“Chaka.” Quait’s voice. “We need to tie the ladder down.”
“Right.” The ladder was about three feet out. Just beyond easy reach.
She tried for it twice. The second time she lost her balance and almost fell. It was a desperate moment. And it was stupid because they didn’t need to do it this way. “Quait.”
“Yes. What’s taking so long?”
“I can’t reach it. I need someone to come down.”
Flojian came next, with lamps dangling from his belt. When he reached the doorway, she caught his hand and pulled him in. And the ladder along with him. They tied it to a beam and lit the lamps while they waited for Claver.
Quait was last to descend, having looped his safety line around the tree and dropped it to them so that someone would be holding the other end.
When he’d joined them, they pushed through into the inner passageway. Beyond, in the gloomy light thrown by the lamps, they saw the stairway and the corridor and the shafts. The shafts were very much like the ones in the towers around Union Station. Chaka looked down into one. “Damp,” she said.
She found a couple of pebbles and tossed them in. After a few seconds, they splashed.
The air was stale away from the door.
Claver indicated his surprise that the air was breathable at all, until Flojian noted a duct cover in the ceiling. There was a system of vents.
The stairway was not cut from rock, but rather was an insert, made of Roadmaker metal. The handrail and the stairs were covered with dust.
They picked up their equipment and started down. Flojian took the lead.
Chaka had never quite believed the story about the six deaths. When people die in groups, they don’t die without marks. She noticed that Quait kept his hand close to his weapon.
That Flojian harbored similar feelings was evident. He moved as quietly as he could, spoke in a hushed voice, and everything about his demeanor suggested that he was controlling his own set of devils. That was an unusual attitude for him: He was given to caution, but Chaka rarely saw him frightened. Nevertheless, he stayed in front.
Even Claver seemed intimidated, and had little to say. He carried a coil of rope and a bar, but he was probably not aware he gripped the bar like a weapon.
The dark was tangible. It squeezed the light from their lamps. Shadows moved grotesquely around the walls. They could hear the wind, seemingly in the rock. Corridors opened at each level. The shafts were always there, of course, and beyond they saw doorways, sometimes open, sometimes not.
“The walls are wet,” said Claver. “This isn’t a place I’d use for storage.”
“It was probably military,” suggested Quait. “Whatever it might have become in later years it was originally a military or naval installation.”
The stairway wound back and forth, landing by landing, until they concluded they must surely be near the base of the cliff. And then it ended. Broke off.
“This is probably where they found your father,” Chaka told Flojian.
Quait stood at the edge of the landing, held his lamp out, and looked down. They could see a floor.
That’s where they died.
“No dust here,” said Claver.
There wasn’t. The landing was dean. So were five or six stairs above the landing. Above that, the dust was thick. Curious.
The floor was about twenty-five feet down.
“Maybe,” Claver continued, “they opened a door and released a pocket of gas.”
That was dose to making sense. It was akin to what had happened to Jon Shannon when he opened the wrong door. But there was a missing element. “There was no explosion,” Chaka said.
“Don’t need one. They start breathing gas, lose consdous-ness, and they smother.”
“All six of them?”
“Well,” Claver admitted, “it does require a stretch.”
“Anyhow,” said Flojian, “they were found in different places.”
Claver shook his head. “There’s always a tendency to dramatize when you’re telling a story.”
“I don’t think Knobby was lying,” said Chaka.
Flojian tied a line around his lamp and lowered it. The remains of the collapsed staircase lay scattered around the floor below.
“I wouldn’t suggest he was lying,” said Claver. “But people get confused easily. Espedally in a place like this. To be honest with you, if things happened the way Knobby said, I’d be ready to accept the idea that there’s something loose in these tunnels.”
Quait knew immediately that Claver regretted having said it. But it was out in the open now, no calling it back, and they looked nervously at one another and peered into the area below. They could see the openings to passageways down there. One in each wall. “If it was gas,” he asked, “could the same thing happen to us?”
“Oh, yes.” Claver shook his head emphatically. “Yes, indeed. I would certainly say so. Just open the wrong door.”
“How do we protect ourselves?” asked Flojian.
Chaka made a noise low in her throat. “Stay clear of doors altogether,” she said.
“That’s right.” Claver folded his arms and assumed the stance of an instructor. “If we open any doors, one person does it, and the rest of us get well back. I’d suggest also no one wander off alone. And be careful with the guns.” He threw a long hard look at Quait. “We’re all a trifle jittery right now.” He stressed the pronoun to suggest that he was really talking about the Illyrians. “We don’t have much light, and we’re likely in more danger from ourselves than from any outside source.”
“I hope so,” said Quait. He tied a rope to the handrail and pulled it tight. The lower area was dark, cold, dismal. Light reflected off puddles. “It’s not the way I expected Haven to look,” he said. He dropped the other end of the line into the lower chamber, wrapped it around his waist, and stepped off the landing.
“Careful.” Chaka drew her pistol.
Quait lowered himself smoothly. He had his own weapon out before he touched ground. The floor was wet. It glittered in the light from the lamps. As soon as he was clear, Chaka started down.
There was a doorway in each wall.
The passage with the shafts was behind her. Two adjacent corridors rolled away into the dark. Directly ahead, she was looking at a flat, low tunnel. A massive door lay half wedged in the tunnel entrance.
Quait was walking around, thrusting his lamp into each passageway in turn. The corridors to left and right revealed several open doors. Chaka took a quick look and saw large rooms with high ceilings and piles of soggy wreckage.
Flojian gazed at the fallen door, and then walked into the fourth passageway. Chaka followed him. Twenty feet farther on, there was another, apparently identical, door. It too was down. Beyond, they saw black water.
“The underground lake,” said Flojian.
“So far,” said Chaka, “Knobby seems to be accurate.”
The surface of the lake lay several feet below floor level. The lake itself stretched into the dark. Chaka looked up at the ceiling. It was quite smooth and flat, only a few feet above the water. “This is a chamber,” she said, “not a cave.”
“Look at this.” Flojian directed the beam from his lamp to a stairway. The stairway descended into the water.
Chaka stared at it a long time. “I don’t think this area’s supposed to be under water,* she said.
Claver by now had joined them. “The doors are hatches,” he said. “They wanted to seal off the lake.”
“Why?” asked Flojian.
“Maybe there’s something that comes out of the water,” suggested Chaka.
Claver’s brow furrowed. “I just don’t understand what happened here,” he said.
The tall corridor was lined with open rooms, all resembling the one that Chaka had looked into. They entered the nearest one and played their lantern beams across ancient tables, benches, cabinets. Everything was wet and cold.
