Old Marof, moving his creaky bones with determined steadiness, took twice as long to reach the ruins as he would have normally, but on this day there could be no mistake. He followed the most devious route possible, using paths and dim forest trails known only to local one-namers, and he paused repeatedly to make certain he hadn’t aroused the curiosity of a lasher patrol.
Finally he arrived at one of three locations called “checkpoints”—one of Egarn’s strange words that Marof always meditated while he waited. This “checkpoint” was located in an overgrown hollow, so why was it a point? Marof seated himself on a log, leaned back comfortably against a tree, and relaxed. Eventually, when the sentries were positive he hadn’t been followed, one of them would come for him. Egarn called the watchers above ground “sentries” and those below ground “guards,” which gave Marof more words to meditate.
Egarn also called everyone living and working there— sentries, guards, helpers, and crafters—his “team”— another strange word. Marof occasionally acted as sentry when one of the regulars was sick or had another job to do. He admired Egarn, but he preferred to work for Arne. Arne always let a helper know what was happening. Few of those on Egarn’s “team” seemed to understand what he was doing except that it was something important to all of them.
Local people had a superstitious dread of the ruins and avoided them. Marof could understand why. From his position in the hollow, he could see the mysterious tower looming above the overgrown remains of collapsed buildings like a petrified monster about to feed on them. As a sentry, on days when absolutely nothing was happening, he relieved the monotony by contemplating the tower’s graceful, curved shape and wondering how it came to be there and what purpose it could have served. Egarn knew, of course, and Wiltzon, but their answers to his questions never made sense to Marof. From his position in the hollow, the tower seemed to be intact; from the opposite side, it looked as though a larger monster had taken a bite out of it. Around its base, the ruins that cluttered the forest floor reared up from deeply delved concrete roots to flaunt their strangeness. An enigmatic people of the past had lavished long forgotten skills on them and then, for inscrutable reasons of their own, left them for time to erode.
The sentry approached soundlessly. He was Havler, a middle-aged man with a crippled leg. Like most of the members of Egarn’s team, he was a one-name refugee who had lost his family in the wars. He was an excellent sentry. He moved slowly, but he saw and heard everything.
Marof delivered his message in a whisper, made certain Havler understood it, and then left immediately. He had his own work to perform, and the sooner he reached South Wood Road and began inspecting bridges, the better.
Marof vanished into the trees; Havler turned in the opposite direction and chirped a bird call before he limped soundlessly toward the ruins. Just outside the concealed mouth of a tunnel, he whispered Marof’s message to Connol, who was serving as head sentry for the day.
Connol gestured at the ground. “I suppose they should be told.”
“Aya,” Havler agreed. “They certainly should.”
“I’ll go,” Connol said. Havler’s lame leg made him a slow messenger on stairs, and there were multitudes of stairs between them and the first of the guards stationed below. “Hold the post for me.”
Havler drew back into the trees and seated himself. He would act as head sentry until Connol returned. Arne had issued a stern order: the post could not be left unattended unless a raid were in progress—in which case the head sentry himself was to pull the alarm wire, make certain that the alarm actually sounded, and then withdraw with the other sentries, trying to distract the raiders’ attention from the ruins. The alarm wire sent a large basket of stones and scrap metal cascading down those endless flights of metal stairs, and if the racket this made was not quite loud enough to raise the dead, as the old saying went, it certainly would attract the attention of anyone below who was still living. Havler had heard the alarm tested.
The tunnel’s entrance was concealed by a layer of sod attached to a base woven of sticks. Connol pulled it open just far enough to admit him and closed it after him. There was barely enough room inside for him to crawl through the darkness on hands and knees. He made his way blindly around several obstructions, followed a sharp turning, and saw, far ahead of him, jagged patches of light that marked rents in the tunnel’s roof. The tunnel seemed to curve into infinity; actually, it went nowhere. When Connol reached a bulging rock, he scraped dirt from its edges and pressed on it until it pivoted to reveal an opening. The rock was a hollow shell fashioned of clay and fired to simulate a real rock. Connol entered and pivoted the fake rock into place behind him. On his return, he would replace the dirt.
He emerged at top of the first flight of stairs, paused to make certain the alarm system’s basket of debris was in position, and then started down at a run. An enemy would try to creep down silently, so members of the team always made as much noise as possible.
The stairwell was roofless. At middae, under a clear sky, it received enough sunlight to sketch shadows on the upper levels. By niot it was a black pit with an occasional star glimpsed directly overhead. Connol quickly descended into nether regions that were dim even by day.
Down, down he went, one flight after another. Each time he made that descent into darkness, the depth seemed more immense to him. At the bottom, a metal door stood a few inches ajar. When it was opened further, it emitted a resounding, grinding screech of protest. Beyond it was a room that must have been enormous before the upper levels collapsed into it. It was totally dark, but Connol had seen it by torchlight. Massive columns that once had supported the building protruded from the rubble like scattered sticks of firewood, and projecting from the walls were monstrous, broken pipes that showed gaping, jagged ends. Egarn had explained why such gigantic pipes had been necessary, but no one understood him.
On the other side of the room, Connol entered a broad corridor that ended far ahead of him at a barrier of light. The illumination was produced by a single dim candle in an overhead niche, but it looked blinding to one who had been fumbling through darkness. When the sun reached a certain position overhead, a small, strangely shaped patch of illumination appeared in the corridor at that point. An unlikely juxtaposition of fissures in the floors above permitted that one tiny splinter of brightness to momentarily penetrate the depths of the ruin, and this was Arne’s inspiration for an underground “checkpoint.” Every time Connol passed it, he tried to imagine light collecting somewhere far above, from tiny drippings, the way a pool of water collects, and then seeping through the ruins to reappear here as a fleeting reminder of the sun.
Connol performed the ritual required of anyone visiting Egarn’s workroom. He stood under the light, slowly counted to twenty, and then moved on. If he hadn’t done so, the exit from the corridor would have remained closed to him, and a guard would have set several silent alarms in operation. Connol moved on and stopped beside a pile of rubble. The rubble swung open; it was a concealed door.
Connol did not enter. He spoke tersely to the guard, relaying the message he had received. He made the guard repeat it twice. Then the rubble swung shut, and he heard a clunk as a bar was shoved into place. He returned to the stairs and began the long, tiring climb back to the surface.
The guard, whose name was Lanklin, made certain the bar was secure before he turned and crawled along a dark tunnel. As he approached the end, he called, “Message.” A voice demanded, “Who?”
“Red,” Lanklin replied. The color was changed daily.
A panel slid open—not at the end, as an invader might have expected, but at the side. Lanklin entered a large, torch-lit room where two more guards, Dayla and Ellar, waited.
The far end of the room was filled with strange objects. One of them, an oddly-shaped shell of wood built by Ellar, a former carpenter, was called a mock auto by Egarn, and when Lanklin was on duty in this room, he often watched Egarn instructing Roszt and Kaynor in its use. They sat on a low seat with a wheel fashioned of wood in front of one of them, and Egarn leaned in from a side that had been left open and spoke words that seemed more like a magical incantation than speech while he drilled the two scouts from Slorn in incomprehensible movements.
The mock auto represented a carriage that propelled itself, Egarn said. Real ones were in common use in the land Roszt and Kaynor would visit on their mission, and they carried people and loads without horses to pull them. Lanklin wondered what was gained by it, since the management of the thing was obviously far more complicated than driving a horse. Egarn rehearsed Roszt and Kaynor tirelessly, over and over, and never seemed satisfied.
Dayla went back up the tunnel to take Lanklin’s place at the rubbish pile. Ellar pivoted a section of brick wall to reveal yet another tunnel. This one led to the corridors and rooms used as living quarters by Egarn’s team and
