by William Ray
“Some of it. They want to stop Phand’s tower, and Ulm said it was about the palace too, but it’s not even going up where the palace was, so why say that? Did they say what they’re trying to restore?” Emily shook her head, uncertain, so he said, “Plus walking for hours in the dark. With all the street lamps, it’s not dark anywhere in this town. I need to go check some things out.”
“Hey!” she called indignantly as he began to walk away and wiggled her bound hands.
He grinned but still did not trust her enough to let her loose, “Don’t worry. I’ll be right back. If you start wondering about that Elven prayer again, just be sure to sing a little bit of ‘Ogria Girls’ first.” She shouted his name a few times as he left the room, and while he felt a twinge of guilt for leaving her tied up, it was entirely counterbalanced by the giddy relief that she seemed to be recovering.
Once out of Rondel’s, he began walking down the street towards the alley where Ulm had met with the other Wardens. He was exhausted, and his leg hurt, but taking six blocks of night air to work off the coursing adrenaline seem like a good idea. He passed several other Elven columns along the way and wondered what exactly he had gotten himself mixed up in.
He did not know what to make of the Wardens or Elves or the end of the world, so he focused on the job he had come to do, which was to get justice for Louis and find Doctor Phand. Dorna claimed Louis’s actual killer was dead, but whoever or whatever had put the killer up to it was still out there. Whatever they were up to, it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the Elven queen’s palace, so he doubted they were saving the world either.
There were copious patent lamps throughout the upper city; in some places it almost seemed like daytime as the light reflected from the white tiles of the Elven road. Wherever Emily had gone in total darkness, it couldn’t have been through the upper city.
The alleyway was darker, but enough light spilled through from the main road for Gus to see that the Warden’s blood still stained the ground. He crouched down to follow that trail in the darkness of the blind alley, and it did seem headed towards the Elven monument before it tapered off.
Approaching the monument, he tapped at it again, listening for any indication that it might be hollow, but heard no echo. He pushed at the flat base, trying to rotate or slide it, but nothing happened. He felt sure this was connected to however the Wardens were traveling unseen, but he could not see any way to operate it. If there really was an elf, that probably meant magic was involved, but the Wardens were humans, and they could operate it.
He suspected the writing probably held some explanation, but the runes scrawled across the inner face, a geometric language of arcs and angles, were meaningless to him. His old friend Gilmot could probably have solved this in a moment, but Gus didn’t know anyone else who knew so much as a word of Elven; with the Elves gone, no one bothered to learn it anymore.
Finally, he stepped up onto the base and stood within the curve of the crescent-shaped column to study the writing more closely. Humans were bad at magic, which he hoped meant this was somehow less mystical than it appeared, so he searched again for any joins or crevices that might indicate a button or a latch of some kind.
His fingers probed at the characters, trying to find a spot where the letters themselves might hide a button or a latch, but most of the symbols were open ended, which left fewer possibilities. There were no seams, and the chiseled surface showed no signs of having ever been anything less than a single solid block of milky white stone. He ran his hand over the surface, perfectly smooth but for the chiseled divots of the runes. He felt no give to any of them.
Suddenly, the ground vanished beneath his feet, and his elbows crashed hard onto the pavement around the Elven obelisk. The base of the column had vanished, leaving him dangling over a steeply slanted chute that disappeared into darkness below the city. Even as he realized his predicament, the white stone was sliding into place from under the column. He barely pulled his legs out of the gap before the stone base quietly resealed the opening.
The column once again looked completely solid and utterly seamless.
He stood back and prodded at the runes but could not get it to open again. Now that he knew that it did, however, he knew they travelled underground. The columns were everywhere in Khanom, but if there was any hope to track Phand’s kidnappers, it was down there.
All he needed to do was explore whatever city-wide system of tunnels they were using and then rescue Phand before the Exposition deadline passed.
That sounded daunting enough, so he set aside the possibility that an elf would be waiting for him at the end of those tunnels—an elf with powerful wyrding and an army of knife-wielding Wardens.
On his return to Rondel’s, Gus paused at the bar for a belt of something stiff before going up to the room. When he arrived back at his room, he found that Emily was unrestrained, sitting on the bed and sipping water.
His heart stopped a moment, but she didn’t go for her knife and instead just gave him a sharp look that said she still took being left tied up a bit personally. Rather than mention it though, she only asked, “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I did! Looks like the Wardens are literally underground. That’s how they move through the city without being seen. That’s why it was so dark when they took you. In the morning, I’ll go buy a lamp and make my way down there.”
She nodded as if that made sense and then said, “You should take someone with you, just to be safe.” At his skeptical look, she hurriedly added, “Not me! Do you know anyone here who knows about tunnels?”
With a grin, he replied, “I’ll have you know the owner of the Khanom Mineral Company and I are well acquainted.”
A quick derisive snort that fell just short of outright laughter was her response, and she said, “I doubt he actually digs the mines himself.”
“No, probably not, but I think I know just who to ask.”
“An actual miner?”
“No, even better! A nightclub owner.”
~
“Curse Threatened Upon Garren”
An edict from the Longying Emperor has formally decreed that a curse will be placed upon Garren and all its peoples, unless control of the island of Hemdou is returned to his kingdom by the next full moon. While the people of Longying have long claimed that their Emperor is a dragon and possessed of the vast magical power such a curse would require, very little evidence has emerged in recent years to support that belief.
As readers will recall, after the Longying courts of trade forbade all further importation of goods from western nations, an assault upon their ports was commenced by two Garren commercial interests: the Maraes Ferma and the Societa Commerce Ogrien. The two companies have offered to cede control of seized territories to Garren in exchange for military support from their home nation, but so far, their merchant ships have readily rebuffed Longying’s military attempts to retake Hemdou.
– Khanom Daily Converser, 17 Tal. 389
~
- CHAPTER 30 -
Despite the exhausting day, Gus spent the night awake. He left Emily on the bed and used a spare blanket to make himself a pallet on the floor. Unfortunately, when laid face down, the cut on his belly was too uncomfortable to let him sleep. Face up was little better—his fall in the alleyway had bruised his elbows, and combined with the constant ache in his leg, it was too much to let him sleep soundly.
Emily did sleep, but she spent the night tossing and turning, apparently in the grip of the same sort of dream that had haunted Gus since the war. In the wee hours before dawn, Gus decided he had lain still long enough and finally gave up on sleep. Emily was still asleep when he rose, dressed again, and slipped out of the room as quietly as he could manage.
At the front desk, he paused to demand the loan of a lantern, which the sleepy clerk managed to produce after a bit of cajoling. At a better hour, the clerk might have questioned him, but he lacked the wherewithal to
deny an insistent customer this early on.
Lantern in hand, Gus made his way to the Viridian. The club showed every sign of being closed when he arrived, but he knew some of the elaborate dinners he had seen on offer the other night required a full day’s preparation, and he doubted Salka’tok’tok’ton would leave all that preparation to chance. He guessed the gob would be there to usher in the morning shift of bakers and chefs before retreating to his diurnal slumber.
He was right. When Gus arrived, Salka’s mouth split into a wide grin, and in his deep voice he rumbled, “Good morning, Mister Baston! What brings you out my way at this hour?”
Gus grinned back and said, “I have a lead on Doctor Phand! You’re invested in the Exposition and struck me as the adventurous sort, so I thought you might want to help me rescue him from his kidnappers.”
Goblins’ broad mouths always gave them impressively expressive frowns, and Salka’s managed to make him look both wary and thoughtful. “You might be better served calling upon the police, Mister Baston. I’m not sure what I can do for you. Despite the reputation for savagery that some of my tribal brethren have built, I am really not much help with fisticuffs, and human guns are hardly scaled for Rakhas hands.”
He held up his oversized paw, and Gus was surprised in all his time fighting in Rakhasin that it had never occurred to him that their rifles would have been exceedingly difficult for the natives to wield. It was probably why they relied upon spears and clumsy sorcery.
Changing his tone to be a bit more pleading, Gus said, “Please, it’s nothing dangerous for you. I’ve found some old tunnels under the city. I could use some expert guidance to find my way through them. You’re my only hope, and I’m Doctor Phand’s only hope.”
Salka seemed moved by that, and the idea of tunnels clearly sparked the gob’s curiosity, for he said, “Under the city? What sort of tunnels?”
“Elven, I guess? There’s an entrance only three blocks from here. If it’s too threatening, you can just back out.” Gus doubted he would. Anyone that travelled across the world to settle in a city full of strangers had to have at least some sense of adventure, and to be the only goblin in a human city, Gus bet Salka had more of that than most.
Salka looked back at his bustling crew as if weighing how poorly they might fare without his morning supervision. With the sun steadily rising, he had probably not planned on staying out too much longer regardless, so eventually adventure won out. He nodded his broad head and said, “Very well, I’ll take a look.”
As they made their way to the alleyway, Salka was the object of veiled stares by the morning pedestrians, who made every effort not to be caught gawking at the unusual pedestrian pressing through their morning commute. They passed another Elven obelisk along the way, but Gus had no idea if they all worked the same, so he led Salka to the one he was sure the Wardens had travelled through.
They stepped off of Queen’s, and Salka suspiciously eyed the dark stains where the Warden that Gus had shot—supposedly the one who had murdered Louis—bled onto the ground. Gus tried to feel some satisfaction in that bit of revenge, but it only left him sad and empty.
Pulling at Salka’s shoulder, Gus urged him around the corner and towards the white column. Gesturing over the symbols on its inner face, he said, “This is how they do it. It opens somehow, and there’s a tunnel below.” The goblin looked skeptical, so Gus began tapping at the script. “I did it accidentally before, which is how I know it works. You’ve got to hit the right words in Elvish or something.”
Salka smiled up at him and said, with just a hint of smugness, “That could take you awhile then. The columns aren’t Elven. They’re Duer.”
“What the hell is ‘Duer’? Like those little dolls people make out in the country? The little mountain spirits they give booze?” He prodded at more of the words on the column and wished he had been more methodical in his earlier effort.
The goblin shrugged and stepped closer into the arc of the column to examine the words. “I don’t know anything about that. They were an old people who lived underground, like the Rakhas do. They left many ruins in Rakhasin, supposedly cursed, but we’d sneak out to play in them when I was young.”
“But this was an Elven city! Why would they have Duer monuments everywhere?”
Salka chuckled and said, “I don’t know, but if they were Elven, why did they get left behind when the Elves took everything else with them?”
Gus was stumped by that, and as he considered it, he remembered passing by an old temple in Aelfua while he was in the army. Gilmot could read Elven, but he hadn’t understood several foreign symbols on that one. “Some expert you are. Maybe I should have brought an archaeologist.”
The goblin ignored him and then pointed out one of the chiseled characters and said, “That one means ‘down,’ I think.”
It was lower than Gus remembered pushing at before, so with a skeptical frown, he reached past the gob and pushed against the word. In the blink of an eye, the base of the column on which Salka stood gave way, seeming to vanish entirely.
For someone with such a deep voice, the high-pitched screech that sounded as Salka slid away into darkness was a bit of a shock. Remembering how fast the opening closed before, Gus hugged the Rondel’s lantern protectively, took a deep breath, and leapt down after him.
Gus fell onto his back in a tight chute of polished stone, which briefly knocked the breath from him as he slid rapidly downward. The light overhead vanished, plunging him into total darkness as he plummeted into the depths.
The chute was obviously designed for someone of narrower frame, and his bruised elbows banged at the sides as he rapidly banked through a series of sharp turns in the stone chute. Just as he was about to recover his breath, Salka’s screaming fell silent, and an instant later the chute was suddenly gone. Gus hung suspended in the air for a brief moment that felt far longer than it was and then dropped hard atop his companion, who responded with a pained whimper.
It was still pitch black. Salka recovered from the fall first, squirming beneath him a moment until Gus recovered and they awkwardly disentangled. Gus’s elbows ached, and the chute had hit them in just the wrong way, leaving his fingers with a tingling numbness. He could hear the goblin move about in the dark, grunting a little as he worked out whatever bruises had been earned in the fall and then in Gus’s subsequent crash atop him.
Trapped in featureless black, Gus sat on the cool stone floor and sucked in strangled gasps of cool air as he tried to get his wind back. He put the lantern in his lap and then wriggled his fingers, trying to restore feeling to his hands. His eyes darted around, but there wasn’t even the faintest glimmer of light, and he couldn’t pick a single shadow from any other. He raised a hand to his face, and while he could feel it brush his nose, to his eyes there was nothing but empty black.
He had no notion of how deep they had fallen, nor how far sideways that chute might have directed them as they fell, and absolutely no notion of how to get back. Submerged into darkness beyond any he had ever known, Gus’s panicked thoughts turned to the descriptions of hell that had been hurled at him while sitting among impassioned congregations as a boy.
He inspected the hotel’s lantern with his fingers, and it seemed to be unbroken. Nervous he might lose a piece of it in the dark, Gus opened it very carefully and began fumbling around with the matches he carried in his pocket.
Salka paced around him and murmured in a soft, reverent voice, “This is amazing.”
Gus’s only matches were safety matches, and it proved frustratingly difficult to strike one without being able to see the surface it was supposed to rub against. Irritated and uneasy in the darkness, he called out, “Don’t wander off!”
Salka gave no reply, but after a moment more, Gus finally got the match to ignite. As light blossomed around his fingers, he felt an enormous surge of relief and carefully paired it to the wick of the lantern. Lit, the lantern provided no more light than the match had
until he slid the glass chimney over it and closed it up. With a soft sigh at the return of sight, Gus glanced around, first spotting his guide’s back and then raising the lantern higher for a better look at where the chute had dropped them.
They stood on one side of a wide corridor, the opposite side of it only dimly in view, and both ends stretched well beyond his small island of illumination. Everything was made of polished white stone, decorated in sharp geometric patterns, dotted with occasional runic chiselings. The floor was laid in the same tiles as the Elven roads.
Unlike the pale white stones along the floor, however, here the walls were streaked in color. Slogans in Duer script were painted large across the walls in reds, yellows, browns and blues. To one side he saw a crude drawing that appeared to depict a large man urinating on a symbol painted in a different color. None of that graffiti extended higher than six feet, above which the white stone remained as clean as it was on the surface.
Gus saw the chute they had fallen down, which emerged from the nearby wall, and it was not nearly as far from the floor as he had imagined. Beside it sat a white column similar to the one somewhere overhead which, hopefully, would be their way out again. “Salka, you know the word for ‘up,’ right?”
The gob nodded and walked over, pointing to a circle overlapped with triangles and three wavy lines that indicated direction in no way Gus could discern. To Gus, the Duer script just looked like a series of boxes, and he had trouble telling the characters apart, so he sighed and resolved not to lose track of his guide.
He had hoped the Warden’s blood trail would extend down here, but there was no sign of it at the base of the chute. After staring around at the floor in the immediate area gave him no leads, Gus began walking further down the corridor, only to be stopped by a purposeful cough.
“That way is a dead end.”
Gus turned back to face Salka, who raised a large hand to shade his eyes from the lantern. “Fine. You’re supposed to be my tunnel guide. Which way?”