.
Our location was excellent for Brigitte’s stealth. The Greater Moon would still be up, if I flew out of the valley, but here it was deep darkness, and a bit of fog hung in the gorge, obliterating any starlight that might have come to this spot. Even though the guards at the mine’s mouth, all from beast-kin tribes with good night vision, had line-of-sight on her, Brigitte could have dropped her skill entirely and it was doubtful anyone would see her.
Frankly, the only reason Brigitte could see the guards and the mine’s mouth was the faint glow from a brazier they had in order to get some warmth in this chilly, high-altitude gorge. Since they were at the back of the grotto, no light was reaching them from elsewhere.
That glow was also enough for me to see the ancient foundations. I could see the remains of rubble piles as well, with shovels and buckets giving evidence that someone was in the middle of removing those piles. At a guess, this was simply a transfer point, and the rubble from the mining operation within was sent on to some other spot to hide the presence of the mine.
No wonder I couldn’t spot it. Perhaps the mine offices and worker dormitories were elsewhere also, or even housed inside the mine?
As quietly as I could, I whispered into Brigitte’s ear, “I will fly up and fetch Dilorè. Wait for me to return before you proceed.”
She nodded. I increased my Cloak, since beast-kin might be able to hear me flying, grew my wings and stepped off the path. As I ascended to where Dilorè was waiting, I quietly called out to her.
“We found it, My Lady. I’m here to fetch you.”
Sounding both amused and uncertain, she answered in a stage whisper, “I just found a flaw in our plans. I can’t see you in order to follow you down.”
As I moved into formation beside her, I asked, “Did you see where Brigitte stopped?”
“I lost her when she went around the corner a bit ago.”
“Drop into the gorge, and you should be able to see the guards and the mine mouth. Then land on that path out of their sight, where you last saw her.”
She complied and then nodded once she saw the guards and flew to the spot I had suggested. I found a nearby shadowy spot and landed there, finally uncloaking again.
“Around the corner, there’s a pitch-black nook,” I whispered, pointing the way. “Brigitte is waiting there.”
She nodded, dropping her wings. Shortly after, we reunited with Brigitte.
I really wanted to pick her up and carry her past those guards using Cloak. I could not imagine that her stealth skills were going to get her past beast-kin eyes, ears and noses. I had misgivings nearly as deep about Dilorè. But I recognized that I was looking down on them a bit and tried to fix it. My eyes and ears, combining fairy and vampire racial skills, penetrated their stealth fairly easily, so it was hard to convince myself they were invisible to others.
As for myself, I could crank up the volume on Cloak and feel assured that, at the highest power, it even blocked scents and footsteps. I can only pull off the highest levels in the dark, where the Darkness mana is rich and thick. I had no fear of the guards seeing me. But I was nervous as heck as Brigitte, alternating deftly between [Wall Blend] and [Shadow Crawl] slipped past them without a single beast-kin ear twitching.
I saw a bit of twitching with Dilorè’s pass, and noted one guard developing a momentary frown. As I followed her, I heard him asking his partner, “Did you hear something?”
Interested, I listened to the conversation as I left them behind. The guard on the other side of the mine entrance was teasing him about ghosts. It sounded like there was a rumor that the monastery ruins were haunted.
They ought not joke about it like that. There are things somewhat like ghosts on Huade, and they are affected by careless words. Although many people believe them to be superstition, vengeful spirits do frequently remain after death, and if they do not depart or get purified, they slowly turn into gidim, demonic spirits.
Our operating plan for once we entered the mine was similar to the climb up to the mine, except, now, Dilorè would follow Brigitte while I took the rear. It was for the simple reason that I could see both of them, Dilorè could only see Brigitte, and Brigitte could see neither of us. Any other arrangement would leave somebody unable to tell when the person in front of them stopped.
The entrance did not look new. In fact, I could see evidence that it was an old tunnel recently re-excavated, in the form of soil still compressed into the junctions between floor and walls, or still clutching the walls. The walls curved over into a vaulted ceiling, and in places, there were stonework arches that probably served the same role as the timbers you see inside mines in the movies.
The walls had the remains of plaster on them, on which I could vaguely see shapes and patterns that suggested there had once been murals or decorations. I came up with the theory that the long-vanished monks had made this part. Had they been mining or had they found an entrance to Ilim Below and formed a religious belief about it?
My remnants of Senhion’s ancient mental map of Ilim didn’t help much. Yes, there had been an entrance near here, but the valley itself was a feature that didn’t exist ten thousand years ago. Back then, the peak had been taller, and this ridge had been far broader. The entrance mouth had been on terrain that was no longer there. I didn’t know what geological process had formed the plateau where Fol and Melis’s village sat, but that feature itself was new. There had been a gentle, nondescript valley there, leading down to a large, deep lake much lower than the current Gado valley. The surface of the current plateau had been far underground back then.
Brigitte halted as we reached a wide gallery, in which a few dimmed magic lanterns were serving as nightlights. A large number of soldiers and a handful of women were asleep on mats in the middle of the floor. On the walls, better preserved plaster was covered in hieroglyphic-like characters from an ancient language I had seen before but never learned how to read. I couldn’t bring to mind the name of the ancient kingdom that they represented, but I knew it was from several millennia back.
My guts twisted as I noticed that the women wore slave collars. More than likely, there were magic formations built into those collars to prevent escape attempts. Our thief shot a look over her shoulder and pointed them out, with a deep frown on her face, but she didn’t approach them. Instead, she slipped sideways along the wall of the gallery.
It would be nice to rescue them, and to kill the bastards who had obviously been using them before sleeping, but right now, it wasn’t practical. There were more women than we could carry, and who knew where we could bring them that was safe? It would be better to leave them undisturbed for now. The way events were shaping up in this valley, their captors’ days were numbered anyhow.
I still privately made a wish that we would find a way to free them later, when we had more intelligence on the situation. When we knew that killing a few rapists wouldn’t create a worse situation for their victims rather than a better one.
As Brigitte worked her way around the periphery, she would investigate objects as she found them, not too subtly evaluating their value. I just watched in fascination, wondering if she was going to go ahead and swipe something in front of us.
She reached one shadowy area and then alarmed both of us by vanishing completely from our view. Dilorè hurried there, and almost dove into the pitch black area before I grabbed her arm.
Very softly, I whispered, “She’s fine.”
Normal vision was blocked with a Darkness enchantment, but I could see her in vampire sight once I reached the little entrance where she had vanished. She was inside a small room at the end of a short hall, apparently still able to navigate in blackness that my fairy sight didn’t penetrate. I could hear her making faint clicking noises with her tongue…
… echolocation? That’s not a fox thing, though…? I decided that couldn’t be it, but there was no way she could see in there.
Brigitte emerged, looking satisfied, and winked– even though there was no way she could see where we were exactly. She was guessing our locations– before turning around and holding her hand up to use the [Relock] skill that reversed the effect of her [Unlock] skill.
She had unlocked some sort of barrier or door while she was out of our view, and removed the evidence of her passage upon leaving. And from the pleased look on her face, I had a feeling she had acquired something while in there.
Passing us, she continued in her path around the perimeter until reaching another tunnel like the one we used to reach this gallery.
It was very short, descending in steep steps and ending only a pace after it began in a tee intersection with another tunnel. This one was slanting downward to the left, the northerly direction. When exploring mines, one tends to seek the downward direction out of habit, and Brigitte and Dilorè both turned that way first.
I don’t like leaving unknown passages behind my back, so I turned the other direction first. I found that, within about five paces, it was blocked with timbers that were heavily buttressed against collapse. I tried using fairy sense to look for voids behind it, then used vampire sense after fairy sense failed. It showed me only rubble and dirt, clogging a tunnel that continued upward.
I spent some time sensing my surroundings to confirm my suspicions. The tunnel had very different characteristics than the ones we had passed through so far. It was much wider and taller, having a circular cross-section with a flat at the bottom about two thirds as wide as the diameter. The tunnel was lined with an artificial material that was neither stone nor metal. I suppose on Earth it would have been called a kind of plastic, although it didn’t resemble Earthly plastics, either.
Having seen it, I knew that in steeper sections, the floor would have steps, because this was the typical form for the smallest class of entrance tunnel for Ilim Below.
Magic lanterns were hung at very long intervals, barely providing any light at all. These looked like the type that someone with the Light attribute had to come along and recharge daily, and they were probably within hours of running out.
It wasn’t a direct continuous descent. Every section would end in a landing, a small, square gallery about four times the width of the tunnel, in which one would have to either turn ninety degrees or at least move over to a few paces to continue in the same direction. Some of the descending sections were gentle ramps, others were uncomfortably steep staircases that thankfully only descended about ten paces at a time. I say that because the ramp sections could descend as much as five times that much.
In one of those galleries, when we had descended about two hundred paces, I began growing disturbed. I slipped around Dilorè and caught Brigitte’s arm before she could proceed to the next section.
She jerked, then whispered, “Aah! Don’t do that!”
“We need to talk about this,” I said, dropping my cloak once I had moved out of line-of-sight of the ascending and descending tunnels.
“This is already the ancient tunnels you were describing, right?” Dilorè observed. “This looks nothing like either a monster-made subterranean tunnel or a modern mine.”
“That’s right,” I confirmed. “There is no mine. Someone knew this entrance existed and unearthed it. They’ve also disabled the intrusion defenses for the entrance, since we haven’t run into any of those. Assuming they’re down there, the Berado and their slaves are doing whatever they’re doing at this entrance’s destination.”
“Meaning, they’re down in your ‘Ilim Below’,” Dilorè supplied.
“Which is another five hundred paces down,” I nodded. “We need to report back before we go all the way down.”
At the exact moment I was saying that, Brigitte turned sharply alert, her eyes widening and her ears standing straight up. She dragged us both further into the corner.
“Which direction?” I asked in a bare whisper. She had obviously heard something coming.
“From below,” she whispered back.
I put my arms around the waists of both women and resumed my Cloak, extending it around both of them and running it up to its highest strength.
“I’m Cloaking both of you,” I told them quietly. “Stay still. I have to be holding you to do it.”
Although I was blocking sound, nobody spoke. Well, maybe the other two didn’t realize I was blocking sight, sound and smell. We waited and watched as the footsteps came up from below and the newcomers emerged.
I expected Berado. Or Gado slaves. Or maybe even some persons associated with Parna and his people.
The one thing I didn’t expect in that moment was a trio of imps.
