The city between the two walls vexed Kezudkan sorely. It was like finding a gold nugget, only to discover that it was merely a thin plating of gold over lead. Why would anyone who could build walls such as that, build a city so rudimentary?

  “You gone kinda quiet,” said Draksgollow. “Something wrong over there?”

  Kezudkan nodded. “Everything. None of it fits. The walls look like daruu work, but the city itself could not be. Not unless my people have designated this a children’s playground. I could have stacked stones better at five.”

  “Yeah. Wasn’t gonna say anything, but you’re right. Who knows, maybe the daruu here aren’t what they used to be. Old walls, new city?”

  “Ghastly thought. Bring the view nearer the wall; I want a closer look.”

  Draksgollow complied, drifting the viewframe right up next to the wall, close enough to reach out and touch had the world-hole been open. “Runes all over it. Bust me, someone spent a lot of time carving that thing.”

  It was true. The wall looked textured from a distance, but now that they were so close, it was plain that the whole surface was adorned with runes. Kezudkan squinted at them, trying to focus on individual patterns. Even by daruu standards, he was well-read on the subject of rune construction. But as he followed the connections, he found himself lost in the complexity. For long minutes he stood tracing a single grouping, looking for a beginning or an end, but found none. “This is beyond me,” he admitted. “It would seem that while their stonework might be a subject of debate, the runecraft of whoever built this wall is superior to anything Korr knows.”

  “You can tell that from just a quick glance?”

  “I could tell that as soon as I couldn’t fathom an end to it,” Kezudkan replied. “I may not be the foremost expert on runes, but I’d wager that you couldn’t fill a trolley car with men with more rune knowledge than I. This … this was done by people who rely on runes, not science, and have plumbed a depth we wouldn’t dare.”

  “It’s just a wall.”

  “Perhaps. But perhaps that proves the point all the better. What casual power, choosing to rune a wall to stop a glacier, rather than melting it away, or better yet, simply not building a city here. And the power of the runes. Do you have any idea the weight of ice and snow bearing down upon it?”

  Draksgollow stared blankly for a moment, eyes twitching back and forth at calculations that Kezudkan could only imagine. It was mathematics the old daruu could manage himself, but it always amused him how Draksgollow ground numbers up in that tinker’s brain of his. Just like Erefan used to do. The memory immediately soured his mood.

  “Yeah, I’ve got a notion,” Draksgollow said. “Still, you want to keep looking? I didn’t see anyone out in the streets, but we didn’t look hard, and it looks like there’s fires going. Someone’s living here.”

  “Indeed,” Kezudkan replied. As Draksgollow lowered the view from the glacier wall, Kezudkan noticed a gate set into the mountainside. “Wait! Stop there.”

  “What? You want to look inside the mountain?”

  “These primitives have no lifts. If they have deeps, it stands to reason that they would have tunnels and ramps heading down.”

  “Fine,” Draksgollow huffed through pursed lips. The view slid smoothly through the solid gate and into a tunnel beyond. The walls were roughly carved in barbaric human fashion. Kezudkan fought down the urge to order Draksgollow to stop and shut down the machine. He needed to know.

  The tunnel curved around and down in a single loop of a grand spiral. Without being there, Kezudkan could only estimate, but it seemed as if they were doubling back to an area directly below the sky. The bottom of the tunnel was guarded by four human guards armed with spears. What lay beyond them caused the old daruu to overlook that distasteful fact.

  They built a deep. These humans built themselves a deep. There was no mistaking it. As in the city above, the construction was all distinctively human: drab, square, and utilitarian, with ill-fitted stone mushed together with mortar. It was, as near as Kezudkan could tell from first glance, a single enormous cavern, defying everything structural engineering said about deeps. There were a handful of pylons running floor to ceiling, big around as a thunderail engine, but by Kezudkan’s estimation, they should not have been enough to support the weight of the city above.

  “Rusty blood,” Draksgollow swore. “Those buggers built themselves an actual deep. Ain’t nothing of our kind around here, mine or yours.”

  “Agreed,” Kezudkan muttered, staring at the scene in the viewframe.

  “Face it. This world’s just like ours, except here it was humans that won the great war. Your kind ain’t nothing but old walls and monsters’ memories. That thing must have been ancient.”

  There was a clack, and the viewframe went dark. Kezudkan spun—his old back protesting immediately—to see Draksgollow throw the remaining switches, powering down the world-ripper. “What are you doing?”

  “Getting some sleep,” Draksgollow replied. “Got no more patience for paving your daruu memory lane tonight.” The tinker stood, the hiss and whirr of his mechanical joints echoing in the quiet left behind as the dynamo spun to a halt.

  As Draksgollow left, taking with him the few onlookers who gathered any time the machine was active, Kezudkan went back to looking at the viewframe. It was nothing more than a webwork of warm copper wires, cooling rapidly in the chilly air. When the sound of kuduks faded, Kezudkan abled over to the door, locking it shut. Sitting himself at the controls, he turned the world-ripper on once more. It was time to see what sort of deep these Veydran humans had managed.

  “What are we doing here anymore, Kep?” Draksgollow asked. He sat across the dinner table from his old mechanic, as close to a friend as the tinker had among his employees. “I didn’t sign on to hunt for lost daruu legends, or fight monsters.”

  “Too right, boss,” Kep replied, just before biting into a sausage skewered on the end of his fork.

  “Rip my rivets out, I didn’t even plan on plundering. I figured, maybe a few easy mines, places we already knew were rich in gold and silver. Maybe if we wanted to branch out, we’d get into lumber. Good money in that if you own land with trees.”

  “Naw, wood’s good for paper, but raw boards make my skin itch.”

  “What’s the good in being rich if we get ourselves killed in the process?”

  “Ain’t none,” Kep replied.

  Draksgollow took his anger out on a chicken leg, ripping the meat from the bone with his teeth. “That old daruu’s down a tunnel with his back to the cavern. He can’t even see what we could do with these machines. We could change the world.”

  “Sounds like more work’n it’s worth.” Kep took a hunk of grey ash-bread and bit into it.

  “What’s work? Ain’t this all been work? I lost good men. You wanna tell them it ain’t work? We crack our backs building the machines, keeping ‘em running right. Good men went into those other worlds to bring back riches.”

  Kep nodded along. “A lot of them didn’t come back.”

  “Can’t we take a bit more … long-term approach? Maybe get rich and make names for ourselves? Right now, we’re looking like the villain from one of those festival day pageants. Robbing, robbing, robbing … just because it’s easy and they can’t stop us.”

  “’Cept that time they did,” said Kep.

  “And that’s just the thing. Why are we taking stuff, risking more run-ins when the owner catches us hitching a ride on his thunderail and boots us off? That sort of risk just doesn’t sit right in my belly.”

  “That or the beans,” said Kep.

  “I’m not getting my britches twisted over morals here,” Draksgollow said, pointing a finger at Kep.

  “’Course not,” Kep agreed before helping himself to a chicken leg.

  “It’s just good business. I want coin, but I want someplace to spend it, too. What good’s being rich when the world’s gone flushed itself down the sewer drain?”

  “It’s them rebels. World weren’t perfect before, but it’s a sight worse now.”

  “You know, we lost a steel shipment? Thunderail got boosted last week. Rebels didn’t haul away the steel, but the thunderail went off the tracks, and it’s trapped in a wrecked car.”

  “Can’t read a paper without seeing some gloom and drear about ‘em.”

  “Well, Kep, who says we have to be the pageant day villains for that daruu? We can get those machines running on our own. Kezudkan’s rebel tinker managed it; why not us?”

  Kep scratched his head. “Well, the old guy seems to have a way with the things.”

  “I’m not suggesting we cut him loose or anything like that. I just think maybe we don’t need him anymore. Maybe we let that thought drift into the miscast skull of his and see if we don’t get a bit of leeway. I’m growing tired of chasing his fancies around three worlds.”

  Kep ran his fingers through his beard, a nervous twitch. “That Kezudkan, he seems like the wrong sort to go knocking at.”

  “So am I.”

  The human city was small, relative to the deeps of Korr. Certainly the large central cavern was immense, but that was the extent of the livable space. There were no tunnels lined with homes and shops, no grand factories, stadiums, theaters, each with their own cavern. All there was of the human deep was there, almost as if the humans had been so ambitious in their excavations that they had gone too far, then decided to use their primitive masonry to replace the lost rock that could have been left for buildings.

  Around that central cavern, however, were mines larger than Kezudkan could have dreamed humans would delve. Considering the lack of technology, the humans had either greater skill at mining that he would have credited them, used magic in the digging, or had been at it for a very, very long time. A simple, macabre fascination took hold of the old daruu. Despite its infestation with humans, and occasionally larger, human-like creatures that he could not put a name to—perhaps some cousin race, or a tribe of humans that had simply outgrown the rest—he was enrapt. Here and there he would recognize a vein or iron, or a seam between two strata of rock that he knew from Eversall Deep. A shop should have been here; a trolley crossing there; over that way would have been the tunnel to the lifts. He got his bearings by the moment and marveled at the differences from the Eversall he knew to the strange, twisted tunnelscape that the humans had created.

  Wandering through the night in another world, Kezudkan lost all sense of time. He would have been pressed to remember that he even carried a pocketclock. But his untold hours of meandering took a sudden turn when the tunnels changed. There was a heavy steel plate set into the wall, with words engraved in two languages. On the one side, closest to the tunnels he had traveled from the human deep, the words were gibberish. Gracing the other side, in immaculate daruu runes, was written: “Human territory. Do not cross without leave.”

  The tunnels beyond were polished smooth, glossy in the faint light that the world-ripper’s search mode provided. Where the human tunnels had been an irregular arch swept through the rock, these new tunnels had flat walls that curved gracefully above head height to meet at a gentle peak. Kezudkan had not seen the style before, but the workmanship was undoubtedly his people’s.

  “Draksgollow, you mechanical wretch, this is what I was looking for!” Though no one was there to hear him, it felt good to say it aloud.

  Kezudkan followed the tunnel, down, down into the bones of Veydrus. It seemed at first that the tunnel complex was deserted, for Kezudkan went miles without seeing signs of his kin. The thought that struck him was how similar the tunnels were to the human mines, when he realized that was just what they were: mines. Rather than leave the tunnels to languish as had the humans above, the Veydran daruu chose instead to finish them as proper corridors.

  With a steam engine determination, Kezudkan pressed onward. His fingers and wrist grew aches from countless twists of the world-ripper’s dials. But he was used to aches; what part of him did not ache from time to time, either from use or idleness. It was a losing game to try to avoid them all. Daruu often quit at Kezudkan’s age—quit everything. The stiffening of the joints was only painful if one tried to move. Many were the elderly daruu whose next of kin discovered a virtual statue. Not Kezudkan.

  At long last, the mine tunnels gave way, and beyond them was a city unlike anything the daruu of Korr could have dreamed. It appeared as a single piece of stone, shaped into tunnels, buildings, statues, fountains, stairs, and everything else a deep needed. There was no sign of a seam, a crack, or an awkward corner anywhere. The runes carved everywhere were not the magical sort he had seen on the walls protecting the human sky far above, but bore the names of streets and shops, all exquisitely formed as if they had been pressed into the stone, not chipped or carved.

  Some few among the runes did bear magic, for that was the cause of the ambient glow that lit the whole of the deep. Soft, pervasive, and a gentle blue-white, it spilled from runes along the tunnel walls, ignoring the rule of shadow and pouring into every corner and doorway. All these wonders Kezudkan took in at a glance and promptly shoved aside.

  Daruu. My people. So, so many. Kezudkan knew perhaps three dozen of his own kind personally, scattered across Korr. Many were kin, a few were old friends, and the rest acquaintances he had met throughout his career. They did not, as a rule, gather. He had never seen ten of them in the same place before, and the last time he had seen more than three at once was at his father’s memorial farewell. His sister had been there, along with his grieving mother, his daughter and her husband, and his two grandchildren. The Veydran deep teemed with them. They strolled the streets, alone or in mixed pairs; they came in and out of shops; they sat on benches in a plaza that surrounded a multi-tiered fountain. His first inclination had been to try to get a chalk-board census of the daruu population, but that was a human’s errand. Too many to begin counting.

  Kezudkan studied his otherworldly kin. In face and body, he could not tell them from his Korrish brethren, though their coloration was matched to this particular deep, which would have had them all look like natives of the Eversall area. The clothing they wore appeared to be entirely metallic. A copper mesh of tiny linked circlets seemed to be in fashion, with fewer daruu wearing steel or iron; one young daruu gentleman wore silver. All were adorned with plates of solid metal, usually on the shoulders, and sometimes at the elbow or chest. None wore footwear of any kind, their bare feet getting to feel the stone of the deep beneath them. I haven’t gone barefoot since I was a lad. Was it kuduk foolishness that made it undignified to go without shoe or boot? Bearded vermin! What else have they corrupted?

  With the Veydran daruu’s signage, navigating the deep was a trifling matter. It was layered and interconnected, each section bearing a harmonious balance that the Korrish deeps strove for but never quite managed, never too much nor too little stone for support between. At intersections and upward-sloped tunnels, signs pointed the way to various landmarks and districts. He found that he liked the sound of Royal Palace Way, and followed it.

  Through twisting tunnels, bedecked with murals and bas relief on every surface, he followed the sign and others like it, seeing ever more opulence as he went. No longer was it rare to see precious metals worn as garments, and many daruu wore jewels worked into their clothing as well.

  By the time Kezudkan reached the palace, he saw guards in uniforms of full gold armor. The interlocking plates covered every inch of their bodies, save for a slit at the eyes and a few holes to breathe through. Only by body shape and context could Kezudkan even guess that there were daruu inside the suits. Stretching from floor to ceiling of an otherwise toroidal cavern, the palace acted as an immense pillar. The entrances were halfway up, thin bridges of stone that should not have supported their own weight except by magic. Each radiated from the palace like spokes of a wheel toward the surrounding tunnels.

  Oh, how secure they must feel, buried beneath a mountain, with such limited access. My appearance inside their walls will be such a shock. The thought amused a giddy part of Kezudkan’s mind too numbed by lack of sleep for sense. Appearance? Blast me, I must be an atrocious sight. With that realization, the weight of that night’s exploration settled upon him and took hold. He took note of the effort it was taking to keep his eyes open; he noticed the slouch in his posture as he sat at the world-ripper’s controls. Not tonight.

  There were times for haste, and introducing yourself to a lost civilization was not one of them. Kezudkan’s drowsy mind was good for little else at the moment, but it knew that much. He scribbled the coordinates on a piece of paper and shoved it into the pocket of his vest. In so doing, his fingers brushed the pocketclock he had forgotten. Pulling it out and giving a flick of the wrist to open it, he saw the time; it was nearly four in the morning.

  It took an effort of will, but Kezudkan kept his gaze from drifting back to the image of Veydrus in the viewframe. He shut down the machine before the temptation grew too strong and spun the control dials back to all zeroes, so that neither Draksgollow nor his underlings would know where he had seen.

  More privacy next time, he promised himself. Can’t be certain how long it will take to meet the daruu king … or emperor, or whatever they call him. He flipped off the spark lights on his way out of the workshop, then hesitated a moment in the dim light from the corridor beyond. Struggling out of his boots, Kezudkan walked back to his accommodations barefoot, feeling the stone against his flesh.

  Chapter 12

  “It is only by the application of advanced sciences that we achieve flight.” - Ebner Jornuss, inventor of the first vacu-dirge airship

  The Jennai hung motionless in the air, parked just high enough above the swells of the Sea of Kerum that the ship was in no danger of getting hit by one. They were positioned well off any of the standard shipping lanes and far from any coast. Per General Rynn’s order, they were located in the least likely place for anyone to spot them. The edge of the airship was lined with crewmen enjoying the view. Some held fishing lines or the end of nets hung far down into the dark ocean below, in the hope of catching something worth eating. The trackless seas were sparse with life as far out as they were, but it did not stop some of the rebels from trying. More daring were the ones who went down the rope ladder to swim in the early dawn hours when the sun was not so blinding on the water.

 

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