by William Ray
Gus couldn’t see any sort of row and had no idea how Salka knew which way the mountain was, but he just nodded and said, “Well, lead on then—towards the mountain. That’s our best chance of finding them, saving Phand, and maybe recovering some of Miss Aliyah Gale’s stolen whatevers.”
Salka did not seem entirely satisfied with that, and after his harrumph, they journeyed in relative quiet for a time. The light from the broken lantern was too dim to show much—walls would emerge from the gloom then turn away, but Salka led them ever onwards as if guided by some internal compass. Gus had always imagined goblins living crammed together in muddy little holes, but now he began to wonder if their homes were far more extensive than he ever would have guessed.
With little to see, Gus listened intently but heard only the sounds of their own footsteps echoing on the white stones of the floor until Salka paused just ahead of him and, in a tone of surprise, said, “Huh. Watch out for the stumps.”
“Stumps? We’re underground. How can there be stumps?” That’s when his foot hit one.
Yelping in surprise more than pain, Gus had to stop walking, and Salka looked back at him in annoyance as Gus took a moment to look down at his nemesis underfoot. It was no natural tree stump and instead was a roughly broken projection of wood emerging from a perfectly square hole in the floor.
Holding the dim lantern higher, he could see another such projection not far off. “They’re every few yards,” noted his companion, “Laid out in squares. I think they were like buildings once, although the lumber’s all gone now.”
Gus nodded and said, “Maybe so. You’re pretty good at this; ever considered giving up the glamorous life of a big city club owner to become a private inquiry agent? It pays less, but I’m sure I could find work for you doing all sorts of grubby odd jobs.”
“No, I couldn’t say that it’s occurred to me. If my career in archaeology doesn’t work out once the club winds down, I’ll keep your offer in mind.”
Gus chuckled, but his reply was interrupted as Salka gasped and commented, “Look at that!”
“You’ll have to take me closer, I’m afraid.”
Impatiently, the goblin grabbed his hand and tugged him off to the side along a cleared path between the rows of stumps that must have once formed a narrow avenue between the underground wooden structures.
A pillar emerged from the gloom, and as the light neared it, he saw it was a statue. The enormous man atop it stood eight feet tall and was nearly five feet across. His broad nose and close-set eyes were difficult to see clearly in the gloom, but Gus could make out the bushy beard and saw a pickaxe carried across the statue’s broad shoulders.
“Do you suppose that’s what they looked like?” Salka hissed in reverent awe as they stared up at him.
“He’s got the bogey beard and everything, so I suppose so. I had no idea they were so large.”
“Don’t be foolish. How often do your people make statues the same size as the man? Besides, most of the doors we’ve passed down here are much smaller.” The goblin paused and then added, “Although I suppose you haven’t been able to see them. If I had to guess, I’d say the Duer were closer to my size than yours.”
“Huh. Well, he’s no elf lord, so unless you’ve changed your mind on being eaten, we should keep looking.” Salka frowned at him, seeming to welcome neither the reminder of what they had just encountered nor what Gus had obliged them to search for. Grinning back at him, Gus said, “Maybe if you find some of her missing keepsakes, Miss Aliyah Gale will give you a tour of her lair down here.”
The goblin shuddered at the suggestion and led Gus back across the wide gallery of square stumps, angling along some route that only Salka could see. Gus felt impatient at the goblin’s short stride but could hardly find his way alone, so he tried to content himself with the limited scenery visible within his tiny circle of light. They hiked for what felt like hours, but the blackness beyond his lantern gave no indication of the time above, and Gus regretted having never replaced his lost watch.
They passed into a narrower corridor and then out again into what, judging by the echoes, seemed like another open area. He could just dimly make out Salka at the edge of his light, and without the corridor walls to stare at, Gus turned his contemplation to the white tile floor that seemed to roll into being from the shadows beneath the goblin’s heels. It was a dreary, monochromatic contemplation, and he was weighing the practical and entertainment value of counting the goblin’s footsteps when a surprising spark of color caught his eye.
“Wait!” he cried out, staring down at a small reddish footprint that marred the white stone tile between them. “That’s not yours, is it? No, definitely not. That’s a man’s boot.”
Wondering if they might just be travelling in circles, Gus lifted up his own shoe to make certain there was no mud on it, but he hadn’t encountered any red mud like that since coming to Khanom. The floors had been notably pristine everywhere else though, which made Gus confident this print had not lain here for centuries.
He raised his dim lantern, scanning the floor nearby for more prints as he turned in a slow circle, then saw another just a bit further off to the left. Whomever it was, they had crossed his path, although Gus could not see far enough to determine where he had come from or where he was going.
“There’s another. Do you see it? It’s not us, and it’s definitely not Miss Aliyah Gale in those shoes. We need to follow him.” Salka nodded, then turned to follow the prints, but Gus caught his shoulder and said, “No, the mud’s coming off his left boot as he walks, so that trail will end wherever it stops rubbing off the bottom of his shoe—probably just in the middle of another hallway. If we go the other way, we can follow him all the way back to the mud and see where he came from!”
Salka looked skeptical but turned back, tracking the heel towards another print just a little further off. After a few more steps, he murmured, “You may be on to something.”
The bootprints became more frequent, and soon a second boot joined the first, leaving a clear trail backwards through a narrow corridor. They ducked under a short doorway and into a series of small rooms, the last of which Gus knew they had reached when the goblin turned the corner and murmured in surprise, “Well, look at that.”
Holding forth his lantern, Gus stepped forward and saw a wall had been broken inwards, and fragments of white stone were scattered on the floor around it. Beyond that crude aperture lay a rough-hewn tunnel supported by wooden beams. “Well, mister archaeologist, this doesn’t look much like the work of the Duer.”
Salka grinned at him, and Gus could see a glint of intrepid curiosity in the goblin’s eyes as he replied, “I must concur, Mister Baston. It is decidedly suspicious. Shall we?”
Gus smiled and gestured for the goblin to proceed. For the moment, the excitement of discovery overwhelming the discomforts of more sensible fears. Salka stepped over the broken wall and into the tunnel, and Gus followed close behind.
The tunnel was small enough that Gus had to hunch down his head to walk inside, and it slanted steadily upwards. Unlike the very dry Duer kingdom it invaded, moisture seeped into the rough-hewn tunnel, and after only a few steps inside, their feet squished in damp red earth.
Salka paused again, making a strange gesture with his hand at the blackness ahead, and then excitedly whispered back, “It’s curtains!”
“What do you mean ‘it’s curtains’? Does the tunnel stop?”
“No, no, it is quite literally curtains. Come see.”
Gus crept upwards, pushing in beside the goblin, and with his light drawn closer, he could see that what had seemed merely more shadows were, on close inspection, heavy black curtains hung across the support beams. He pushed them slowly aside, and his lantern illuminated a small space with another set of heavy curtains beyond.
Across the top of the second set of curtains, Gus could see a slim sliver of light, and he heard the sounds of someone hammering at something in
the space beyond. Turning back to Salka he whispered, “We may have found them. Better stay behind me.”
“You’ve brought a pistol, I trust?” Salka asked as he moved back down the tunnel to place himself behind Gus.
Gus offered a reassuring grin and replied, “I don’t think we’ll need it.”
The goblin looked no more reassured by that than Gus felt about it, but before Salka could question him further, Gus pushed through the curtains and into the lit space beyond.
The tunnel widened into a larger chamber as they moved forward but was still roughly hewn by comparison to the Duer halls behind them. The ceilings arched upward from the curtains in a way that suggested this was once a natural cavern that the tunnelers had connected to the ancient labyrinth. The natural walls had been widened in places and shored up with wooden beams as needed.
A great hearth burned on one side of the chamber, tended by a large man in a leather apron who kept it burning with the large cord of wood stacked nearby; there was a chimney leading most of the smoke away, but it still made the chamber feel hot and grimy. Judging by the different layers of soot on the wooden columns, this hearth had been in operation on and off for years, if not decades. A tunnel on the other side of the chamber sloped upwards and, Gus presumed, outwards.
Another man worked at an anvil nearby, chuckling to himself with simple-minded amusement as he gleefully pounded away with his hammer. Those things Gus noticed first because they were bright and noisy, but then his attention caught on something else entirely.
Across the room was a stacked pile of shimmering gold.
Gus stared at it in shock, having never seen anywhere near so much in one place. Small crates appeared to be stacked with coins, and piled about those were crowns, scepters, some sort of picture frame, and various figurines depicting men, women, or dragons.
He quickly realized these must be Miss Aliyah Gale’s stolen treasures. If someone had been stealing in amounts like this for decades, then the wealth stolen from Miss Aliyah Gale’s ‘collection’ would be enough to make anyone fantastically rich.
Lost in speculation, Gus’s reverie was cut short when Salka hissed, “That’s Saucier!”
Turning back, Gus saw the goblin pointed to the grinning idiot at the anvil. Taking a more careful look, Gus saw the man wore his dinner clothes, but they were filthy and ragged, having already fallen to tatters in the weeks since his disappearance. Watching the operation more closely, Gus saw the man at the fire push a gold figurine into the furnace, and a few moments later, he pulled the sagging soft metal from the fire and placed it upon the anvil.
Saucier, renowned patron of the arts, giggled to himself and then hammered the statuette into a shapeless lump of metal, which he then tossed into a barrel behind him. It was the same sort of manic devotion to a mindless task he had seen in Aelfua once before; it was only missing the music.
Gus stepped further into the chamber, but when neither of the two men acknowledged his presence, he said, “Richard Saucier? Sir?”
Saucier looked up at him, smiling broadly as if he had just bumped into an old friend while on holiday. The man working the fire seemed less amused and busied himself with working the bellows and checking the flume. The fire tender began to chant a series of foreign syllables, and after the first few, Saucier smiled and joined in.
Salka watched, dumbfounded, but Gus recognized the sound right away. It was the same prayer Emily had been struggling with as she recovered. Grabbing Salka’s arm, Gus pulled the goblin towards the tunnel across the chamber and said, “Don’t listen! Do not listen to it! Hum something else to keep it out of your head!”
He hurried them further up the tunnel until he could no longer hear the chanting below. His bad leg ached from the exertion, and he paused to rest and stretch it out. Bewildered and clearly exhausted, Salka asked, “What happened to him? What were they saying? It sounded ….”
At Salka’s question, Gus could feel the memory of the chant tickling at his mind, and upon catching himself trying to sound out that first syllable, he shook his head and whistled the first few bars of the fiddler’s tune to his dumbfounded companion. The gob was clearly frustrated at that baffling response but followed Gus as he continued along the upward-sloping stone corridor.
Crude stone stairs were supplemented in places by wooden ones as the caves and connecting tunnels extended onward and further upward. Eventually they reached an open room that had been cut into the earth, the exit to which gave them their first glimpse of sunlight.
Between them and the outside world, the room held a row of chairs, in which sat a half-dozen men dressed as miners, holding picks and shovels across their laps as they waited out their day. The miners bore dazed, dreamy-eyed expressions on their faces, and Gus doubted they would be any more helpful with his questions than Saucier, but he instantly recognized their uniforms.
They all wore matching coveralls, each embroidered with the logo of the Khanom Mineral Company.
Gus led Salka past them and to the tunnel entrance that lay just beyond. Across a small valley to the north, he could see the city of Khanom atop its plateau. A large building stood near the entrance to the ‘mine’, which he assumed was the dormitory for the gold miners so envied by those working the copper seam. The other miners had said the gold mine was dangerous, but thinking back to the men sitting idle, those dangers now seemed far less accidental.
A two-rail funicular sat idle on the slope, leading down to a small utilitarian building that probably served as storage. A very large house sat adjacent to that building, and pointing it out to Salka, he said, “That’s Maurice Sylvester’s place, isn’t it?”
The goblin shaded his eyes and peered down at it uncertainly, and Gus suddenly recalled his friend was not only many hours beyond his usual diurnal slumber, he probably couldn’t see much in the bright light of early afternoon.
Gus gave Salka a friendly pat on the shoulder and then said, “Thanks for all your help. I think we’ve found our kidnapper and our thief. I’m betting Doctor Phand will be there too. This is probably the dangerous part, so you should head back the way we came. If you see Miss Aliyah Gayle on the way, remind her she owes us that reward.”
“What about you?”
With a sigh, Gus looked down at the imposing edifice below and said, “I have to try to rescue Doctor Phand before that elf decides his time has run out.”
~
“Investment News”
For some time, the complaint has been made that, in managing portions of the civic fund, the city does not select Khanom Mineral Company Annuities in preference to the other stocks and thus affect a saving of public money due to the lower price of the security. It has been answered that the Khanom Mineral Company Annuities are so limited in amount, that they would rise to the level of the other stocks directly once an operation of any magnitude was commenced; therefore, it is incorrect to suppose the whole difference in price would be saved. To-day, however, Khanom’s broker has, for the first time, employed civic funds in the purchase of Khanom Mineral Company Annuities.
– Khanom Daily Converser, 17 Tal. 389
~
- CHAPTER 32 -
The funicular was driven by weight, so to descend the mountain, all Gus had to do to was step aboard and release the brake. Looking down at the houses on this side of the valley, Gus could see Mister Beck’s house was not that far away from Sylvester’s, and he shook his head ruefully at how close he had come yesterday, totally unaware that Doctor Phand’s kidnapper was just a few doors down.
Though far from the main attractions, electrical lines for the tram system were already strung through most of the area. The trams would not be running until they could receive a dramatic unveiling for the Exposition. Once in service, Khanom’s trams would provide easy mass transit options for the handful of wealthy residents living here in opulence, although Gus supposed such large houses also had staff who might be permitted to ride them in to work.
Exiting the funicular, Gus stepped through the construction detritus surrounding the final tram stop, which would be conveniently located right at Sylvester’s doorstep. Having spent the entire day hiking through the Duer underworld, Gus’s legs were aching, so he paused to rest at the future tram terminus. Leaning against one of the new electrical junctions, he massaged his left calf and studied Sylvester’s abode.
It was a large blue and gray edifice with three floors, towering gables, and a scale siding that gave it a decidedly piscine aspect. Two wires were strung from the junction he leaned against, draped inelegantly across the yard before being joined to the house. The second wire seemed like an oddity, and Gus wondered if that meant Sylvester owned a personal telegraph.
Approaching the house, Gus hesitated at the door, not sure if he should knock or just step inside. After their failure to murder him at the warehouse, he had no idea what to expect of the Wardens inside—the kidnapping had been so carefully orchestrated, but everything else had been strangely clumsy.
His best guess now was that he faced a sharp criminal mind working with duller tools, but he also knew a hammer could kill a man as dead as a knife if it were swung hard enough. This was the part where he could really use a plan, but looking around the grounds, nothing sprang to mind.
If Doctor Phand was to get out alive, however, someone had to go in after him. After a deep breath to steady his nerves, Gus gripped the handle and opened the door.
Beyond the threshold, the foyer opened into a main hall where thick eastern rugs covered the dark wood of the floors. Despite the wire from the tram, Sylvester’s house appeared to still be lit mostly with softly hissing gas lamps rather than electricity. Side tables lined the walls, topped with vases, statuettes, and other odds and ends, and were spaced apart only by large works of art similar to the depictions of Elven cities in the Exposition offices.
