Chapter 26
The lift cage rattled as it descended on chains, a magical engine in the building up top powering it, linked to simple glowing buttons for up, down, and stop.
It was possible Aunt Tibby had played a role in creating it, but something told Syla the lift had been built in a much earlier era.
With a worn wooden floor and metal bars for the ceiling and walls, it hadn’t changed an iota since she had visited more than fifteen years earlier.
It might not have changed in centuries. A dented and pockmarked iron cart resting inside with them also might have been original to the mine.
A few chunks of salt and fine powder coated the bottom of it.
Though large enough to fit eight or ten people, the lift cage felt claustrophobic, the ride down a lot less safe than it had seemed all those years ago with her parents and siblings and a couple of bodyguards cozily crowded in with her.
Venia had complained, she recalled, that their brother, Gylonar, had been deliberately sneezing on the girls and blaming it on the dust. Syla shook her head bleakly, missing them all.
“How deep does this go?” Fel’s knuckles were tight, both around the haft of his mace and the handle of one of the two lanterns they’d grabbed from the building.
Through their many adventures, her bodyguard had been fearless, but it was with wary eyes that he looked at the shaft as the sides changed from dark grayish-brown rock to off-white salt with pinkish striations.
He hadn’t seemed disturbed by the cave they’d found the teal ore in, but this felt tighter. More ominous.
“According to the map,” Syla said, “the deepest levels are hundreds of feet down, but I’ve only been in the topmost one, and that’s as far as we should need to go. We should be almost there.”
Fel’s hm wasn’t that heartened.
“If it helps, the levels of the mine themselves are spacious. Cavernous. Wreylith could have fit down there with us—if she’d had a way in.”
The shaft around the cage disappeared as they entered the first level, the space as vast as she’d promised.
Syla lifted a hand to the stop button but waited to press it.
As she’d recalled, it was thirty or forty feet, it not more, from the ceiling to the floor, and the first level stretched into the darkness in all directions.
Great pyramid-shaped pillars of salt had been left untouched, the mine carved out around them, to support the high ceiling.
Lanterns burned on some of the pillars, with a couple of carts full of salt lined up on tracks near the lift cage.
It almost appeared as if the place were engaged in its normal operations, but Syla spotted a body next to one of the carts, and her heart sank.
There was nothing normal about this situation.
The body belonged to a uniformed soldier, not a miner, and she hoped Oyenar had sent word ahead and cleared the place of workers. Military casualties were bad enough. Syla didn’t want to worry about simple laborers being turned into additional victims.
When the lift cage drew even with the floor, Syla reached for the stop button.
But a boom and a flash ahead and to the left startled her, and she almost didn’t halt them.
For an instant, the entire mine was lit from the brilliance of the explosive, revealing pyramid supports stretching back in wide rows for what seemed like miles, and she got a glimpse of shadows—people—hundreds of yards in the distance before the darkness returned.
Fel stepped in front of her. “It’s not safe to get out here.”
“I’ve got more explosives, and I’m not afraid to throw them!” Aunt Tibby yelled.
Syla hit the button. “We have to get out here.”
She tried to push Fel aside so she could open the gate, but he threw the latch himself and ran out first. A crossbow quarrel zipped away from the direction that Aunt Tibby’s voice had come. Then another boom followed the first. Tibby was aiming at something—someone—deeper in the mine.
Syla ran after Fel as he rounded one of the pyramid supports. Lanterns flickered on it and yellow light glinted off the metal of equipment-laden wagons and large wheeled machines, a few of which hummed with magic. It took Syla a moment to spot Tibby and two guards with crossbows.
There were no lanterns lit in the depths that they faced, but the flashes of light had revealed people in black, a few with white gargoyle-bone blades.
“There are stormers already down here,” one of the soldiers told Fel when he walked up, as if he were the senior person present that they needed to report to, not Syla.
“We saw the bodies,” Syla said.
“The stormers were waiting down here for us. How did they get here so quickly? I know there were reports of ships on the way, but—”
“These are the same people who attacked the palace and the docks—the weapons platform.”
Tibby frowned at Syla as she lowered a flat square-shaped package identical to the explosives she’d made weeks earlier to defend the shielder chamber under the castle. “Is he with them?”
“Vorik?” Syla asked. “The last I saw, he was back on the mainland, but I’m sure he’s coming.”
Tibby bared her teeth.
“He fished you out of the river,” Syla pointed out.
“He’s the one who put me in the river,” she said.
Since Syla couldn’t argue with that, she only spread her arms.
“If this must be discussed with enemies about, at least stand behind cover.” Surprisingly, Fel gripped Tibby’s arm first, guiding her into a nook between a machine and a pillar.
Syla joined them while the guards stood behind the wagons and pointed their weapons over them and into the darkness.
The stormers had to remain in the area, shrouded by the shadows, but they weren’t doing anything at the moment.
And they didn’t make a sound. Syla sensed someone with power but didn’t think it was Lesva.
“You shouldn’t have come down here,” Tibby told her.
“Neither should you, but we have missions.” Syla raised her marked hand, then glanced from the wagons and machinery to the lift cage. “How did the miners get all this big stuff down here?”
“The things I worked on were brought in pieces and assembled down here.” Tibby wiggled her fingers.
“We need to get more men down here,” one of the soldiers said, glancing at the cage lift for a different reason. “Have more troops arrived?”
“The wagons were going back to the city to get more when I came via dragon,” Syla said.
The soldier mouthed via dragon, apparently not parsing that as a normal mode of transportation.
“But… we shouldn’t bring more people down here.” Syla gave her aunt a significant look and waved at the machinery, silently asking if what she needed to drill with was in the machine-storage area with them.
“We have to, Your Majesty,” the man said as Tibby nodded back to Syla. “The stormers outnumber us and have magic.”
“I know, but we’ll have to try to avoid them.”
“They’re after the shielder, aren’t they? How are we going to avoid them?”
“They don’t know exactly where it is. Or they shouldn’t.
” Syla remembered that Lesva had Abrya, who might have divulged that information.
Abrya might even now be leading Lesva to the chamber with a sword pressed into the back of her neck.
“Have you seen Lady Abrya or Captain Lesva? The silver-haired woman?”
“I know which one that storm-cursed scion of the mad god is.” Tibby climbed into the cab of a giant wagon with machinery in the back. “No, I haven’t seen her, and I hope not to.”
Fel lifted his hand, as if to pull her back down where she wouldn’t be visible to someone in the distance. “Are you going somewhere?”
“The mission that Syla mentioned must be completed.” Tibby waved toward the machinery in the wagon, which included numerous sections of long, thick helical bits.
Were there enough to be assembled to reach the surface? The drill machine itself looked complicated with a glowing bulb and panel of switches and levers that presumably powered and controlled everything.
“You two, go with Lady Tibaytha.” Syla pointed at the soldiers. “Sergeant Fel and I will find Lesva and deal with her.”
“You can’t deal with her, Your Majesty,” one soldier blurted. “She took out half a squadron by herself in the palace. I was there. And there are archers down here that took out the rest of our team just minutes ago. There are only one or two riders with them, but they’re deadly too.”
“We’ll get some more men down here,” Fel said firmly, giving Syla a defiant look.
Aware of the possibility that the mines would later be flooded, Syla didn’t want to bring any more people down than necessary, especially since the lift cage was slow and couldn’t hold many occupants.
But… she had to be reasonable. She and Fel wouldn’t defeat Lesva and a horde of stormers without help.
“Get reinforcements, Syla. If we do this—” Tibby waved at the drill bits, “—it won’t happen quickly. And once we get through, anyone down here will see what’s happening and have time to get out.”
“All right.” Syla had envisioned the lake rushing in like a huge waterfall, but the drill wasn’t so wide that the hole would be huge, and the mine was vast. Even if Oyenar got a team down here to seal off the lower levels, she supposed it would take hours for this one to flood.
Her aunt must have done some math to figure it out.
Knowing that made Syla’s muscles loosen.
She’d been imagining Oyenar’s scenario, of armies of stormers being drowned, but Tibby’s vision had to be more accurate.
The goal was as Syla had wished, to deny access to the shielder chamber, not drown the enemy.
“All right,” she repeated. “Tibby, would any of these machines be useful to us as… er, weapons?”