10. N
Haldeen stumbled forward, tripped over the threshold and fell to his knees, wrapped in pitch-black darkness. He panicked at first, before finding a mage-light that he raised with a shaking hand. He chattered out the incantation to light it. Nothing. Dead.
No ambient magic. He froze, listening. His heart raced, deafening him at first, until slow, deep breathing slowed his pulse and other sounds began to intrude.
He heard the Probe’s slow steady breathing beside him, and something further away …
a steady dripping of water, and the slow susurrus of air moving in a vast space.
He felt very exposed on the Gate threshold, and very, very blind.
He rummaged around in his shoulder bag until he found a candle and an igniter, and felt a trickle of gratitude that he’d had enough sense to bring both.
He made several hand-passes across the igniter, bringing his full will to bear to accomplish this minor piece of magic.
It took several tries, with him stumbling once over this trivial incantation.
The igniter eventually flared to life, and he lit the candle with shaking hands.
He held the candle up, both grateful for the light and very, very aware that he stood in the center of the lone pool of illumination in the cave.
Something scurried in the distance, and he heard the clash of metal on metal out in the darkness.
He jumped at the sound, dropping the candle, where it promptly went out.
It took brow-sweating effort to find and light a second candle stub.
He had to get off this exposed stage. Now.
He half-stepped and half-slid down the long ramp that joined the Gate threshold to the cave floor, then turned back to where several ancient metal wagons were piled and jumbled together.
Three wagons made a sort of half-wall that rose to twice his height, and still barely covered the lower half of the passage between worlds
He had forgotten just how damned big the World Gate had been.
His little experimental portal had carried only one at a time (two, if counting Triana).
The Household Gate, the noble’s status symbol, carried only a few travelers at a time from place to place within a city.
Those were mostly gone now, cannibalized for parts.
The cities’ Gates could carry, at most, a dozen or so …
when the magic could be spared to risk powering them.
None of those came close to the World Gate.
It stood in a league of its own; large enough to transport several wagons or half a hundred men across the vast distance between Evelon and the Colony World he had entered for the first time.
He felt a flare of pride. He had brought the Gate to life so long ago.
He had breathed life into this mighty engine; bent it to his will, and opened a great road from his world to this.
He held the candle higher, to better see the Gate.
Silver had dulled to gray, and clean stone lay strewn with rock and metal debris, but even diminished by time, the Ring still projected awe and power.
He turned slowly, shining the candle around.
Its light illuminated the wreckage and the tragedy that followed hard upon his triumph.
The panic and stampede hadn’t been his fault.
The peasants and scrubs, weak with magic and thus fit for this world that had none of its own, had bolted as the Gate had opened, and ruined everything.
Not his fault, but the failure of it still clung to him, following him like the faint scent of unwashed clothes.
He turned slowly, holding the raised candle, and surveyed the wreckage.
He had seen the panic for himself when it had started, but was still taken aback by the unmitigated chaos here, where it had finished.
He couldn’t see far, perhaps a few body-lengths, but even so the ruin and wreckage lay everywhere.
Wagons and Machina lay strewn like child’s toys, casually thrown about.
He could see odds and ends of personal possessions …
a belt buckle, the broken face of a child’s doll, a rotted shoe close by a broken box.
The mayhem and havoc that reigned when the Gate failed on the other side had played out here too.
Was it like this everywhere in the cave?
What had happened to the army of Machina that had been sent through in stages before that final, panicked attempt at evacuation?
He shook his head. He had come to scout the cave for himself, to see what might be usable.
He needed to focus on that. Memory stirred.
He recalled his presentation to the king to secure the resources to construct the Gate.
The small anomaly that showed how it might be possible, the smaller Gates already in common use that could be scaled up, the brave souls in the first spelling who came across the ether to a world barely sensed, sent by a convocation of the most powerful wizard-kings on Evelon.
The tiny team with no certain way home who built the first Gate.
It was just large enough to pass materials through, and too small for an elf to pass.
Those materials built the second, large enough for a single elf.
The second begat the third Gate, large enough for the scaffolds, crews, and resources needed for the third Gate.
This one was the largest ever built … a Transit Gate large enough to link the populations of two distant Worlds.
It had done it, and the Gate had worked, until it had been undone by stupidity and panic.
Many had died, but enough had lived to spawn Triana and her kind … weak as they were, they had prevailed. They had conquered the natives, and dominated here, if she was to be believed.
Haldeen walked carefully down the ramp, lighting his way with the candle, and picking his way through the rubble.
Once he thought about it, he shouldn’t have been surprised that King Alliard had known what he had been doing after hours.
He was the Lord Gatekeeper, after all, and if he were to be mucking about with unsanctioned experiments that drained the city’s ambient magic, those experiments would probably be related to sending people and things over long distances.
King Alliard would have been keeping tabs on all of his lords.
After thinking it through, Haldeen concluded that he should have realized he would have been caught.
Right now, Alliard wanted Triana. Soon, he would want the Gate.
Haldeen walked amongst the debris, then nudged a piece of rolled metal with his toe. It fell over with a clatter. Underneath, some kind of arthropod skittered away. He stepped back involuntarily.
He walked a bit, getting a feel for the scale of the place while thinking through the problem Alliard had thrown at him.
He needed to find a way to keep Alliard from confiscating his first gate, tempering his enthusiasm for now while promising enough rewards later to give Haldeen the leash needed to proceed.
All while fighting the clock. Haldeen knew the loss of the last of the outlying farms put the city into a parlous state. How to thread that needle?
He’d never been shy about embroidering a bit when stirring the imagination, and … part of his presentation to the king might be the promise that the metal army still existed, and could be mobilized to cement the conquest of this new world.
His first views showed more scrapheap than conquering army. But, all in good time.
A slight movement of air guttered the candle-flame.
He lowered the candle and cupped his hand around it.
He was not sure he would be able to relight it again if it went out.
He cast about for something else he could burn, and his eyes lit on what looked to be ancient poles, once soaked and water-swollen, but long since dried.
He set the candle down to pick one up and break it across his knee. He found it split easily.
Odd. It should have taken them centuries to get to this state. Is there something in this world that causes organic matter to age prematurely?
What would that mean for organic us?
The first snap caused him to freeze, and listen for something stirring.
After a count of 10 or so heartbeats he continued, breaking the poles into arm-length pieces that he put into a crude fire-pit.
Some ancient scraps of fabric taken from a wagon seat served for tinder.
The fabric caught readily enough, tinder that burned hot and fast, even if it left an acrid smoke that seared his lungs and burned his eyes.
He turned away, coughing heavily and his eyes streaming, as it lit and crackled, melting away into a puddle.
In a few minutes he had a cheery blaze going, and a few minutes later the fabric had burned away enough that the smoke no longer irritated his lungs.
The fire served as a beacon that would allow him to explore.
His inner pessimist reared up, reminding him that the light also told anything else in the cave that cared to look exactly where he was.
He considered that for a moment. He needed the light, and the fire made him feel better, along with providing him with a reference point.
The fire also posed a danger, but he would just have to cope with that and make the best of whatever happened next.
He stopped. Was that all that bravery is? Coping? Something to think about.
He bent down to pile on more wood. The firelight made it easier to see, and he looked more closely at the poles and he had broken apart, picking two pieces up and holding them as though they fitted together.
It took him a moment to work out that these were not poles …
but rather something more like spindly legs, of the sort that might be on a spider …
if the spider were half-again his height.
A substantial amount of his newfound equanimity bled away into fear. He dropped the pieces on the fire, where they burned cheerily.
The light from the fire flared up as the spider’s leg burned, throwing light on the Probe that still stood at the top of the ramp that led up to the Gate.
It remained where he left it. He hadn’t directed it to do anything, so it hadn’t.
Time to complete the first task, and get a sense of his surroundings..
He took out the control rod, and directed the Probe to step down the ramp to his side.
He looked around, trying to decide where to begin his explorations.
Perhaps to see if he could find a way out.