if they had not stopped, but I wondered why the others did not open it. I would have asked, but even as I stopped beside Dell, I noticed that the metal door was humming softly. The metal split open, and each side slid into the wall to reveal a small chamber lit from above. I stared as the others crowded into the tiny space, arranging themselves carefully around Merret and Orys and the pallet they carried.

  “Come,” Dell said, and I entered the chamber, where there was barely room to move, let alone do anything else.

  “I thought we were going to see Jak?” I said.

  “We are,” Dell answered calmly as the metal doors slid back to seal the opening.

  I began to feel I could not breathe, being pressed into such a small space with other people, but Dell laid a hand on my shoulder. Then I realized that nobody else looked alarmed or even surprised. The chamber began to hum softly and vibrate, and I had the strange and terrifying sensation of falling. A heaviness filled my limbs, but before I could gather my wits enough to ask what was going on, the metal door split and slid away again.

  I stepped out into the passage on trembling legs, suppressing nausea. Merret, Orys, and Seely set off along the passage, but I caught Dell’s arm just as the metal door closed again. “Why did we shut ourselves in there? Don’t you know how ill Domick is?” I demanded, and heard the anger in my voice.

  “That was an elevating chamber,” Dell said mildly. “It has brought us to a passage on another level of the building. Look at the color of the light.” She gestured to the walls, which I realized were now emanating a green light. “The chamber travels up and down the levels of this building through a vertical chute on thick ropes of twisted wire,” she added.

  “We are below the library level?” I asked incredulously.

  She nodded, beginning to walk after the others. “To be precise, we are seventeen levels under it,” Dell said. “The elevating chamber is very swift.”

  “We…we are seventeen levels under the earth?” I asked, my mouth drying out.

  “You get used to it,” Dell said lightly as we caught up with Seely.

  “Jak will be waiting,” Seely said, and set off again along the green-lit passage. As we followed her, I thought of my dream of Hannah and Cassy meeting for the first time. Hannah had brought Cassy to just such a shining metal door in the foyer of a Beforetime building, and they had stood waiting outside it just as we had waited in the passage. Had not Hannah even spoken of an elevating chamber? And certainly the Reichler Clinic Reception Center had been some floors above ground level.

  We turned into another passage that led to a metal door marked with a yellow and black symbol. As we approached, the door slid into the wall to reveal a continuing corridor with a red line painted on the smooth floor. Jak stood there, speaking to Orys and Merret. He beckoned to Seely and bade her show them where they were to lay Domick. Then he greeted Dell and me, clasping my hands with a warmth that surprised me. Maybe Dell and Seely had not been the only ones changed by their time in exile.

  “It is very good to see you, Elspeth,” he said. “When Dell told me you had come here alone, with the help of a ship fish, I was amazed.”

  I was in no mood to speak of my journey, however amazing. “Jak, Domick…”

  His expression became grave. “Yes. Let us go and see how he is.”

  He led me to an enormous room whose walls were lined with Beforetime machines such as I had seen in the Teknoguild cave, only there were ten times as many machines. What astonished me more than the number was that several of the screens glowed with life.

  “How did you do this?” I whispered incredulously.

  “Wait,” Jak said gently, and I followed him into a circular room lined with glass chambers and centered around a large computermachine. Each chamber was brightly lit and contained an identical flat, hard-looking white bench rising on a single metal stalk. Beside it stood a metal construction as tall as a man and incongruously fitted with four great hinged arms, each ending in a different tool. All of this so astonished me that it was a moment before I saw that Domick had been laid out on a bench.

  Seely was inside, removing Domick’s clothes, and I heard her gasp when we saw the extent of the scarring on his body. Orys and Merret turned away, the latter saying she would clean up, eat, and sleep a few hours before riding back to Halfmoon Bay to check on Iriny. I thanked her and noticed that Dell had already slipped away. Her cat-footedness had not changed.

  “The Beforetimers called this a biohazard laboratory,” Jak said, speaking these strange words with ease. “Each chamber can be completely sealed off, for it has its own air supply. That machine alongside the bed can be made to administer food and medicines and even various treatments, as well as carry away waste.”

  He looked at me to see that I understood, and I nodded.

  “Once the plague becomes contagious,” Jak continued, “we can care for Domick and speak to him, and we will not catch the plague so long as he remains within the chamber.”

  “How can that feed him?” I asked, pointing to the metal construction.

  “He will be fed nourishing liquids through tiny tubes that fit into the ends of needles, which are inserted into the veins inside his arms,” Jak said. I gaped at him, and he laughed slightly. “Forgive me. You must find this very bewildering. It is hard to find simple words to explain the wonders in this room, let alone the levels of this incredible place.”

  Seely called out, and Jak muttered an appalled exclamation when he caught sight of Domick’s ravaged naked form.

  “Shall I wash him?” Seely asked Jak, her voice echoing oddly in the glass chamber.

  “There is no danger yet, Dell says, but let us seal the chamber and show Elspeth what Pavo can do.”

  “Pavo?” I echoed faintly.

  He pointed to the tall machine beside Domick. Seely emerged from the chamber and closed the door. Jak went over to the computermachine in the center of the room, slid into a chair, and began to tap at the letters laid out in lines.

  “Watch,” Seely instructed, pointing to the chamber where Domick lay. I turned again to see the tall machine unfolding its arms
like some sort of metal mantis. When it leaned over the unconscious coercer, I held my breath, for it looked so cruel and ugly, but the plast hand reached out silently and, with startling delicacy, removed the sheet. Then it ran its hand over Domick’s body with infinite gentleness, and where the hand went, water and soap suds flowed, running off him and drawn away by narrow runnels carved into the white bench. The water flow eased to a trickle when the hand smoothed over his face and increased again when it touched the black stubble on his head. Then the water ceased altogether, and the plast hand lifted and moved over him again without making contact. I realized that air must be flowing from the hand, for soon Domick was completely dry. The hand gently replaced the sheet and withdrew. Not until it stopped did I recognize that my face was wet with tears. I hardly knew why, save that he looked so utterly lost and vulnerable lying in the glass chamber. Brushing the tears impatiently away, I turned to look at Jak.

  “As well as washing him, Pavo has been taking his temperature and making various small tests. But we will have him conduct some more complex tests and take some blood to learn more of this plague.” His words were for me, but his eyes were fixed on the glowing face of the computermachine.

  I looked into the glass chamber and saw the plast hand attaching small flat circles of what looked like plast to Domick’s forehead, his chest, and the insides of his wrists. Each circle had a thin plast line attached to it, which coiled back to the tall machine. I gasped to see another of the metal hands insert a shining metal spike into the crook of Domick’s thin, scarred arm, but Seely laid a light hand on my arm, saying, “Do not worry, Guildmistress Elspeth. Pavo will be far gentler than any of us could be. I know, for I was brought here when I broke a bone in one of my legs.”

  I stared at her, in awe of the fact that she and the others had been living among these machines and artifacts of the Beforetime for many months, learning how to use them.

  “Now Pavo is taking some blood,” Seely said, and I watched in horrified fascination as the plast hand inserted another spike into Domick’s other arm, and the plast tube turned red as his blood began to dribble through it. I noticed now that transparent straps lightly attached Domick’s wrists, ankles, and forehead to the bed, and while I knew these prevented him from moving and hurting himself, it ached me to see him bound up as must have been his fate at Ariel’s hands. If he woke…

  “The blood will tell us what sort of sickness Domick has been infected with,” Seely said.

  “Jak is controlling that?” I asked, pointing to the machine tending Domick, because I could not bring myself to call something so ugly by the name of my old friend.

  “Jak could control Pavo manually using the computer-machine,” Seely answered. “But mostly it is better to leave it to Pavo, for he knows a great deal more than even Jak. You might say that Pavo is deciding what to do and Jak is agreeing.”

  I stared at Seely, for she had spoken of the machine as if it were a live creature.

  Jak came to my side. “The air in the chamber is being heated to exactly the right level that is needed. Domick’s fever is high now, and Pavo is administering various potions that will help to cool it.”

  “How does the machine know what is needed?”

  “It is designed to heal. In a way, it is a healer, but you have to tell it to heal and agree to its suggested treatments. In Domick’s case, I have asked it to examine the blood being taken and look into its memory to find out if it has any record of the same sickness so it will know how to treat it. If it is a Beforetime sickness, as Dell says, we will soon discover its nature, for Pavo’s memory contains knowledge of all the Beforetime sicknesses. Although Pavo is swift, the records to which it has access are impossibly vast, so it will take some time.”

  “How did you figure out how to use this place? That elevating chamber…?” So many questions clamored to be answered.

  Jak laughed. “I daresay you did not like your first experience in it. We would not have been able to operate any of this, of course, without the computermachines. Fortunately, computermachines remember everything, and once you can make a computermachine work, it can tell you how to use it better. It can teach. You don’t even need specialized knowledge. You can ask questions every step of the way. Of course, communicating with computermachines is no simple matter, because a computermachine can only answer in the words it knows, and it can only understand questions put to it in words it will understand.”

  “You are saying that computermachines taught you how to work the lights and the elevating chamber and this machine? But how did you make the computermachines work?”

  “We did not have to make them work. They were working all along. Their power source is buried deep under all the levels of this place, and it was never switched off. Once we learned to communicate in a way that the computermachines could understand, we had the means of learning everything we needed to know. Of course, a lot of our discoveries were pure accidents, because while the computermachines could answer most questions, they could not tell us which questions we failed to ask.

  “For instance, initially we used a long and exhausting set of metal steps to go from one level to the other. I set up a bed here, rather than running up and down the levels. Then I thought about it and realized that Beforetimers clever enough to create all of this would surely not have traipsed up and down so many steps. So I asked the computermachine how else I could reach the surface, and it told me about the elevating chamber. As you can imagine, I had not the slightest notion what an elevator was, but with persistence and lots of questions, I finally understood the gist of it. Nevertheless, that first trip was extremely horrible.”

  “Seely said you have used these chambers to heal on other occasions,” I said, noticing that the girl had slipped out.

  “Many times,” Jak said comfortably. “We have never had to seal the room before, though. Indeed, I did not know that was possible until I began asking questions to prepare for Domick’s arrival. Poor wretch,” he added, and flung a look at the pale coercer. “I have had the computermachine produce all the information it can about such sicknesses. Apparently, plagues are ancient Beforetime sicknesses that had been wiped out long before the Great White—until some Beforetimer had the bright idea of resurrecting them to study their effects. It seems incredible that the fools would choose to wake such lethal diseases merely to study them. There must be some limit on the pursuit of knowledge.”

  “Garth would be surprised to hear you say that,” I said.

  He gave me a startled look, then frowned and nodded. “Maybe he would. But all of this changes a person, Elspeth.”

  He moved back to the computermachine, and I watched him tap the rows of small numbers and letters scribed on squares in the tray before the screen, aware that this was how he spoke to the computermachines. I had seen it done before in the caves of the Teknoguild, but again I marveled that spelled-out words could be understood and responded to by something that was only metal and plast.

  “Domick’s chamber is now completely sealed,” Jak said after some moments. “No one will enter the room until he is healed.”

  I looked at the coercer again and gasped to see bars of plast emerge from the side of the white bench and move lightly over his torso to fasten themselves on the other side. Then the plast hand drew a white cloth over him.

  “He is like to become restless because of the fever, and the straps will keep him from throwing himself off the bed. There are also things in that strap—I do not understand what, exactly, that will feed constant information to Pavo and help him tend to Domick’s needs.” He frowned at the screen in concentration, then he turned to me. “He has been drugged?”

  I nodded and explained about Rolf’s sleep potion.

  “It has done no harm to him, but I have asked the computermachine to tell me what it is made from, just in case. Did you speak with Domick before you gave it to him?”

  I told him what had taken place in the sea market and in the lane, concluding, “He remain
ed unconscious from then, because we were giving him the potion.”

  “So he spoke in the voice of his spy persona,” Jak said. “That is strange, but I suppose the fever made him hallucinate.”

  “Is there any way to get the demon band off him?” I asked. “Once he wakes, I would like to be able to probe him, if he is unable to speak to me.”

  Jak nodded. “I have sent Seely to get a key. Dell has one, but she must not have foreseen that he would be wearing a demon band.”

  “But you said the chamber is sealed.”

  “We can put the key into a tiny drawer from which all air can be drawn, and then push it into the larger chamber where Pavo can take it and use it,” Jak said. “However, as far as being able to question him, I am afraid he is unlikely to wake naturally for some hours, unless you want me to force it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good. His body has been savaged enough. Why don’t you go rest? A sleeping chamber has been prepared for you, and I will send for you the moment there is anything to tell.”

  I shook my head. “I will stay here in case he wakes.”

  Jak sighed. “Very well. There is a chair over there. Drag it over to the chamber and keep watch. I must work in another room, but don’t worry—Pavo will watch over Domick.” He added gently, “It is not your fault that this happened to Domick.”

  Is it not? I wondered bleakly after he had gone. Whatever Ariel had done to Domick, we at Obernewtyn had begun the harm by allowing him to spy, even after it had become clear that it was affecting him badly.