Chapter 5: The Submount Steamtunnels
Zanther and Novanostrum walk along the metal tracks leading to the Centripetal Mountains. Though most of the sleepers are missing and many of the metal rails are missing, some of the sections of track look to be in good repair.
“Has someone been fixing these?” Zanther asks.
“I can’t imagine why they would,” Novanostrum says, “they were abandoned for a reason, and that reason still holds true.”
“And what reason is that?”
“These tracks lead to the Submount Steamtunnels,” Novanostrum says, “steam-driven locomotes ferried goods between Claustria and Port San-torus along this route, at least, they did until problems started occurring.”
“What kind of problems?”
“Well, the locomotes that went in one side of the tunnels started to develop a habit of not coming out the other side.”
“Hmm. How are we going to get across these mountains to Zweissergrund?” Zanther asks.
“Well, since nobody else is using these tunnels, I thought we might as well. We won’t have to worry about snowstorms and ravenous mountaintop thunderbuzzards.”
The tops of the mountains are dusted with a thick layer of snow, with dark clouds obscuring some of the peaks. Zanther peers into the dark maw of the tunnel where the tracks converge.
“I don’t know, Nove, it just seems kind of dark...and...gloomy.”
Novanostrum pulls out his longpipe and fills it with a few shakes of glowing smokeweed. He lights it and blows a few smoke rings.
“You’re scared of a cave? We made it through the Deathstretch; we’ll make it through this. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel fated to die here. Do you?”
“Dying is for cowards and zealots.”
As the wagon rolls through the outskirts of the Universitorium, Madra scans the signs of the shops and buildings. At the sight of the first pub, Madra hops off the wagon and rushes inside. Undeterred, Sogbottom keeps his pace.
Madra walks through the bar, which is empty save for a bald man reading the day’s Kleighton Gadabout over a flat pint, a barmaid with a broom, and the bartender. He cleans glass mugs and hangs them from pegs overhead, trying to avoid making eye contact with the young woman sauntering up to his bar.
“Did a wizard and a knifesman come through here?” Madra asks.
“Lots of people come through here.”
She taps her finger on the table impatiently, her ring clacking against the wood. Noticing the Claustrian royal crest, the bartender meets her gaze.
“Listen, they were here last night. I wouldn’t have thought twice about them, except that the guy with the longknife didn’t pay his tab. I asked around about them this morning, but a Librarian told me they were off to Zweissergund.”
Dejected, she steps away from the bar, lost in thought. Out in the daylight, she looks up and down the road for Sogbottom, but he’s nowhere to be found.
“Guess you’re off to Zweissergund, huh?”
Madra turns around to see the bald man holding his newspaper.
“Sorry,” he says, “I overheard you talking to the bartender. Name’s D’kassar.”
He holds out his hand, and she gives it a cautious shake. “I’m...Madra.”
“It’s not an easy place to get to,” he says, “the Centripetal mountains are treacherous. You’ll need a guide. I grew up near Zweissergund, so I’m very familiar with the area.”
She sizes him up. He’s wearing a beige robe and has a necklace of beads strung on a leather thong.
“You’d just head off through the mountains with someone you just met? Why?”
He scratches the back of his head. “Until yesterday, I was an instructor here. I taught a class detailing the rituals of the many religions of Upper Kleighton, but my entire department was sacked. Said they needed to expand the Philosophy Department. So now I’m looking for a new gig.”
Madra sighs. “Give me your necklace.”
“What?”
“I need to know if I can trust you.”
“I don’t understand how that will help,” D’kassar says, “but here.”
She puts on the bead necklace. “Now pull out one of your knives. The one tucked into your left boot should suffice.”
D’kassar blinks in surprise, but does as she asks.
“Now,” Madra says, “come at me. Try to cut this necklace off of me.”
“Um...”
“I haven’t got all bonking day! Just do it already!”
D’kassar charges at her, slipping behind her and getting an arm around her shoulders, struggling to grasp the necklace. He fails to see her boot as she knifekicks over her own left shoulder, striking him in the face.
He drops his knife and crumples to the ground, cupping his face in his hands.
“What’d you do that for?” he asks, sputtering up a mouthful of blood.
She places his necklace over his head. “I’m a young, vulnerable woman. Before I go running off into the mountains alone with you, I need you to understand the consequences should you attempt to defile me.”
“I...understand,” he says.
She holds out her hand and helps him up. “Great. Let’s go shopping. We won’t get far without supplies.”
The two of them walk down the cobbled street, passing young people carrying books. The bell in the main tower of the Pedagog, the sprawling building constituting the heart of the Universitorium, chimes eleven times.
“If I may be so bold,” D’kassar asks, “who is it you’re so eager to find in Zweissergrund?”
“A friend. His name is Zanther.”
“He must be someone special if you’re willing to go all the way across the mountains just to see him again.”
“Oh, you’ve no idea. It was lust at first sight.”
“Does that happen to you often?” he asks, giving her a devilish glance.
She smacks her open palm against his ear. “That’s twice I’ve warned you, now.”
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. So what was it about this Zanther person that sent your nethers into such a tizzy?”
“That’s kind of a personal question, don’t you think?”
“Hey, the mountains are filled with horrifying ways to die. If I’m going to risk my life trudging across them, I’d at least like to know why we’re undertaking this journey.”
“If you really must know,” she says, “I saw him kill an entire Darrinian assassination squad before they even had a chance to blink.”
“He sounds like a High Hell of a guy.”
They reach a large store specializing in travel goods, and Madra pawns off one of her more elaborate pinky rings. They buy fur coats, powderblasts, backsacks, and mountain-climbing gear. Across the street, they find a smaller general store and fill their new backsacks with hardbread, yafbeest jerky, and other random supplies.
As they walk past the last vestiges of the Universitorium, they are able to see the tops of the Centripetal mountains beyond the plains before them.
“I’m wondering,” Madra says, “what the powderblasts are for.”
“Aside from the perpetual blizzards and sheer drop-offs, there are also beasts to contend with. There’s supposedly a tunnel that runs under the mountains, but you’d have to be bonking crazy to go that way.”
The walls of the steamtunnels are sheets of smooth, bluish rock, pocked here and there with veins of violet stones which sparkle in the light of the torches.
“Hey, Nove, what are these shiny rocks? You think they’re worth anything?”
“I don’t know. They seem a little familiar, but I don’t recognize them. You’d think if they were worth any money they’d have been stripped when the tunnels were first dug.”
As they walk along the tracks, the tunnel suddenly widens into a large underground chamber. The walls are irregular, apparently the natural features of a preexisting cavern.
“Hey!” Zanther s
houts, his greeting echoing through thousands of man-lengths of tunnels and caverns. A few eyeblinks later, they hear a reply.
“Hey!” shouts an echo of Zanther’s voice as Novanostrum gives himself a wizardly facepalm.
“You realize,” Novanostrum says, “that if there’s anything down here, it now definitely knows we’re here?”
“Good,” Zanther says, “it’d be nice to have someone a little more interesting to talk to.”
The two of them walk deeper and deeper into the mountain before they’re stopped by a distant sound, the sound a hundred footclaws would make on stone if they were running towards something. In the light of their torches, Zanther and Novanostrum realize that the sound is, in fact, a hundred footclaws running toward something--the two of them. The footclaws are attached to feet, which are attached to lizard-shaped people, which in turn are attached to rather large spears and pickaxes.
“Serpentites,” Novanostrum says.
“I think,” Zanther says, “that we’re going the wrong way. If I recall, there was a fork in the tunnel a while back. That other way seemed like the right way.”
Novanostrum draws his staff and stands fast against the rapidly approaching horde. The serpentites stop in their tracks, confused and awed by the sight of an angry wizard.
“Don’t take another step!” Novanostrum shouts, “Or I’ll blast you right out the other end of this mountain!”
“He’ll do it,” Zanther says, “I saw him do it just the other day.”
One of the smaller lizard people daintily puts his foot in front of him and takes a step. Novanostrum responds by attempting to conjure a huge fireball, but all that happens is the purple stones in the walls glow with a fierce scarlet light, which causes the wizard to have a revelation.
“I remember now! We learned about these stones when I was a student at Pigrash. They’re called moonmight stones. They...absorb magickal power...damn.”
“I think it’s time to go,” Zanther says, to nobody in particular. He can hear Novanostrum’s rapid footfalls receding into the distance.
The air is thin, and Madra’s breath comes out in puffs of steam. An aggressive goat charges her from behind a rock. There’s an explosion as she squeezes the trigger of her powderblast and fells the animal.
“Nice shot,” D’kassar says.
“Thanks.”
They trudge forward and tiny clumps of thick snow begin to fall in sheets, limiting their visibility. Madra snaps her head toward a sharp whooping sound as two yeti, seemingly identical twins, run out of a cave and straight for them.
“What the High Hell are those?” Madra asks.
“Reload your weapon.”
She does, and they both fire on the beasts, to no effect.
“It’s just bonking them off!” D’kassar shouts.
“Forget it! Run!”
Madra and D’kassar run down the mountain trail with the yeti in hot pursuit. They spot a cottage in the distance and dash towards it. As they get closer, an old man steps onto his porch to greet them.
“Get inside, grandpa,” Madra yells, “they’re coming!”
“Hey!” the old man shouts at the yeti, stopping them in their tracks. “They don’t want to play! Go home!”
The twin yeti slink away, dejected.
“Wow,” D’kassar says, “that was some neat trick.”
After sprinting down the side-tunnel of a side-tunnel, Novanostrum and Zanther manage to barricade themselves inside a room filled with barrels and metal shelves stocked with boxes of hardbread and jerky.
Novanostrum grabs a dusty mug from a metal shelf, wipes it with his sleeve, and holds it under a nozzle protruding from one of the barrels. He twists the knob, and a frothy, amber liquid falls into the mug. He sniffs it, puts it to his lips, and takes a sip.
“It’s beer,” Novanostrum says, “and it’s good.”
Immediately, Zanther fills his own mug.
“Oh man, it is good,” he says, trying to gauge how much beer is left in the tapped barrel and in the other barrels. “We should probably hang out here for a while until those lizard people forget about us.”
Novanostrum takes inventory, looking over the shelves while nibbling a piece of hardbread. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he says, “these tunnels were supposedly abandoned a few dozen sunspins ago. Why would these supplies still be fresh?”
Zanther shrugs. “It’s cold down here. Maybe this stuff just keeps really well in this kind of environment.”
“I don’t think so,” Novanostrum says, “not this well, anyway. And did you notice how some of the sections of the tunnels seem to have been repaired recently?”
Zanther finishes his beer and refills his mug. “Let’s just enjoy our good fortune without reading too much into it.”
Novanostrum nods, clinking his glass to Zanther’s.
“So, Novanostrum, I’ve gotta ask you, if you’re some big-shot wizard, why are you running around the countryside like some bum? Shouldn’t you be flying on skyships and walking around flanked by servants?”
“I had some problems after I graduated from Pigrash.”
“Oh? What kind of problems?”
“Well, when I finished Pigrash, I was a Maximagus of the Sixth Circle. I got a job as a researcher, working with top secret artifacts being stored deep in the sublevels of the Knot, you know, that giant superstructure which encompasses most of Arcania.
“Long story short, I got a little too curious, looking at things I shouldn’t have been looking at and playing around with types of magick which shouldn’t be muddled with. I was banished to a horrible place, but with a little help I was able to get back to Upper Kleighton. However, I’m no longer welcome in Arcania.”
Zanther nods.
“And you, Zanther, how’d you get so handy with a blade? You don’t strike me as the soldiering type. Are you a mercenary?”
Zanther almost chokes on his beer. “A mercenary? Not quite. When I was very young, my father had me study the intricacies of longknifesmanship. I was in a couple of tournaments. No big deal.”
Zanther pulls out the map, turning it over in his hands. “So this Nexus Sketch, do you really think it’s worth all this trouble? Worth dying for? It’s just a piece of paper.”
“I’ve seen a lot of ugliness,” Novanostrum says, “seen a lot of things I wish I could forget. But this is a chance to see something divine, something amazing. That’s worth something to me. What about you? Why are you going through all this?”
“I’ve spent my whole life growing up in my father’s shadow. Finding this Nexus Sketch, that would be a way for me to prove my worth. Plus, I’m sure it would really get his goat.”
Madra and D’kassar are sitting at a table inside the old man’s cabin, drinking hot cocoa.
“And that’s when my wife walked in! Heh, rest her soul,” the old man says, eliciting laughter from his two guests.
“Ha! And did you explain to her that the woman was just a witch responding to your ad in the Kleighton Gadabout?” D’kassar asks.
“I was too embarrassed to tell her I even took out that ad. I thought by trying to sell the mole on my bum to a witch I was being clever, saving the money it would’ve cost to pay some physick to cut it off.”
“So then what happened after your wife walked in?” Madra asks.
“Well, it would’ve been funny, save that my wife started punching the witch and got herself turned into a groundpig.”
“But you got her changed back, right?” Madra asks.
“No way to turn her back. Had that groundpig for ten sunspins, was a damned shame when it came time to eat it.”
“No way!” D’kassar shouts.
“Yep, fed the thing to her family for Beaster Feast. You see, I’d already told my in-laws long before that she’d run off with a philosopher, but her parents still came to visit every summer. Well, one summer when they showed up, I realized I’d forgotten to go to t
he market, so...”
“What did she taste like?” Madra asks.
The men both look at her, their mouths agape.
“Truth be told,” the old man says, “she was a little gamey.”
The old man walks to a closet and tosses his guests some pillows and blankets. “Well, kids, it’s time for this old man to get some sleep. Like I said, in the morning we’ll walk on over to the village and I’ll show you where Slotterhaus, the Mayor, lives. I’m sure he’ll be able to help you find your friends; it’s his job to know what’s going on in Zweissergrund.”
Feeling dehydrated and cranky, Zanther and Novanostrum stagger cautiously out of the supply room. Encouraged by the lack of lizard people, they make their way back to the main tunnel.
As they walk along the metal rails, they both notice a faint, melodic sound--a lullaby being plucked on strings.
“Really?” Zanther asks, “I mean, how did this guy even find us? Maybe if you bathed more, your smell wouldn’t lead him right to us.”
Novanostrum holds a finger to his lips before producing his staff and raising his arms into a battle stance. “Brace yourself,” he whispers.
Varello appears, flanked by dozens of serpentites. He plays a minor seventh, and the lizard people charge Novanostrum and Zanther. Novanostrum swings his staff, managing to clock one on the head, while Zanther cuts one through its midsection before clanging the steel of his longknife against the axe of another serpentite.
“Use your watch!” Zanther shouts as he severs a clawed arm from its owner.
Novanostrum swings his staff wildly, clearing the area around him for the short instant it takes him to attempt to twist the outer ring on the face of the Ristwatch.
“The stones! They block this magick as well,” Novanostrum shouts, ramming the butt of his staff into a lizard face before snatching his attacker’s scimitar from its claws and using it to loose his entrails upon the cold stone floor of the cavern.
“Yeah? This guy’s magick seems to be working just fine!” Zanther says before picking up an attacking serpentite by his tail and swinging him around in a circle, knocking out three other lizard people in the process.
“The acoustics in here are really good,” Varello explains quietly, observing the skirmish from a few man-lengths away, managing not to skip a beat.
“Don’t fight them, Zanther,” Novanostrum says with a grunt, narrowly avoiding the thrust of a pike aimed at his head.
It takes him a moment, but Zanther finally understands what Novanostrum is getting at. He does a spin move around the nearest serpentite and cuts between the thrusts of two others, bringing his blade down through Varello’s lute with a grating thwonk and reducing it to a pile of splinters.
In the absence of musick, the serpentites blink their huge, reptilian eyes, focusing their attention on Varello. Zanther and Novanostrum use this opportunity to slink away from the fracas, stepping away cautiously at first before breaking into a full-on fleesprint.
The lizards circle the bard, brandishing their weapons ominously and flicking their forked tongues in anger.
Varello slips a hand inside his coat and produces a small, wooden flute.