The Mechanical Crown

The betrayer

Crossing the bridge, the silent inactivity of the mesa docks struck her a blow like that of a weapon; she had spent much of her childhood around the docks and gardens, first while her parents worked and then after being taken in by the Queen. The bustle and noise of the arriving and departing ships, of cargo being offloaded and transported, had been the comforting music of her younger years. It had become a background hum she had taken for granted and now its absence felt like a wound.

Servants buzzed about the palace as always, though they now laid tables with food that nobody would eat and made beds with fresh linen that would never be slept in. The princess was gone, the King was gone and, it seemed, the Queen was also now gone. Pienya's queries were met with distrustful silences or fearful glances. Having checked the aviary, the Queen's bedchamber, the dining hall and gardens, Pienya left the palace and crossed back to the other mesa where the city prison was housed. It was a long, low building beside the barracks, which appeared small and unbarricaded from the outside. It was only after venturing within that it became apparent that the bulk of the prison was underground, built into the core of the mesa itself, descending level after level, each one housing criminals found guilty of increasingly heinous crimes, and each more difficult to escape from than the last. The only way in or out was the central shaft, in which a vertical cable car ran, entirely separated from the cell floors. It could stop at any level, after which a bridge extended across the yawning abyss, connecting the car to the walkway that ran around the edge of the shaft and the cells beyond. She saw faces at the bars as he descended, and averted her eyes.

Pienya kept going down, to the very bottom of the pit. She left the car, walked across the sodden floor, aware of the steady beat of incarceration that stretched above her, and then entered into a second car, which protruded from the ground but did not rise up any higher. To enter she used a key kept in a clasp about her neck; only a very select few were able to go below. She closed the gate and pulled the lever, prompting the car to drop into the ground. Compacted earth rushed past and then she emerged into a new chamber, cut from the rock itself. Pipework and mechanical contraptions wheezed and spun and vented, as the machinery that kept Treydolain functioning continued to operate. The same machine that had given the citizens of the city an advanced appreciation of life for several centuries, those above prospering from the toil of the worst and most useless inhabitants; it was criminality turned to efficient production. Pienya had always admired the vision of those early builders, who had seen the need for the isolated valley to offer a comfortable way of life to its trapped inhabitants, if unending conflict was to be avoided. It was only recently that she'd come to realise that Kraisa had been instrumental in establishing the system, which somehow made her appreciate it all the more.

The guards who worked down here were selected carefully and monitored closely to ensure that nobody knew of their work; they were well recompensed for the trouble of maintaining silence. Officially they were presented as employees of the prison above; unofficially they spent their days keeping the subterranean workforce in line. Pienya had only visited the machine rooms and mines beneath the city a handful of times in her life, not having had much of a need to do so in carrying out her duties as a King's Eye, and as she moved down the walkways, observing the workers on the machines below, she noted for the first time that many were strikingly young. Had that always been the case? Perhaps she hadn't noticed when she had also been younger.

Moving through each chamber, she descended a metal staircase to the dusty floor, then followed old, worn signs set in to the walls which led her through multiple chambers to the tunnels beyond. The machines seemed to be operating at a more intense pace than she remembered from her last visit. The mining of source material had been in operation for centuries - had, in fact, been the reason for the original shaft drilled into the mesa. After the mesas had been hollowed out, the mining had fanned out into the valley itself, the tunnels now comprising a lattice-like network of thousands of interconnected pathways. Some had even theorised that the tunnels could be extended below the mountains, to create path out of the valley, but it had never been successfully achieved.