by Emily
But it was surprisingly easy going once she got below the summit.
"Are you okay?" Flojian's voice drifted down.
She assured him she was and continued the descent. Every few steps they'd ask again and as she got farther away it became more distracting until finally she called up that she'd yell if she needed anything and please otherwise keep quiet.
Once she ran out of slack and had to signal. The rock was rougher than it had looked from above. Vegetation was sharp and prickly. At one point it snagged the ladder and she had to hang by one hand while she worked it free.
Streams of pebbles dribbled past. Vertical fissures appeared. From a dark hole, a pair of eyes watched her.
A sudden burst of wind hit her and she swung gently back and forth, clinging to the ladder. Below her, right where it was supposed to be, she saw the discolored rock. It looked exactly like a set of doors. "A little more," she called up. "I think we've got it."
There were actually four doors set in the face of the cliff. This was where Showron Voyager's bullet-shaped vehicle had delivered its passengers. So there had been a terminal here once. Several pieces of iron remained, supports outside, beams inside. And a bench. One of the doors was wedged open. She had some difficulty gaining purchase because the ladder was hanging a couple of feet out, as a result of the overhead bulge. But she swung herself close, grabbed a wiry bush, and tried to get inside.
The scariest part of the entire operation came when she tried to climb off the ladder and get through the doorway. There wasn't enough slack and they didn't seem to understand up there that if they kept the safety line tight she couldn't move. Moreover, she had to hang on to the bush to keep the ladder close until she was safely through the open door. When it was over she wasted no time releasing the safety line. She congratulated herself and called up that she was okay. The high-roofed corridor Knobby had described lay beyond. But it was too dark to see more than a few yards.
"Chaka.* Quait's voice. "We need to tie the ladder down."
"Right." The ladder was about three feet out. Just beyond easy reach.
She tried for it twice. The second time she lost her balance and almost fell. It was a desperate moment. And it was stupid because they didn't need to do it this way. "Quait."
"Yes. What's taking so long?"
"I can't reach it. I need someone to come down."
Flojian came next, with lamps dangling from his belt. When he reached the doorway, she caught his hand and pulled him in. And the ladder along with him. They tied it to a beam and lit the lamps while they waited for Claver.
Quait was last to descend, having looped his safety line around the tree and dropped it to them so that someone would be holding the other end.
When he'd joined them, they pushed through into the inner passageway. Beyond, in the gloomy light thrown by the lamps, they saw the stairway and the corridor and the shafts. The shafts were very much like the ones in the towers around Union Station. Chaka looked down into one. "Damp," she said.
She found a couple of pebbles and tossed them in. After a few seconds, they splashed.
The air was stale away from the door.
Claver indicated his surprise that the air was breathable at all, until Flojian noted a duct cover in the ceiling. There was a system of vents.
The stairway was not cut from rock, but rather was an insert, made of Roadmaker metal. The handrail and the stairs were covered with dust.
They picked up their equipment and started down. Flojian took the lead.
Chaka had never quite believed the story about the six deaths. When people die in groups, they don't die without marks. She noticed that Quait kept his hand close to his weapon.
That Flojian harbored similar feelings was evident. He moved as quietly as he could, spoke in a hushed voice, and everything about his demeanor suggested that he was controlling his own set of devils. That was an unusual attitude for him: He was given to caution, but Chaka rarely saw him frightened. Nevertheless, he stayed in front.
Even Claver seemed intimidated, and had little to say. He carried a coil of rope and a bar, but he was probably not aware he gripped the bar like a weapon.
The dark was tangible. It squeezed the light from their lamps. Shadows moved grotesquely around the walls. They could hear the wind, seemingly in the rock. Corridors opened at each level. The shafts were always there, of course, and beyond they saw doorways, sometimes open, sometimes not.
. "The walls are wet," said Claver. "This isn't a place I'd use for storage."
"It was probably military," suggested Quait. "Whatever it might have become in later years it was originally a military or naval installation."
The stairway wound back and forth, landing by landing, until they concluded they must surely be near the base of the cliff. And then it ended. Broke off.
"This is probably where they found your father," Chaka told Flojian.
Quait stood at the edge of the landing, held his lamp out, and looked down. They could see a floor.
That's where they died.
"No dust here," said Claver.
There wasn't. The landing was dean. So were five or six stairs above the landing. Above that, the dust was thick. Curious.
The floor was about twenty-five feet down.
"Maybe," Claver continued, "they opened a door and released a pocket of gas."
That was dose to making sense. It was akin to what had happened to Jon Shannon when he opened the wrong door. But there was a missing element. "There was no explosion," Chaka said.
"Don't need one. They start breathing gas, lose consdous-ness, and they smother."
"All six of them?"
"Well," Claver admitted, "it does require a stretch."
"Anyhow," said Flojian, "they were found in different places."
Claver shook his head. "There's always a tendency to dramatize when you're telling a story."
"I don't think Knobby was lying," said Chaka.
Flojian tied a line around his lamp and lowered it. The remains of the collapsed staircase lay scattered around the floor below.
"I wouldn't suggest he was lying," said Claver. "But people get confused easily. Espedally in a place like this. To be honest with you, if things happened the way Knobby said, I'd be ready to accept the idea that there's something loose in these tunnels."
Quait knew immediately that Claver regretted having said it. But it was out in the open now, no calling it back, and they looked nervously at one another and peered into the area below. They could see the openings to passageways down there. One in each wall. "If it was gas," he asked, "could the same thing happen to us?"
"Oh, yes." Claver shook his head emphatically. "Yes, indeed. I would certainly say so. Just open the wrong door."
"How do we protect ourselves?" asked Flojian.
Chaka made a noise low in her throat. "Stay clear of doors altogether," she said.
"That's right." Claver folded his arms and assumed the stance of an instructor. "If we open any doors, one person does it, and the rest of us get well back. I'd suggest also no one wander off alone. And be careful with the guns." He threw a long hard look at Quait. "We're all a trifle jittery right now." He stressed the pronoun to suggest that he was really talking about the Illyrians. "We don't have much light, and we're likely in more danger from ourselves than from any outside source."
"I hope so," said Quait. He tied a rope to the handrail and pulled it tight. The lower area was dark, cold, dismal. Light reflected off puddles. "It's not the way I expected Haven to look," he said. He dropped the other end of the line into the lower chamber, wrapped it around his waist, and stepped off the landing.
"Careful." Chaka drew her pistol.
Quait lowered himself smoothly. He had his own weapon out before he touched ground. The floor was wet. It glittered in the light from the lamps. As soon as he was clear, Chaka started down.
There was a doorway in each wall.
The passage with the shafts was behind her.
Two adjacent corridors rolled away into the dark. Directly ahead, she was looking at a flat, low tunnel. A massive door lay half wedged in the tunnel entrance.
Quait was walking around, thrusting his lamp into each passageway in turn. The corridors to left and right revealed several open doors. Chaka took a quick look and saw large rooms with high ceilings and piles of soggy wreckage.
Flojian gazed at the fallen door, and then walked into the fourth passageway. Chaka followed him. Twenty feet farther on, there was another, apparently identical, door. It too was down. Beyond, they saw black water.
"The underground lake," said Flojian.
"So far," said Chaka, "Knobby seems to be accurate."
The surface of the lake lay several feet below floor level. The lake itself stretched into the dark. Chaka looked up at the ceiling. It was quite smooth and flat, only a few feet above the water. "This is a chamber," she said, "not a cave."
"Look at this." Flojian directed the beam from his lamp to a stairway. The stairway descended into the water.
Chaka stared at it a long time. "I don't think this area's supposed to be under water,* she said.
Claver by now had joined them. "The doors are hatches," he said. "They wanted to seal off the lake."
"Why?" asked Flojian.
"Maybe there's something that comes out of the water," suggested Chaka.
Claver's brow furrowed. "I just don't understand what happened here," he said.
The tall corridor was lined with open rooms, all resembling the one that Chaka had looked into. They entered the nearest one and played their lantern beams across ancient tables, benches, cabinets. Everything was wet and cold.
"Must be water in the walls," said Claver.
Many of the cabinets were standardized. They were made of Roadmaker materials, neither wood nor metal, and most had four or five drawers of varying thicknesses. Some of the drawers were empty. Most contained a kind of brown sludge.
Quait knelt beside one and held his lamp close. He dug into the sludge and drew out a piece of shriveled material. Several threads hung from it.
"Might be a book binding," said Claver.
Flojian nodded. "I think that's right. I think that's exactly what it is. That's what they all are. They put the volumes into individual drawers. You wanted to see something, you pulled it out, took it over to one of the tables, read it at your leisure."
Chaka surveyed the sludge and said nothing.
Each drawer had been fixed with a metal plate, possibly identifying the book within. But the plates were no longer legible.
Because of the poor light, they were slow to appreciate the size of the chamber. The ceiling was high, about twenty feet. And the room was quite extensive, probably a hundred feet long and half as wide. It was circled by a gallery, which was connected to the lower level by a staircase at either end. Two hundred cabinets, at a rough guess, were scattered across the floor.
They walked through the debris with sinking spirits, and
climbed to the gallery hoping that, somehow, miraculously, the upper levels might have escaped the general destruction. They had not.
What had happened? "We know there was stuff here," said Chaka. "Karik and his people found some books intact. Somewhere."
"Let's see what else there is," said Quait.
There were three more such rooms located in that wing. But all were in identical condition. They trooped listlessly through the wreckage, trying to read plates, to find something that had survived.
The opposite wing, however, gave reason to hope. It too had four storage areas. Three were ruined. But at the end of the corridor, a door was still closed. "Maybe," said Chaka.
"These doors look watertight, too," said Claver.
The locking mechanism was operated by a ringbolt. Quait lifted it, and the others withdrew to a safe distance, taking the lamps with them.
But the door would not open. "Give me a bar," he said.
They worked almost half an hour, forcing the door away from the jamb. When they were satisfied it was ready, they reassumed their positions, Quait inserted the bar at a strategic point, looked at them hopefully, and pulled.
The door creaked. He tried again and it came open a few inches. Quait sniffed at the air. "I think it's okay," he said.
"Wait," cautioned Claver.
But Quail's blood was up. He ignored the warning and threw his weight behind the effort. Hinges popped and metal creaked. He got his fingers into the opening and pulled. The door came.
They tied a lamp to a line and dragged it across the threshold from a respectful distance. When nothing untoward occurred, they entered the room.
It was identical to the others, two stories high, circled by a gallery. But it was dry. The furniture, the cabinets and chairs and tables were all standing. And bound volumes gleamed inside the cabinets.
Chaka shrieked with joy. Her cry echoed through the chamber.
"I don't understand it," said Claver. "What happened here?"
"Who cares?" Quait strode into the room, went to the nearest cabinet, and opened the top drawer. "Look at this," he said.
Black leather. Gold script. The Annals. By lacitus.
The cover was held shut by snaps. He wiped off a tabletop and lifted the book out. The others gathered behind him while he set it down and opened it.
They turned the pages, past the titles into the text:
He was given sway over the more important provinces, not because he was exceptionally talented, but because he was a good businessman, and neither his ambitions nor his talent reached any higher....
The cabinets were arranged methodically, usually in groups of four, backed against each other, with angled reading boards and writing tables nearby. Chairs were arranged in convenient locations. A long elliptical counter dominated the center of the chamber. .
Flojian selected a cabinet, deliberately averted his eyes from the identifying plate and, while the others watched, opened the top drawer and removed the book. Its title was written across the cover in silver script:
<&ai(teia
6y
ls)erner $aeyer Volume 9
He opened the cover gently, almost tenderly. Title and author appeared again. And a date: 1939.
Turn a page. Lines of script in shining black ink filled the
vast Whiteness Of the paper. Gtiuca/mna/Jlejuvcessfyai&cAacommu-nt'/y jwserues am//nuuau/s //r pjfyjrca/ and'ai/efiec/uaJc/farac/er. S%ir /£r /nmo/m/afpasses taoay, oa//ne fype remains.
"Voices from another world," Chaka whispered.
They embraced in the flickering light. For a few moments the shadows drew back. All the tension amd frustration of the preceding months drained away. Claver, pumping Quail's hand, gave way to tears. "I'm glad I came," he said again and again. "I'm glad I came."
These were substantial volumes, not books as another age might have understood the term. They were written by hand, thousands of lines of carefully produced script on large sheets of paper, the whole bound into gilt-edged leather covers. They were of the same family as Connecticut Yankee.
It must have been the history section. They found works they'd heard of, like Gibbon's The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire (in numerous volumes), and books they hadn't, like The Anabasis. They paged through McMurtrie's The American Presidency in Crisis and Ingel Kyatawa's Japan in the Modern Age and Thomas More's The History of King Richard III. There was Voltaire's The Age of King Louis XIV and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Josephus's The Jewish War. There were copies of The American Century, Kissinger's Diplomacy, and America and the Pacific, 1914-2011.
"These are relatively recent transcriptions," said Quait. "Look at the condition of the paper. They can't be more than a couple of centuries old."
The gallery was also filled with volumes. Chaka went up the staircase and plunged into the upper level treasures.
They almost forgot where they were. Like children, they gamboled among the ancient texts, calling one another over to look at this
or that, carrying their lamps from place to place, opening everything.
Chaka was paging through a copy of Manchester's The Last Lion. Suddenly her eyes brightened and she shook Quait. "I think we've found Winston," she laughed.
Coming on the day after her wedding, discovery of the golden chamber seemed almost a culmination to that sacred event. She was standing in the uncertain light, looking lovingly at Quait and at The Last Lion, when the illusion exploded. Flojian, down on the lower floor, announced there was water in the corridor. Rising fast.
30
They tried to dose the door, but water poured through the bent frame. One of the lamps crashed to the floor and went out. "Not going to work," said Chaka. She looked around wildly. "How high will it go?"
"It's going to fill up," said Claver.
"You sure?"
"What do you think happens every day in the other rooms?"
They were snarling at each other now, the joy of a few moments before turned to rage and frustration. They opened the door and, two inside and two outside, tried to lift it higher in its frame and shut it again. The water kept coming in.
Books and cabinets looked polished in the dim light.
Chaka was dose to panic.
"It's the lake," said Flojian. "It's open to the sea, and the tide's rising."
"No way to stop it?" asked Quait.
Claver laughed. "Are you serious?"
Quait tore off his jacket and tried to jam it between the door and the frame. "Damn!" he said. "One of us should have thought—"
Chaka watched the water spreading across the floor. "What do we do? There must be something—"
"We can save a few." Flojian splashed over to the nearest cabinet, opened it, and removed the top book. It was The Letters ofAbelard and Heloise.
Quait looked around wildly. "We'll save, what, twenty or thirty, and lose everything else?"
"Wait." Claver was holding his lamp high, looking at a
shadowy ceiling. "There might be something we can do, at that."
"What?" said Quait.
