.
I expected to emerge from the seemingly endless maze of empty corridors of the complex into an underworld similar to the one where we had left Diurhimath. The reality to which we arrived couldn’t have been more different.
The final corridor terminated in a closed door, which I feared would be as stuck as the door I had failed to move in the first corridor we entered. But, as unreasonable as it seemed, touching the control for it resulted in smoothly operating hinges which allowed the two door panels to swing open silently, ten thousand years after the last resident left this place.
I thought about the ‘cleaner’ we had encountered, and wondered if some similar automaton with a maintenance function was also wandering the complex. We had enjoyed working lighting the entire way, after all. Once I accepted those, was it really unreasonable for other fixtures to still be operational?
The doors let out onto a porch at the top of long ramps leading down into a bizarre landscape.
Before us, the dimly-lit ground showed no sign of any plant species except a brown-green moss that covered the lumpy surface. Frankly, in the light available, it was impossible to be sure of color, but I had the impression it might be brown-green. The moss covered a field occasionally broken by small hummocks, each around a pace or so high.In places, taller hills rose, and to our left a small lake stretched from mid-cavern to the far left wall. A few small islands rose from the dark, placid water near the shore. Regardless of the landform, every inch of ground grew the same ugly moss.
Contrary to the strange ground, the ceiling and walls did have the same sort of luminescent moss or lichen that tended to decorate the other cavern walls and show up in mines and natural caves as well. From the colors, I suspected every species in existence was present, creating the same glowing patchwork. But thanks to the total lack of moonglow grass and other luminous plants, it was the only lighting. The overall effect was a much dimmer space, under a ceiling alive with psychedelic colors of every imaginable shade, like a rave organizer gone stark raving mad.
The cavern was circular, and the ceiling had vaguely the shape of a ger, the style of yurt used in Mongolia. As befit the normal scale of things in Ilim Below, it was enormous, nearly a mile in diameter, with the center nearly two hundred paces above the floor. But yurts have internal columns, while this was a free-standing ceiling. It had that same feeling of gravity-defying impossibility that I had felt upon entering the main cavern.
The scale and design was right… but the meadows and forests of an underground park, as we had found in Carael and in the main cavern, were nowhere to be seen.
The lake was easily explained. The drain for this cavern was the top end of the same tunnel that I had entered earlier, which exited at the point in the circle closest to the cavern behind us. Now that the floor slanted southward, water had flooded all points farther south than the exit.
“The princess is in here somewhere?” Brigitte asked with an uncertain tone. She was also surveying the room with the same dubious frown that I was wearing.
I nodded anyway, pointing to Diur’s outrider. “The guide is still trying to lead us. See?”
It was waiting for us at the bottom of the ramp to our right. I rested my hand on Durandal’s pommel, where it had been for most of the time since we first began climbing the stairs, and was about to set out.
Then I had a thought after looking at the ground beyond the bottom of the ramp and then at Brigitte’s bare feet. “We aren’t on nice clean floors anymore. Do you want to use my slippers? Nothing I step on in here is going to bother my feet.”
She had declined them before, but this might be a much longer trek. But she twisted her mouth and shook her head.
“I’ll be okay.”
She strode down the ramp ahead of me. I followed, wondering if I was hurting either her hunter pride or her fox-kin pride. She usually wears shoes, though.
I quickly realized, as I concentrated on my fairy sense, that there was absolutely nothing larger than an insect moving on land in this cavern. Absolutely the only vertebrates I could detect were Brigitte and myself. Not so much as a field mouse lived in this place.
Without insectivores, one might think the place would be crawling with insects, but maybe the thin, sickly moss that we were walking on didn’t provide enough food to support that many insects in the first place. There were enough insects to support dragonflies and spiders, though. We encountered many as we walked through the strange landscape.
It was eerie in this place, without wind, animal noises, or human noises, just the occasional whirs of passing bugs. None were the normal pests, like flies or mosquitoes. The vertebrates and their carrion that such bugs depended upon were absent here, so those species had long since died out.
Soon, my mind replayed memories of this place, or similar ones. I knew that many such pleasure domes, as they were called, had existed throughout the underworld. They were exclusive rest and recreational retreats for Elders and Servants, places to unwind, exercise and meditate, a refuge away from the job of caring for the mortals and creatures in the larger caverns. There would be baths and playing fields and pavilions and lodges, mostly for the Servants, who needed recreation more, but also used occasionally by Elders on break. Senhion had largely lived outside, but she had been fond of taking occasional meals at a particular pavilion, something like a tea house, in a similar dome far to the south of here, near her mountain.
Once I remembered that, I realized that the hummocks were the remnants of structures. Unlike the caverns themselves, or the mile-long complex of a hundred thousand rooms behind us, which had been fashioned directly by Gaia, the ordinary structures were the handiwork of Elders and Servants. The fact that anything at all remained of the pavilions and lodges was a marvel. I searched one of the hummocks and identified tumbled building blocks and buried foundations. The rest of the structure had long since returned to soil, but no weather occurred here beyond a light irrigating mist to erode that soil. Only the action of roots and worms acted upon it.
The guide led us onward through this eerie landscape, occasionally running us afoul of spider webs and the like, until we reached our destination, a spot on the wall near the northernmost point of the cavern.
There, it stopped.
Brigitte and I looked around in confusion. Nothing in this place looked any different than the rest, other than the fact that we were against the wall, and we certainly saw no missing princesses here. But a vague notion of a memory was haunting me, as if I should be noticing something about the place.
“Are we waiting for something?” Brigitte wondered.
“I’m not sure,” I answered, then raised my voice slightly. “Guide, are we to do something in particular now?”
The outrider simply continued to hover, enigmatic and silent. I tapped Lucy’s pouch.
“Lucy? Are you able to speak with this thing?”
Lucy appeared, and went to fly around it. She tipped her head.
“Spirit?” she asked, looking my way.
“It’s supposed to be something like that,” I told her.
She continued pondering it, but said nothing further.
I tapped Durandal’s pommel, but his reply to my unspoken question was, It seems to be waiting for a reply from something, My Lady.
“Lucy, can you call a local Wind spirit here?”
“Call!” she answered, and then, for some reason, fluttered to her stone and disappeared. But she had done as requested, as a spirit appeared before us a very short time later.
“Lucy, ask it where the girls that Lord Moram is helping me look for went.”
After a pause of a few seconds, Lucy’s voice declared, “Here!”
“Here? The princess is here?”
The Wind spirit floated up to the wall, then disappeared into it. A moment later, it reappeared, and Lucy explained. “Go here!”
Confused, I sent my sense into the wall. It had been telling me there was solid rock behind the moss covered surface, but perhaps if I concentrated on it…
No, it was definitely solid rock. I switched over to vampire sense, sending Dark mana forward, and again found nothing but rock.
“But there’s nowhere to go, here,” I said, while something was tickling my memory.
Lucy used her ‘other spirit speaking’ voice to translate for the Wind spirit. “Follow aura. Girls go. Can’t follow.”
“I’ve heard legends like that,” Brigitte noted. “That there are people who can use [Shadow Pass] to travel to a completely different place instead of just passing through a wall.”
There are a lot of legendary magic spells. They are mostly just urban legends, but they always have a chance of actually being rare, high-level spells. But…
“Amelia is only a second level mage,” I said with a shake of my head. “And Darkness isn’t one of her affinities.”
“What about the knight with her?”
I wanted to object to that idea. If Chiara had such a spell, they could have long ago escaped their captors. But we didn’t know whether Chiara was a captive or one of the perpetrators.
“Is this the spirit that actually saw her go into the wall?” I wondered.
Spirits pass memories around so much, there is no way of knowing that, My Lady, Durandal answered. It possesses the memory of seeing it happen.
I went to the spot where the spirit had faded into the wall and began very closely inspecting with fairy sight. Then I sighed.
“This place is so alive with mana, it’s hard to tell anything. There might be an ancient pattern underneath all this, but I would have to clear off all the moss to be sure.”
“You could do that, right?” Brigitte noted. “Blast it with water or something?”
She was probably thinking about the other day, when I poured out a few hundred gallons in front of everyone.
I looked at her while considering it, then dug into my belt-wallet and pulled out the Starfire Jade Writing Brush. I summoned a large quantity of Water mana, and…
“Please step forward for identification,” a voice intoned before I could let loose.
