Secrets in the Sludge II

Synopsis

Koa got a lantern through the wall first and saw what was making the noise: a faceted crystal hanging unsupported above head height, pouring wind out of every face of it, lit faintly blue-green inside, the color of the sludge. He leapt for it and could not close his hand in the gale. Aldo solved it from the corridor instead, finding a small filigree lever inside the ornate wheel with three positions: blowing, off, and drawing in. With the wind off the crystal went dull and could be handled like a paperweight.

The plain wheel opened the door they had been locked out of, and behind it ran a hallway all three recognized at once: three doors, one at the end, the proportions exactly those of the keep in the mountain. The room at the end held the same stone table and the same relief map, only intact, and the Elder in it, clearer than he had ever been.

What he told them took the morning. There had been a city overhead, tens of thousands of people, and when the curse came through it took every one of them apart: mind, body and soul reduced to their elements and caught by the great water-elemental that guarded the keep’s door. The two are one thing now, and that thing is the sludge. It holds only those present that day, and if the curse is ever broken they should finally be let go.

The rest followed from it. The crystals are not gems and are not mined. They form where this world runs thin against another, and a creature can be bound inside one. The inscription on the well then read as plain sense: crystals were cut here, and outsiders had wanted that, so the place guarded both ways. The keeps are bound to one another, and a crystal will serve as the key to the doors they could not open in the Valley of Doom. His one warning was about timing. The curses re-prepare themselves within about a moon, so breaking a single one before they can reach three at once risks setting it running again over whoever lives above it.

Then he walked out of his own chamber, which he had never been able to do, and put a hand on Koa’s shoulder: cold, and briefly solid. More strength is brought to me by you. He faded the further he went from it.

The rest of the keep took the day. A workshop of magnifiers, cutting tools and bins of chips, where Koa found a small orange stone twinned to one Gemsmith keeps. A hall with its targets scorched black, where the Mól had practiced binding fire. A corridor of six pillars and eight braziers where anything metal grew heavier the further in you went, until all three put their weapons down and left them, and where Mikhail counted eighteen carved figures on the pillars, one for each plane the Mól reckoned. Then a chamber ringed with small quarters, and past it a temple: an oak under a domed crystal that made honest daylight, and a ring of runes in the floor that shut on Koa and dragged at him: the runes made the ground heavy, and read who had stepped into them. They roped him out. The oak’s markings were a dryad’s binding: the tree is the anchor, and while it lives, so does she. An hour in the quarters turned up brittle papers of ordinary Mól life, a scatter of coins, a pouch of gems under a bed, and a slime that leapt onto Aldo’s face and left him coughing.

Last, they tried the lever the other way. With the door open the crystal lifted into place and drew every drop of sludge back up the central tube, locked behind the priming runes, and the Elder showed them the setting beyond that, which with the outer door open would have flushed the lot of it toward the river. It was how the keep had cleaned itself.

The argument came at the end. Koa and Mikhail worked out that Aldo had been able to see and hear the Elder since the tour began and had said nothing, holding it back to test whether the ghost was what he claimed. Nobody could account for it, and Mikhail still cannot see him at all. The Elder read it more kindly than either of them: Aldo had come back for a second keep and a second curse, which is its own answer. Choose the third wisely, he said.