A City Lost By Time: PART 4 by Jeni Meadows
This is part 4 of Jeni Meadows’ serial A City Lost By Time. Click here to read part 3 first.
They felt like they walked for miles down that tunnel. It descended steeply, wooden planks nailed into the floor to provide support where the rock began to crumble. A thick rope had been bolted to the walls on either side, presumably so that people coming the other way could pull themselves up. The whole tunnel was uneven, dug in a hurry, barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Every so often, Staven’s head scraped against the ceiling.
On and on they went for what the darkness made feel like hours, but could’ve easily been minutes. Staven only looked back once, and he couldn’t see the light from the entrance anymore. Seeing nothing but blackness reminded him of the whole mountain standing above them, and suddenly his mind was filled with images of the whole thing coming down around them. He kept the flickering torch in his line of sight permanently after that. The darkness and silence stretched on ahead of them. Eventually Staven began to feel like he was sleepwalking. The soft purring of the cat sound asleep on his shoulder did not help.
Until Anneli slipped.
She let out a yell that bounced frantically between the close walls, and the torch fell to the floor. Staven dived after her, the cat letting out a yowl in his ear, and managed to grab the hood of her coat with one hand and loop the other around the rope on the wall. They stopped abruptly. For a second Staven feared that the bolts would dislodge and they’d be falling all over again, but they held, and for a long moment they lay there, breathing heavily.
“You alright?” Staven called down.
“I’m fine,” Anneli replied, sounding slightly strangled. “You can let go of me now, I’ve got the rope.”
Staven gingerly unclenched his fist, and when Anneli didn’t start sliding again, he reached up to grab the rope with both hands. His arms shook as he heaved himself back to his feet. The cat hissed with each breath, claws digging into skin. Given the circumstances, Staven didn’t really mind.
“Well,” Anneli said shakily, “that was almost fun.”
Staven tried to laugh, but couldn’t quite manage it in the total darkness that had enveloped them. He had no idea where the torch had gone, and once again the miles of solid rock piled above them pressed their weight down on his mind. He thought of how it had collapsed before, and all this tunnelling must’ve made it very unstable. He struggled to breathe. The air itself felt so heavy.
Then a flame flickered, and after a couple of false starts, Taire’s grinning face emerged, the torch brought back to life.
“There we go,” he crooned to it, “just needed a bit of encouragement, didn’t you?”
Staven forced himself to take a deep breath. The one after that was easier, and with the next one, the fog around his mind started to clear. The three of them exchanged glances, relieved and wary, and continued forwards. Taire went first this time. He had a much keener sense of his footing in the darkness, and every few steps he pointed out uneven patches and sections where the wooden boards had come loose.
They moved along in this way for a little while, until Staven thought he could see a greyish light up ahead of them. He tapped Taire on the shoulder and moved past him when he stopped. Without the glare of the torch in his eyes, it was obvious. They’d come to the end of the tunnel.
Taire doused the torch and they crept forward slowly, feeling their way along the rope, careful not to disturb the ground. They paused in front of the opening, shared one final glance, and peered out.
The cavern beyond was vast. The entrance to the tunnel emerged some six feet above ground level, and a makeshift staircase of ladders and wooden planks led down to the ground. An open space stretched out before them that could easily fit a sports arena inside it, and stretched up above their heads further than the light of the torches on the walls could reach. Most of the walls were made up of the kind of rock to be expected inside a mountain, but they were punctuated here and there with enormous pieces of stone.
Staven gaped. These sections of white, stark and clean even after all this time, were ornately carved in swirling patterns just like he had seen in the history books. The floor likewise revealed slabs or stonework protruding from the mountain floor, much of it cracked and shattered, but it didn’t take too much work for the imagination to identify the detail and artistry that had once been there. Fragments of colour popped out in the gloom. Mosaics, perhaps, their brilliance untouched by the centuries. The air smelt musty, as if the tunnel they had come through was the first contact this cavern had made with the outside world in all of its one thousand years.
The sound of distant chatter echoed through the chamber and the three of them froze, listening, but nothing moved. The torches lining the walls revealed three other tunnels had been cut, and led away into darkness. Stacks of what appeared to be storage crates stood randomly on the cavern floor, surrounded by bedrolls and other signs of civilisation. The cat, who had never really calmed down after Anneli’s fall, leapt from Staven’s shoulder and began to sniff around at the boxes. He quickly disappeared. Staven left him to it.
They’d been lucky that nobody had been in the cavern to see them come in, but it was unlikely they would remain undisturbed for long. They made their way as quietly as they could down the ladder, and hid themselves behind a stack of crates.
“Now what?” Taire whispered.
Staven held up a finger for quiet. He listened. The voices in the air bounced across the cavern in a dozen directions before reaching him, but eventually he isolated each one and followed them back to the source.
“They’re down there,” he whispered, pointing to the tunnel furthest to the right.
“What, all of them?” Taire asked. “So we could go look down the other two and not run into anybody?”
“I have no idea if there’s anyone in the other two or not,” Staven clarified, “but if they are, they’re not making any noise.”
They looked at Anneli, who thought for a moment, before nodding and leading the way across the cavern. They crept behind the boxes as much as they could, and when they reached the leftmost cavern, they shared a glance and plunged into the uninviting silence of the tunnel.
What greeted them in the cave beyond glittered in the torchlight like a sunset reflected on a lake. The golden dome was enormous, six feet high and at least twenty across, and that was just the top section. The rest was still buried under the earth, carrying on down an unknowable distance. It stood there before them like a drunken lord, its grandeur spoiled slightly by the steep lean to the left it had developed over centuries of subterranean burial. The cave wasn’t much bigger than it was, so the light softened and glowed on the walls. The three of them stared at it in gobsmacked silence for a long minute.
“Is that solid gold?” Taire asked in awe as he walked slowly around it.
“Not all the way through,” Staven murmured, staring. “There’s probably a room under there.” It wasn’t the gold that impressed him so much as the intricate carvings that adorned it. This dome would’ve probably stood hundreds of feet above street level, and yet an ornate pattern of overlapping swirls and floral detail had been hand-hammered into the metal. It was a work of art in itself, a project that must’ve taken months to complete, and yet probably hadn’t been seen up close enough to be admired since the day the dome was finished and mounted on the roof. Staven reached out and ran a finger gently along one of the patterns. He felt each individual dent the hammer had made under his skin. A chill went down his spine.
“I hate to be the boring one again,” Taire piped up. Staven could hear the frown in his voice without looking up. “But does this cave feel… I don’t know… deliberate to you?”
“Deliberate?” Anneli asked.
“Watch this.” Taire stood in the middle of the space between the dome and the wall and stretched both his arms out wide. The tips of his fingers just about scraped either surface. Then he moved to the opposite side of the cave and stretched out again, with the same result.
“And I bet that if I climbed up on that thing,”
“Please don’t,” Anneli interjected.
“I’m not going to. But if I did, I wouldn’t be surprised if the ceiling is as far away from the dome as the walls are. I doubt it formed like this naturally.”
“You think our friends over there dug this out?” Anneli asked. Staven knelt down to examine the floor.
“Theodora’s journal said that these people, whoever they are, knew where to show up and start digging,” Taire said. “This cave feels too symmetrical to be natural. I’m getting the impression that they’re looking for something specific, and they know where to look for it.”
“You’re right,” Staven said, blinking his vision back to normal and standing up. “This cave has been dug, and recently. They did a very good job of trying to cover it up, too.”
“Wait, I don’t understand,” Anneli said. She had one hand on the surface of the dome and looked at it as she talked. “You’re saying they came here looking for something? On purpose? To a place our entire Nation has been actively trying to find ever since we lost it? How? How do they know it’s here? Who even are they?”
“I don’t–”
“And why now?” Anneli continued, ignoring Staven completely. She looked at him angrily, tears in her eyes. “Why not come looking a hundred years ago? Or, I don’t know, as soon as the collapse happened? And why are they sneaking around, why not just ask for it? I don’t understand any of this.”
Despite her best efforts, she began to cry. Taire put his hands on her shoulders and spoke gently.
“I know, it’s frustrating. We definitely need to answer all of those questions, but right now I think we should just concentrate on finding Theodora and getting out of here.” He looked over his shoulder at Staven, who nodded. “Whatever’s going on down here, it’s too big for the three of us.”
“I just…” Anneli sniffed, then tried again. “We’ve found Maerûn. Maerûn. Even you know how significant that is. But rather than celebrating it, it’s going to be wrapped up in so much suspicion and investigations. I just… it’s wrong.”
Neither Taire nor Staven knew what to say to that. They stood in silence for a moment while Anneli regained her composure, then made their way back out into the main cavern.
The echoing voices met them when they emerged, and for a moment Staven imagined they were closer than before, but nothing moved in front of him, so he quickly led the others into the middle tunnel.
They emerged into a cave identical to the last. Another golden dome stood at an angle in the middle, and the rock around it had been dug out in exactly the same dimensions. This one, though, wasn’t as well-lit as the first. Empty brackets pierced the wall, as if the torches had been taken down and moved somewhere else.
“I wonder what’s so special about these,” Taire thought aloud, running a hand over the dome. In the dimmer light it wasn’t quite as impressive as the first.
“I would love to break one open and find out,” Staven admitted. “But–”
“Psst.”
Everyone stopped. The sound came from the wall behind Taire, who was rooted to the spot, eyes wide. He turned slowly.
“Hey.” It was a woman’s voice, in a whisper. “Yes, over here, that’s it. Sorry, it’s really dark back here. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Miss Peerson?” Anneli asked, hurrying over. Staven hooked a torch off the wall and brought it over. Something at his feet gleamed in the flames and he looked down, bemused, at the old tomcat sitting patiently in front of a wooden crate identical to the ones in the main cavern.
“Yes!” the voice cried. “Oh my goodness am I glad you’re here, I was starting to get a bit worried.”
The crate was standing longways in a tiny alcove that must’ve been dug out of the wall especially for it. A heavy padlock bolted it shut.
“They dug you a prison?” Anneli asked as she pushed against the wood, testing its strength. “Why?”
“Well, I admit that’s my own fault,” Theodora answered sheepishly. “They did have me out in the main cavern, but I kept shouting at them whenever they were trying to sleep, so eventually they got fed up and put me in here.” She paused for a moment. Taire smirked. “Have you lovely people got a way to get me out of here? I don’t recommend asking our hosts for a key.”
“We could probably kick the wood down,” Taire suggested, eyeing up the crate. “How much space have you got in there?”
“There’s no need for that,” Staven grumbled, passing Anneli the torch. He took a small leather pouch from the inside pocket of his coat and knelt down by the padlock.
“Staven,” Taire said slowly.
“Hmm?” Staven didn’t look at him. He pulled two lockpicks from the pouch and stuck his tongue out as he wriggled them in the lock.
“Since when do you own a set of lockpicks?”
“Longer than I’ve known you,” Staven replied, absently.
“Why did you bring them with you?”
“I didn’t mean to, actually,” Staven lied. “I just keep them in this coat.”
“Why do you even have them?” Taire sounded like he was about to explode.
“Taire, you’re an Investigator,” Staven pointed out as the padlock sprang open with a satisfying clunk. He stood up. “There are a lot of things I choose not to tell you.”
He dropped the lock to the floor and opened the crate, putting wood between himself and Taire before the argument could escalate. The cat sniffed at the cold metal, then climbed up Staven’s leg and settled there as if he’d never left.
“Oh, he’s lovely,” Theodora cooed as she got to her feet. Staven frowned.
“You’ve never seen this cat before?”
“No, why?”
“We found him in your house.”
Theodora scratched the cat behind the ears and shrugged. “How peculiar. No, I’ve never had pets. I’m too scared I’ll get so absorbed in my work I’ll forget to feed them. Thank you so much for coming to find me, by the way.”
“You’re welcome,” Anneli said, her gaze drifting towards the tunnel. “Now let’s go, before we get caught.”
“Oh no dear,” Theodora said. She was still looking at the cat, so for a moment Staven wasn’t sure who she was talking to. Eventually, she stopped scratching its ears and turned to face Anneli. “No, I’m afraid I won’t be going anywhere until I find out what our friends are looking for.” And before any of them could react, she turned and dashed right past them, moving faster than anyone had expected for a middle-aged librarian.
“Gods above,” Staven muttered.
“Miss Peerson,” Anneli called in a forced whisper. “Come back here.”
Nothing. She was gone.
“Right,” Taire sighed. “You two head for the exit. I’ll try and find her. But it’s vital that word about this gets back to the Office, so if she and I get caught again, just go. We’ll be fine.”
This time, nobody argued. They nodded grimly, and retraced their steps back into the main chamber.
When they got there, Theodora Peerson was nowhere to be seen, and half a dozen confused faces stared right at them from the other side of the cavern.
Written by Jeni Meadows
Jeni's professional life involves customer service and office management at a local charity in Lancaster. When she's not doing that, she's organising the practicalities for a small theatre company, writing a series of increasingly complicated novels, or she's trying to learn sign language. Or she's playing video games to procrastinate doing any of the above.