The Secrets of Starellion- the Court of Lincoln Hart

by Ember Lane

  “Not a thing, but then, we are just mapping it all. Soon, if a tree’s cut down or a fire’s started somewhere new, and if the grassland beyond the forest darkens with soldiers—we’ll know.”

  “It’s so tranquil up here. Hard to imagine what might be coming,” Allaise said, her voice hushed.

  “I thought you said Muscat—”

  “I’m talking about the end game,” Allaise whispered ominously, and she shivered. “Come on, time to divine.”

  “May as well start in this corner.”

  Lincoln pushed himself off the beacon tower’s wall and clambered down the ladder, walking diagonally away from the tower. He stopped thirty paces in and cast his mind down through the mud, now conscious of how easily he should have uncovered the battlements, if only he’d thought. A yard, a yard and a half, his divination sense pierced a layer of clay and hit rock—the hard gray stone of the mountain. He forced it farther, a full ten feet, but found nothing but stone, no chambers, no corridors, nothing of interest.

  “Just rock,” he told Allaise, who’d sketched out a rough outline of Starellion on a piece of parchment Jack had crafted. Lincoln then marched another thirty paces down the side of the battlement, sank his mind into the mud again, and found nothing remarkable. He repeated it again and again, until he was just past the bridge and at roughly the halfway point of the rock buttress.

  “There’s a road here, just under the surface,” he shouted, walking around carefully, plunging his senses down. Lincoln saw Allaise marking it on the map. Lincoln moved on, finding nothing of interest. He eventually came to the end of the fields and start of the mountain slope. He turned, marched another thirty paces away from the edge and started again. He found nothing more until he came to the road again.

  It was midmorning before they knew it, and by this time Lincoln and Allaise were trudging through the fields and jumping over the irrigation bridges, treading around crops. Instinctively, and although they couldn’t even see it, they rested on the roadway, feasting on bread, meat, and a skin of ale.

  “So, no chambers ten…fifteen feet down,” Lincoln said, curiously disappointed.

  “I suppose it starts a little farther down. At least we know that the road leads to the battlements, so it must come from somewhere. I think we’d be best mapping that first and see if there are any others; see where it goes.”

  Lincoln nodded, took a bite out of the lump of bread and looked along the line of the road. “I need to sink my mind deeper, but I’ll empty my energy if I do it too often.” He pointed. “Now we know the stone road is underneath, it’s easy to see where our trail shifts over to it. I suppose the undergrowth was less. You’re right, let’s see where it leads, but I think I already have a good idea.”

  They finished up their food and followed the hidden road. At the halfway point, Lincoln discovered another road that quartered the top of the castle, and where they joined, a huge circle of stone lay hidden. Allaise sketched it all.

  They chose to walk down the path of the road that roughly led to the caves where Lincoln and the others had seen the vision of Poleyna. They had high hopes that it would lead to what they were looking for—some kind of entrance. Lincoln leveled up his divination twice, but they found nothing—if you discount Belzarra and Cronis.

  The wizard and the witch were just emerging from the caves.

  “Lincoln!” Belzarra beamed. “What a surprise. “Allaise…” she said, curtly. “So, we’re none the wiser. There’s a roadway that quarters the top, and paths that divide it all farther, but there appears to be no entrance or exit.”

  “Eh?” Lincoln said, wondering why he’d just wasted all his time.

  Cronis brought out an old parchment. “Had this…flown in from my tower.” He sat on a rock and unraveled it, then thought better of it and set off for the cave. Once inside, he unrolled it on the table with the strange pools and the glowsphere hovering over. “Here, this shows it all. See the castle’s top, the walkways, the roadways—all solely for supplying the battlements—yet, there appears to be no way to get anything up here or down again.”

  “A bridge?” Allaise asked.

  “I don’t think so, or else there’d be a drop in the battlements, but it all looks even. We know Darwainic had no use of the portal technology, so that rules that out.”

  Lincoln looked at the scroll. He tried to imagine Starellion as it was. It had to be a puzzle, nothing more. There was the possibility that some form of structure had rotted away. Maybe a wooden platform cantilevered over the battlements, but he doubted that. No, it had to be hidden somewhere.

  He stabbed his finger down.

  “There,” he said. And pointed to where the roads intersected. “The roads don’t intersect like that. It has to be there, under the round stone.”

  “Why on earth would it be there?” Cronis asked.

  “Because they never met there. Look, look at the stream, the little river. On this map it flows to the crossroads.”

  “And they’d have had a bridge over it,” Cronis grumbled.

  “Yes, but look at the river again,” Lincoln said.

  “It doesn’t carry on,” Allaise whispered.

  “Because…” Lincoln teased.

  Belzarra’s laugh rang out. “He’s not all brawn and bone. There’s a brain in there too,” she said. “So, the river supplied the castle with water. If sieged, no one went thirsty.”

  “And that is where we’ll find our entrance. When they hid this place as best they could, they plugged the hole and diverted the river away from the castle’s insides.”

  Cronis rolled up the map and stuffed it into his sack. “Well, what are we waiting for,” he muttered, and shuffled off. Soon, they were all standing in the middle of the fields. Once again, Lincoln summoned Echo, who took great pleasure in diverting more bots away from Finequill’s house renovations.

  “He really is using up too many resources on personal things,” Echo told Lincoln.

  Lincoln growled inside. Finequill was turning out to be just the kind of leader he didn’t want. Stowing those thoughts for later, Lincoln sunk his perception into the soil. He stood on the exact spot the roads should have met, right in the middle of the circle of stone. At first, he just sensed the soil, but noticed it felt different, somehow fresher. Underneath the soil, he came to a slab of clay—cracked, dry clay. Then, his excitement built as he came across the stone circle again, and for a fleeting moment he thought he’d been wrong, but then his mind broke through, and his senses fell and fell. He quickly tried to rein them back, to pull them from the abyss they’d found. All manner of dark, devilish thoughts invaded his emptying mind. His energy plunged, and he fell to his knees.

  The shaft was endless, almost like the chimney that Alexa had described to him—the one that led to the demon. He sensed ledges, balconies, pools, and steps all lining it. Eventually, he managed to slow his mind’s plunge, and it came to a halt by a spiral of curved, stone guttering—a water divert, he realized.

  Caution! Your energy is 50/230

  Lincoln reeled the skill in and then collapsed back onto the ground. “It’s there,” he gasped. “Dig there.”

  The bots started almost instantly. Allaise helped Lincoln back. He lay back for a while, drinking in the late-morning sun.

  “Are you nervous?” Allaise asked.

  “Of opening it up?”

  “Of what it might hold, yes.”

  “We have no choice.”

  Allaise pulled Lincoln up until he was sitting. “There’s always a choice; we can defend the wall.”

  “Aye, we can do that, and if it falls, and you die staring at an empty castle—what then?”

  Allaise bit her lip. “What did you see? What did it look like?”

  Lincoln realized he was going to have difficulty explaining, for he’d seen, or at least sensed, a marvel. It was no mere shaft to hell, no hewn rock, but an intricately carved, incredibly functional piece of architecture. He’d sensed, not only the spiral gutter, bu
t traps, stove dishes, and carvings—gargoyles, busts, shields and even knights—like he’d seen in Darwainic’s tomb. He suddenly realized that Starellion was indeed going to be one of the wonders of this world.

  Bit by bit, the bots cleared the detritus, the built-up mud, and scraped and cleaned the stone plug. By noon, a large stone circle had been unearthed, the clay scraped from it. It was around twenty feet in diameter, a vast rock plug.

  “So,” Lincoln said. “Any idea how we move it?”

  Belzarra, Allaise, Cronis, and Lincoln all stood around scratching their heads.

  “I could just blow it up,” Cronis offered.

  “And smash everything underneath?” Lincoln said, horrified. “Nope, this calls for a bit of engineering. Echo, do we have anymore spare bots?”

  “What have you got in mind?”

  “Really annoying Finequill.” Lincoln smirked, and asked Allaise for the piece of paper. He started sketching out his idea.

  “We can’t afford to just smash the plug—who knows what damage we might do, and what we might need that’s underneath it. We need to lift the plug out.”

  “So,” Cronis grunted, “just how do you propose to do it?”

  Lincoln tried to gauge the lay of the land. The small river was close, only around ten yards away. He tried to form a clear plan in his mind that wouldn’t need any excavations near it until the plug had been removed.

  He thought about chiseling out a hole in its center, then building a rope and pulley system over it. After that, he would lash a log to a strong rope, drop it through the hole and pull it up tight, the theory being that the log would clamp under, and they could then winch it up.

  Too hard, too much stress on the rope, too much on the winch, plus debris falling from chiseling the hole.

  What he did have was an abundance of manual workers who could dig, shovel, and clear twenty-four seven. He hoped it wouldn’t stray any where near the seven.

  “Echo, I need a pit dug right around the plug. I need it to be two feet deeper than the plug itself, and three feet wide.”

  He drew it on the paper. Then sketched another trench at 45 degrees to the two roads, and aiming directly away from the river.

  “I need this trench to be the diameter of the plug in length plus 20 feet, and three feet wide. Next, cut me a block of wood the size of the long trench and three feet square. I’ll need a load of wooden planks too, say fifty, all the width of the stone plug. Then dig another trench across the main one, but nineteen feet away from the plug, and slightly deeper where it intersects the main trench.”

  Echo issued his instructions. “We’ll need to see if there’s a suitably sized trunk up here, else we’ll have to build a winch system to pull it up the side of the castle.”

  Lincoln thought on it. “You can lash several sturdy trunks together like this.” He sketched it out and passed the paper to Echo.

  “That should be easier.”

  “Before you lower it into the trench, put a load of short trunks in the bottom to act as casters.”

  If his plan worked, he would have a vast stone disc raised in the air, the next question was what to do with it. He looked at the river and decided that it would make a great divert to get the water flowing back down the hole. He was just praying that it used to flow down the shaft, but everything he’d sensed told him it did. Why else would there be stone gutters and pools lining the vast hole?

  He sketched out a ramp. “We’ll need to build that too.”

  “I’ll divert the necessary workers. When will you need it done by?”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Afternoon?” Echo queried.

  “Afternoon,” Lincoln affirmed.

  Lincoln prowled the plug’s edge one last time, sized up the river one last time, and nodding to himself, decided it would all work fine.

  “Ale?” he asked everyone.

  “Ale sounds good,” Cronis agreed. “What Belzarra and I have to tell you will probably be best told over ale.”

  Just as Lincoln made the newly cleared battlements, just before he was about to cross the bridge, he heard a voice.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Shrimp asked, smashing his fist into an open palm and shifting from foot to foot.

  10

  Esteem

  Finequill was pacing up and down outside the tavern. Lincoln couldn’t fathom a way to get past the ceratog without being seen. Though reluctant, in the end Lincoln knew he needed to face his steward. The others disappeared inside, while he joined Finequill at a table outside.

  “Echo is intolerable,” Finequill told him. “I demand he does something, and he takes no notice. Tell me, Lincoln, how am I supposed to be your steward if I can’t run this city how I see fit?”

  “You were building Mrs. Finequill some baths?”

  “I was not!” Finequill said indignantly.

  “Then…”

  “I was having some baths built—for the populace as a whole—and Echo has taken all the labor away. I can’t employ anyone as I have no gold to pay them. This is futile, frustrating. I just want to do my best.” Finequill’s subsequent grin was packed with insincerity.

  “So, just what are your plans? If I remember correctly, I asked you to steward over my little city, to settle arguments, to fill in where needed and not build—”

  Finequill coughed. “To sort out Spillwhistle’s shop, to build a street, to set up vendors, and all while you were off gallivanting with witches and celebrity dwarves.”

  Lincoln felt his temper rise, mostly because he knew Finequill had a point. “I—” he made to say, but the ceratog wasn’t finished.

  “And half the city joined a guild last night, more this morning, a guild, I might add, that I can neither approve nor disapprove membership. A guild that has not approved my own application. Tell me, how does that help my standing?”

  Lincoln mulled. He’d been in these situations before, mostly because he’d played games before. Guilds meant two things—spies and politics. To run a good one, you needed a great team, but not necessarily a team of friends. Finequill was certainly a slimy, no good, self-centered little ceratog—that wasn’t up for debate. The question was, how could the guild best use those qualities?

  The answer was money, specifically gold or some such system. Finequill’s little issue with not being able to find anyone to build was a symptom of the city’s size. When Joan’s Creek only had a handful of cottages, everyone chipped in. Now, even there, it was nearly all left up to the bots. Folks did their day-to-day toil and little else. That little early days push, had slowly gone by the wayside.

  He also realized that their joining up to his guild was pure emotion, an emotion that would also fade. He’d relied on his ale to hold the morale of his city at its dizzy, early heights, but now it was the norm.

  You have approved Finequill. Finequill is now part of your guild.

  You have promoted Finequill to officer. Finequill now has the power to recruit members.

  A smile twitched on Finequill’s furry face.

  “Now,” Lincoln said, “that's the good news, the bad news is that I’m sacking you as steward.”

  “Sacking me?”

  You have promoted Finequill to Treasurer.

  “There, a new role,” Lincoln said, fiddling around in his pocket for his pipe. “From now on, all authority is through the guild. Your first job is to come up with a monetary system, or some equivalent way of rewarding those who work hard, but I have one condition.”

  “Treasurer, eh?” Finequill puffed his little chest out. “And pray tell, what is the condition?”

  “The reward must be useless outside these two cities. If you hold coin, or whatever you come up with, it has to be of no value anywhere else in this land. We cannot have folks making their fortune here, and being able to take it away. This is House Mandrake, what is earned here is for the good of House Mandrake, and House Mandrake alone. Should we ever trade with any other cities, we will come up with an exchange r
ate.”

  Finequill blinked. “A tall order.”

  “Not really,” Allaise said, approaching the table with fresh ales for them. “Try and think what rewards you would want. Status? Fame? How about a leveling system similar to how we live our lives? Imagine if we could get a city contributor rank, or some such thing.” Allaise sat down, pinching Lincoln’s pipe and taking in a lungful of smoke. “Folks covet coin—all folks, both good and bad. Good folks do good things to make coin, and bad do bad, that’s the way of things. It can’t be coin—never coin.”

  Finequill looked deflated. “No coin,” he grumbled. “Then…what else is there?”

  Allaise shrugged. “Look at Griselda—the way the dwarves act around her. They idolize her; they would do anything for her. Perhaps we need something more than ale; perhaps we need folks like Griselda.”

  Lincoln perked. Tokens, tickets, ale allowances, entertainment—that’s what they needed. Thinking back on it, he’d never seen anything like Griselda’s entrance in this land. He’d never seen the hysteria, nor the euphoria. They needed culture and they needed sport. They needed contests. Lincoln told them what he thought.

  “But you’d still need money,” Finequill said, right away.

  Lincoln slammed his fist on the table. “No! No coin, I said I don’t want coin, and I don’t. It’s a cancer, a bane, and I won’t have it here. Think along Allaise’s lines. Use a system of esteem, or some such reward system—no coin.”

  “No coin,” Finequill mumbled.

  “Esteem,” Allaise repeated. “I wonder if we could get it somehow written into the guild’s rules. If you join the guild, you have an esteem rating for the amount you contribute. That esteem can be traded and built back up but is on show for all to see.”

  “You’ll have to look up the guild rules to see if it’s possible,” Finequill said, clearly still on the fence about it all.

  Lincoln didn’t have a clue how to do that, but pulled up his guild tab, it had a few dozen sub-tabs, and he expected another few layers under that.