The Long Climb

Synopsis

They had fallen back an hour up the Goat Trail to camp, because the door was not going to open in the dark and the valley had a reputation. On the way Mikhail heard something on the wind like laughter and decided he had imagined it. In the morning Koa put a roar across the slope to see what echoed, and an animal cackle came back.

What came up the trail were hyenas (wolf-cat things with ruinous jaws and that laugh) and behind them frothing bipedal gnolls in crude wraps, with spears and slings. The first hyena took Koa in the thigh and thrashed him off his feet; Mikhail put a scream in its head that only it could hear and Aldo finished it with a bolt. After that the fight turned on noise as much as steel: Koa cutting a gnoll down in one stroke and shouting to press it, the other two screaming as though far more gnolls were dying than actually were, and Mikhail dropping two into a sleep they did not wake from. Two ran. One got clean away to the north.

The sack the runner dropped answered the question they had come west asking. Chewed leather, travelers’ scraps, a rusted dagger. The wounds on their own bodies matched every rumor they had heard about the curse of the valley. A hyena’s stomach, opened, was full of recent meat in country with almost no game in it. The curse of the Valley of Doom is a gnoll pack eating the people who come through, and the party had not stumbled on them: the tracking ran back more than half the road to the ruin. They took four heads to pike as a statement and went back down to the door at half pace.

Aldo had spent the morning boiling lye water out of wood ash. He flushed both keyholes with acid, then lye, greased them with lantern oil, and tried the key. It lurched into place at the last few millimetres, hummed in the hand, and came out discolored: the same tarnish that had come off the ring they cleaned in the mountains. Mikhail, who has an academy education and finally something to spend it on, worked out the rest: there is electricity in the metal, and magnetism with it, and the hum is a pulse discharging through the lock and staining it. Both locks had to turn outward together. They set the ring on Aldo’s finger as a sacrificial conductor, added thin gloves, and he picked the right-hand lock with the charge running into the ring instead of into him. Mostly. The door came open on the first attempt.

Behind it was a hall of ore-veined Mól stone, fifty feet long, with a stairwell opening off it. They led the animals in and draped blankets over the spikes so nothing tore itself getting past. The inner handle proved to be a wheel, and the wheel proved to be spiked too, which Koa discovered with both hands.

Then the climb: three hundred feet of stair, taken slowly, watched the whole way. Mikhail found near-invisible holes in the ceiling and Aldo could not find the plate that fed them, so all three jumped the bad stretch together and chalked it. Mikhail then spotted a step sitting fractionally wrong; stepping over it pressed the real plate deeper. Iron bars dropped across the bottom of the shaft, something began grinding above, and the whole staircase tilted flat into a ramp with a boulder loosed down it. Koa drove pitons into the wall so they could rope themselves against the slide. Mikhail went down to the bars and found a stretch of wall unscuffed where every other surface was worn, which meant it was not normally there. Koa threw himself at the plate behind it, crushing Mikhail’s arm against the stone, and a chain-lift scooped all three up the shaft as the boulder struck with a noise that left two of them deaf in one ear for the day. Behind them the stairs clicked back to level and the whole machine reset itself.

The top mirrored the bottom: two plain halls, one ending in an ornate door. Aldo walked up to it, the floor folded away into a fifteen-foot drop onto spikes, and the door turned out to be painted on. They reset the pit, roped across, and stood in front of whatever the real way forward was.