When Eril reported the discovery to Master Silurian, The Master was overjoyed and expressed great interest in seeing it himself and for the water wheel and Dynolyth to be restored, so that the gates could be used regularly once again.
Eril had described the state of the water-wheel and Dynolyth equipment, and Master Silurian believed that getting the gate system back in operation was not only possible but doable in the short term. This, of course, assumed that Eril could figure out all the points of gate operation and also decipher the means to repair the Dynolyth. Again, Master Silurian had boundless confidence that Eril would figure it out.
§ § §
Eril kept studying the manuals as the coal fire slowly built the gate reserve. His frustration returned, as time and again, the manual used words and concepts he simply couldn’t grasp. He was, at the Master’s suggestion, studying the section that talked about repair, operation, and maintenance of the Dynolyth. The more he studied, the more frustrated he became. He needed help, but had no one there to give it.
Finally, The Master suggested that Eril bring the manuals with him back to castle Salaways and see if Master Silurian, Dorull and Eril, with input from Master Kason couldn’t make more progress by pooling their areas of expertise. In spite of a week of burning coal almost non-stop, Eril didn’t feel the primary gate had enough energy to function, so Master Silurian suggested he fly back to Salaways with the manual.
Meanwhile, Fil had continued exploring the seemingly endless corridors of the underground complex. She had just discovered an auxiliary stairway that led nearly to the surface but was blocked the last few feet by rubble. With a judicious application of his zdrell lifting the debris, Eril had the path cleared in an hour. He then spent another two hours rearranging the rubble on the surface so that the entrance was concealed and with Fil’s assistance emplaced a door with a mundane lock on it so she could enter and leave on her own.
With all of this in place, Eril left Fil to tend the coal fire to keep the gate charging, took up his two manuals, and flew back to Salaways. He made the now-familiar trip in less than half a day. The only excitement being a thunderstorm he had to fly south to avoid.
Chapter 51
Arriving at Castle Salaways, Eril found both Zeldar, and Master Dorull there together with The Master. All of them were impressed when they saw the two manuals. They were also almost immediately frustrated on seeing that much of the manual’s contents was unreadable to them. Eril was happy that Master Silurian had taught him the spell that allowed him to copy what he saw into a normally readable medium, but quickly grew frustrated when he realized that it would take several thousand, maybe tens of thousands of pages to replicate the contents of the two manuals. The zdrell writing did not only make the text invisible to mundane senses, it allowed over ten times the information to be stored on a single page, and the two manuals had well over a thousand actual pages between them.
“Eril,” The Master said, as he looked over the work of the frustrated journeyman. “It just isn’t practical at this time to copy these entire manuals. They’re just too large.”
“I know, Master, but what can I do? If I don’t copy them, no one but me can read them. I need your help, but how can you if you can’t even see to read them yourselves?”
“I agree, Eril,” the old wizard said, musing. “This is a pretty problem. If time were no factor, I’d say we just take the time and copy them out complete. But time is a factor, and I don’t think copying them alone will solve your problems. No. What I think is needed is for you to find the sections that are most difficult for you. You’ve already read and figured out so much. Find those sections and read them to Dorull and me, and let us see if we can shed light on those parts. You may need to copy them out, but let’s start first with just reading them and seeing if the experience we’ve both garnered over the centuries will allow us to assist you.
“Also, I want you to copy out the diagrams for the parts of the Dynolyth. I’m going to have Kason look at them and see if his expert metal worker’s eye can figure the quickest method to get it working again.”
§ § §
They went to work with gusto, and within three days they had managed to unravel some of the more difficult points that Eril had been grappling with. Both Dorull and Silurian had larger working vocabularies in Klathar. Their understanding of the meaning of the words allowed Eril to finally grasp what several of the passages had been trying to say, and Eril felt that he now knew what he needed to get the primary gate to function on a limited basis.
When Kason was shown the diagrams from the manuals and told the size of the structures and that they appeared to be made primarily out of precious metals, he was dumbfounded. In short order, he determined that he would have to see the current state of the Dynolyth in person to make assessments as to whether it could be repaired, manual or no.
In just a week since Eril had arrived, The Master decided he was ready to return, so he could apply what he had learned. Kason and two of his journeymen would accompany Eril back so that they could begin work on repairs for the Dynolyth and water wheel. The amount of text Eril had already copied out of the manuals was enough that Dorull said he’d be months studying it.
Everyone felt the press of time, as there had been no recent reports of where the charzen were located, and both Eril and The Master were troubled by the lack of news. Master Silurian was almost frantic with the idea of getting the primary gate functioning on any level.
Chapter 52
The next morning, after everyone had eaten, they climbed into the modified wagon Eril had tasked for the trip, Kason and Eril sat on the driver’s bench while Kason’s two journeymen sat uneasily in the bed of the wagon along with multiple chests containing metals and tools. A small crowd had gathered in the castle courtyard to see them off, including masters Silurian and Dorull.
Eril called back, “Everyone ready?” He received a nod from Kason and affirmative grunts from the journeymen. He then activated his enhanced invisibility amulet as well as the shield amulet he’d taken from Boregond. There were murmurs from the apprentices and journeyman wizards in the crowd as the wagon and its occupants disappeared. Inside the wagon, the morning light became tinged with gray as it always did from inside the invisibility spell.
“I’ll talk to you over the communicator when we arrive,” Eril said to Master Silurian. This elicited another round of murmurs from the crowd as Eril’s voice appeared to come from nowhere.
“See that you do, Eril. And please try not to scare Kason’s people too much,” The Master said as he turned to leave.
“Not too much,” Eril said quietly, as he concentrated on lifting the wagon quickly up out of the castle courtyard. The journeymen in the wagon, who had been looking mildly offended at Master Silurian’s remark, were suddenly gripping tightly to its sides as it sailed above the castle walls and continued to rise as they moved east toward Alavar.
Kason, for his part, made no sound, but Eril could see his knuckles were white where he gripped the outer edge of the driver’s seat rail. After several minutes of sedate flying, drifting in a smooth way above the capital city, Kason spoke.
“Is it always like this when you fly, Eril?” Awe tinged his voice. The two journeymen had also gotten over their initial fright and, while still holding very tight to the wagon, were excitedly pointing out different landmarks below to each other.
“Mostly,” Eril replied after some hesitation. “I’m still not entirely used to flying a loaded wagon like this, so I’m going slower than I normally do when I’m making the trip back to Argaland.”
“So, y’ mean this is slow? We’ve already crossed more than half the width of Alavar, not to mention the distance from the castle to town, and I reckon it hasn’t yet been twenty minutes.”
“Yeah,” Eril replied distractedly. “I went about this fast the first time I made the trip, at least until I got comfortable with flying long distance, but lately I go a lot faster. I couldn’t go very fast until I got
the shield spell worked out because the wind gets painful the faster you go, but I solved that a while back and now I can go nearly as fast as I want.”
At this point, the two journeymen perked up and added in, “So why don’t you show us this faster thing?”
“Right, then,” Eril said, looking back meaningfully, “Just remember, you did ask.”
Turning forward, Eril closed his eyes and brought then up another thousand feet or so higher. He opened his eyes, glanced sideways to see a stoic expression on Dorull’s face. Grinning he focused on moving them faster.
In short order, they were moving more than three times faster than they had been earlier. The shield spell kept the wind from penetrating to them, but the whistling sound kept getting louder and louder.
“This wagon is much harder to push through the air than when I’m just flying by myself,” Eril had to shout over the noise of the wind. “I’ll have to find some way to fix that if I’m going to do this more often.”
“Why don’t we slow down some, so the wind isn’t so loud,” Kason shouted.
Eril nodded and reduced their speed until the wind noise dropped to a bearable roar.
One of the journeymen asked, “I thought you said we were going to go fast? That didn’t seem that much faster, just noisier.”
Eril sighed, “That’s because I brought us up this high. Trust me, if we’d stayed at the same height, you would have noticed the difference. The higher we go, the less it seems like you are moving fast.”
“Y’ fools,” Kason said. “Have y’ looked at the road below? We’re already more’n two days travel from Alavar on the ground, maybe more. It’s been a few years since I’ve gone out this way, but I’m sure we’ve made it more’n a hundred miles. And it hasn’t been an hour since we left the castle.
“Carry on, Eril. Don’t listen to these two slag fer brains. An let me get a blanket on, I’m getting chilled,” Kason muttered, reaching under the bench for one of the blankets Eril had insisted they’d need.
They flew on with almost no more comment for the next hour and a half. The strain of flying the wagon was much greater than when Eril had flown himself, or even when he’d flown the wagon with Fil. The problem wasn’t the weight, but the air resistance. To move at the speed Eril wanted, the air pushed back quite hard, so he continually had to fight against it. He was sweating freely and soon realized that he was going to need a break. They weren’t going to make the trip in one continuous flight as he’d hoped.
Just as Eril was convinced he needed a break, he saw the same village he’d stopped at the first time he’d flown from Salaways to Chilzen. Remembering the awkward reception he’d had the previous time, he slowed and surveyed the road leading to the village. Seeing no traffic on the road for a distance, he dropped the wagon into a break in the trees north of the road.
Eril explained how they would need to say they’d walked in from Crispin Vale and using that story, they should be accepted.
After they had landed and concealed the wagon, Eril flew invisibly above the inn, The Fighting Cocks, to make sure there wasn’t anyone about to see them emerging from the brush.
With the way clear, they all walked into the inn. Being still before mid-day, the common room was only sparsely occupied. They entered, found a table, and soon were being served. Eril let Kason do most of the talking, and unlike his previous experience, no one seemed to think a master smith with two journeymen and a journeyman wizard were too odd of a group, or they were too polite or maybe intimidated to mention it.
As Eril ate, he realized how exhausted he was. Kason saw it and said, “Lad, you look like to fall over at any moment.” He looked around and lowered his voice. “Why don’t you go back to the wagon and nap for a couple of hours. I’ll keep the boys here occupied, then we’ll wait for you a couple miles past the village. In fact, fly the wagon to a good spot, and we’ll take our time here and then wake you when we arrive.”
Eril nodded. A nap sounded like a wonderful idea. He stumbled his way out of the inn, crossed the road and as soon as he was sure he was unobserved invoked the invisibility amulet and went to the wagon.
In short order, he had flown it up the road past the village to a spot where the path veered. He found a secluded spot but still just visible from the road. After he had arranged the wagon so it could just be seen, he used the blankets to form a nest and promptly fell asleep.
§ § §
Eril woke to the sound of his name.
“Eril, wake up, we’ll never make it the rest of the way today if you sleep any longer.” Kason was leaning over the side of the wagon. The sunlight slanted through the bows of the ancient oak tree he’d parked the wagon under.
Stretching as he got up, Eril looked about to try and determine how long he’d slept. Kason guessed his question.
“It’s been over two hours since you left us. We took our time at the inn and then paid a visit to the village smithy. He’s a good enough sort, but you can tell that wagon wheels, plows, and shoeing horses is most of what he does. Still, we had a good chat, and the boys here helped him with a couple of larger pieces. Good for them to stay busy, but now daylight’s wasting.”
Eril felt quite refreshed from his nap and said as much. They all got back into their places in the wagon, and Eril took them back into the air.
This time he didn’t go quite as high, and that allowed the journeymen to see just how fast they were going. After another hour of flying, he took them up even higher than they’d gone previously, both to allow them to go faster and to avoid some low lying clouds.
As they flew above the clouds, Kason asked, “How do you know where you’re going if the clouds are solid below you?”
Eril shrugged, “I’m not sure exactly, but I always know the direction I’m going. I can sense North, just like a compass, so I just keep the direction I’m going in mind and don’t pay much attention.”
Kason grunted. “Tis strange to see clouds from above. Somehow I thought they’d look different from above than below.”
“Yeah, I thought the same thing too. I do try to stay out of the clouds. They’re cold and wet and even harder to push through. Also, the air around them gets, ‘bumpy’ I guess is the only way to describe it. It can be fun if you’re expecting it, but I don’t want to deal with it with the wagon. All our stuff would be thrown around.”
“Yes,” Kason said, grimacing, “We would not want to have that happen.”
Chapter 53
It was nearly full dark by the time they arrived at Chilzen. Eril took the wagon directly to the main entrance to the complex under the ruins. Once they had the wagon below ground, Eril led them back to the inn.
Took greeted them enthusiastically. Marta immediately started to flirt outrageously with the two journeymen. Kason said little while Took prattled on about Eril and about the goings-on in the village. He insisted on telling Kason about Eril’s ridding the community of the bandits and finding the zdrell cache.
Kason perked up when Took showed the metal workers pieces of armor and weapons that Fil earned from the venture. Fil was off on a supply run and Took expected her to arrive shortly. Kason had to be very firm with Took that they would be staying that night in the complex rather than at Took’s inn.
Fil finally showed up just as Eril and company were about to head back to the complex.
“Oh Eril, you’re back,” she ran up and gave him a quick hug, and then stepped away embarrassed. Both Eril and Fil were a bit abashed as everyone was staring at them. It was only the second time they’d ever hugged and the first in public and neither of them knew what to think about it.
“Good to see you too, Fil,” Eril said, awkward. “This is Master Kason and two of his journeymen, come here to see what we can fix, uh, below.” He didn’t feel comfortable discussing any of this at the inn.
“Right,” she said. “I see you were leaving. I’ll see you, tomorrow.” She glanced sideways as she said that.
“Okay,” Eril said, not meeting
her eyes. “I’ll see you then.”
With that, they left the inn and walked back to the ruins and below ground. As they walked, Kason kept sneaking sly glances at Eril.
“So, y’ve found yerself a girl then, eh?”
Eril stammered, “Well, no, not really. I mean she’s just Fil. Filora is her real name. She just has been helping me with exploring the complex and stuff. She’s not a girlfriend or anything like that.”
Kason said nothing for a while. “Huh, that hug and the look on her face seemed a bit more . . . friendly like than that, I’d say. Even if you don’t think so, she’s set her cap your way. And not a bad looking lass either. In spite of the way she dresses like a man. Not that I mind that, myself. Too many women spend too much time trying to make themselves look finer than they really are. That one is doing the opposite. I bet she’d be quite the striker if she cared to try for it.”
Eril was glad that it was dark enough that they couldn’t see his blush. He was also glad that the two journeymen were walking far enough back that they couldn’t hear exactly what they were discussing. He suspected they too were likely discussing Fil’s merits, or possibly Marta’s.
Eril didn’t trust himself to speak. He really didn’t know how he felt about all of this, but really would much rather everyone left it alone.
After several moments of silence from Eril, Kason continued, “I won’t say more on this, boy. I understand, ‘tis confusing. But you’re a good lad, you’ll figure it out.”
They descended the long staircase into the main cavern. All thought of Eril and Fil fled everyone else’s minds when Eril activated the lights and the cavern lit up.
§ § §
Both Kason and the journeymen stood stunned with their mouths agape.
“Yeah, kind of gets you, doesn’t it?” Eril said grinning.
The Journeyman for Zdrell Page 30