Remains, Part IV

From behind him, Shazer heard a succession of quick, sharp cracks. Nodding to himself at the industry of his companion, he returned to his survey. He had never seen a group of ruins like this before. It was obviously far older than the aboriginal or colonial structures that seemed to appear behind every hill. He had read about Azhō-Eochaid, the Sundered Realm, the ancient civilization that bards spoke of, but he had never seen any real evidence of it before.

Clearly, however, this compound had served many purposes over the centuries. More modern architecture brushed up against the older generations of stone, and Shazer had found debris: an old sack with a hole in it, a broken horseshoe, and so on. His heart began to race as he considered what might be beneath the floor Boaz had found. It had been a long time since they had found anything worth selling at the market in Lutz.

“Shazer,” Boaz called and the scholar hurried back to his friend.

“What is it?” he said as he stepped onto the stone floor. Boaz had driven two long, heavy spikes into the trapdoor and was busy adorning them with ropes.

“I don’t think I can do this alone,” Boaz said with a grim smile.

Shazer smiled too and set down the lantern.

The spikes were angled away from the men so they would not easily pull free and, after taking a few deep breaths, Boaz and Shazer threw themselves against their ropes. Boaz growled and Shazer squeeled, each of them getting low and pushing with their legs.

Slowly, the stone began to lift. The men strained on in the flickering lamp light until, just as Shazer’s strength was about to give out, the heavy block finally tipped over. Both men collapsed as suddenly the resistance to their weight disappeared. Shazer gasped for breath. Boaz cleared his throat a few times, but otherwise made no noise.

It was not long, however, before the curiosity and desperation of the two men overcame their weariness. It had a year since they had found anything decent to sell in the markets of Lutz, and it had been several month since either had had an honest, decent meal. Each man had sold nearly everything he owned, keeping only those possessions that would facilitate their expeditions after the artifacts of forgotten worlds.

“Come on,” Boaz moaned, rising ponderously to his feet.

Shazer took three more deep breaths, then rose as well, though he sighed at how sore his muscles had already become.

Together, they walked toward the black opening in the floor. In the dregs of the twilight, it seemed to pulse against the lantern’s glow, as though it was a living mass of some kind, gently breathing.

Boaz looked in first.

“Too dark,” he said. There was a shaft, but it dug into the darkness long before it revealed its terminus.

“I’ll get the lantern,” Shazer said. As he turned, Boaz gathered phlegm and saliva into his mouth and spat into the shaft.

“Not too deep,” he said, turning to recover their ropes. “Fifteen or twenty feet, I think.”

Carefully, they tied one of the ropes to the lantern, then slowly lowered it into the darkness. In the beginning, the walls glistened, as though years of water draining through the trapdoor had rubbed them smooth, but as the globe of light descended, the texture of the walls gradually changed. The stone blocks became pitted and porous and the two men both wondered what could have created such an irregular pattern in the body of such hard stones.

The shift descended nearly ten feet, and then opened into room directly beneath the one in which they stood. As far as they could tell, the strange features of the lower walls of the shaft continued into the room. The lantern settled twenty feet below on a flat surface of packed dirt.

Remains, Part III

The buildings were even more derelict upon closer inspection than they had appeared from the road. The men had seen old structures many times before: this was not their first time at such a task. But these felt much older than others they had pillaged. Boaz found it harder and harder to focus on the separateness of the architecture. These stones had stood by their neighbors for so long that they no longer seemed to think of themselves as individual stones, and so the walls and towers reared up as solid monuments to something forgotten. They stood, huge and unreduceable, except by time, which had ironically also fused them together.

The men were practiced and thorough in their investigation and it was not long before Boaz passed under a heavy arch onto a floor paved with stone. Other rooms had left behind pieces of flooring, but this surface was seemingly untouched. Thorn carcasses and dirt lay scattered across it, but it was clear that this floor had been made more recently than the rest of the outpost. He stuck is fingers to his lips and whistled, then crouched down to wait for Shazer.
His eyes poured over the surface, looking for anything to account for its abnormality, and by the time his companion had joined him, he had found it.

“A trap door,” he said, pointing to the far corner, beneath a gaping window. Shazer squinted.
“Yes,” he said. “Well done, Boaz. Well done.”

Boaz ran back for the lantern, and then together they crossed to the flag the fitted too loosely among its fellows. Shazer had heard for years about Boaz and his remarkable skills of observation, and had seen it for himself many times since, but it still never ceased to amaze him. Though he had nodded at what his companion had indicated, it wasn’t until they reached the trap that he finally saw what had given it away: the space between this stone and those surrounding it was slightly wider than that between the other stones.

“How do we open it?” Shazer said.

“I’m not sure we’re supposed to,” Boaz answered, kneeling to examine the door.

“Supposed to?”

Boaz passed his eyes over the huge block.

“I don’t see a mechanism,” he said. He pointed to several patches of scarring. “And look. Others have tried. And failed, I’d guess.”

“Imagine what’s down there,” Shazer said. Boaz sat back, clearly following his friend’s advice.

“Let me see what I can do,” he said finally, then unslung his pack and started rummaging. “Why don’t you see if you can find anything else. We don’t want to come home empty handed. Not after being gone this long.”

Shazer nodded and vanished into the rubble and the dusk. He took the lantern with him, swinging it around as he examined the rest of the old compound and its surrounds. He looked the ruins differently than his companion. Boaz looked for purely physical, external evidence to lead them to the kinds of objects they could scavenge and sell. He had proved himself time and time again to be able to find even the smallest artifact, simply by deconstructing the fields of their searches with his eyes.

For Shazer, the investigations were more academic. Like Boaz, he had grown up in near the village of Ahrbul, but Shazer’s father had been a wealthy rancher, with many servants. As a result, Shazer had done little physical labor, and when his father died, Shazer inherited a small fortune, a ranch, and plenty of men to work it for him. As a resulted, he also inherited a great deal of free time.

As a child, he had always loved exploring the bones of old cultures that were abundant in that part of the world. As an adult, then, he was able to expand his explorations by buying books and scrolls from passing merchants and by spending much of his time interviewing travelers who came through Ahrbul and its neighbors.

When he moved through the ruins, he was piecing together a puzzle in his brain, trying to guess the purpose of each structure, and as a result, the most likely location of any loot. Scavenging had never been a profession he had aspired to, but when the Netherwild had seeped into the land around the south road, many things had changed.

Remains, Part II

Boaz finally stepped off the road. There was no grass, but there was a good deal of moss, and a pervasive carpet of bull thorns.

“What should we be looking for?” he said, blinking a few times to clear his eyes for the close examination that would follow. Shazer grinned.

“There’s my man,” he said. “I doubt that much would be left on the surface, but several of the histories I read described caves or cellars of some kind. A few of the old mercenaries I spoke with at Dunan and at Lutz said the same thing.”

“Doors, then,” Boaz said, almost in complete mastery of his fear now. In the fine details, in the observation of the world in its constituent pieces, there was nothing to fear. For twelve years, he had worked for the marshal in Ahrbul, taking spot inventories of goods of passing caravans for the purposes of taxation. At first, he had been overwhelmed by the huge wagons, filled with goods, stuffed with merchandise, but he had learned to be patient and take each load a piece at a time, and as the years passed, that learning seeped into his own soul.

Fifty carts bloated with wares going north seemed as uncountable as a thousand, but there was nothing intimidating about a single barrel sitting on the deck. It didn’t even matter if it had a wooden box beside it. There was nothing overwhelming about a barrel, or a box.

Later, when the road dried up and carts stopped coming, when the marshal sent him home for the last time, he found himself staring out at week upon week without food and felt despair tickling the back of his neck. He couldn’t handle weeks, but he could make it through a day. He had gone many days without food during his life. The gods often called on their children to fast in praise or supplication. A day without food was nothing to be afraid of, and if it happened be followed by another day, so be it. A day was just a day, he thought. It didn’t matter what came before or after, and he could manage a day without food.

Now, the ruins conjured in his heart fears so primal he could not even fully understand them, but he told himself that they were nothing but piles of individual stones, and there was nothing as ordinary as a pile of stones.

He nodded to Shazer, beginning to feel excitement.

“Doors, or stairs, or perhaps other, more natural openings.”

The two men spread out, leaving the lantern on a pile of rubble, its hoods all open. Shazer began to whistle and though it was little forced, it was cheerful nonetheless. The whistle was like the light, however. Its influence spread no further than the radius of his muted sound and beyond, the silence became emboldened by the sudden challenge.

Remains, Part I

“We’ve never been this far south,” Boaz said, nervously lifting the old, thirsty lantern to illuminate the broken landscape before him. His companion paused only for a moment, then stepped off the cracked flagstones that had once borne men and merchandise. He kept his face out of the light.

“Shazer,” Boaz said. “I said we’ve never been this far south.”

“I heard you,” Shazer said. “Are you coming?”

Boaz lifted the lantern as high as he could. The sun was still setting and should have cast off its light with impunity, but it did not. There was a stickiness to the summer twilight and the emerging gloom clung like sweat to the old bones of architecture, to the trees, and to the skin of the two men.

Boaz had surveyed the area three times now, but he did it again anyway. The desperate shafts of light dusted the memory of the road, lost to the haze of the south and, Boaz noted glumly, to the haze of the north as well. Where the men stood, the track had found some relief from the fields of thorns and desolation that flanked it for three miles to the north and who knew how many miles to the south. A deep-cut stream bisected the road, spitting out a small pool.
The stream had once been tamed by a wide bridge, now little more than jutting arches and rotting timbers left from some attempt to renew the crossing of old. The pool had also been tamed once, but the remains of such a settlement or outpost were even less coherent than those of the bridge. Boaz’s lantern revealed hollow structures that reminded the man of his father and the other old men who played dominos together while the sun was high, though they could only remember pieces of the rules. It had been so long since these walls had served the purpose of their creation that they seemed to have forgotten it. They slumped against each, crumbled into heaps to nap in the evening heat, and stared vacantly at their environment, their eyes wide.

“This is too far south,” Boaz muttered, then called for Shazer to wait.

“Stop grousing and bring the light,” Shazer said, without turning around. “Let’s finish up here before it gets too dark. We’ve wasted too much time already.” His head was moving rapidly as he took and inventory of the buildings and other features of the ruin.

“Are you sure we’re going to find something here?” Boaz said, lowering the lantern a little.

“Something solid?”

This time, Shazer did turn. His eyes showed pity, his jaw disgust.

“I have told you,” he said. “Caravans stopped here for a thousand years or more, before the….”

His confidence wavered for a moment as he swallowed the word he had almost uttered. As he recovered and found an alternative, the bravado returned.

“Before the new road,” he finished. “We’ll find something solid. Something we can sell.”