chapter 20
previous chapter
The tunnels leading to the airship platforms were a quirky mix of old cave passages and relatively newer, dynamite blasted openings. The way was lit by an occasional lantern or two, casting a dim pool of light in a sea of inky darkness. Cantrip heard another airship creaking and groaning as it glided by slowly in the darkness.
They were utterly lost now. The tunnels wound round and round, and branched left, right, up and down, before twisting suddenly and spiralling in a totally different direction. Every once in a while, the tunnel appears to lead in the right direction, before it deceptively turns again, thoroughly confusing anyone who dared to try and plumb its complicated depths. In other words, it bore a remarkable resemblance to the brain of an average human female.
The unicorn flew close to the floor of the tunnels in order to avoid detection by other airships. Even the most experienced airship pilots only stayed on familiar paths in here, since some of the cave passages led on to even older tunnels, and if you ended up on one of those, then you were well and truly beyond rescue: the natural cave network within the Spire was huge and even more confusing than the original tunnels, and you could probably get lost for months before you could find a way out.
Cantrip stared ahead into the inky blackness, while Seraph shifted restlessly behind him.
"Do you really think there is a diamond hidden somewhere in here? It could be anywhere within the tunnels!" whispered Cantrip.
"We've come this far, kid, and I'm willing to bet that our good friend Mr Fortune wouldn't just throw a diamond anywhere. No... eccentric rich people who wish to hide their treasure always put some kind of clue lying around, in the secret hope that someone will find it," replied Seraph.
He'd been on enough treasure hunts to know that this was true: lots of fabulously wealthy madmen were too paranoid to keep their hard-earned treasure in a bank. Instead, they chose to spend a large sum of money constructing an elaborate treasure room of some sort, and then surround it with fiendish traps which could only be defeated with cunning (answer a riddle or solve a puzzle of some sort), agility (leaping spiked pits, dodging huge rolling balls) and a healthy supply of courage (for those nasty snakes and scorpions, say). And then, subconsciously worried that nobody would actually be able to see the results of all this effort, they then helpfully provide enigmatic clues to the secret location, and on some occasions, they liberally sprinkle these dungeons with health potions, additional weapons and other useful stuff.
However, if there were any hidden clues at the moment, then they were doing a damn good job of remaining firmly hidden. The unicorn flew onwards, deeper into the gloom.
* * * * *
A small, unmarked airship docked at Platform Sixteen, and Tiffany stepped out. She had been tracking the bounty hunter for days now, but the attack on the airship had made a huge dent in this little pastime.
Over the last few days, the bounty hunter and his two friends have stumbled from one major crime scene to another, and Tiffany's suspicion meter was on full alert. Either they were trying to start something big, or someone was trying to start something big to them. Trouble had an amazing tendency to find them wherever they went, and Tiffany was quite frankly surprised that they lived long enough to board that airship.
Fortunately, she had not been onboard the doomed airship herself: she had observed them boarding the Donkey, of course, but she would have been spotted the moment she stepped foot inside the cabin. Instead, she had bought tickets for the next flight to the Spire, and radioed ahead to the platforms for additional agents to keep an eye out for passengers disembarking from the Donkey. Too bad it never arrived... getting shot at and blown up in mid air tends to mess up any carefully planned flight schedule really badly.
Something was wrong with the airship attack, but Tiffany couldn't quite put her finger on what was bothering her. A small detail, something overlooked, and it nagged at the back of her head like a concerned mother-in-law. She tried to recall the scene... it all happened rather quickly, of course, and the Dreadnoughts had cleverly hid in the clouds and struck the Donkey like a bolt of lightning: a quick, sudden and devastating attack. The ships emerged from the clouds out of nowhere, fired twice, and then vanished as quietly as they had come.
She had rushed to the crash site as soon as the airship began to plunge, but there was nothing there but smouldering wreckage and mangled bodies. The ship had fallen right in the middle of the Commerce District, crushing several tax collection offices and moneylenders. It ripped out a good chunk of chimneys and drainpipes as it fell, and created a little crater right in the middle of the road. Tiffany had searched carefully, but she found no traces of anything suspicious: it looked exactly like an airship that had been shot down.
Tiffany knew that the girl travelling with Seraph was a bounty hunter wanted by the Merchant's Guild, but certainly they wouldn't be mad enough to shoot down an entire airship just to take her out. Well, Tiffany thought, at least, it would be an unlikely event. This is the Merchant's Guild, after all, and they would do anything for financial gain.
And that was another thing that was bothering her. There was no financial gain for them with such a brazen attack; if anything, it was a serious blow to the Guild, a public relations nightmare of epic proportions. It'll take months to regain some semblance of public trust again, if ever. Tiffany shook her head. The whole thing stank of politics, and she didn't like it at all. Politics is confusing, and makes your head spin if you try to reason things out.
Another airship glided into the hangar, pulled by another white unicorn. Tiffany stared at it as it flew past and came to a rest at Platform Seventeen.
Unicorn. There was no unicorn at the crash site. That's it, that's what's so weird... a unicorn would have broken its own fall, and was quite likely to have survived such a drop even it if was injured in the process. But there was no unicorn... which means that there was one running loose somewhere in the City. The bounty hunter might have survived after all... but if he did, where could he go?
Tiffany's lips curled into a smile. Where else would he go? The bounty hunter had taken a flight headed straight for the Spire. Tiffany very much suspected that a person with a flying unicorn would have no problems at all sneaking into the tunnels.
* * * * *
Cantrip was sure that they had been here before. The caves were starting to look very similar to one another, and even the bounty hunters' instincts were useless against miles and miles of featureless rock. They needed another sign, a clue, a pointer, anything. Penelope was steering the unicorn, mostly because she firmly believed that women are better drivers than men.
"You're quite sure we're headed in the right direction?" asked Seraph doubtfully. "Only I think we've passed that funny rock formation an hour ago."
"Oh, so it's my fault is it? We're miles away from civilization, without a map, and not the foggiest idea of where we came from and where we're going to. We don't even know what we're looking for! How the hell would I know if we're headed in the right direction??" snapped Penelope.
They were hopelessly lost now, and they hadn't even seen any other airships for some time. There were no lanterns here anymore: the rock walls were smooth and overgrown with dirty green moss. The unicorn flew onwards, reached a fork, and then randomly took another turning into more tunnels.
Silence, broken by the distant and soft beating of unicorn wings. Then the shadows squirmed and moved, and a blink of an eye later, an observer would have sworn that several additional cave openings appeared where there had been none before.
* * * * *
Two hours later, they came to a stop. Right in front of them was a giant door. Penelope halted the unicorn, and the three of them got off and stared at it.
The door was thirty feet high and thirty feet across, and was smooth to the touch. Despite appearances, there was no giant doorknob, just one big flat slab of stone carved into the cave walls. There were no visible levers or buttons on nearby walls, either, and the only interesting feature in the entire door (besides the fact that it was excessively big) was a small hexagonal depression cut into the center of the door, about seven feet off the ground.
Cantrip stared, open mouthed, as Seraph walked ahead and placed a hand on the cold stone surface.
"Well, certainly looks like we've found something," muttered Penelope as she gazed upwards at the door. "Looks firmly shut to me though. And it'll take a lot of explosives to blow a hole through a door that size, but I think that even all the explosives in the world would barely dent it."
She was right, of course: the door looked like it was built to last. It would probably take several nuclear bombs to even put a dent in the door, and right now they had nothing but daggers. Seraph squinted at the hexagonal depression. It was.. hexagonal, and it looked very depressed indeed.
"Ookay. So now what? We have, against all probability, managed to navigate through miles of barren tunnels without the slightest idea where we were going and, somehow, found what appears to be, against all probability, again, a massive door slapped onto the cave walls. Only there seems to be no way of opening it, and we'd probably get lost if we tried to retrace our steps, and die of hunger/thirst/sheer madness somewhere in the damned tunnels. If this is someone's idea of an elaborate joke, then I'm laughing, ha ha, very funny!" said Seraph angrily, and gave the door a violent kick.
Something dropped from above, and bounced off the floor before rolling to a stop at Seraph's feet. It looked like a hexagonal shaped metal object, with a single, foreign-looking rune carved in the middle. Seraph, Cantrip and Penelope stared at it.
"I think..." said Penelope, breaking the silence. "...that you should try fitting it into the hole."
Seraph wordlessly picked up the object, stretched, and slid it into the depression. It clicked into place, and then there was a moment where the world held its breath and waited.
Deep inside the earth came the deep rumbling of ancient gears, as the walls shook and it rained dust. A hairline crack appeared and began to split the door right down the middle, and then the door groaned as it creaked open, swinging very slowly inwards, until it stopped with a great resounding thud. Once the dust had settled, Seraph looked into the room beyond.
* * * * *
It was... a strange room. The entire floor was roughly hexagonal in shape, with each of the six walls stretching upwards into the darkness as far as the eye could see. Lanterns blazed in here, but the flames were pure white. Each of the walls were inscribed with a single, gigantic rune word, except for the one with the door. Two of the five runes blazed brightly, while the other three glowed dimly in the darkness.
The strange thing about the room was the scribbles: someone had scribbled words everywhere, and the walls were covered by the same spider-like writing. Apparently the author ran out of space to write, and so the old writings were overwritten with new scribbles, until the entire room was overwritten several times over. The writings were unintelligible to Seraph, Cantrip and Penelope, and in any case they weren't paying much attention to it.
This was mostly because there was someone sitting in the room. Someone with long, bedraggled white hair, yellowed nails, sunken eyes, and a constantly twitching facial motion. If insanity had a smell, then this old man would be a walking perfume counter. He radiated nine different kinds of madness, and gazed blankly at the three intruders who had walked into his lair.
The old man laughed maniacally, then broke down crying, and then giggled helplessly. His eyeballs swivelled madly in their sockets for a moment, and then he started laughing again.
"Er... hello?" said Seraph. Every fibre in his body was telling him to run: madmen tended to do mad things, and sometimes those mad things involved very violent ways to die.
The lunatic sitting in the room twitched, and turned to Seraph, apparently becoming aware of the existence of visitors to his little room. He giggled again. "So, so, so so so so. You have come at last, haven't you, hm hm hm? Excelllent, excellent, it is time for the story, oh yes indeed! The story, the story!" And then he cackled madly again.
Seraph looked at him bewilderedly. Certainly there were no diamonds here, unless the old man was hiding it. Oh well, worth a try... "Erm, you wouldn't happen to have a large diamond in here, would you?" asked Seraph hopefully. "Only there was this guy who said..."
"Diamond? Diamond diamond diamond... no no, no diamonds here, no indeed. No. But a story now! I have many stories, oh yes, many many stories indeed, and many many tales, and some songs. Songs? Yes, sing songs, yes yes, but first, a story! Ask me a story, I know many stories. And many tales."
Seraph gave up. The old man was babbling. "Alright, alright, I guess we have time for a story. It doesnt look like we're going to be going anywhere soon, in any case."
The old man lost his smile, and his face became dead serious. His voice lost the edge of madness, and then he began a story.
next chapter
The tunnels leading to the airship platforms were a quirky mix of old cave passages and relatively newer, dynamite blasted openings. The way was lit by an occasional lantern or two, casting a dim pool of light in a sea of inky darkness. Cantrip heard another airship creaking and groaning as it glided by slowly in the darkness.
They were utterly lost now. The tunnels wound round and round, and branched left, right, up and down, before twisting suddenly and spiralling in a totally different direction. Every once in a while, the tunnel appears to lead in the right direction, before it deceptively turns again, thoroughly confusing anyone who dared to try and plumb its complicated depths. In other words, it bore a remarkable resemblance to the brain of an average human female.
The unicorn flew close to the floor of the tunnels in order to avoid detection by other airships. Even the most experienced airship pilots only stayed on familiar paths in here, since some of the cave passages led on to even older tunnels, and if you ended up on one of those, then you were well and truly beyond rescue: the natural cave network within the Spire was huge and even more confusing than the original tunnels, and you could probably get lost for months before you could find a way out.
Cantrip stared ahead into the inky blackness, while Seraph shifted restlessly behind him.
"Do you really think there is a diamond hidden somewhere in here? It could be anywhere within the tunnels!" whispered Cantrip.
"We've come this far, kid, and I'm willing to bet that our good friend Mr Fortune wouldn't just throw a diamond anywhere. No... eccentric rich people who wish to hide their treasure always put some kind of clue lying around, in the secret hope that someone will find it," replied Seraph.
He'd been on enough treasure hunts to know that this was true: lots of fabulously wealthy madmen were too paranoid to keep their hard-earned treasure in a bank. Instead, they chose to spend a large sum of money constructing an elaborate treasure room of some sort, and then surround it with fiendish traps which could only be defeated with cunning (answer a riddle or solve a puzzle of some sort), agility (leaping spiked pits, dodging huge rolling balls) and a healthy supply of courage (for those nasty snakes and scorpions, say). And then, subconsciously worried that nobody would actually be able to see the results of all this effort, they then helpfully provide enigmatic clues to the secret location, and on some occasions, they liberally sprinkle these dungeons with health potions, additional weapons and other useful stuff.
However, if there were any hidden clues at the moment, then they were doing a damn good job of remaining firmly hidden. The unicorn flew onwards, deeper into the gloom.
* * * * *
A small, unmarked airship docked at Platform Sixteen, and Tiffany stepped out. She had been tracking the bounty hunter for days now, but the attack on the airship had made a huge dent in this little pastime.
Over the last few days, the bounty hunter and his two friends have stumbled from one major crime scene to another, and Tiffany's suspicion meter was on full alert. Either they were trying to start something big, or someone was trying to start something big to them. Trouble had an amazing tendency to find them wherever they went, and Tiffany was quite frankly surprised that they lived long enough to board that airship.
Fortunately, she had not been onboard the doomed airship herself: she had observed them boarding the Donkey, of course, but she would have been spotted the moment she stepped foot inside the cabin. Instead, she had bought tickets for the next flight to the Spire, and radioed ahead to the platforms for additional agents to keep an eye out for passengers disembarking from the Donkey. Too bad it never arrived... getting shot at and blown up in mid air tends to mess up any carefully planned flight schedule really badly.
Something was wrong with the airship attack, but Tiffany couldn't quite put her finger on what was bothering her. A small detail, something overlooked, and it nagged at the back of her head like a concerned mother-in-law. She tried to recall the scene... it all happened rather quickly, of course, and the Dreadnoughts had cleverly hid in the clouds and struck the Donkey like a bolt of lightning: a quick, sudden and devastating attack. The ships emerged from the clouds out of nowhere, fired twice, and then vanished as quietly as they had come.
She had rushed to the crash site as soon as the airship began to plunge, but there was nothing there but smouldering wreckage and mangled bodies. The ship had fallen right in the middle of the Commerce District, crushing several tax collection offices and moneylenders. It ripped out a good chunk of chimneys and drainpipes as it fell, and created a little crater right in the middle of the road. Tiffany had searched carefully, but she found no traces of anything suspicious: it looked exactly like an airship that had been shot down.
Tiffany knew that the girl travelling with Seraph was a bounty hunter wanted by the Merchant's Guild, but certainly they wouldn't be mad enough to shoot down an entire airship just to take her out. Well, Tiffany thought, at least, it would be an unlikely event. This is the Merchant's Guild, after all, and they would do anything for financial gain.
And that was another thing that was bothering her. There was no financial gain for them with such a brazen attack; if anything, it was a serious blow to the Guild, a public relations nightmare of epic proportions. It'll take months to regain some semblance of public trust again, if ever. Tiffany shook her head. The whole thing stank of politics, and she didn't like it at all. Politics is confusing, and makes your head spin if you try to reason things out.
Another airship glided into the hangar, pulled by another white unicorn. Tiffany stared at it as it flew past and came to a rest at Platform Seventeen.
Unicorn. There was no unicorn at the crash site. That's it, that's what's so weird... a unicorn would have broken its own fall, and was quite likely to have survived such a drop even it if was injured in the process. But there was no unicorn... which means that there was one running loose somewhere in the City. The bounty hunter might have survived after all... but if he did, where could he go?
Tiffany's lips curled into a smile. Where else would he go? The bounty hunter had taken a flight headed straight for the Spire. Tiffany very much suspected that a person with a flying unicorn would have no problems at all sneaking into the tunnels.
* * * * *
Cantrip was sure that they had been here before. The caves were starting to look very similar to one another, and even the bounty hunters' instincts were useless against miles and miles of featureless rock. They needed another sign, a clue, a pointer, anything. Penelope was steering the unicorn, mostly because she firmly believed that women are better drivers than men.
"You're quite sure we're headed in the right direction?" asked Seraph doubtfully. "Only I think we've passed that funny rock formation an hour ago."
"Oh, so it's my fault is it? We're miles away from civilization, without a map, and not the foggiest idea of where we came from and where we're going to. We don't even know what we're looking for! How the hell would I know if we're headed in the right direction??" snapped Penelope.
They were hopelessly lost now, and they hadn't even seen any other airships for some time. There were no lanterns here anymore: the rock walls were smooth and overgrown with dirty green moss. The unicorn flew onwards, reached a fork, and then randomly took another turning into more tunnels.
Silence, broken by the distant and soft beating of unicorn wings. Then the shadows squirmed and moved, and a blink of an eye later, an observer would have sworn that several additional cave openings appeared where there had been none before.
* * * * *
Two hours later, they came to a stop. Right in front of them was a giant door. Penelope halted the unicorn, and the three of them got off and stared at it.
The door was thirty feet high and thirty feet across, and was smooth to the touch. Despite appearances, there was no giant doorknob, just one big flat slab of stone carved into the cave walls. There were no visible levers or buttons on nearby walls, either, and the only interesting feature in the entire door (besides the fact that it was excessively big) was a small hexagonal depression cut into the center of the door, about seven feet off the ground.
Cantrip stared, open mouthed, as Seraph walked ahead and placed a hand on the cold stone surface.
"Well, certainly looks like we've found something," muttered Penelope as she gazed upwards at the door. "Looks firmly shut to me though. And it'll take a lot of explosives to blow a hole through a door that size, but I think that even all the explosives in the world would barely dent it."
She was right, of course: the door looked like it was built to last. It would probably take several nuclear bombs to even put a dent in the door, and right now they had nothing but daggers. Seraph squinted at the hexagonal depression. It was.. hexagonal, and it looked very depressed indeed.
"Ookay. So now what? We have, against all probability, managed to navigate through miles of barren tunnels without the slightest idea where we were going and, somehow, found what appears to be, against all probability, again, a massive door slapped onto the cave walls. Only there seems to be no way of opening it, and we'd probably get lost if we tried to retrace our steps, and die of hunger/thirst/sheer madness somewhere in the damned tunnels. If this is someone's idea of an elaborate joke, then I'm laughing, ha ha, very funny!" said Seraph angrily, and gave the door a violent kick.
Something dropped from above, and bounced off the floor before rolling to a stop at Seraph's feet. It looked like a hexagonal shaped metal object, with a single, foreign-looking rune carved in the middle. Seraph, Cantrip and Penelope stared at it.
"I think..." said Penelope, breaking the silence. "...that you should try fitting it into the hole."
Seraph wordlessly picked up the object, stretched, and slid it into the depression. It clicked into place, and then there was a moment where the world held its breath and waited.
Deep inside the earth came the deep rumbling of ancient gears, as the walls shook and it rained dust. A hairline crack appeared and began to split the door right down the middle, and then the door groaned as it creaked open, swinging very slowly inwards, until it stopped with a great resounding thud. Once the dust had settled, Seraph looked into the room beyond.
* * * * *
It was... a strange room. The entire floor was roughly hexagonal in shape, with each of the six walls stretching upwards into the darkness as far as the eye could see. Lanterns blazed in here, but the flames were pure white. Each of the walls were inscribed with a single, gigantic rune word, except for the one with the door. Two of the five runes blazed brightly, while the other three glowed dimly in the darkness.
The strange thing about the room was the scribbles: someone had scribbled words everywhere, and the walls were covered by the same spider-like writing. Apparently the author ran out of space to write, and so the old writings were overwritten with new scribbles, until the entire room was overwritten several times over. The writings were unintelligible to Seraph, Cantrip and Penelope, and in any case they weren't paying much attention to it.
This was mostly because there was someone sitting in the room. Someone with long, bedraggled white hair, yellowed nails, sunken eyes, and a constantly twitching facial motion. If insanity had a smell, then this old man would be a walking perfume counter. He radiated nine different kinds of madness, and gazed blankly at the three intruders who had walked into his lair.
The old man laughed maniacally, then broke down crying, and then giggled helplessly. His eyeballs swivelled madly in their sockets for a moment, and then he started laughing again.
"Er... hello?" said Seraph. Every fibre in his body was telling him to run: madmen tended to do mad things, and sometimes those mad things involved very violent ways to die.
The lunatic sitting in the room twitched, and turned to Seraph, apparently becoming aware of the existence of visitors to his little room. He giggled again. "So, so, so so so so. You have come at last, haven't you, hm hm hm? Excelllent, excellent, it is time for the story, oh yes indeed! The story, the story!" And then he cackled madly again.
Seraph looked at him bewilderedly. Certainly there were no diamonds here, unless the old man was hiding it. Oh well, worth a try... "Erm, you wouldn't happen to have a large diamond in here, would you?" asked Seraph hopefully. "Only there was this guy who said..."
"Diamond? Diamond diamond diamond... no no, no diamonds here, no indeed. No. But a story now! I have many stories, oh yes, many many stories indeed, and many many tales, and some songs. Songs? Yes, sing songs, yes yes, but first, a story! Ask me a story, I know many stories. And many tales."
Seraph gave up. The old man was babbling. "Alright, alright, I guess we have time for a story. It doesnt look like we're going to be going anywhere soon, in any case."
The old man lost his smile, and his face became dead serious. His voice lost the edge of madness, and then he began a story.
next chapter
posted by nerdook at 1:40 PM
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