Dawn of the Dreamsmith (The Raven's Tale Book 1) (31 page)

For the first hour, our march continued in the same fashion as the previous day, with one exception. I now took the lead, alongside Captain Brandt, eager to see where the tunnel would lead us. By the time we had walked half a league, by my measure, the movement of the air was undeniable. Even so, an hour is a long time to maintain a state of anticipation, and eventually my enthusiasm began to wane.

I was not the only one. The further we walked, the louder Jan’s grumbles became, until with an angry bark he called for us to stop. “This is a fool’s errand,” he shouted, striding up to confront me. In spite my own doubts, I pointed out the movement of the air to indicate we were close to discovering something. As I did so, I was dimly aware that the quality of the air had changed again, though as before I did not yet understand its significance.

Jan sneered and snatched my torch. “I’ll tell you where you can stick your air,” he said. “There’s nothing down here, and I’ll prove it. A dozen more yards I’ll go and no further. When you see there’s nothing there, we’re going back. You can rot down here with your air for all I care.”

With that, he marched further up the tunnel. When he reached a dozen yards, as he promised, he turned triumphantly. “See, I told you-”, he began. Then his words became a scream. We heard the crumbling of rock, and the light of the torch fell abruptly and disappeared.

We ran to the spot where we had seen him last, taking care not to stumble into whichever hole Jan had unwittingly discovered. As we did so, I could not help but notice that the walls and floor suddenly vanished before us. There was a muffled cry from below, and as the captain lowered his torch, we saw Jan’s terrified face looking back up at us. His fingers were clinging to the ledge he had fallen from. Several droll observations came to my mind, but in the interests of diplomacy I kept them to myself. I could not help a small smile, though, as Sten reached over and pulled his crewmate back up to us with a small grunt of effort. His strength, as I had noted before, was incredible; he had lifted a grown man with no more difficulty than I might have stooping to pick up a book.

Jan was shaken by his discovery, and his eyes fired daggers in my direction. That he somehow blamed me for his own carelessness, I had no doubt. The captain continued to brandish his torch before him. Beyond the small ledge on which we were standing, we could see nothing. The change in air I had noted before, but thought little on, now told me that we stood on the edge of a vast open space beneath the mountain. The others began to laugh at the realisation, but I did not join them. “What’s wrong, Caspian?” the captain asked me. “You were right, there is something here after all.”

“We found nothing, captain, and much of it,” I replied. Where were we to go from here, but back? I felt on the floor for a stone, and threw it out in front of us. It vanished quickly and silently into the darkness. Then, just as I was about to turn back to the tunnel, there was a distant sound, one I had not thought to encounter in such a place. A deep clang of metal, like the sonorous chime of a great bell, far below us.

“It sounds like something to me,” the captain said. He began to search more closely around us with his torch, examining the mouth of the tunnel and on each side of the ledge. A few moments later, he chuckled to himself. I didn’t catch his words properly, but to my ears it sounded like “why do they never think to put in a handrail?” Before any of us could stop him, he stepped off the ledge.

I cried out in shock, but the captain just turned and smiled at us, his head now lower than it was previously, but quite clearly not falling to his doom. I looked down and, in the halo of light from his torch, could dimly make out a series of deep cuts in the rock to our left.

Steps, leading down.

That marked the end of another page and Captain Brandt chuckled, as he had that day that Caspian recounted. He’d never been able to resist a touch of the dramatic when the opportunity presented itself. The memory of it made him smile now, seeing the boy’s eyes and mouth wide open in shock as he dropped onto that first step. Sten had seen it at the same time, but a glance at his captain was enough to tell him to keep it to himself.
Not that he ever needs much convincing not to talk,
he thought.

He remembered the rush of excitement he’d felt when the outline of the steps were visible in his torchlight; the first he had felt since the discovery of the doorway in the cave. “What do we do now?” Caspian had asked, his voice radiating nervousness.

“We go down,” he’d replied. What else was there to do? Return to the ship and tell the others they had spent two days in the dark, only to turn back the moment they found something? Jan would probably not have objected. After his fall, he had looked heartily sick of the entire endeavour, while Caspian had appeared torn between his curiosity and his fear. Sten, as ever, had been impassive. The captain had known he would follow, whichever way he chose. But, for Captain Brandt, there had been no choice to make.

He searched through the loose pages again, until he found the one that spoke of their descent.

My first impression was that the carved stone steps followed the rock wall of this vast cavern, but my assumption was soon proven incorrect. The first few were indeed attached to the wall, but after our heads dropped below the level of the ledge on which we had stood, they began to spiral downwards on their own. On one side of us was a narrow stone column, onto which the winding steps were built. The other side of us was open air and impenetrable blackness. The steps were wide, wider than the breadth of a man with both arms outstretched, but I felt very exposed as we descended.

I cannot say how long it took us to climb down the stone spiral, nor how many steps there were, but it felt as though there were hundreds. I heard someone, Jan I presumed, grumbling that the further we went the further we would have to climb back up. I must admit, it was a thought that had occurred to me also.

Just as the dawn rises slowly, chasing away the darkness of night so gradually we barely are able to notice it happening, at some point during our descent I realised that I was able to discern the outline of the step below mine. The light from Captain Brandt’s torch had disappeared around a bend a dozen or so steps below me, yet nevertheless I was able to see without it for the first time since entering the tunnel. This was just as well, as my own torch had disappeared with Jan’s stumble.

The others soon noticed as well, and our pace quickened. Before long I was able to see two steps ahead, then three. By the time we reached the cavern floor, our torches were no longer needed. It was not bright, but there was a dull orange glow to our surroundings. And with the light came heat. Where the tunnel had been cold and damp, the air of the cavern floor bathed us in warmth, and we were soon sweating beneath our woollen cloaks.

I didn’t know what I was expecting to find at the bottom of the staircase, but still I was surprised. A vast open space stretched out before us. On either side of us, illuminated by the glow, were immense metal drums, with an opening at the front large enough to admit a fully laden cart and oxen. They were unlike anything I had seen the Crag’s smiths using, but all the same their purpose was clear. Great furnaces, built on a scale that left me flabbergasted. Were they worked by giants? The size of the passage we had entered the mountain by seemed to suggest not... unless there were other, much larger, tunnels we had yet to see?

I approached the nearest furnace, which towered above me. I placed my hand on its surface. The metal was cold. Whatever their use, it was clear the fires that warmed the colossal furnaces had not been lit for a long time. I tapped it with my knuckle, producing a hollow noise like the one I had heard after pitching my stone from the ledge above. It was likely one of these great drums that I had struck.

It did not take long to locate the source of the light. In the centre of the cavern floor, a strange contraption had been erected. As we neared it, it was soon clear that, like the metal furnaces, it was built on an enormous scale, as tall as the Crag’s curtain wall at least. Yet its purpose was not immediately apparent.

Thick, metal beams supported a large platform above a large round hole drilled into the ground. It was from this hole that the light came. Peering inside, I could see red, liquid fire far below. A blast of hot air hit me in the face as I peered over the edge. Before I pulled back from the hole, I had noticed a number of pipes leading into the rock beneath us.

I looked again at the platform above the hole. On top of it was a strange device. It was fashioned from a number of enormous, circular metal bands. These were fixed together in some way, so that the device as a whole appeared roughly spherical. Once again, I was reminded of the Archon’s servant; his incredible prosthetic arm and this device could have been crafted by the same hands.

Several metal steps led up to the platform, and before any of my companions could stop me, I climbed them. At the top, near the base of the strange spherical device I found a number of metal levers, the purpose of which I could not guess.

I was still looking at these, trying to divine some meaning or purpose, when Captain Brandt appeared beside me. “What do you think it is?” he asked. I replied that I did not know; whoever built this device clearly had an understanding of technology and metallurgy far beyond our own.

Jan and Sten joined us a moment later. “We should leave,” Jan told us. “Whoever built this is gone. Dead most like. And what killed them, I wonder?” It was an unsettling thought, and I could not say with certainty that he was wrong. It was clear we stood in the halls of an advanced race, yet as far as we could tell they no longer resided here. Had they abandoned this place? Had something even more powerful risen from the dark to claim them?

But before I could answer him, Sten pushed past me, and with a great heave and grinding of metal pulled one of the levers. Jan flew into a fury. “What did you go and do that for, you dumb ox,” he shouted. The big sailor replied with a shrug.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then, I heard the sound of rushing water below us, seeming to come from the fiery pit. A few moments after that was a hissing, as loud as a thousand angry snakes, and then a squeal of metal. All four of us leaped down off the platform, which had begun to tremble beneath our feet. No sooner had our feet touched down on the rock floor of the cavern, than the giant metal sphere began to move. The circular bands began to spin inside of one another. Slowly at first, and then fast enough to create a breeze on our faces.

My companions stood as open-mouthed as I, but what happened next was even more unexpected. All around us, rows of lights began to flicker on the cavern walls, reaching up into the distance above our heads. From below, it looked as if we were suddenly standing under a starry night’s sky. The light was even brighter than before, and what I had taken to be the end of the cavern in front of us now appeared to be a titanic stone column stretching far into the air. The size of it made my mind spin; it was wider than the Crag in its entirety, including the rock island on which it is built. Assuming it was perfectly round in diameter, I estimated it would take several hours to walk all the way around it.

My musings were interrupted by a grunt from the captain. “Well, I’ll be,” he murmured. “Perhaps we won’t have to walk back up after all.” I followed his eyes, and saw what the captain had spotted. Beyond the spinning sphere was another metal platform. This one would have been comfortably large enough for twenty men to stand upon, and was surrounded by bars like a cage. From this rose a thick chain, that disappeared up to the ceiling. I had used a contraption like it enough times at the Crag, when assisting the Brothers in raising supplies up to the keep, to understand at first glance what it was. “An elevator,” I gasped.

We approached the cage, and this time my first impression seemed the correct one. In particular, I was impressed by the chain. Close by, I saw that each link was larger than my head, formed of metal thicker than my arm. Like the furnaces we had passed, it was at once both familiar enough to understand its purpose, yet dissimilar enough to inspire wonder. Jan, however, did not seem pleased by the discovery. “A lot of bloody good an elevator is when there’s nobody around to winch us up,” he moaned.

The captain did not reply, instead examining the inside of the cage and the chain. “That might not matter,” he said at last, gesturing for us to step onto the platform. After we had done so, the captain pulled at a large lever set into the floor beside the cage, which I had not previously noticed. As he did so, the elevator juddered and began to rise. A moment later, the captain leapt onto the platform beside us, almost losing his footing as he landed. A second more and we would have been out of his reach.

Indeed, the speed of our ascent was impressive. I suspected that the captain had benefited from the initial stiffness of whatever mechanism controlled the winch following a long period of disuse. After perhaps twenty seconds, the enormous furnaces looked no larger than my fist below us. Soon, the dull orange glow beneath the sphere was swallowed up by the darkness. All I could see was the pinpricks of light scattered across the walls of the cavern, and now it felt as though we were soaring into the night sky.

Our journey on the elevator took much less time than our descent down the stone spiral staircase, but I judged the distance we travelled to be similar. This time however, when our ascent finished and the metal platform came to a stop, where we had once stood upon a narrow ledge and stared out into a black void, there was light.