by Ren Cummins
The shadows ahead of them suddenly held to the floor as they approached. It remained as a fixed curve along the dim lighting of their respective visual range. Rom realized what it was first, stepping quickly up and extending her arms to each side. “Wait. The floor falls away there.”
Cousins let out a breath of air he hadn’t realized he was holding. She was right – the floor simply vanished not three meters ahead of them. He edged carefully ahead in an attempt to look down – the floor was still there, but it was a stairway, quite a ways below them. “It looks like it starts on the side of the room opposite the doorway,” he said, pointing into the darkness.
The main entry doors were still open, but the reflected light from outside seemed frail and cold in the darkness. Worse still, looking back in its direction forced their eyes to struggle with seeing in the dark. They decided instead to make their way back to the center of the room and forge on from there.
As they approached the center, some tall object loomed out at them. It wasn’t until they were nearly on top of it that they all could see what it was, but knowledge failed to bring them comfort.
Standing more than ten meters into the air was the statue of a great skeleton, wearing a loose robe. In its hands, extended above its head, was a scythe. Its vacant sockets seemed to peer back at them.
Mulligan whispered something, but even Rom could not hear it for what it was. He pointed at characters written along the base of the statue. Unlike the ones at the bases of the Sheharid statues they had seen earlier, this one was written in several different languages. At the bottom, the characters were very similar to ones found in Aesirium and in Oldtown, and they all understood then what Mulligan had said.
Only Favo was bold enough to repeat it, but even his voice shivered slightly as he did so.
“The City of the Dead,” he read aloud.
Chapter 20: City of the Dead
Favo exhaled loudly, the reverberations of the sound making its way up and around, coming back in time to the four of them. “City of the Dead, is it?” He shook his head. “Not a horrible shock to me, if you must know.” He hoped the casual tone in his voice gave the three others a level of reassurance, even if it only masked his own anxiety.
He patted Rom on the head, earning a stern glare. “Well, then,” he continued, his voice resuming its usual melodic pacing. “Let’s do see what all the fuss is about, shall we?” Turning to Kari, he gestured around the room. “Little smith, I give you this task: considering that this structure was built centuries ago, even in that day they would have needed some means by which to meander about without the trouble of falling into a pit of certain despair. And that means light.”
Kari nodded, resting her chin between her thumb and forefinger. “If there was some kind of automation, then the controls would need to be somewhere it could be found quickly and easily…” Her voice trailed off, and she looked back at the door. “Ugh. Stupid!”
She pointed to the others. “Stay here, I’ll be right back.” With that, she walked briskly back towards the doorway. Grabbing one of the opened doors, she pulled it back closed – both doors seemed to be on the same control, as they closed at the same rate and speed. With a booming roar, the lights vanished, save for their suddenly pale chemical tubes. The room was filled with the same ticking sounds as before, while the door locks re-engaged.
Then, slowly, the room began to glow. It began as a pale amber trail running the circuit of the room, then sped more and more rapidly until it wove like the threads of a great tapestry up and down and around the entirety of the room, finally coursing between the stones of the floor until each strand ended beneath the base of the statue they stood beside. Then, only after every stone and column of the room was brilliantly outlined in a shimmering yellow warmth, the statue itself began to shine. The bones of the skeleton burned with a bright pale light, and the robe glimmered pale blue. The eyes, even, shone a natural red, a light which was echoed along the length of the scythe’s great curving blade.
“Oh, I do so appreciate a craftsman,” Cousins murmured, “glorious in their efforts to strike fear into our hearts.”
Favo’s voice betrayed his deep awe at the magnificent room that rose up around them. “Seriously, lad, you need to stop speaking like me.”
“Shush, both of you,” Rom whispered. The room felt beyond ancient, it felt strangely familiar to her. But with that sensation came the impression that they’d walked into someone’s home, a stranger due to return at any moment.
Kari came skipping back up behind them. “I love this place! I could learn so much from these things!” Seeing them all staring at her, Kari flushed. “Sorry, I just thought that maybe the mechanism for the doors would be the same if you closed the doors from inside. That’s, um, how I would’ve designed it, anyway, but I was right!”
Cousins shivered in spite of the warmth of the room. “Yes, well, let’s start looking around, all right?”
Favo turned in a slow circle, letting his eyes lay out the parameters of the interior as best he could. He counted six levels within this main room, all supported by columns with a series of stairways at the end opposite the main entrance. Each floor had exactly twenty doors, all exact duplicates of one another; none bearing any significant markings to distinguish one from another. The stairs ascended one last time up a chamber above. Those, plus the two curving stairs down at the periphery of this main level, were the only obvious ways out. He nodded to himself.
“We should go down first,” Favo said simply, walking towards the main doors from which point they both initiated, as if the decision was thus made.
Cousins paused, mouth open, but decided that some battles simply weren’t worth the fighting, and nudged the two girls to come along. They followed Favo down the stairs that headed around to their left.
The stairs down were remarkable only in their absolute lack of design or decorations. They were themselves of impeccable construction, but the two walls were of the most well-tempered steel – smooth and polished, but blackened to a sheer gloss. Cousins glanced at his reflection and felt for a moment as if he were falling into a bottomless pit. He bit his cheek and stared straight ahead at Favo’s back the rest of the way to the last stair.
As it turned out, both stairs came to the same point – another bronze door, on the inside of what was essentially a giant column taking up the entire first floor. This one, however, was not locked and pushed open easily. Inside this room was a central dais within an otherwise featureless room. The floor, ceiling and single cylindrical wall were all laid out with an elaborate grid of small square stones. The room appeared to be lit, but there was no obvious light source – the room itself seemed to be simultaneously illuminated from all angles at once.
They walked across a simple solid path leading to the dais, and the door slowly closed behind them.
Favo was the first to the dais, and he looked back, somewhat confused. “It’s just a flat piece of crystal, nothing more.” He stepped aside as Cousins and Kari moved closer.
Kari took a scientific approach, moving around to examine the dais from all sides. It was a simple cylinder, smooth on all sides, made apparently from a single pale brown stone. The crystal on the top was angled slightly towards the door, presumably to lend itself to easier manipulation by whoever entered the room.
Cousins simply slipped his Looking Glasses down over his eyes, changing the lenses back from those that allowed him to see in the dark to a series of other scaled viewing options. At last, he came back to the historical setting.
“Oh!” he said, laughing. “Now I understand!” He pointed at the glasses. “This is where they were made - - I can see the moment the lenses were imbued with all their visionary properties; I see their first moment, right here in this very room.”
He slowly dialed the view forward. “It looks like you touch this crystal and…well, something happens, but I can’t tell what it is…”
Rom glanced around the room, taking a slow, deep breath. Then sh
e placed one palm on the flat crystal surface and said, “How does this work, then?”
The room responded with the sound of rushing waters. The flat stones on the walls flipped over in what initially seemed to be a random pattern, but within seconds revealed a large mural that covered the entire room. On this wall, they saw an outline of the dais itself, with a stylized person walking up to the dais and placing one hand on the crystal, just as Rom was doing. Circular lines radiated from his open mouth, and the scene repeated.
Cousins looked at her out of the corner of his goggles. “You just never think ahead, do you?”
Rom shrugged. “Hasn’t hurt me yet. So what do we want to know?”
Kari’s mouth hung open. She had so many questions, she couldn’t think of just one.
Favo placed a finger below her jaw and closed it for her. “Well, we did come here with a specific purpose. But now that we are here, I don’t know that this is the actual source of what we need. This would appear to be more of a place for you, Rom.”
Nodding, Rom kept her hand on the crystal. “Who are the statues outside meant to be?”
With another rush like the ocean waves, the tiles flipped over in turn until it showed a circle around them. Each image was a detailed reproduction of the statues, each with the same unusual characters displayed beneath them.
Rom turned around until it showed the image of the statue that looked like her. She pointed at it. “Who is that?”
The room displayed an image of her at that very moment, holding one hand over the dais.
“Ha ha,” she said without humor. “And who am I?”
The tiles changed again, this time to simply display the unreadable characters.
Grimacing, Rom looked at Kari and Favo. “A little help, here?”
Favo nodded. “Ask it if it can show you that word in any other language.”
Rom did so. The tiles flipped again, to show a variety of written languages, finally pausing upon characters they understood. Rom yelled out for it to stop, and it obeyed.
She looked carefully at the letters, uncomprehendingly.
“Wow,” Kari breathed. “That’s pretty neat.”
Cousins continued to look through his goggles at the large wall images, shaking his head slowly. “Amazing. Simply amazing.”
Favo patted Rom on the shoulder, pausing to stroke Mulligan’s fur, though the little creature did not seem to notice.
Rom raised her hand from the dais as if she’d been burned. “I don’t understand. What does it mean?”
Cousins lifted the goggles from his eyes and turned to face Rom. “Well, Rom, since all those other Sheharids you know have a name that talks about who they are, I guess this must be yours.” He pointed back to the simple word that had frozen on the wall. “You must be ‘Life.’”
She shook her head. “No, that’s just weird. I think it’s just spelling it wrong. I think its just means that I’m alive, since the others aren’t.”
“No, I think Cousins might be right, Rom,” Kari said. “I think it thinks that it’s your name.”
Frowning in concentration, Rom shook her head again. “Whatever, it doesn’t make any sense to me. All I ever do is kill things that are already dead.”
The tiles moved again. The three young people looked over to see that Favo had placed one hand on the crystal. He glanced over, smiling. “You don’t actually have to say your questions out loud, apparently.”
The wall now showed a large stylized drawing of what appeared to be the very building they were now in, only as if it had been cut in half by a gigantic sword.
“Okay, so that’s where we are, at the bottom, and everything else of any interest is above us. I would suggest we go up and find someplace to rest for the night, and we can go exploring in more detail in the morning. Are we agreed?”
The others agreed, and walked back from the room. Rom maintained a long, unreadable look towards the dais, holding the images of the wall fast within her mind until long into the night.
Chapter 21: Seeking Answers in the Past
The upstairs rooms all seemed to be individual guest rooms, though it was difficult for them to imagine the hundred-and-twenty rooms all being filled at any one time; most likely, many of them doubled as rooms for the monks or caretakers of this place.
“If people lived here, then there would have to be facilities for them,” Favo reasoned. “Kitchens, baths, that sort of thing. I’d imagine we’ll find those in the segments upstairs. But for now, we’ll content ourselves to the comforts we can more easily find.”
They chose a pair of rooms nearest the central stairs on the landing one floor above the main room. The lights from the outer rooms did not carry into the individual rooms, but Kari discovered a small apparatus in each room, powered by scaled-down versions of the Morrow Stones which rested in a small dish. The hardened sediment on the dishes suggested that water had once been contained therein.
Kari filled the dish in the room she and Rom were sharing with water from the skins they’d brought along. The water eventually covered the stone in the shallow dish, causing the stone to spin slowly.
It became hot to the touch, eventually heating the water into a gentle rolling boil. The steam that rose from the surface of the water was then drawn back into the stone, which somehow managed to keep the water level constant. A pipe that ran beneath this dish in a long coil took on this focused ambient heat and powered a quiet motor. This motor in turn powered a set of crystals set at strategic points around the room, creating a soft light.
Rom laughed briefly. “Seems like a lot of work just for a light,” she remarked.
Shaking her head, Kari pointed to a patterned set of small holes along the motor’s base. “No, see these? There’s energy here, too. If I had machines that used this kind of energy, I could probably connect them here, as well.”
Kari pulled out her ever-present notebook and began sketching the design. “Do you think anyone would mind if I borrowed one of these stones?” she asked.
Rom shrugged. “I’m not really tired yet, I’m gonna walk around,” she said. Kari, engrossed in her sketch, nodded absently. She sat Mulligan down, patted his head and assured him that she would be back shortly. He fussed a bit, but curled up and went to sleep.
* * * * *
Several hours later, Kari was certain she understood the mechanics of the small reciprocating steam engine. She would have given nearly anything to examine one of the machines that also ran from the simple device, but she hoped that maybe they’d find something when they explored the upstairs area tomorrow. She put the notepad with all her schematics and notes back in her pouch and looked around the room.
Mulligan was still there, laying on his back and snoring softly. Rom still hadn’t come back. It had been a while by now, Kari was sure of that. Frowning, she got up, picked up her satchel and put her tool belt on; just in case. She checked the chemicals in Favo’s glow-tube and shook it. Once it began glowing again, she nodded decidedly.
It was mostly quiet out on the landing. She could hear Favo and Cousins arguing about something in the room they were sharing. Shaking her head, Kari resolved that one day she’d figure boys out like she’d figured out machines. Surely they couldn’t be any more complex than that, and look how good she was with them!
She quietly walked past their door, but Favo must have had ears like a cat – for he flung open the door, pistol drawn.
“Oh, sorry, heard a noise,” he apologized, holstering the gun. “Everything okay?”
Kari nodded, swallowing. “Rom went wandering off, I’m going to go get her.”
Favo looked inside at Cousins, who nodded. “We’ll come with you.”
“No, no,” she demurred. “I think I know where she is, anyway.”
Cousins stepped to the door, his goggles in his hands. “Don’t go into any rooms we haven’t already gone to, okay? It might not be safe.”
She smiled. “I’ll be okay,” she said, patting the bag on her belt whic
h held her gloves. “I can take care of myself, anyway.”
Certain that they’d never be completely okay with the idea of her running around this place by herself, she left before they could insist on taking them with her. She took the steps down three at a time, nearly running across the central plaza before taking the additional spiral staircase down to the ‘tile room’.
She could hear the tiles fluttering while she paused at the door. She knew by the expression on Rom’s face earlier that her friend would be coming back here. There was a moment in which Kari nearly turned and walked back up the stairs, but she had a feeling that Rom needed her a bit more than she wanted her privacy.
The door opened quietly, and Kari pulled it closed even more silently behind her. Rom sat beside the Dais in the center of the room, one hand stretched up to rest upon the crystal plate.
The walls were flashing images, like a moving recreation of events. Because the tiles themselves were each no more wide across than her thumb, it gave a level of detail that, had it not just been black and tan, would have been astoundingly realistic.
On the wall around her, Kari saw Rom and Ian, standing upon a rooftop. Their mouths were moving, engaged in some kind of silent conversation – but Kari could swear that she heard sounds, regardless. As she moved closer, she realized that Rom was speaking along with her image on the wall, saying apparently what she had been saying in the events being depicted.