Secrets in the Sludge I

Synopsis

The answer was in the lettering. The Mól had written the spell into the words themselves, in extra strokes riding the script, and between the three of them (Koa on the pattern, Mikhail on the sense, Aldo on the stops) they worked out the order the stones belonged in. Mikhail tested a drop on his own forearm first and got burning for it; water would not thin the stuff. Then all three took hold at once and turned. The runes went burgundy, the circle turned itself inside out, and the sludge climbed the walls and emptied out of the well into a hole with no bottom in sight.

They dropped a torch down it and followed. The shaft became a long steep slide and ended in what had been cushions centuries ago, which burst into a choking dust when they landed on it. Below was another octagon: two stone doors, two wheels (one plain, one ornate with electrum filigree), and cubbies where a cloak and a pair of boots fell apart at a touch. The warding runes still worked overhead, which was why nothing here had rotted. Behind the cubbies, in hidden compartments, sat three vials with the stoppers gone soft, and Aldo got the contents into fresh glass without losing a drop.

The plain wheel opened the far door. Beyond it a worked tunnel ran better than a mile, curving southeast, and ended at a thick rusted grate open on the night air with a river somewhere close. There was no mechanism on it at all. It had been built as an exit and never as a way in.

Walking back, Mikhail noticed a puddle that was not where he had left it. What came at Koa was less a creature than an animate hole, an extradimensional space that went where it liked and took whatever stood over it. Bolts and screaming vanished into it without result. Koa, raging, with oil on his blade, cut at it until it dragged him in, climbed out, and finally went down into it swinging and killed it. The corpse stayed exactly what it had been alive: a hole, liftable, portable. That was the whole of their luck, since the stone door had shut itself on a timer while they were gone and had no wheel on this side. They shoved the dead hole partway through the grate’s bars, looped a rope, and climbed down out of the ruin onto the riverbank.

At Gwenivere’s shop the next day, Ashanti helped Mikhail name two of the three vials: a Mól working on the meld-into-stone pattern, which they took to calling stone wrap, and a draught that sharpens comprehension of something already legible. The third would not give up even its school.

Then an argument. Aldo, broke and out of patience, would not see a hundred gold of rare potion burned to open a door; Koa’s was the deciding voice, and it sent them back to the hideout instead, disguised as before: nobody there was to learn who the Valiant Few were. The inside guard, Foren, was transfixed by Mikhail’s tailored trousers, and traded his own worn pair and the run of the upper floor for them.

Upstairs was the door the guards said did not exist. Koa could see its handle; the others could not, and their hands went through the place where his closed on solid metal, which unsettled him more than it unsettled them. Behind it lay a Mól library, collapsed at one end and sealed at the other and full: a dozen intact scroll cases, three more volumes of the Mól Encyclopædia, and a wall-safe holding three further potions and an electrum circlet engraved with small mouthed circles and no readable word on it.

They left by the grate again, the dead hole visibly softer than it had been. Mikhail drank the stone wrap and walked through the plain stone door. He learned, trying the walls, that their electrum veining stopped him dead. Only plain stone would let a man pass. It was a fortress measure. Then he put his head through the second door, into a room of screaming wind lit by one suspended crystal, and his torch went out.