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.