The Lost Canals of Turnitia.
Kali had been planning to explore them for as long as she could remember. They were, however, a massive undertaking. Some references she had unearthed about them suggested that they went on for hundreds of leagues and, until now, somewhere between the planning and the exploration of them, something had always managed to get in the way. Last year, there had been the matter of the Red Queen, for instance, and only a few months before she'd been considering their allure when she had been distracted by the small affair of the Clockwork King. Her current circumstances were perhaps not the ideal ones in which to finally fulfil her ambition, but Kali was quietly relieved that fate had pushed her in this direction and she had to admit that she was more than a little excited by the prospect ahead of her.
The journey from Andon had taken her a day and a half, moving slowly and cautiously through the stonewood forests of southern Pontaine, on a horse hired from the city wall stables, which she had dismounted and slapped back home when she had neared the Anclas Territories. She had used the cover of the forests not only to avoid the k'nid, but also to avoid the gaze of the surveillance scopes with which the Vossian army had equipped their forts.
Dividing the peninsula — and thus Vos and Pontaine — like a great thick belt, the Anclas Territories stretched from Freiport in the north to Turnitia in the south, and had once been neutral farmland. After the Great War between Vos and Pontaine, however, the former had wasted no time in establishing a number of forts on the land whose official reason for existence — the protection of the Vos Empire — had always struck Kali as somewhat ironic considering that it was they who had invaded Pontaine in the first place. Whatever the politics of it, Pontaine, battered by the war, had been in no position to dispute the placements. While they remained little more than observation posts, the number of additional forts, garrisons and service structures that had grown alongside and between them over the intervening years, had transformed Vos's presence in the area from a broken series of scattered bases to a virtual wall, over which they held complete autonomy and control. They hadn't exercised its strategic power until now, allowing relatively free trade and passage between the neighbouring states, like Pontaine, having no wish to precipitate another conflict, but in doing so it had become abundantly clear how insidious its growth had been to the area. Simply put, when they had closed the borders they had had the capability to do it literally. There was no way through.
Lucky, then, that Kali hadn't wanted to go through. All she'd had to do was make sure they didn't see what it was that was going under it. And the two bound and gagged and struggling guards at her feet were testimony to the fact that she had succeeded.
Kali stood, now, on one of the more remote guard towers towards the southern end of the Territories, staring through the surveillance scope with which the guards had unwillingly provided her. The looks on their faces as she had suddenly appeared before them, forty feet up in the air, had been priceless. While they weren't to know that she had, in fact, been dangling from a strip of shadow wire at the time, their surprise had lasted long enough for her to be able to slam their heads together, disabling them before they could sound the alarm. The action had been necessary because, out of all the towers in the Anclas line, it was this one that overlooked her destination. Or, to be more accurate, the entrance to her destination; one of the huge roundels to which she had given the name dropshaft.
That was the thing about the Lost Canals of Turnitia — they were not lost in the sense that no one had been able to find them. They were only lost in the sense that they had been long abandoned. Long, long abandoned by Kali's reckoning. Because, as far as she could make out, the inscriptions on the dropshafts were neither elven nor dwarven and seemed to her old enough to predate both. What exactly the implications of that were, she had no more clue than she had to what purpose the dropshafts served. In all the time she had been planning an expedition to the canals, she had located three of the dropshafts, one south east of Scholten, one west, near Malmkrug, and the third here, near the coastal city of Turnitia. That Turnitia had been honoured with giving its name to the canals was not, though, in reference to this particular dropshaft but rather that — unique among the canal network — this part of the coast had once had an entrance to the canals leading in from the sea.
Kali trained the surveillance scope to the north east, and it was from that direction, from the Flagons, that she expected her companion to come. Anytime now.
Sure enough, as she watched a small, though bulky and unnatural, shape appeared on the horizon and began moving towards her, weaving erratically in a way that suggested its driver was not quite used to the controls. As she had instructed in her note, the headlights of the machine had been dimmed upon approaching the Anclas Territories.
It was time to go, to make her rendezvous. But first she had to make sure that two sets of eyes did not lay sight on something they shouldn't. It was Merrit Moon's old edict, told to her long ago in the Warty Witch. Certain discoveries from the world's past had to be kept to themselves, for everyone's peace of mind. So, to ensure the guards neither saw nor heard the approaching dwarven artefact, Kali smiled sweetly and apologized. Then she bent down and punched both guards hard on the nose, knocking them cold before leaping onto the shadow wire and lowering herself to the ground.
Now came the hard part.
Kali had left the actual opening of the dropshaft until the last minute because she had not wanted any Vossian patrol stumbling across it in the dark, ruining not only her privilege of being the first person to access the network in an unimaginable time, but also any chance of a successful stealth operation into the bargain. She reckoned she had perhaps fifteen minutes before The Mole reached her and in that time, she would put into practice what she had been researching ever since she had first learned of the canals' existence.
One of the more unusual aspects of the dropshafts was that they were sealed with a metal door containing one of the most complex locking mechanisms Kali had ever seen. It was designed, if an attempt to open it was made incorrectly, to jam the chambers in place permanently, preventing anyone ever accessing it again. One thing was certain — whoever had built these things had gone to extreme measures to ensure no unauthorised person could access them, accidentally or otherwise.
Just what the hells were they going to such lengths to conceal?
Reaching the dropshaft, Kali worked slowly and carefully, following the diagram in her head that she had worked out over long nights at her table by the Captain's Chest. First, she disengaged the perimeter safeguards, then locked down the punchbolts in a predetermined order and, finally, released the chambers one by one, until the entire centre of the dropshaft door rotated counter-clockwise. She moved to the right of the metal plate, repeating the procedure — though, when it came to the punchbolts, in a different order — until, again, the centre of the door rotated, this time clockwise.
Kali sighed with relief. There was only one thing left to do.
Directly in the centre of the door, a circle of ten metal projections rose from the otherwise flat surface. These, she knew, had to be depressed in exactly the right order, otherwise the entire process would cancel itself out. There was only one problem — according to the ancient records she had found, the order was different for each of the dropshafts, and there was absolutely no indication of which order applied to which dropshaft. She had a one in three chance of success, so it was lucky, then, that she liked a gamble.
Tongue sticking out of her mouth, she crouched on her haunches and tried to put herself in the mind of whoever had last — if ever — operated the projections. Then, swallowing, she plumped for the third from the left, depressing it with a strenuous groan, until it was almost flush with the surface of the plate. There, with a metallic boom, it locked into place. Bingo — but that was the easy one, because two of the sequences started with that projection. The sixth from the left, then, or the eighth, the antepenultimate one? The eighth. She was sure it was going to be the eighth, and after that it would be plain sailing.
Be sure. Be very sure.
Kali depressed the eighth projection. There was another metallic boom. She cast a quick glance around all the perimeter chambers and they all seemed to be remaining in place. Yes! she thought.
Boom. Boom, boom, boom.
The locks were cancelling.
Shi -
All kinds of things went through Kali's mind, not least how stupid she had been. With her one-in-three chance of success, she had been presuming that the three sequences related to the three dropshafts she knew of, but if the sequence she was using was wrong that meant there was another one out there somewhere. This made the network potentially even bigger than she thought! The thrill she felt at the prospect was, however, rather comprehensively subsumed in the fierce rush of adrenalin produced by the realisation that she had only seconds to stop her work being in vain.
With a grunt of exertion she flung herself across the dropshaft plate, whipping a small metal bar from her equipment belt and jamming it between the chamber bolts before they could slam shut. The collision of metal on metal vibrated the whole plate and almost took Kali's hand off, but at least it had prevented the reverse sequence going any further. But it was not the only one. Kali back-flipped, grabbing another metal cylinder from her belt and jammed it into the second chamber feed before sighing in relief. That should have been that but Kali's interfering with the delicate balance of the locks and chambers had clearly knocked the whole mechanism out of kilter. She looked around in disbelief as chambers and punchbolts began to engage and disengage themselves in no particular order and with ever increasing speed.
Dammit. There had to be an order to it somewhere.
As she leapt around blocking or freeing those bolts that looked as if they should go this way or that, Kali tried to visualise the underworkings of the dropshaft plate. Rapid calculation after rapid calculation followed, Kali flinging herself here and there like something possessed, and she was beginning to think that she'd be doing this until she dropped dead of exhaustion when there was a sudden heavy clank from beneath her.
The plate had just released itself.
It began to rise.
There was only one problem. If Kali were to keep it open she had to remain in the position she was in, a kind of crooked spreadeagle with the sole of her left foot jamming one punchbolt, the calf of her right leg another, one hand pushing upward to block yet another, and a painfully positioned elbow blocking the last. She looked as if she were posing for some strange art class.
The plate had risen fully now, and Kali with it, and while she could not see what was beneath it, she could smell it. A dank, briny mouldiness that was redolent of the rot of ages. It made her want to gag. She didn't, though, because her mind was taken off the desire by a prolonged and bass rumble that originated somewhere from within wherever the opened plate led.
Or at least she thought that was where it came from. It was difficult to tell because The Mole was nearing her now, the sound of its engines drowning out everything around it. And all Kali could do was wait until it fully arrived. She was glad that she had incapacitated the guards in the watchtower because this, frankly, was embarrassing.
The Mole manoeuvred into position beside her and, after a second, there was the hiss of its opening hatch. A tall, wiry, moustachioed and ear-ringed figure eased itself out of the hatch, took in Kali's predicament with an amused glance, and then stroked his moustache.
"I see you are enjoying yourself," Aldrededor observed.
"Not… quite… the… words… I'd… have… chosen," Kali gasped as she strained to keep the punchbolts in place. "Do you think, maybe, you could give me a hand here?"
Aldrededor applauded softly.
"Aldrededor!"
The ex-pirate smiled again, sighed, and began to look around for suitable pieces of rock or detritus with which he could jam the spaces Kali's appendages currently occupied.
"Is it any wonder," he commented as he worked, "that we at the Flagons worry about you all the time? Why is it that you get yourself into these ridiculous situations?"
"I have a knack for it."
"Clearly. Tell me — just what would you have done had we not come along?"
"I don't know," Kali said through clenched teeth. It took a second for what Aldrededor had said to penetrate. "Hang on. What do you mean, 'we'?"
"There," Aldrededor said, fitting the last block into place. "I believe you can climb down now."
"Thanks. Ahhh. Ooohh. Aldrededor, what do you mean, 'we'?" She repeated before becoming distracted as what appeared to be a thick cloud of brown fog roiled from The Mole's cabin.
A second later, it happened again, and Kali moved to the door, coughing as she was engulfed in a cloud of cloying reekingness.
Oh no, she thought, and stepped back as something tall and thin articulated itself, in the manner of a brackan, from the inside of the cabin and stood, cheroot in mouth, arms folded.
"Dolorosa?"
"Of coursa Dolorosa! Who you expecta, thatta red-headed tart, the Annoying Lord?"
"Anointed," Kali corrected, absently. "Dolorosa, what in the hells are you doing here?"
"Our land is plagued by man-eating theengs and you think I woulda let my 'usband make thisa journey alone?"
Kali stared at the aforementioned and Aldrededor shrugged, picking at a tooth.
"Who's looking after my pitsing pub?"
"Do notta worry. Horse issa behind the bar."
"Horse!?"
"Hah! I havva her! Eet ees a leetle joke. No, thatta reprobate Deadnettle, he looka after the place. Notta that there are any customers. Nothing, and I mean nothing, comes near while the fat women dance."
"The Bellies are still dancing?"
"They havva leetle choice."
"True," Kali reflected. She paused for a second, looked at the two of them, and shook her head fondly. "Look, I appreciate you bringing The Mole, but I have to go now."
"Offa to save the world."
"Again," Kali sighed.
She patted them both on the shoulder and moved to the dwarven machine. She settled into the pilot's position but found her legs bent up against the control panel, as they had been when she had first found The Mole. Again, she tried to push the seat back but this time it would not go, blocked by some object. Kali leant around and found that Dolorosa was not the only unexpected extra to arrive with the dwarven machine. Something was jammed behind the seat. A small, wicker basket. Kali flipped the lid and stared inside. There were a number of bottles of flummox and two small mountains of slices of bread, layered in pairs, with filling between them. Kali prodded the uppermost layer of bread tentatively then pulled back with a grimace as a thick, brown substance slowly oozed from beneath it.
"What," Kali asked cautiously, "is this?"
Dolorosa looked surprised. "It issa beer anda butties for our trippa into the mountains."
The beer Kali didn't have a problem with, but it was these 'butty' things, and what was still oozing insidiously from inside them, that had disturbed her. She picked one of the creations up and it flopped under its own weight, plopping a lump of brown stuff onto her lap.
"Surprise stew butties?"
"Ovva course!" Dolorosa looked affronted. "Wassa the matter, eh? You havva gone offa my signatura dish while you havva been away?"
"No, no," Kali said quickly, having no wish to incur the old woman's wrath, especially by mentioning you couldn't have a signature dish if it was the only dish you ever made. The fact was, while she had nothing against surprise stew as such, she'd rather have eaten her own knees than the mess that was being presented to her now. That wasn't really the point though, was it? "Dolorosa. This isn't a picnic."
The woman stared at her, squinting her eyes, then turned to her husband and threw her hands in the air. "Pah! Now she thinks I amma some kind offa buffoon! A madda olda lady whose marbles havva rolled away, eh?"
Aldrededor curled his moustache and smiled, saying nothing, and Dolorosa span back to face Kali.
"Ovva course I know this issa no piccaneek! Eet ees going to be very dangerous. Alla the more reason to keepa uppa our strength, yes?"
Dolorosa seemed to entering full flow, so it was going to be useless to argue. "Well, yes, I suppose so, but — " Kali began and then faltered. Dolorosa had just said what she'd thought she'd said, hadn't she? Our strength. Yep, she'd definitely said our, as in 'we.'
"Ohhoohhhooooo no. If you think you're coming with me, you've got another think coming. This isn't a day trip into the country, old woman, it's the Drakengrat Mountains we're talking about."
"I thought itta wassa the Lost Canalsa of Turnitia first?"
"Those, too! And you can guarantee that they became lost for a reason. There's always a reason with these places. Deathtraps, monsters, insatiable, grasping hairy things that lurk in the dark…"
"I havva shared my bedaroom with Aldrededor for forty-five years, this issa nurthing."
Aldrededor blew her a kiss.
"What?" Kali said, looking at him. "Oh no, uugh, I don't want to know. The point is, it's what I do — and I do it alone. You could die down there."
"Anda we coulda die uppa here. Or havva you forgotten the k'nid?" She leaned in towards Kali and added: "Havva you forgotten that when you take thissa machine, we woulda havva to walk home to the Flagons? Howwa long do you thinka we'd survive outta there, hah?"
"What?"
Dammit!
In all the chaos of the past few days she had forgotten that. Her own trip here from Andon had been perilous to say the least, and she couldn't reasonably expect Dolorosa and Aldrededor to make a journey ten times that length. And neither could she leave them here, where Vossian patrols might find and detain them, or worse. Maybe they could camp just inside the entrance to the Lost Canals, she pondered briefly. But then remembered the deep roar she thought she had heard when she had first breached its gates. It might have been nothing — an acoustic trick of the waiting labyrinth — but then again…
Dammit!
"All right, all right! But the two of you do everything I say, understand? You keep quiet when I tell you and you keep your heads down when I tell you and — "
Aldrededor interrupted her. "Young lady. My wife and I have survived the Mirror Maelstrom of Meenos and the Seven Sirens of the Sarcrean Sea, we have stood fast in the path of ripper gales and laughed in the face of the Chadassa themselves — "
"Like a this — hahahahaaaar!" Dolorosa interjected.
"— we have sailed the acid surf, we have swum the shadowed waters, and we have rode the boiling waves of the north."
"Enough!" Kali said. She had to admit she sometimes forgot that these two had… history and, being reminded of it by them, she felt vaguely chastised. She couldn't help but worry nonetheless. Neither of them were any longer in their prime and, when it came down to it, they were family. She made no apologies for trying to keep them safe.
But what choice did she have?
"Aldrededor… Dolorosa?"
"Yes, Kali Hooper?"
"What say we get this show on the road?"
The pair released a satisfied sigh. "Yes, Kali Hooper."
Kali gunned the engines of The Mole as Dolorosa and Aldrededor clambered into the seats behind her, checking they were settled before she flicked the lever that closed the hatch. The loud and sibilant hiss as it sealed made what they were about to do seem all the more immediate. But Kali wasn't sure what was worse — the unknown region they were about to negotiate or the sudden overwhelming odour of garlic and piratical aftershave that pervaded The Mole's cabin. This was going to be a long journey.
Having become quite used to the dwarven machine's controls by now, Kali pushed forward the lever that set it into gear, and then another that turned it on its tracks until its nose pointed towards the open hatch. Then, without further hesitation, she urged the machine forward, swallowing slightly as its front dipped onto the slope that lay beneath the opening. Outside the small observation portholes, the ambient light turned from the azureness of above to a strange and somewhat eerie rippling green.
"So theesa canals, they are what?" Dolorosa queried. "Some kind ovva sewer?"
"Not a sewer," Kali said. "But, to be honest, I haven't a clue what they actually are. All I know is where they go. At least, part of where they go."
"Whicha beggas the question. If you avva thees 'Mole', why is it you didda not drill into them somewhere else, inna stead of using thees hatch? Somawhere less dangerous?"
That, Kali could answer, and did. The fact was, she had made one exploratory dig at the location of one of the canal's branches over a year before, but had hit a layer of something that had been as impenetrable as the dropshaft plates she had later discovered. Whatever the material was, it defied damage from all the tools in her possession and then some. She seriously doubted that even the dwarven drill bits would make much inroads without taking damage. No, the dropshafts were the only realistic way in — and now that she was actually using one of them she hoped that she might find some answers as to what the material was. Because if she knew that, it might give her more of a clue as to who it was had built the bloody canals in the first place. Speaking of which, The Mole was coming to the end of the access tunnel.
"Lady and gentleman," Kali said as she flicked on The Mole's headlights. "The Lost Canals of Turnitia."
Both Aldrededor and Dolorosa leaned forward to peer through the portholes, and gasped. Kali almost did the same. Only the fact that her brain was working overtime to process what she was seeing preventing her from doing so.
Because with the affair of the dwarven testing ground and then the entrance passage to this network, she was beginning to think that she'd had enough of tunnels to last her half a lifetime, but the fact was tunnels were not what she had got. Instead, ahead of The Mole, she found herself staring at an arched thoroughfare that was as large and as grandiose as the inside of a cathedral. What was even more awe inspiring was that this passage was only one of the canals. Beyond further dark arches, to their left and right, as far as they could see, were many more of them, routing away to Gods knew where beneath the surface of the peninsula.
"By all of the Gods," Aldrededor breathed. "I never thought I would see this place."
"You know it?"
"From tales told on the high seas."
"Itta reminds me ovva the crystal caverns beyond Sarcre," Dolorosa whispered. "You remember, Dreddy? Where a we founda Davyjonz Locket?"
"I remember, darling," Aldrededor said, his eyes twinkling. "Ah — it is good to smell the sea again."
The sea? Kali thought, and then realised that what Aldrededor said was true.
That briny odour she had smelled above was stronger here, detectable even through the filters that were bringing air into the cabin. The fact that they were a good number of leagues from the sea, then, could mean only one thing. The canals down here were seawater canals, pumped throughout the network by who-knew-what kind of mechanisms.
"It's nice to be somewhere where there's a little peace and quiet," Kali commented.
Aldrededor's eyebrows rose.
"Wait — you do not know?"
"Know what?"
"These canals. The tales on the high seas tell of something that lives down here." He stroked his moustache. "As my beloved wife might say, something beeeg."