Storm Rising

He moved out of the way, leaving space for the others to enter behind him.

Karal lagged back; for one thing, he was not sure he wanted to see what they were looking for. For another, he knew very well he wouldn't know what he was looking at!

So he allowed all the others to crowd in ahead of him, and trailed behind. He expected exclamations, but he heard nothing but a few whispers.

When he passed the threshold himself, he understood why.

This was a huge room, but practically empty except for four of the crystal lights suspended from the ceiling, and a single floating barge in the middle. Faint outlines in the ceiling above the barge suggested a door or hatchway there.

Around the periphery of the room were fifteen more doors, all of them closed.

Where were the weapons? Had all of them been taken away?

'The weapons must be behind each of those doors, one to a room,' Firesong said authoritatively. 'If I were holding dangerous objects, that's what I'd do with them. That way if you had an accident with one, it would be confined to the room it was in and not spread to the others.'

'You begin to sound like a career artificer, Firesong,' Silverfox replied. 'That makes entirely too much sense.'

Firesong turned to the nearest door on his right, and continued talking. 'What's more, I'll bet the room we were in held a weapon that Urtho did use, and the reason that the barge is in here is to take large or bulky creations up to where you can—or could, I mean—move them out the doors.'

'I wonder why this place even exists,' An'desha said, as Firesong checked to see if the door was locked before he tried opening it. 'You'd think that a force that would melt the Tower would destroy everything, wouldn't you?'

'Maybe because this was right below the event, none of the force went downward,' Karal hazarded, trying to remember some of what he'd learned from the artificers.

'Perhaps the shields on the Vault disintegrated, but absorbed all of the force in the process,' Silverfox guessed.

'Perhaps the Star-Eyed had something to do with it,' Lo'isha said with great dignity.

'Perrrhapsss all of thossse rrreasssonsss, perrrhapsss none,' Treyvan said with impatience. 'Isss the doorrr locked orrr not?'

'Just stuck,' Firesong replied, finally shoving it open. He spoke the word that lit the lamp and gave an exclamation of disappointment.

'Come look for yourself, but I don't think this one is going to do us any good,' he said, waving them over.

Once again Karal held back, but on his own viewing, he was inclined to agree with Firesong. This room contained a conglomerate of bizarre parts, from coils of wire to animal skulls with jeweled eyes, all woven together in a crazed spider-web of colored string, ribbon, hair-thin wire, and rawhide thongs.

'Good God, why skulls?' Karal exclaimed, revolted.

'Perhaps because they had been used in shamanic ceremonies and so now were attuned to power of a sort he needed,' Lo'isha hazarded. 'Not Kaled'a'in ceremonies, but Urtho made use of the magics he had learned from many peoples, and many peoples were his allies.'

'I don't know about you, but I don't even want to touch that,' Firesong said as he edged back outside. 'I don't know what it does, and I'm not sure it would still do it at this point—and even if it did, how much of it would fall into dust if you brushed against it?'

'Trrrue,' Treyvan said, taking care to tuck his wings in as he moved back outside. With one accord, they closed the door with the greatest of care and moved on to the next room.

By the time they were finished, they had eliminated eight of the fifteen possibilities. None were quite as bizarre as the cow-skull construction, but no one wanted to take any chances on them. Two were featureless boxes that had even Treyvan shaking his head in bafflement, one was an unidentifiable object that resembled nothing so much as a spill of liquid caught and frozen in midair. Two more were delicate sculptures of wires and gemstones that they were all afraid to touch lest they fall to pieces, and the remaining three Treyvan recognized from his litany as being simple weapons of dreadful mass destruction of life and property—not at all suited to their purposes, for there was nothing magical about the energy released when these things were triggered.