more of them come out of those webs, let's take care of them," Katy said, already getting her flint and steel out to set them ablaze. We unwedged the plank and hurried back to that awful tunnel. With weapons readied, we watched Katy light the webs. They went up like flash powder, nearly instantly, accompanied by the screeches of what could only have been more of the hellish creatures. The whole tunnel was illuminated brightly for a moment, and then everything went dark. No more sound issued from the tunnel.
A simultaneous sigh of relief echoed in the now-silent stone hall. I stuck a torch into a cranny in the wall to make sure we could see, and something caught my eye. About fifteen steps into the tunnel, a wooden box with metal bands holding it together glittered.
"And our first discovery!" I said, striding toward it. I slid the sword back into its sheath and bent down to look at the box. I kicked it open.
Inside the box, there were five heat-formed gold ingots, a small sachet of seeds, a roll of string, and a handful of absolutely stunning diamonds.
Austin clapped his hands once. "Jackpot, boys and girls." We loaded up the spoils, and pressed onward. Navigating the tunnels was something interesting, but we continued forward, making sure to mark the stone so we could get back without being helplessly lost.
The tunnel led through dark, damp, open caves, the track rolling across a bridge high above the depths of ravines, and every now and again, a lone skeleton would lob an arrow our way, or a zombie would stumble off the edge of the path and fall to its doom.
All in all, we found four more crates during our exploration, and, laden with the goods we found, we emerged from the hole just as the sun was falling below the horizon. Back in the house, we spread out our haul.
Diamond, gold and iron ingots, seeds, cocoa beans, leather tunics and boots . . . The most mysterious items were the three black discs, each with a small hole in the center and a single spiral leading to the outside edge. There was a label in the center, paper cut into a circle and glued on, which had a picture of a strange device drawn on it.
"What do you think these are?" said Mary, inspecting one of them closely. "They can't just be decorations, can they?" She studied the label in the center. It seemed to have writing on it, though it was no writing that any of us could read. The device depicted seemed to be a box with a circle on top, ostensibly a place to put the disc. Small dots with tails seemed to emanate from the box. "Mysterious . . ."
The next morning we worked on building an irrigated farm. Mary's admonition was that if we could go play in a ruin for an entire day and get nice things, then we could help her build the thing that would allow us to continue going on adventures because we have eaten well. It made sense. The whole day, we dug trenches, carried buckets of water, tilled the ground, and planted seeds. The sachet of seeds we got from the tunnels was also planted, though we were not exactly sure what they would become. Finally, just as Mary finished fertilizing the soil with a huge pile of bonemeal, we went inside.
Anne had gone inside an hour or so before us, and I expected she was just tired or something. When we came back inside, however, there was sawdust all over the first floor's stone flooring, and Anne sat on top of a contraption, looking proud of herself.
"I was thinking about this thing," she said, holding up one of the discs. "The diagram on the label was a huge clue as to what it was. I figured, if I could vaguely copy the shape of the apparatus on the label, then maybe I could make this thing do what it was supposed to do."
Austin laughed, clapped her on the shoulder. "That's my Anne! So, did you figure it out?"
She knocked on the contraption. It was a wooden box, with a rotating table on the top of it, over which hung a sort of thin arm, tipped with a diamond, its point meticulously oriented downward. She wound a crank on the side and slid open a panel on the front of it, revealing the rotation mechanism and what appeared to be a very wide cone attached to a tube.
"You guys are not going to believe this." She grinned ear-to-ear, and dropped the disc onto the rotating table. Carefully, she positioned the arm over the disc and then let it down so that the point of the jewel scratched along its surface.
Nothing happened for a bit, but just as the feeling that we'd been had started to set in, a sound issued from the cone. It was . . . music?
Yes, it was! Music, a soft melody that played over a sort of low resonation, and little percussions keeping time! How on earth . . . ?
"These things, these discs," she said, holding up two more of them, "they are like written-down sound! And this device on the labels can read the sounds to us. How intense is that?"
We had a party that night, Katy baking up cakes and pies as Austin and Anne prepared a feast. I set up the great table, draping a deep red-dyed wool cloth over it. James and Mary bustled here and there making sure that everything was safe and locked up because we were not going to have any disturbances in our party tonight. We had a machine that played music! Tons of great food! Good company!
"We've made some great discoveries these last few days," Austin was saying. "Proof of previous inhabitants, an extensive system of caves, and today, Anne has found us the technology to listen to sounds that were recorded long in the past. This party, my friends, is because we're the best!" he said with a fist pump, and we all cheered at this. Drinking! Eating! Dancing! Only the best for the explorers, inventors, and heroes!
The party went well into the night, and when I awoke the next day, the sun had already climbed high into the sky. We had breakfast hastily because everyone was excited to go back into the mines, Anne and Mary included this time. Everyone gathered their gear, and we skipped into the mine shaft, heading for the entrance to the Old Tunnels, as we had taken to calling them.
The danger of spiders was of course still there, as was the occasional other monster, but for the most part, we worked as a well-oiled machine and navigated several of the tunnels, mapping out how they turned and twisted while gathering the items from the boxes that we found.
It was only when the tunnel that we were in ran directly into a huge cavern deeper than any of us had ever seen before that we stopped for pause. The sheer heat in this ravine was staggering, and it smelled like fire and rot. The reason was clear as to why: through the bottom of this ravine flowed a river, not of water, but of molten stone. We must be getting very deep for there to be actual live lava actively flowing at a reasonable pace. That must be how this ravine had formed, magma flowing over it and melting the stone over which it passed, deepening the crevice and bringing along more and more stone.
Austin's eyes lit up. "There!" he pointed to the edge of the lava flow. "That's the stone I was telling you about! Smooth, black stone formed from the very bowels of the earth! If we can get down there and get some of that, we'd never find anything stronger to build with!"
He hurriedly pounded a piton into the wall, looped his rope through it, and was just about to jump over the side to rappel down the sheer cliff face when Anne stopped him, grabbing him by the back of the belt. "What, are you stupid? You'll be incinerated."
"Yeah, if I touch it! That's the plan—don't touch the lava." He pushed himself back and over the ledge, his rope taking the slack and becoming taut in the piton. We watched as he lowered himself down, Anne pinching the bridge of her nose.
"He's a fool sometimes . . ." she muttered.
He reached the bottom after a few minutes of descent, the rest of us helping to belay him down. He unhooked his rope. "Okay, everyone, I'm good! It's hot down here, but I'm not in any danger. I'm going to try to break off some of this stuff," he said, and unslung his pickaxe. The iron head sang through the air, arcing downward to the focal point of its tip, and a dull clang-thud echoed up the cavern. Austin dropped the pickaxe and swore loudly, frantically shaking his hands back and forth.
"Yipes, this stuff is hard! My damn pick just broke on it," he said, sucking his teeth. "That really hurt." He sat down on a rock for a moment. "Yeah, no way we can get this stuff with just the tools we have now. We'd need something a
lot harder."
James, in a flash of insight, rigged up a worktable with some wood from one of the tunnel supports and laid down a couple of the diamonds we'd found on the way here. "Think we can make a pickaxe with a diamond head? That's harder, for sure," he said, and began putting together a pickaxe but with diamonds instead of iron. He held up the finished product, a heavy-looking tool with a glittering, blue head.
We belayed it down to Austin on the rope. He untied it and hefted it in his hands. He looked up and gave a thumbs-up to us, and then heaved it over his shoulder, bringing it crashing down into the black, glassy rock.
The heavy tip bit deep into the stone, shearing it on a natural fault, and with a few more strokes, it freed a large chunk of it from the ground. Austin reached down, picked it up. "I could get used to this!" he called up, waving the stone at us. The light reflected off it in such a way that even from way up where I was, I could see it sparkle from the inside, as though a thousand tiny fires were hidden within.
He hooked himself and the bag of the black stone he'd mined back up to the rope, and we began to haul him back up the cliff face. "The funny thing is," said Anne, as she gripped the rope in her hands, "he'd never let me tie him up any other time!" We had a good laugh, and I looked over