The twelve-symbol Mól combination lock

Three hundred feet of trapped stair inside the Valley of Doom keep end at a heavy door of banded iron and old timber, and it is neither iron nor timber nor a door. It is a door painted onto the solid face of the mountain. The only working part in the whole of it sits behind one painted stud: a dial of three layers carrying twelve Mól symbols, which has to be read before it can be turned.

The door that is not a door

False doors had been painted on the walls the length of the stair, and every one of them was a lie told to slow a man down. Koa was the one who saw that the last was the same lie, banding and hinges and all, laid over stone that had never been cut. Aldo then found the single place on the painting that had been touched by hands: honest wear on one stud, at the center, where a painted ring hung like a knocker. Pressed, it gave. A slit opened across the middle in two halves like a moon, one sliding left and one right, and a small round housing pushed forward out of the stone with the dial inside it.

There is no keyhole. Not a covered one, not a concealed one, none at all: Koa asked where a key was supposed to go and there was nowhere to put one. The door at the foot of the same cliff is the exact opposite. It has two keyholes, both alive with the charge Mól metal carries, and it took a Mól-metal key turned in the left lock and a tarnished ring worn on a finger as a conductor to give it up. Live locks that eat a ring, and doors that open on a combination and no key at all: the Empire kept both habits, and they are not the same device.

Right, then left, then right

The mechanism came to Aldo almost at once. Three concentric layers, a knob at the center, and a mark at the top of the housing to bring each chosen symbol against. Turn the first layer to its symbol, pull the knob out until it clicks and the next layer engages, turn, pull, click, turn, then press the whole thing home. What he read off it first was left, then right, then left, which is how a lock is built for the hand of a right-handed man.

It was Mikhail who turned that over and got it backwards. This is Mól work, and the hobgoblins who made most of it are left-handed, so the order runs right, then left, then right. Aldo heard it and agreed on the spot.

Two spraying traps were set into the door, and he could tell neither what they sprayed nor where it would come from. A wrong combination would set off one of them, or both. So three men stood in a corridor and argued for an hour rather than guess.

The twelve symbols

Mikhail read every symbol on the dial, and what the Empire meant by each:

• Chain: loyalty, and servitude.
• Crown: power.
• Eye: observation.
• Flame: destruction, and purification.
• Flask: alchemy, and experimentation.
• Gem: perfection.
• Hand: service.
• Moon: secrecy.
• Mountain: strength.
• Sun: knowledge.
• Sword: protection.
• Tree: growth.

Three of the twelve, in order. Not a word and not a name: a sentence about what the builders held to be true, and the lock will only hear it said their way.

Two ways in

Working the first layer, Aldo turned up more than he had asked for. Two symbols will set it, the flask or the hand. The door has more than one answer, which is a strange thing to build into a lock.

The two readings the company argued over are opposites, and both of them fit the Empire. Flask, tree, gem is experimentation, then growth, then perfection: a people who improve a thing on purpose until it cannot be improved further. Hand, chain, crown is service, then loyalty, then power: a people who understand exactly what holds a throne up. Nothing on the door decides between them.

What tipped the choice was smaller and older than either. The Mól were shamanistic and revered the elements ahead of any god, and among them were men who kept no gods whatever and prized discovery instead, which is a scandal to a Peredhel scholar bound by law to worship Lady Eravil. And the finest horses anywhere in Erôth were bred by the Mól in Idir seven centuries ago, bred so well that the breed names are still Taal in the mouths of people who have never heard of the Empire. A house that shapes a horse toward perfection across generations is a house that would write its own door that way.

Aldo turned the last layer to the gem and pressed the knob home. The lock clicked. A trap brought part of the ceiling down on Mikhail and Koa. Then the door, stone all along and painted to look like wood, ground open onto a hall built into the mountain across several levels, with no supporting pillar anywhere in it.

Nobody has turned the dial since.