Chapter 10 #2
“Is this a bastion?” fel Arron asked, frowning at the mark chiseled over the entrance.
“No. We’re now descending into the levels of the blue-inked map.” I lifted a lip at the darkness beyond, but the scent of humans was so strong it couldn’t be ignored. “Stand back.”
I leaned in, fingers curled to swipe at whatever might come rushing out.
But the spiral staircase beyond, an architectural twin to the first bastion, was empty. No sound, no light. Only the stench of frightened people.
“Stay close. We descend.”
Her golem, despite being a creation of metal and animated blood, was wise enough to take the rear, enveloping the women between us. I heard their soft breathing as we descended, but my senses were focused elsewhere, reaching out and hearing a distant mumble of voices.
The scent was strong, in the sweat and hand oils left on the walls, lingering in this still air.
They had been terrified. It was not the fear of a man in his right mind; it was the pure, unthinking terror of hunted prey, and for several tense moments I considered sending both fel Arron and Marrion back to the surface.
And yet, I felt they would be more secure at my side. Better they have a fiend to protect them, than to send them back unguarded even for a moment.
The staircase finally ended, and we moved cautiously into a wide chamber.
There were several dark holes in the chamber’s walls, tunnels leading elsewhere, and a massive, entirely incongruous vault door, but here before us was true progress in our mission: a campsite, the fire long gone cold, bedrolls still laid out.
Several swords gleamed where they lay discarded.
A deck of cards had scattered everywhere.
Several bottles of wine had been smashed against the wall, glass sparkling in the golem’s light.
And the scent was so rich, especially around the vault door before us.
“They camped here because of the vault,” I said, speaking to myself. “It was their last line of defense, should something go wrong. Idiots.”
The golem strode into the campsite, hands fisted so they looked like spiny morningstars. Fel Arron and Marrion followed, poking through the remnants of Alvar’s workers’ camp.
I studied the vault door as they rifled through personal belongings. Large and rectangular, a slab of solid bronze covered with a pale green patina, with a large lever set to the side.
Like many other liminal things in the Below, it had clearly been stolen from elsewhere and dropped into the earth at the random whims of the Fae. The chiseled carvings around the door were purely fanciful, and a long-ago vampire had scrawled a symbol over the door with paint.
The symbol itself meant ‘danger’, not so much a word as a universal sign to anyone passing that entering was a death sentence.
But Alvar was not a vampire, raised with our collective knowledge.
He may have looked at that symbol and thought nothing of it, or perhaps even believed it a bastion.
Which would be quite the illogical leap, considering that the opening mechanism was sitting here in the open before me, and yet they had clearly gone inside; their scents did not lie.
“They left money.” Fel Arron squatted by a bedroll, holding a velvet coin purse. She spilled several silver coins onto her palm and frowned. “They left money, weapons, food…it’s not even spoiled yet. This was recent.”
“And they ran in a hurry, if they left their ill-gotten gains behind.” I eyed the door again, and the heavy bronze lever. Gripping it, I tried to thrust it back up, but the mechanism merely groaned at me, refusing to budge.
Perhaps they were all dead. I stepped closer to the door, pressing my ear flat to it. Nothing. With all my strength, I battered the vault door with three booming knocks.
Screams erupted from within, thin, hysterical, and muffled by the door, but unmistakably alive and human.
Glancing back, I found both fel Arron and Marrion staring at me with wide eyes.
“Even I cannot lift that door, not without blood,” I said grimly, wondering if the golem could manage it, but fel Arron raised a tentative hand as she stepped forward to examine the lever.
She dropped her pack, yanking out hammers and wrenches, and began poking at the mechanism’s base. “Light, please.”
The golem clomped over to her, bending over and shining his light within. Fel Arron practically lay on her stomach, poking at the interior with a turnscrew. “This is positively caked with debris. I can hardly believe they got it open in the first place.”
Glancing at the symbol, I crouched beside her. “There is a good chance my people sabotaged it themselves to prevent entry…or to ensure whoever used it next would remain within.”
“I can see that,” she said, her voice distracted. “This is a mess. A little to the right, Talos, thank you. Ugh. I don’t want to know what that is…where are my gloves?”
She scrambled back up, digging through her pack for a pair of worn leather gloves, and pulled them on before jamming her hand into the mechanism.
When she removed it, there was something thick, dark, and sticky clinging to her fingers. She examined it, closing her eyes as she sniffed at it.
An image of her licking the chthonium lungs lurched into my brain against my will.
“I swear, if you try to taste it I will have you bound and shipped back to the surface,” I warned her, but she merely opened her eyes with a faint smile.
“Oh, I don’t have to go that far this time,” she assured me, which was not actually all that reassuring.
“This was simply a poorly-mixed batch of alkahest to strip the corrosion, which is fortunate for them, as pure alkahest would have dissolved the mechanism and left them trapped in there forever. Whoever made it must have been in a hurry. Now it’s all just…
gunk, clotting up whatever’s left. Here, help me remove this cover. ”
She handed me a hammer with her non-sticky glove, and stared at me expectantly.
“I…you realize it will be destroyed?” I asked, hesitating to grant her wish.
“Indeed!” She sounded cheerful at the prospect of destruction. “I need better access to the machinery. Take it all off, if you please.”
With a will, I set out to please her. When sheer brute strength failed, I used the hammer, ripping aside corroded metal and exposing the gears beneath the device.
Fel Arron peered closer, scraping away at the gunk fouling the mechanisms. “What in the Light’s name was this for, anyway? It doesn’t make sense. If one wanted a vault to be protected, they wouldn’t simply leave the mechanisms for its operation out in the open.”
She picked up a wrench, torquing something in such a way that her entire body strained.
“Allow me,” I said, reaching over her, and she gave in with a sigh. “And we don’t know. It's clearly not Fae-made, but as you can see from everything else down here, it was likely stolen from somewhere in the world.”
I heaved on the wrench, gratified when the gears began to rotate, squealing the whole time.
Fel Arron loosened a bolt somewhere, brows scrunched together. “So this was all stolen? Hold that in place. I need to realign this gear.”
“Some think…” I grunted, bringing the wrench around for another turn.
It shivered in my hands, and I wondered if it would give way before the mechanism did.
It wanted to slip away, or bend under the pressure.
“That some of these places were once elsewhere. How else can we explain the strange melding of natural caverns and—gods, fuck, that was close—what appear to be random elements of human architecture? The presence of the Fae themselves, and whatever they were doing, twisted the environment completely.”
“Like the liminal hall and that weird cathedral,” she said, unscrewing a brass plate from a gear and completely ignoring the fact that my grip had nearly slipped.
The way her fingers were jammed into the device, a mistake on my part would’ve ripped them all off at once.
Jesamin levered her entire body, straining against a slipped gear.
There was a sharp crunch, and I felt my grip on the wrench stabilize.
She screwed the plate back on, tightened the bolts again, and poured something from a vial onto one of the powdery green gears, wiping the corrosion and gunk away. “There we go. Give it a turn.”
The gears shrieked, but they spun more smoothly with every torque.
It required every iota of strength in my body, but the vault door began to rise.
Water spilled out, soaking the stone around my feet.
Once the door rose halfway it refused to budge another inch, and I braced myself against the lever, arms and legs trembling to hold it all in place.
“Call them!” I snarled, and fel Arron scrambled to the door.
“Come out!” she called. “We’re human! We’re here to help!”
There was a faint shifting sound, the slap of bare feet through wet puddles. “What’s your name?” a man’s voice called out. He was weak, and frightened, but defiant.
“I’m Jesamin fel Arron,” she said, projecting calm and confidence with every breath. “We’re here to rescue you, but you must hurry! The door won’t hold for long.”
A single fraught heartbeat passed, and then the living came scrambling out from under the vault door. Five filthy, dirt-streaked, water-soaked men in miner’s rough clothing, followed by a young man.
I caught Marrion’s eye, and she nodded.
But the wrench slipped and gave, and before I could shout, fel Arron gripped the young man and practically ripped him out of the way before the door came down with a shuddering boom. Dirty water splashed everywhere, leaving dark marks on the ceiling.
“I hope you didn’t leave anything important behind,” she said, panting and laughing with an edge of hysterical relief as she wiped droplets from her face.
She looked down at the young man, sprawled before her. He looked up at her, and I saw the expressions of recognition, even affection, cross their faces at the same time.