Chapter Fifty-Five
It was quite easy to navigate the archipelago that had once been the land of Imvish’al. The gaps between its various fractured parts were wide, and what remained was without banks or shores or even shallows. Shoals were few and far between.
The tops of the islands were several hundred yards above rolling swells and did not slope down to the water at all; they descended directly into it. Wherever the waves and currents were strongest and unrelenting, the once sheer sides had become concave, the brim of the land above now hanging over open water.
As Druadaen finished arranging the fit of his armor, Ahearn came to stand alongside him. “It’s like looking at the remains of a child’s puzzle,” he mused as they waited for the skiff that would carry them to “Library,” one of the few named islands in the archipelago.
Umkhira turned away from her somber study of the towering tan-ochre masses. “It is very strange. I have been watching for any sign that these island-buttes are made of unusually hard rock, but their sides are too regular for that. Also, they show layers of different kinds of stone.”
Druadaen nodded, asked, “And what does that tell you, Umkhira?”
“It tells me that these objects are not simply what has been left behind after wind and water has worn at them. Because if so, the softer layers would be more eroded.”
“You are quite correct, Lightstrider,” said Tharêdæath as he emerged from the sterncastle. “Their peculiar shape is not the result of natural forces.”
“So…supernatural forces, then?” quipped Ahearn with a hint of seriousness at the end.
The ancient Uulamantre shrugged. “I may not say.”
Ahearn’s frustrated frown made it necessary for Druadaen to smother a grin. Using the phrase “I may not,” Tharêdæath could have meant, “don’t know” or “I am not allowed,” and the Iavarain clearly had no intention of clarifying which he had intended.
S’ythreni was squinting at the side of Library. “There seems to be a set of flat rock outcroppings that follow upward all around its core, like a ragged spiral staircase.” She lowered her eyes slightly as she glanced toward the Uulamantre. “Til’A’Thruadëre, I would ask: Have you knowledge of their origins?”
He smiled at her. “Be at your ease, Alva S’ythreni. I am not one to judge you, neither before nor now. You may speak less formally. But in the matter of those structures, I only have conjecture, not knowledge.”
“Til’A’Thru—er, Tharêdæath, would you be willing to share those conjectures with your guests?”
He nodded slightly, staring at the islands. “From the first time I saw these islands—and I have only been here twice before—those climbing platforms were present. Since these islands have never known inhabitants, construction, or vegetation since the Cataclysm reduced Imvish’al to these fragments, those stepped platforms cannot be the product of mundane engineering.
“However, it is equally clear that they are not the result of natural forces. The other two named islands—Mastaba and Nursery—have similar structures. No others do. So I must conjecture that these were created by an immense, if crude, application of manas.”
“So it was mancery,” Ahearn breathed.
“No,” Elweyr corrected quickly, with a nervous glance at the Uulamantre. “Not in the way you mean it.”
Tharêdæath nodded. “This was not achieved by the casting of mantic cognates nor any form of dweomancy or even deistic miracles. It is conceivable—barely—that a broad array of such forces could be harnessed to create what we see before us, but then the shapes of the ledges and the islands themselves would have been more regular, more precise. These have the appearance of elemental transformations.”
Elweyr goggled. “At this scale?”
Tharêdæath shrugged. “Many of the feats that now sound impossible were once living realities. We are speaking of the time when great dragons vied for power with nations, when chthonic direkynde and cryptigants still roamed, barely held in check.” He nodded at the crude staircase. “Their powers were great but crude. Just as we see here.” He stepped back from the gunwale and added, “I will tell the quartermaster to furnish you with climbing gear. Unless my eyes are becoming unreliable, I believe the path upward may not be as congenial as it looks from here.”
* * *
“You climb pretty well,” S’ythreni called from below. “For a human.”
“A skill from my misspent youth,” Druadaen chuckled down at her.
“I cannot picture that,” she muttered.
“So you can’t imagine me running from rooftop to rooftop?”
“No. I can’t imagine you having anything vaguely like a ‘misspent youth.’”
He didn’t reply, in part because he had to focus on the tricky task of traversing a gap where one of the stone platforms had fallen away. But he also couldn’t think of a valid rebuttal. Was I really that boring, or was I just that cautious? he wondered as he boosted from one handhold to the next, dislodging a few pebbles as he checked the seating of the piton he’d just placed.
“Hey! Watch what you’re doing!” shouted Ahearn from even further below. A loud guttural grumble conveyed Umkhira’s similar opinion of being beneath the tumbling chips of stone.
“Just about there,” Druadaen shouted down and pulled himself up the rest of the way. Setting another piton quickly, he searched the sloping surface of the platform and found a startlingly convenient spot to tie off the guide rope and belaying lines. “All is secure,” he shouted, glancing upward. The rest of the climb was comparatively simple: just navigating the giant-sized staircase to the top of the island-butte.
He spooled down the belaying lines and stood ready to assist the others. S’ythreni had stopped near where he’d secured them. “When were you going to mention this?” she asked.
“When the others are safely up here.”
“Sensible,” she conceded and stood with him, ready to assist.
But the others made the rest of the ascent safely, Ahearn being the last to clamber over the edge. “Well, I won’t be disappointed if we don’t have to do that again,” he muttered, just before noticing that Elweyr and Umkhira were looking down at something in the seam between the platform and the sheer side of the rock column. He joined them, stared, turned back toward Druadaen. “The place you fixed this piton—that hole was already there, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but it had this in it.” Druadaen held up a weathered bronze ring.
“So much for being the first ones here,” the swordsman muttered sourly.
“Well,” S’ythreni mused, “maybe that’s today’s ‘disturbing surprise.’” She looked around the group. “There has to be at least one, right?”
Elweyr stared at her in something like pity and disgust. “I never thought I would have reason to say this…but you are revoltingly optimistic.”
She smiled at him, then stuck her tongue out.
Druadaen looked up toward the lip of the tableland. “Either way, we can’t know if there are more surprises until we get to the top. So let’s hope for the best.” But he kept his caveat to himself:
There’s a first time for everything, I suppose.
* * *
A skull glared at them as they came over the crest. It was resting in a fissure just a few yards beyond the lip, brown with age. The actual head had been smaller than any of theirs, but the shape was distinctly human.
“Well, that’s reassuring,” Elweyr muttered.
They found a few more ancient bones lying in other nearby gaps in the rock, along with a badly weathered bronze knife blade. Except for the tang, nothing remained of the hilt at all. It wasn’t hard to imagine what had happened to it and the rest of the bones: the wind blowing atop the barren tableland had carried everything else over the side. The only exceptions were objects trapped in depressions so deep that even gales could not sweep them clean.
But Tharêdæath’s assessment of the islands was correct: neither people nor vegetation had intruded since the sundering that created them. Library was flat, dusty, and featureless, except for a few low stone ridges and lumps some distance in from the edge. The other nearby island-mesas differed only in that their tops showed no such variations at all.
Leaning into the intermittent gusts, they made their way to Library’s only landmark and discovered it to be the knee-height remains of a temple, worn down to the stereobate and a few wind-smoothed nubs of stone objects embedded around it.
“I think,” Ahearn announced, “that the library may not be open today.”
Druadaen tried to grin but the wind blew dust and grit into his teeth. “Tharêdæath mentioned ruins. Underground.”
“And he was right,” called Elweyr, who had stopped at one of the stone nubs. The size and shape reminded Druadaen of an outsized capstan. He knelt down and traced a finger along the seam where the rock met the ground. The wind blew new dust into the line he’d cleaned, but before it did, they saw that the stone had a metal rim and that a small amount of dust disappeared down into the narrow seam between it and the ground.
“Odd way to get into a library,” Ahearn muttered.
Elweyr shook his head. “This was a secret entrance.” He glanced toward the almost vanished stone rectangle of the temple’s base and smiled. “The library is under there.”
“How can you be so certain?” asked Umkhira.
Druadaen smiled. “Before the modern age, many human nations were strict theocracies. The palimpsests of that time speak of scholars being exiled, imprisoned, even burned with their tomes and scrolls.”
Ahearn smiled. “So where better to put a secret library than right beneath their arses. Oh that’s rich, if true.”
“Let’s find out,” said Elweyr, who rocked the stone gently, sensed where there was a bit of wobble, and pushed hard in that direction.
He almost fell into the hole that was revealed. The nub did not ease down into the ground; it swung rapidly out of the way, as if mounted on a loose, well-greased hinge. A dark set of spiral stairs descended into the darkness. “Glad we still have those bull’s-eye lanterns,” Elweyr muttered as they pulled him back up.
“And my eyes,” S’ythreni said. “Tie a rope on me and stand aside.”
* * *
Twenty feet below the surface, the spiral staircase ended in a broad landing carved out of the surrounding rock. To one side, a much wider straight staircase continued down. On the other side was an alcove housing the secret entrance’s mechanism—although that was a charitable term for it. It was a simple counterweight, actuated by an egg-shaped block of exaggerated proportions. When enough force was exerted, the change in balance caused it to roll, pulling the entry’s stone cap with it.
Druadaen examined it, admiring the simplicity of the arrangement. “Ingenious,” he said.
“Dangerous,” S’ythreni countered. “That cursed stone flung itself away so quickly, Elweyr could have broken his neck.”
Umkhira frowned. “So maybe it was crafted to kill intruders who did not know enough to lean away when it opened.”
“I think there’s another explanation,” Druadaen said, pointing out the device’s simple connections and counterweights. “This was designed to move something much heavier. So what has changed is the weight of the stone. The wind has probably worn it down to a fraction of its original size.” He frowned. “But that means the actual entry would have been somewhat higher. It probably involved some kind of pedestal with a false bottom that could turn—”
“Druadaen?”
“Yes, Ahearn?”
“Maybe we should go find that library now.”