Amates 31, 1277. Past the panels and below. We didn’t find trouble; it came looking for us.
The room spun three more times to the sound of rattling gears before a way out opened up. It wasn’t the spiral staircase. That stayed a spring-loaded, hungry meat grinder. Instead, the way out was a dark, dusty door hidden behind one of the medical cabinets. There was another spiral staircase behind it, only without the spring blades ready to snap out at us from all directions.
All told, it was a good sign they were on the right path. Ruins were often thick with locks and inventive ways to get killed. Those were always far less complicated than a room-sized combination lock. Still, it made my head throb.
But the floor below was well worth the headache.
I left the stairwell, took two steps into the new room, then froze. This room was round, similar to the one above, but lacked the engraved wall panels. Instead, there were wide, broken bay windows, some the size of a small carriage, that had a breathtaking view outside. Not that there was much to see. It was just giant, glowing blue mushrooms on the cavern ceiling and the massive underground lake with its dark water splashing in the distance, far below.
Everything else in the room? It looked like a carpenter’s shop thew up. The chaos was so much. I had a hard time taking it all in. So I focused on the view, and a set of tall, aged cabinets made of a dark wood that stood between the broken windows.
It wasn’t hard to imagine what the room looked like centuries ago. The place was fascinating. I flexed my hands, as I had an itch to sketch the room. Common sense tackled that urge and shoved it into a closet. We didn’t have time for that.
“Whatever happened upstairs, happened here too,” I said in a reverent whisper. “A last stand, maybe?”
Ki left the stairs behind me, sent his parrot-shaped light spell to fly near the high ceiling, then walked over to a nearby broken table. The room was bathed in a soft, yellow-white glow. The added light didn’t make the place any more cozy.
That nearby table, like most of them, had once been a long affair, like the ones in the room above, but smashed into large pieces. He knelt down and touched the jagged edge of the ancient, shattered wood. A dried, dark stain of some suspicious liquid was painted across the savage splinters. It was dribbled along the wooden planks that made up the floor.
“Most likely. Rough fight, too. This almost looks like it was hit by cannon shot.”
He squinted at a nearby window. A chill wind streamed through the room, filled with the dampness of cavern and underground lake.
“Could have been a made with a fireball, too.” He shrugged. “Not a better thought.”
I walked a little farther into the room, but studied the scene outside. Anxiety over the Crimson Company haunting our back trail nagged at me. But I ignored it and focused on the destruction. Ki’s glowing parrot was a good source of light, but it was constantly in motion. This left the pulsing cobalt light from the mushrooms outside and overhead. My magic-altered eyes could see better in the dark, but even for me, there were a lot of long shadows. Most of those slowly danced from the moving lights.
“A ship? That lake is pretty far down. We’re not suspended that far down off the cavern ceiling.”
Ki shrugged. “Tela, given everything we know about the Ancient Order, would you count out flying ships?”
I started to say something about the logistics of a ship trying to fly, but didn’t. Ki had a good point. Everything found so far, from relics to records, pointed out that the Ancient Order was way ahead of us in, well, everything. Which is what made it even more scary, and interesting that the Ancient Order had been wiped out by the Great Collapse.
But none of those thoughts were the least helpful, and more than a little depressing. I put my hands on my hips and blew out a sigh.
“No, not really,” I admitted ruefully, then squinted at the room.
Mikasi blew past us in a hurry and into the disaster of a room. Nicodemus was close on his heels. The halfling looked at the room with unvarnished fascination.
“So, it’s the right place, yes?” Mikasi asked. After a quick glance around, he frowned. “Maybe they hid it?”
“I’m sure of it,” I replied. “But just not sure where.”
I stared at the room and made myself take in the details. Ki and Mikasi busied themselves searching in other parts of the room. For Ki, it was the tables and what might have been footlockers underneath them. Mikasi was interested in the cabinets.
Most of the walls really were large windows. They were all shattered, though some still held some of their wide panes. Large, jagged pieces that looked like teeth with a spiderweb of cracks through the glass. Between the walls were the wooden cabinets I saw when we entered or stone walls of the same mottled brown-gray stone of the original stalactite of the building.
The more I saw, the more Ki’s idea about the room being attacked made sense. Though I struggled with the flying ship part.
Nothing I saw suggested the attack came from the room above. Maybe from outside. Besides, if it had been an attack from the other room, that ‘lock’ to get down here would have already been opened. So that wasn’t at all right, but neither was this room.
The intact cabinets that lingered at the edges of the room seemed familiar, but also highly out of place. It was like seeing a wet bugbear walking into your room wearing nothing but a towel and a twinkle in his eye. Not that I had any experience with that I wanted to talk about. But the cabinets did remind me of the relic restoration tables back in the Windtracer Records Hall. It was the old dusting brushes and scraping picks on a nearby cabinet that stirred the memory.
A light crash of wood snapped my attention back to the moment. I saw Mikasi over by another cabinet, holding one of its doors that had broken, rotten hinges. The halfling was two shades of dim crimson.
“Are we sure it’s here?” he asked, then sheepishly set the broken door down at his feet.
I blinked as my eyes flicked between the broken cabinet door and Mikasi. Quietly, I bit down on a dozen replies about respect for history and not searching fragile, ancient cabinets like a bag of old socks. Slowly, I let out a small sigh.
“It’s here,” I told him with more confidence that I felt. A thought I couldn’t pin down flashed through my head and bolstered that reply. I nodded, more to myself than anything. “I just know it is.”
Ki, who was over by another of the broken tables, squinted at me. It looked like a memory had come back to him.
“Because of the baron and his ‘dowsing rod’ trick with his crystal?”
“The same,” I said before I navigated some of the broken furniture, then pointed up and a little to the right. My mental map of where we had traveled sprang into life in my mind.
“We came down on that stone platform about over there. After that, we took the first marble bridge into the city. Using that platform as a guidepost, that would put the Crimson Company’s camp a little to my right. Maybe four degrees?” I shifted my hand in that direction.
“So his dowsing rod stunt pointed this way and I think right here,” I continued. “Also, if the Ancient Order was using Automatic Crystals for anything like sending messages, this would be the likely place for that.” I waved a hand around me. “Somewhere.”
Ki stood while he brushed soot and wood dust off his hands.
“This place looks like a battlefield. Where would you even hide something like that? We barely know how big it is.”
I let out a heavy sigh.
“All right, think, Tela,” I growled at myself. “They had one here. Why? Wait, no. That doesn’t matter. There was an attack, and they didn’t want it found. So they stashed it somewhere but might want to come back for it later.” After another frustrated sigh, I rubbed the sides of my head to fend off a headache. “Siren’s tits! Where would you hide a large crystal in here?”
I scowled at the room, which didn’t seem all that impressed. So, instead, I pursed my lips.
“Where would I put it?”
Broken tables were mostly congregated in the middle of the room. Even burnt wooden shards of the ruined furniture were there. None of them were close to a window or a cabinet. That was odd. Even an attack from the stairwell would have scattered parts of the tables right up to the windows.
Ki was right. There were signs everywhere this place had been a battlefield, and the defenders didn’t win. It was like looking at a painting where the artist left out one important, but tiny detail you couldn’t quite place. Which just nagged at you until your skin twitched. Or maybe that was only me.
Then it hit me.
Missing pieces.
I turned to stare at the ancient brush and picks on that nearby cabinet while my thoughts raced. This wasn’t possible, was it? It couldn’t be right.
“You haven’t heard a word I just said, have you?” Ki asked with no small amount of tartness to his tone.
I twitched and blinked. Given the thin smirk on Ki’s face, I figured I looked like a stunned owl with golden eyes.
“What?” I asked, probably a bit too sharp.
Ki shook his head a little, tiefling tail swaying thoughtfully.
“I said that this ‘battlefield’ looks too perfect. Too organized.” Ki waved a hand at the tables. “Hells, it’s like a stage play.”
That brought a grin to my face. Ki saw it, too. Either we were both wrong, or both right. I went with ‘right’.
“Exactly! Look for papers! Journals! Something!” I exclaimed while I ran over to the cabinet that held the picks and brushes.
There was a loud bang off to my left. Miksai had slammed his head on a cabinet door when I shouted. Ki glanced over in concern, but Mikasi waved him away. The halfling backed a step away from the offending cabinet and grimaced, rubbing the spot where his head had met the edge of a door.
“Like blueprints?” he asked in a small voice.
“Even a scrap of cloth with words on it,” I said while I carefully, but quickly, sifted through the cabinet’s dusty contents. “This entire room is a disguise. A blind. If I was in a hurry and needed to hide something, this is what I would do. Also, I’d leave a hint for me to find it again if I made it back here.”
Ki tossed aside the lid of a shattered long box.
“Exactly,” he agreed. “If this was a battlefield, where are the bodies? Given the mess upstairs, someone was here. Maybe the corpses were blown out the windows over time, but all of them?”
Inside the cabinet, I found loose blank paper, more brushes, and a stack of ancient cloth. Interesting, but not what I was looking for. I gently nudged those aside and winced when some papers crumbled from being disturbed.
“The windows, too,” I added. “The frames are bent outward a little and the glass is broken. If something attacked this place from the outside, glass would be everywhere. Still would be everywhere. But there isn’t any. Where is it?”
Ki nodded, but Mikasi looked around in surprise. The inventor went back to his searching in earnest. I tried not to flinch at the sound of a solid clunk or the crack of porcelain hitting something a little too hard from Mikasi’s direction. Instead, I focused on my hunt for any scrap of hint about a hiding place for the Automatic Crystal.
We found it five minutes later.
A pair of journals, wrapped in sealed oil cloth, were nestled behind an ancient wooden drawer. Inside the ancient papers were drawings of an Automatic Crystal with a long list of numbers and what looked like calculations in the margin. Measurements? Improvements? I wasn’t sure, but we could figure it out later.
They also had a detailed layout of the room. Elaborate drawings of what everything looked like before the stage play of destruction was set up. We dragged broken tables aside, using those drawings as a guide. What we were looking for, and what I hoped to find, was not quite in the middle of the room.
Below one of the tables was a set of pale, bone-white lines carved into brown stained floorboards. Almost a half-finished diagram, it was carved in a series of concentric circles on the floor with the occasional dots around them. For a second, I wondered if it was a worn out summoning circle. But when I tapped the edge of one delicately carved line, a curved section in the floorboard shifted. This jostled its neighbors. They could be moved.
It was complicated, but the scratches were faint enough that the whole thing was easily overlooked. Unless you knew what you were looking for, or at least had a good guess. We were in the latter camp. We gathered around the markings.
“I don’t understand,” Mikasi said slowly. After a second of staring at the scratches, he squatted down for a closer look. “Another lock?”
“Another one,” Ki replied. “A scrambled puzzle, I think. But if it’s for a door, I can’t see where the edges are.” He rubbed his eyes before he glanced at the ceiling. “We are running out of time. I can just feel it.”
I nodded.
“Agreed. Ki? Look for the seams. If you can find them, we can try to pry the door open,” I said, then glanced over at the inventor. “Mikasi, look for the mechanism. There has to be something that opens this. I’m betting it’s not here, but nearby. I’ll work on the diagram pieces.”
To be fair, I had no idea how to do that, but this has never stopped me before. I sat down on the floor next to the diagram and got to work.
I frantically searched both the Ancient Order journals and my own, while I racked my mind for any loose ideas.
Everyone who studied the Ancient Order had their own ideas on how their culture worked. They left behind enough in ruins, documents, and relics that people agreed to disagree. Their understanding of magic, really devices and magic, went beyond what we knew. Often, most researchers would stare at a relic, shrug, then poke at it until it did something.
A good way to lose a scholar if you ask me. Not that I’m any less guilty of poking at the unknown. I’m just lucky I’ve not been turned into a chicken wearing socks by now.
But this? The markings on the floor were so familiar it hurt. I had seen those before. Where? It was recent. I flipped quickly through the journals in front of me. Fast enough that I worried I tore one. Then I stopped on a set of sketches of an Automatic Crystal. Both mine, and those by whomever, wrote the Ancient Order notes.
What I drew was a guess at best. But what was in the Ancient Order papers didn’t look like a guess at all. The numbers, which looked like chicken scrawl before, suddenly made a kind of sense to my addled head. They were measurements, with a lot of corrections. Then I noticed a phase scribbled in the margin of one of the old journals. It was written in Atani, the common dialect of the late Ancient Order, like the rest of the book next to a line pointed at the Crystal’s surface.
“Unknown metal,” I translated.
The meaning hit me like cold water to the face.
“They weren’t using it,” I said in a low voice. “That’s why nothing makes sense about the Automatic Crystal. The Ancient Order wasn’t using it, they were studying it. They didn’t know how it worked, either. So they needed to store this quickly, but carefully.”
No sooner had I said that to myself than a memory snapped into place. The cargo loading room we found once we first entered the ruin on the canyon floor. It had similar circular lines like this on the floor. I touched my Sun Orb to them. They came alive with a ghostly, pale white glow for a moment, just like the magical paint in the cargo room.
“Ki! Mikasi! Look near the cabinets or by the stairs for…” words failed me, so I gestured at the stairs and waved a hand in that direction like it would help explain anything. A few words finally tumbled to mind. “A lever. Pulley system. Something. Like what was up in that cargo dock room we found.”
“Where we first took the platform down into here?” Ki asked with a frown while Mikasi ran past him. “That’s here?”
“Yes! That!” I nodded. “Find those, pull them. I’ll adjust these pieces here. This room has something like it. I think it’s how we open this.”
Ki frowned as he took a deep breath, but I cut off his reply with a scowl to let him know I was serious. We didn’t have time to debate this. He raised his hands as if to ward off the argument before he retreated to help Mikasi.
While they looked for hidden levers, I placed my Sun Orb against the carvings on the floor. This time, I held it there for a few seconds. The paint instantly glowed with a soothing, soft, ghost-white light. Once the glow was strong and steady, I pulled back the Orb. I couldn’t help but grin as I got busy trying to work out the correct order for the carved puzzle pieces.
It turned out they were, of course, an outline of an Automatic Crystal. I wasn’t sure if the maker was in a hurry or wasn’t feeling imaginative that day. But once I slid the last piece into place, the circular outline of the Crystal, complete with hints of bumps and knobs, glowed once with a sharp, bright white light.
A muffled thump followed by a rattle of gears filled the room. Slowly, a seam parted between the glowing outline on the floor in front of me. The small panel, large enough for a person to stand in, swung down to a dusty crawlspace below the floor. I jumped back, eyes locked on the opening.
It was there. Covered in centuries of dust, but it was there. The Automatic Crystal was a round ball, just like in the drawings, but a good bit bigger than I imagined. Three times the size of a person’s head, at least. Underneath the dust, the surface looked made of dark lacquered wood, or even metal, plates. White crystal glimmered between them like seams. Tarnished metal studs, just like from the sketches, sat in the middle of each plate.
I almost cried while a platform magically, and silently, raised the large crystal and metal ball out of the floor in front of me.
Instead of crying, I nearly screamed when I looked up from the relic.
“Thank you, Tela. I always knew you would be the one to find it. Really, I’m just surprised you lived to do just that.”
The voice was smooth. Sickly sweet, like a poisonous syrup. But in the few times I had heard him talk, Baron Marius Apollinare was like that. I figured it was a lich thing.
He stood on the far side of the room near the stairwell from above, brandishing his piece of an Automatic Crystal. It already glowed with a promise of magical mayhem. Four thugs from the Crimson Company were with him, and, of course, Vincent Vargas.
They all, except for the baron, looked battered and a little bloody. Leather and brigandine armor sported enough claw marks and tears, I was surprised any of it held together. Even Vargas looked like a dog had scooped him up by the scruff of the neck to shake him like an old towel.
One of them, a wiry man with a weathered, scarred face, also had his hands on Kiyosi and held a knife to my friend’s throat. Mikasi was nowhere to be seen. I just hoped the little inventor had found some place safe to hide with his cat. With any luck, they would be safe until this got sorted out. If it got sorted out.
“Now. I’ll be taking that, my dear, since you’ve unearthed it for me,” the baron said while he started across the room. “We can discuss a new arrangement after that once I’ve helped you think about your future.”
“Tela!” Ki tried to step forward, but the thug with the knife didn’t let him move.
Not that I needed much encouragement, anyway. The moment the baron took a step forward, I jumped for the crystal. I remembered what Odro told me about light, intent and all with this thing. If the baron was going to use a spell on me again, and it sounded like he might, I wanted to be as ready as I could. Also, I could use this to bargain for Ki’s life. The latter was far more important to me right then than the former.
Only that was when everything happened at once.
People were shouting, yelling, or running at me. Ki managed to put some space between himself and that knife. With a quick twist, he slammed an uppercut into his kidnaper’s throat. The man wheezed, then sliced out at Ki.
Vargas, over by the stairs, hadn’t moved. The man looked furious, but I wasn’t sure if it was at me or the baron. Hard to tell, since one of the Crimson Company had just fired an arrow to try to slow me down.
“No!” Baron Marius shrieked. “I told you. Don’t fire at the Crystal! Not here!”
It was good advice for dealing with any relic, since they were often fragile. But the Automatic Crystal seemed in better shape than that, since the arrow bounced off in pieces. Arrow fragments clattered to the floor somewhere nearby. I didn’t pay it all that much attention. There were more important things going on in front of me.
The Automatic Crystal had come alive with light and magic the instant I, or maybe it was the arrow, touched it. A bright snow-white glow with a touch of sea blue deep inside lit up the white crystal seams between the plates. It was pretty, but that wasn’t what made everyone stop in their tracks.
What did was that the Automatic Crystal in my hands had started to unfold on its own.
