After completing his survey of the city, Eril flew slowly back to the inn at Chilzen. He landed just outside the door, and only then dropped his invisibility. One of the regular patrons was just coming out the door as Eril appeared.
“Wizard,” the man exclaimed, jumping as he saw Eril. “You gave me quite a fright. Did you just get here?”
“Yes,” Eril said, walking into the still-open doorway. “Sorry if I startled you.”
“It’s all right. Wizards, wizards, never know when they’ll turn up ‘en all,” the man muttered as Eril strode in.
“Ah, young master wizard,” the innkeeper, Took, said heartily. “Here for a late lunch?”
“Yes, I suppose I am. I need to catch a bite and then head back out to the ruins.”
“Aye, don’t want to search on an empty stomach. Have you found aught there yet? Fil wouldn’t tell me anything. She seemed even more surly than usual over it too.”
“Well, there’s not much to tell,” Eril said, suddenly very grateful that he’d cautioned Filora about talking about what they’d discovered. “I’m poking around, and Fil has been a great help, but there’s so much out there. She might be surly because I showed her that I could fly when she tried to leave me behind with her rapid hiking.”
Took guffawed. “Oh, I bet that would do it. She takes great pride in being able to hike any man into the ground. Flying. Now that would sure steam her pride.” He continued to chuckle to himself as he served Eril. “Flying . . . flying, ha.” He said as he went into the kitchen.
When Eril had finished his meal, he asked, “Do you know where Fil is? I’m headed back out into the ruins.”
“Truth be told. I’m not sure. I’ve not seen her since this morning early. I’m not sure if she’s out hunting or in the ruins. Half the time I’ve no idea where that girl’s at. I’m sure she’ll turn up. You could probably use your magic to find her no doubt.” He winked slyly.
Eril sighed, “I suppose I could. I just thought you might know.” He waved and left. Once he had walked twenty yards or so in the direction of the ruins, he took to the air. He didn’t bother with invisibility as everyone in the village knew of this ability. He didn’t fly directly to the blocked stairwell but circled aimlessly for ten minutes or so over an area opposite to that, then he dropped low, invoked his invisibility, and flew to the stairs.
Unsurprisingly, when he arrived and dropped his invisibility, he found Fil down in the stairwell. She had removed the smaller boulders and cleaned the dust and dirt off the stairs. She did not seem at all surprised when he walked down to where she was sitting.
“So, did you get control of this place from Old Man Torch?” she began, as though they’d already been talking for some time.
“I contacted Master Silurian’s agent. He is going to start the process and thinks he can have the title transferred in as little as two weeks. He also thinks it is a good idea if we don’t let anyone know what we’re doing here and we especially don’t want to take anything out of the ground until the title is clear.”
“Told, ya,” Fil said smugly. “I haven’t said anything to anyone my Da hasn’t already blabbed to. I sure didn’t tell him anything about yesterday, though he tried to pump me for juicy details.”
“Yes, he said that to me too. Just so you know, I told him you might be steamed because I bested you in your little fast hiking game by flying. He found it quite amusing.”
Fil looked indignant. “I’m sure he did, humph. You didn’t have to tell him that, ya know.”
“Well, I figured I had to tell him something to not make him question the amount of time we spent out here yesterday.”
“Ya could’ve just told him we looked all day and found nothing. That would have been enough,” she groused.
“I suppose I might have, but he seemed to think your attitude didn’t match that.”
“He’s a right nosy sort, he is, jarg him.”
Eril was thinking that since she was a young woman wandering around unaccompanied and unaccounted for regularly, that Took was actually a very broad-minded man from what little he’d heard of most men and their unmarried daughters, but he didn’t voice those thoughts.
Instead, he chose to ignore the comment. “Well, I think we’ve got this loosened up enough. Shall we see what further obstacles are waiting for us below?”
She nodded. Then he motioned for her to get up out of the stairwell. He followed and wrapped his mind around the now-familiar contours of the stone plug. He concentrated, and it started to slide, grinding up out of the stairwell.
Eril continued backing, leading the stone until it finally cleared the sides of the stairwell and floated above it. He carefully maneuvered the stone to a clear area near the stairwell and set it down. He was breathing in great gulps, something he didn’t notice until he finished.
Filora didn’t wait for him but dashed down the now cleared stairs. Eril waited, resting. He was sure she’d tell him what she saw soon enough. He wasn’t disappointed.
She reappeared at the top of the stairs, breathless. “It goes down a long ways. I’m glad I thought to bring a lamp,” she said, swinging the brass lantern she’d taken down with her. “I counted six landings, and then there are a huge set of stone doors that seal the bottom of the stairs. There were no handles, or locks, or rings or anything that I could see. I don’t know how we’re going to get past them.”
Eril was actually surprised that there weren’t even more obstacles. Those doors sounded like they were the bottom of the staircase, and he guessed that they were sealed, but that his zdrell would be the key to getting them open. He started down the stairs, casting a light globe to follow them down.
It was actually more like eight landings before they came to the doors. It was immediately apparent to Eril that these doors were by far the most significant obstacle they’d encountered thus far. The doors themselves were solid granite and were hardened by magic to a degree Eril would not have believed if they weren’t there in front of them.
He examined the doors, bringing the globe close to get enough light to make them fully visible. The doors were utterly featureless, only the thinnest of cracks indicating where their edges were. No handles, indentations, or any other devices were visible. After several minutes of examining them, he switched to using nothing but his zdrell sight.
As soon as he did, he saw something completely different. The doors were ornamented in a shifting geometric pattern, that had somehow been embedded in the very structure of the stone’s molecules. At the very top of the two doors there was a line of ornate Klathar script which read, “If you wish to gain entry, you must look beyond to lift the latch that is within.”
Eril puzzled over this for several moments. He told Fil what it said, but she didn’t have any ideas either, then he smacked his head in frustration. “Duh, ‘look beyond.’ I bet since I can only see the message with zdrell that I need to look beyond the door with zdrell too.”
“You can do that? Look beyond these doors? How?” Fil asked, confused.
“Well, yes, but it’s hard to explain. I don’t actually see, and I don’t know if I can, but that’s got to be what this is referring to.”
It had been a long time since Eril had used his zdrell to see through an object, but it was a skill that once learned was not easily forgotten. He closed his eyes and focused on his zdrell ‘sight’ which wasn’t exactly sight, but he could perceive with it. Once he penetrated the surface of the doors, he saw that they were over a foot thick. Within moments of examining them, he found a latch mechanism embedded in the doors themselves. There was no way to manipulate it other than zdrell. With his sight and practice at manipulating things, it wasn’t too difficult to lift the latch. When he did, the doors quivered and seemed to move slightly, but they still didn’t open.
Eril checked, but while the doors still wouldn’t move, the latch was definitely disengaged, so there must be something more. He spent the next twenty minutes scouring the doors from top to bottom and
side to side, but he found no additional latch. The doors should be free to open, but they wouldn’t.
He went back to the inscription, searching for some additional clue that he might have missed. Finding nothing more, he decided to take it literally and attempted to see not just within the doors, but beyond them as well.
As soon as he did this, he encountered an additional obstacle. It was hard for him to perceive anything clearly through the width of the door, but after several moments of careful checking, he determined that there was an additional bar of reinforced stone in brackets keeping the doors closed on the other side. This was very similar to the blocking bar he’d seen at castle Kord, only this time the bar was keeping people from getting into the gate area rather than keeping people from getting out.
Following his previous efforts, he tried to lift the bar with his zdrell. One end lifted easily, but the other stubbornly resisted. After wasting several minutes trying vainly to get both ends to raise, he realized that he didn’t need both ends to come up, only one. As soon as he abandoned trying to raise the pinned end, it quickly became apparent that it was a pivot. Once he had the bar lifted cleanly from the one bracket, he felt the tension holding the doors closed ease. He continued raising the loose end of the bar until it was vertical, at which point, he felt it lock into place.
With the lightest of touches, the huge doors pivoted inward. As they opened, a rush of cool air enveloped them. They were looking into an immense cavern that the light of Eril’s globe and Fil’s lantern barely penetrated. After all the time he had spent getting to this point, Eril hesitated to enter, but he could feel the gate calling to him.
Chapter 37
The light from Eril’s globe, even after he increased it fourfold, was still swallowed by the massive space. The doorway didn’t open on the cavern floor but on a landing to yet more stairs going down. The ceiling was over thirty feet above them and appeared to be at least partly the natural roof of a cave.
The floor of the cavern was still another forty feet down. Even from their current position, they could hear the sound of rushing water. There was an underground river here, and Eril figured that accounted for the chill moist air.
As they descended to the cavern floor, they passed three landings, each with doorways that led off to halls. Eril wanted to explore them and had to actively hold Fil back from scampering off, as he wanted to get to the cavern floor and the gateway that he could feel was down there.
When they finally got to the ground level, the place appeared all the more immense. He guessed that they could fit all of castle Salways inside the cavern with room to spare. The river they could now see was off to one side and was at least ten feet across and ran in whitewater rapids. The stairway had ended not too far from the back wall of the cavern, which was nearly vertical. It had clearly started out as a natural formation, but been worked so that the bottom forty feet or so presented a smooth uniform surface. In the center of that wall was the primary gateway.
Like the gate at castle Kord, it was in the shape of an arch, but this one dwarfed its companion. The top of the arch was forty feet above the ground and twice as wide as it was tall. The sheer size of the thing absolutely floored Eril.
When he reached out and touched the device, he sensed a power reservoir so enormous that measuring its capacity would be like trying to measure the sea with a bucket. He was at a complete loss as to how anything could ever fill it or how this gate could power the entire gate system, as the manual had said.
He examined the gate and saw two immense tubes leading from it to another strange device firmly anchored to the cavern floor. The outside of it was a tremendous metal casing. The device was like a large cylinder laid on its side, with various flanges and metal fins protruding from it at several points.
As he looked along its length, he found that the end farthest from the arch was connected to immense and complicated gear works. Several of The gears were taller than a man and they all ended in a twenty-foot wheel with a small gear on one end and large studs which clearly were meant to connect to something else that wasn’t there.
Moving the light and looking, he quickly found what was missing. A massive water wheel at least forty feet tall was laying on its side on the cavern floor. The water wheel was made of some sort of metal and was straddling the rushing river. It didn’t take Eril long to discover that the support tower, which had supported the side of the wheel away from the gear works, had the axel support for the wheel broken away.
The two support towers for the wheel were still in place, and the close support looked somewhat corroded but intact. The far support tower was shorter, with the stone broken. What remained looked cracked and unstable.
The wheel too looked like it had taken some damage when it fell from its place. Looking at the whole thing, Eril guessed that the wheel had powered the cylinder on the floor and that had somehow made the gate function, but he had no idea how that could work. He’d never heard of a way of converting mechanical motion into magical energy.
The water running through the cavern now made more sense. It clearly had been supposed to lead to the water wheel and with the wheel gone had found its own way back into the channel that led out of the cavern.
The more he thought about it, the more Eril was impressed at how intact things were. It had probably been well over one thousand years since anyone had been in this place and yet most of the equipment looked like it could be salvaged. True, all of this had been wrought by the Zdrell masters of old, and they had clearly built things to last, but that only served to show Eril just how much knowledge had been lost.
Looking around, he knew he would have no chance of getting this gate functioning if he couldn’t find another manual similar to the one uncovered at castle Kord. And even then, he despaired at what it would take for him to be able to restore this place to even a pale shadow of its former glory.
§ § §
While Eril had been searching the arch and major ruins in the cavern, Fil had quickly grown bored and gone back to explore the corridors they’d passed on the way down the stairs as well as the other passageways leading off of the main floor. When they got back together, she reported that nearly all the rooms were empty except for the remains of what had probably been wooden furniture which had decayed with the centuries.
“It looks to me like they left here and took their important stuff with them,” Fil told him. “There’s still lots of rooms I haven’t gone into, but so far I haven’t found anything interesting.”
“Hmmm,” Eril said, disappointed, “I guess we’ll just have to keep looking and hope they didn’t take everything.”
After another two hours of fruitless searching, Eril yelled until he got Fil’s attention. “I think it’s probably best if we call it a day. Do you have any idea what time it might be?”
“No. It’s just like being in a cave. You can’t tell time at all, but I’m tired and hungry, and that’s a good sign that we’re probably already late getting back.”
Eril nodded in agreement. They headed up the stairs. On the way out, Eril closed and latched the stone doors behind them. When they got to the surface, he put the boulder back covering the stairwell. He wasn’t willing to chance that some curious town folk might not have followed and try exploring.
It was indeed dark when they got back to the inn and Took was not happy with either of them, especially when neither would tell him what they had found or why they were so late. His happiness with Eril had nearly wholly vanished, and he was even more cross with Filora.
For his part, Eril apologized repeatedly and said that they had found something underground that he couldn’t talk about and that while there they had utterly lost track of time. He said it in such a way as to imply that the underground entrance he had found was far from the main ruins.
He stressed that as the lands were being acquired by Master Silurian, it was imperative that Took not let it be known. He also said that once Silurian had ownership of the property that the
re would be a great deal more traffic through the village and especially the inn.
All of this did a fair job of mollifying Took, but Eril decided that he was going to need to be much more careful about time. It was entirely too easy to lose track of hours when they were underground.
§ § §
As soon as Eril finished eating his cold supper, he got out the sending stone to report his progress to Master Silurian. The Master was overjoyed that Eril had located the primary gate and confident that they would be able to eventually get it working again. He had also heard from Jesstell that his initial overture on acquiring the property had been well received. The Master was also concerned that some of the other villagers would inform Torch if anything was discovered. He thought some misdirection was in order.
“Eril,” The Master sent, “I want you, very visibly, to head off searching in the woods north of the village. You need to let it ‘slip’ when eating in the tavern that you found something in the ruins which leads you to believe that there is something valuable in the woods north of there.”
“But what if there is something really there, Master? That cavern is huge, and we barely started searching it. There really might be something in those woods.”
“All the better,” Silurian responded. “I have assured Torch that I was only interested in the land south of the village. If he thinks that the valuable stuff is located north of the village, he’ll be even more willing to let the ruins go easily.”
“But if there’s something there?”
“Eril, don’t forget, we’re not looking to turn a profit here. We need control of that gate and facilities around it. If Torch ends up with some old buildings or artifacts, well that’s so much less he’ll want to fight when it comes out that we bought the gate out from underneath him.”
The Journeyman for Zdrell Page 22