by Ron Miller
“Each balloon,” he continued, “contains 720,900 cubic feet of hydrogen, for a total for all fourteen balloons of 10,206,000 cubic feet. Since a thousand cubic feet of hydrogen, which as you well know is sixteen times lighter than common air, can lift about seventy pounds, you can see that the total lift of the combined balloons is over seven hundred thousand pounds or three hundred and fifty tons, more than sufficient to carry aloft not only the passengers, but all of their supplies in addition to the platform itself.”
The whole affair was constructed of the lightest possible materials: bamboo, pine, paper and molded cellulose. There was little provision for human comfort, beyond the necessity for simple shelter. Tudela did not expect to have to maintain his aerial village aloft for more than a few days, a week at the most, though he provisioned it for a month. This was, of course, in addition to the year’s supply of preserved foodstuffs that was stored in the large warehouse in the center of the platform. The whole affair was being constructed as a separate project in a small subcaldera between the main encampment and the volcano, where it would be protected from winds until the time of its launch.
“It looks like you’ve allowed for a great many more people than I’ve seen here at your camp,” observed Wittenoom.
“True,” agreed Tudela. “Several ships will soon be arriving from the mainland, carrying scientists and technicians and their families, all of whom are sympathetic to my cause. Did you think that I planned to create a new civilization solely with the untutored, brute workmen out there in the crater?
“We will begin the ascension,” he continued, “as soon as I am assured that the moon will fall where I have directed it shall fall. The balloons will carry us as high as practically possible, perhaps twelve thousand feet or so. If the passengers undertake no undue physical effort, they should not undergo any harm remaining at that altitude for a few days. Taking along a quantity of oxygen and its necessary supply system would have meant either constructing a larger balloon or leaving behind much more important things. The people can do with a little less oxygen for a while.
“Once the moon has crashed to the earth and formed the new continent, I will allow the balloon to descend and it will form the provisional capital of my empire.”
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” sneered Bronwyn. Tudela angrily gathered up his plans and turned to her, his face black with restrained fury, the rolls of brittle, translucent paper crushed to his narrow, starchy bosom.
“You are an ignorant little animal and the sooner the earth is rid of your kind, the better off it will be!”
I think, concluded the princess sourly, that I have just forfeited my ride on his balloon.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
WAR & MAGIC
Rykkla and Basseliniden were landed just south of the entrance to Sommer Bay, where the shore met the sea in the form of a vertical, chalky cliff more than four hundred feet high. A long, sloping beach of white shingle allowed them to easily pull the longboat out of the reach of the waves. Since there might not be any easy way up the cliffs, they might need the boat to row around Porkkalla Point and into the bay itself before they could make a practicable landing.
Rykkla turned to look back out over the water, shading her eyes against the glare of the early sun, and saw that the Amber Princess had already set sail and was rapidly diminishing in size. Well, she thought, a little sourly, they certainly didn’t waste any time.
“Rykkla!” came a shout from the captain. “Take a look over here!”
She joined her companion where he had wandered a hundred yards away, to the rubble and boulder strewn base of the cliff. “Look at that,” he said, pointing to a shadow that looked inkily black against the white chalk.
“It’s a cave,” she shrugged. “So what?” But she had spoken before thinking and Basseliniden, knowing this, kept his silence, allowing her brain to catch up with her mouth.
She was confounded: how could she so easily have forgotten her connection to caves, or, more specifically, subterranean worlds? Perhaps, she offered herself as an excuse, because I had grown to accept Thud so completely as a man that I had dismissed or supressed my knowledge of what he really was and where he had come from.
“It’d be pretty far-fetched,” she said, “to have any hope of this being a lead to the Kobolds. That’d be much too easy.”
“Of course it’s far-fetched,” he replied cheerily, “but then almost everything is far-fetched, some things just more so than others. The tide’s going out and it’s going to be hours before we can relaunch the boat. Neither can we scale these cliffs. Unless you’ve something else to do, why not pass the time exploring?”
“Why not, indeed?”
She returned to the longboat where she gathered together enough food to make a dinner for them both, including two bottles of wine, wrapped it all up in a spare shirt whose sleeves she tied in such a way as to convert the whole bundle into a makeshift rucksack.
Meanwhile, the captain had taken the two signal lanterns from the boat and fueled them from a gallon can of oil. Handing one of these to Rykkla they were ready for their exploration.
The cave entrance was relatively high up the cliff face, well above the line of high tide, and could only be reached with some difficulty; the chalk boulders that had fallen from the cliff above were frangible, slippery and treacherous.
The cave, once they reached it, was revealed to be a large circular opening perhaps forty or fifty feet across. Cool air blew from it in a constant, moist exhalation and a small stream gurgled over its lip only to be lost in the labyrinthine talus slope.
“In order to save the lanterns, we’ll go as far as we can before lighting them,” Basseliniden suggested.
The floor of the cave was only slightly concave and not difficult to traverse, as long as the bed of the stream was avoided, which was difficult since it would change capriciously from meadering rivulet to a broad sheet that made the chalk as slippery as wet ice. Fortunately, the rising sun poured light directly into the tunnel, which ran straight for several hundred feet before gradually, almost imperceptibly, turning downward. The cool wind continued to blow, carrying with it a mossy scent that was not at all unpleasant.
“How far do you think we ought to go?” Rykkla asked.
“A little further, at least. We haven’t even had to use the lanterns yet.”
“We’ve been going downhill for some time now. I’ve just noticed that we’ve lost the stream somewhere.”
“So we have, not that I miss it much.”
As the tunnel descended it also began to twist in broad curves to the left and right; they were soon in an impenetrable darkness and Basseliniden stopped to ignite the two lanterns. Their lenses threw out a yellow gleam that was quickly devoured by the dark, like a stream of warm butter lapped up by a black panther.
They descended another few hundred feet and the tunnel became perceptibly steeper and narrower; Rykkla could almost touch both walls with her outstretched hands. The steepness of the path was becoming a problem; there was little foothold on the water-polished stone. Rykkla knelt and felt the glossy surface. It was no longer chalk, but instead a hard, lustrous mineral that must have been laid down layer by infinitesimal layer, like a patient artist who built up his colors in transparent glazes. It shimmered polychromatically beneath her lantern light like mother-of-pearl or moiré silk. She rose, wordlessly and without looking to see if Basseliniden followed, continued her descent.
The path grew ever steeper and Basseliniden finally voiced his concern and suggested that they give up the effort and return to the beach. Rykkla ignored him and found that after a further few dozen yards she had to half sit and brace herself with her hands against the walls or floor in order to keep from plunging headlong into the abyss.
“Rykkla!” called the captain, in a curiously hushed voice, as though he were afraid of disturbing someone. “Come on, let’s call it quits. This isn’t getting us anywhere. It was a long shot and a pretty far-fetch
ed one at that. There’s no point in getting ourselves lost or hurt. There’s nothing here.”
“Just a little farther. I want to see how steep this gets, then I’ll come on back. Promise.”
“I’m afraid that you’re getting so far down that slope that you won’t be able to get back up. How’re you going to turn around? We should have brought a rope.”
Rykkla’s answer was not at all what he hoped, but was half what he expected: a sudden scream that was quickly engulfed by its own echoes.
“Rykkla!” he cried, but when the echoes of his own shouts finally died down, there was no sound at all.
Rykkla opened her eyes slowly only to discover that it was darker with them open. She lay still, a little afraid to move for fear that pieces might fall off and that they might be important ones. The fall had taken her entirely by surprise; she would no doubt have broken every bone in her body, all two hundred and six including the sessamoids, or at the very least her neck, had not her acrobatic training taken automatic control and prevented the worst from happening. She discovered, as she carefully unwound her tangled body, that she suffered only painful sprains and bruises, but nothing seemed broken or dislocated. She waited for several long minutes, letting her wits piece themselves together and not finding anything immediately important missing. She listened for a good half hour to a distant drip of water that was like the ticking of a liquid and mournful clock. The surface she was sitting upon was cold and slightly damp; it was sandy and she was in the deep depression made by her impact. A depression, she thought morosely, that is the result of more than just landing on my butt. The air smelled damp, earthy and slightly mildewy. The darkness was a palpable substance, like a sheet of wet velvet dropped over her head, clinging to her contours like an opaque enamel. It was as physical a presence as the ground beneath her, the small sharp stone at her back or the aches in her body. She had to consciously suppress the urge to tear the nonexistant opacity from her face.
As her wits became more particularized, she began to wonder what subterranean creatures might be regarding her with atrophied eyes, perhaps not inches from her body. She had always been burdened by a not entirely irrational fear of the kind of unearthly, white creeping things that have the perverse preference for living in lightless, damp places. She loathed the very idea of turning over rocks or logs and seeing the pale, soft creatures that writhed and scuttled in blind, mindless panic at the sudden light. She decided that she’d prefer being erect, rather than sitting on the ground, where she’d be further above the level of albino worms, salamanders and spiders. She put out a hand and suddenly recoiled in disgust and horror as her fingers fell on something unspeakably clammy and slimy, that turned beneath her touch. She scuttled back on her haunches with a sharp cry of repulsion, before a faint scent recalled the lunch she had brought with her and the cold chicken leg that it included.
She rose unsteadily to her feet to find herself in a darkness that was not as complete as she had first thought. There was instead a faint glow in one direction that was just barely distinguishable from the sparkles and drifting colors produced by otherwise bored retinae. She had to move her head slowly from side to side before she was convinced that the glow had a reality outside of her own head. She turned to look up in the direction in which she believed she had come, but saw there only an even deeper blackness. She reached out gingerly with her arms and discovered the steep slope down which she had tumbled. It was almost vertical and slick as greased glass; she abandoned any hope of reascending it. She listened, but could hear nothing significant beyond the beating of her own heart and the distant trickling of water. like most people suddenly deprived of their sight, Rykkla was terrified of moving for fear of walking into something: a rock wall or a bottomless pit. She advanced with mincing, shuffling, inch-long steps, her hands held at arm’s length before her. As she moved, she discovered that the floor of the cave seemed to be sandy and dry; the almost subliminal glow became almost imperceptibly brighter, but brighter it was indeed: a hazy blue-green that was scarcely lighter than the gloom surrounding it. For all of its near-nonexistence, it drew her like a sunflower.
She bumped against the smoothly curving wall of the tunnel, and discovered that the latter was swinging in a broad, gentle arc to her right. Keeping her left hand lightly touching the stone, she moved with a little more assuredness, a confidence encouraged by the rapidly brightening glow.
Rykkla was just beginning to be able to distinguish patchy features in the cavern around her when she suddenly stopped, hunching behind a blocky boulder that had fallen from its place in the ceiling. She found herself breathing as hard as she had when she had first fallen into the pit, and she struggled to bring both it and her fluttering heart under control.
There had been sounds from ahead; regular sounds like that of machinery and low murmuring sounds that couldn’t have been anything else but voices. Musrum! was this silly venture on the right track after all? Have I really stumbled onto the Kobolds . . . or, or the Weedking himself?
She had never fancied herself as being particularly superstitious; she had always believed herself to be a skeptical pragmatist, but nevertheless felt the hairs on her nape bristling with the atavistic wariness of the unknown.
There seemed to have been some ancient cataclysm that had shaken huge stones from the roof of the cave, and these formed a line of hiding places of which her boulder was the first. Scuttling from one to the next, she approached the light and sound as stealthily as a gypsy stealing up on a pie-laden windowsill. As the light grew brighter around her and the sounds grew ever louder, if no less comprehensible, she had to forcibly prevent herself from succumbing to what was becoming an almost intolerably intense curiosity. Nevertheless, she finally reached an enormous boulder that seemed to her to be the only thing opaque and substantial remaining between her and the mystery. Taking two or three deep breaths to calm her pattering heart, which was thumping audibly like a tiny, trotting horse exercising in her chest, she cautiously protruded her head, inch by inch, beyond the sheltering rock.
Her first thought upon seeing the round, smooth, almost featureless rock that presented itself to her, not more than a yard from her face, was How strange! A rock formation that looks just like a bust of Thud! It was about the size of a large cantaloupe, balanced atop a much larger, nearly spherical boulder. It had a thin crack where the mouth ought to be, a bump for the nose and a pair of tiny inset obsidian beads that blinked at her in mutual wonderment.
“Thud?” she whispered, experimentally, automatically, as hopelessly as she was hopeful.
“Hi, Rykkla!” the cracked rock said.
“Thud?” she repeated, this time just as automatically, but as an expression of disbelief.
“I sure am glad to see you, Rykkla. I’ve been talking and arguing until I’m just sick of it, but no one will believe that I want to get back up to the top. Besides, there’s the war, you know.”
“War? What war? Thud? Is it really you?”
“Huh? Sure it is. How’s the weather been?”
“Oh, Thud!” she cried softly, throwing herself onto his broad, convex chest. “Damn the weather!” His powerful arms, as thick and corded as oak boughs, enfolded her gently, firmly, completely. “Oh, Thud, I thought you were dead! How did you get here? What happened to you?”
“I fell into a hole.”
“No, you were beaten and thrown into it. I was sure that they had killed you.”
“Nope.”
“I searched and searched, but there was no sign of you at all. What happened?”
“The Kobolds found me.”
“The Kobolds?”
“Yeah. They’re always interested in any big new holes in the ground. They sure were real surprised to find me there.”
“I can imagine. You’re all right, then?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve missed you so much. You have no idea of what I’ve been through since I lost you. It seems like forever.”
“Has it
been very long?”
“It’s been months, Thud.”
“Really? It seems like yesterday. Or maybe the day before yesterday.”
“You look well.”
“Thank you. You look pretty good, too.”
“How do we get out of here?”
“Out?”
“Uh huh. You’re well. I’m pretty good. Let’s get out of here.”
“I don’t know,” Thud responded hesitantly. “I’ll have to ask.”
“Ask? You need permission to leave?”
“Nope. I just don’t know how to get out.”
“Then let’s ask.”
“What or who?”
“What?”
“You said, ‘let’s ask.’ I wondered whether you wanted to ask somebody, or if you wanted to ask something.”
“Both. I want to ask somebody something.”
“Who do you want to ask what? I mean, what do you want to ask whom?”
“I want to ask whoever needs to be asked how you and I can get out of this cave.”
“Sure.”
“And what’s all this about a war?”
“Oh yeah, that,” Thud replied, but rather than elaborate, he stood and began to walk away. His bull-like, bear-like, ox-like figure towering above Rykkla like a ship of the line pulling away from a dinghy. She had to doublestep to catch up, her long legs flashing like scissors.
The tunnel rapidly grew broader and higher, the blue luster shimmering over its walls aurora-like, in shifting, reticulated patterns as though the cave was beneath a tropical sea, like a little plaster grotto on the bottom of an aquarium. The floor was a soft and silvery sand that looked as liquidly slippery as mercury. Rykkla followed the big man silently for what seemed to be more than a mile before the tunnel opened into a cavity so large that at first she thought she was outdoors.
