The Hall of Heroes

20. - The Draft

The monastery courtyard was pitch dark at night as the two figures of Duzz and Crefar crept down the winding ramp. Nobody was expected to move about inside and the lamps that burned in the guard-towers on the outer walls shed light mostly to the outside.

"S-s-so you're saying you just f-f-felt some impulse to g-g-go there and y-y-you have no idea wh-wh-what caused it? And th-th-that's why we're creeping down this r-r-ramp at night to i-i-inspect a laundry-room?" Duzz whispered.

"Yeah. That's all of it in a nutshell," Crefar said wearily.

"Can't you a-a-at least tell me what you're ho-ho-hoping to find there?" Duzz asked with the same tone of weariness.

Crefar stopped creeping down and sighed. "Look, I'm working on a hunch here, so I know nothing? But what I can tell you, is that what I sense from that door is magic. Something to do with magic. Maybe they just dont want us to go there because they are stashing something and it's not a laundry at all."

Duzz curled her lips. "Hope y-y-you're right."

They crept down to the base of the tower and walked around it until they reached the door Crefar was interested in. The door was not locked, so they were inside in a flash and nobody seemed to be the wiser.

Duzz lit a lantern and they looked around. Many gowns of the order were hanging from numerous clotheslines attached to the ceiling. And all of them were waving in a seemingly sourceless phantom wind, just like the Grand Wise Woman said.

"Anything?" Duzz turned to Crefar.

Crefar was walking about the room, knocking on the walls. "Well, at the very least it is intriguing. I mean, a door calls to me, and on the inside there is some weird thing with wind going on. Could that be an accident?"

"Hmmm." Duzz grumbled. "S-s-so, where do you th-th-think it's coming f-f-from?"

Crefar looked left, right, up, and then, he took a long gaze downwards. "Doesn't it feel like coming from below?" he said at length.

Duzz shrugged her shoulders. Crefar leaned down and inspected the floor. It seemed to be earthen. The tower obviously had no foundation below, or whatever foundation there was in the past was now covered with soil.

"Let's go get a shovel." Crefar decided.

They found one outside in the courtyard and after digging into the dirt floor of the laundry room for some ten minutes, Crefar leaned on to the shovel and wheezed. "This damn body! Gets all sweaty after two shovel strokes!"

"Hmmm. Doesn't s-s-seem to me like you're keen on d-d-doing something about its sh-sh-shape, though." Duzz poked him.

Crefar only stared at her. "Well, why don't you take up the mantle from here?"

"M-m-might as well, i-i-if we want to g-g-get anywhere this n-n-night."

It couldn't be said Duzz was in any way more efficient than Crefar with the shovel. She did jump in and crouching down tossed one shovel after another, but the amount of dirt she managed to pull out with a single stroke was negligible. And so they took turns digging for another half an hour before something strange happened.

As Duzz thrust the shovel into the dirt beneath her, both she and Crefar suddenly lost the firm ground beneath their feet and started plummeting down. They didn't fall deep, though. They hit a solid stone floor not ten feet beneath.

As they collected themselves and stood up, Duzz found her lantern that fell with them and lit it again. They looked around and realized they were in a downward sloping tunnel that curved just like the ramp that ran around the tower and seemed to be winding ever downwards into the depths below. As they looked up, they saw no earthen floor, no hole that they were sweating over for nearly an hour. Only a steady decline of the stone tunnel that continued up and ended in the laudry room as if it had always been there.