Matthew finished putting the finishing touches to the small piece of ironwood he’d been carving and carefully inserted it into the lock.
It fit, he knew it fit. He could feel the way the carefully shaped teeth fit the levers of the lock, and if it had been made of good solid steel all he’d have had to do was turn it, putting all his strength into it, and eventually the stubborn tumblers would have given way and the door would open.
This key was made of wood, though. Ironwood, true, but wood nonetheless, and its teeth were dangerously thin. For several minutes he was too scared to try it in case one of them broke off in the lock, jamming it forever. Still, a door one was too scared to open might as well be jammed forever for all the good it was, so he summoned all his nerve to put a little pressure on it, praying that it was meant to be turned in the same direction as modern locks.
The levers remained stubbornly immobile, though, so the young soldier gently increased the pressure, a little at a time, dreading to hear the brittle snap that would mean that the key had broken. His fingers became slippery with sweat and his hand began to shake as the fear mounted in him, almost making him stop and go find the others, wanting one of them to take over and accept the responsibility. Another part of him rose up in anger, though, cursing him as a coward. It made him put still more pressure on the key. Stop dithering, he told himself angrily. Just do it. Something’s going to give, and if it’s the key, that’s just too bad. At least I’ll have had the courage to try.
Not afraid any longer, he turned the key, treating it as though it were as strong and solid as steel. It refused to turn at first, but then there was a dry, brittle click and the end of the key was suddenly turning freely. Matthew was so certain that it had broken that, when he removed it from the lock and looked at it, it failed to register at first that it was still perfectly intact, and when the information finally trickled through to his brain, it just sat there on the edge of his awareness as if his mind didn’t know what to do with it.
Gradually, the truth dawned on him and he jumped up in euphoria, almost drunk with delight. He pushed the door and almost fainted with victorious jubilation as it swung open with the dry, grinding sound of dust trapped between it and the floor.
He spun around, intending to dash back and get the others, but stopped in his tracks as a thought occurred to him. Thomas had said that there must be something behind the door, something valuable, since that was the only conceivable reason for putting a locked door up here. If Diana was with him when he went through, though, the unbendingly law abiding young cleric wouldn’t let him keep anything he found. She would insist that anything valuable be given to the poor or returned to its rightful owner or something, as she’d done with every bit of real money they’d come across since they’d started journeying together. We’d be rich by now if it hadn’t been for her, he thought resentfully. He looked back at the door, standing temptingly ajar behind him. He stood, paralysed with indecision. After all, haven’t I earned some sort of reward for opening it? he said to himself as he pushed it all the way open.
Beyond the door it was dark and gloomy, lit only by the light that filtered in through the open doorway. He tiptoed cautiously through and found himself in a large room, just a little smaller than the room he’d just left. A low chain fence ran parallel to the wall to his left, about two yards away from it, so that Matthew was confined by it to a narrow strip of the room between the door he’d come in by and another door in the opposite wall. Wondering why most of the room had been fenced off, the young soldier leaned over the low fence and thought he could see a large patch of darkness on the floor a couple of feet away. He stepped over the fence he knelt down to touch it.
His hand went down and down into the darkness without touching the floor, and Matthew realised with alarm that he was crouching on the very edge of a great pit. He scrambled back away from it, almost tripping over the fence as he jumped over it and landed in a heap on the other side, his heart pounding madly in his chest. Gradually, he calmed down as the shock of being so close to death faded and he was able to think rationally again, to wonder who had left such a great pit up here on the smallest moon and why. No plausible reason came to him, though, so he put it out of his mind and went over to the room’s other door.
This door wasn’t locked and opened easily revealing a spiral staircase leading down into jet, inky blackness. For a few moments the young soldier found himself unable to summon the nerve to go on, but then he thought again of the immense treasures and riches to be found at the bottom and so, after swallowing nervously and fingering the reassuring solidity of the hilt of his sword, he began to descend.
The staircase went down and down for hundreds of feet with metal steps jutting out of the sides towards the plunging hole in the centre. For the first hundred feet or so the wall down which the staircase ran was made of sheet steel, curved sections of which were joined almost seamlessly together with magic spells, but after a time his fingertips felt a change in the texture of the shaft and he guessed that, from here on down, it was bare rock. He pressed close up against it as he went, afraid of the sheer drop beside him, invisible in the darkness, and after a few minutes he’d made up his mind to go back, since it didn’t seem to be going anywhere and he had visions of his friends gathered up at the top commenting angrily about his stupidity in going on alone. Then he noticed a glimmer of light far below. It was the yellowish light of artificial illumination, and he realised with excitement that he was almost at the bottom. He continued down with renewed enthusiasm, almost running down the stairs in his eagerness to reach the imagined heaps of gold and jewels that he expected to find ahead.
At the bottom the staircase opened out into a huge chamber the size of a football field, its ceiling three times the height of a man above the ground. It was illuminated by glowing globes of white marble that hung from the ceiling. A few yards away from him the shaft he’d almost fallen down opened in the ceiling and continued down through the floor, surrounded by another low fence. All around it were great heaps of broken rock, mainly piled up in the corners of the great room but with a shallow covering of dust and gravel all over most of the floor. Many of the larger lumps of rock had glittering streaks of silvery grey running through them.
“A mine!” exclaimed the young soldier in surprise. “An iron mine! That explains it! All the steel!” He wondered what had come first. Had the Agglemonians come up to the tiny moon to use it as an observatory, to look down on their enemies, and discovered the wealth of iron afterwards, or had they known about the iron first, by means of a divination spell or something? He looked around the room more carefully and for the first time noticed two doors that he’d missed before; one in the middle of the wall facing him and another in the middle of the wall to his right. Foundries, he thought to himself. Of course, they’d want to refine the metal up here so that they’d only have to send pure ingots back through the teleportation chamber instead of thousands of tons of ore. The furnace rooms must be through those doors, and maybe something else as well, something even more valuable than iron. He ran over to the door in front of him, threw it open and gaped in astonishment at what he saw.
There might well have been furnace rooms here once, when the mine had been operational, but someone had altered and rebuilt it completely since then. A wide corridor stretched ahead of him. Not dirty, crooked and dusty as a mine tunnel would have been, but straight and smooth with a carefully tiled floor covered by only a thin layer of dust. Plaster covered walls, cracked and grey with age, still bore a trace of their original ivory whiteness, and from the ceiling hung more of the polished, glowing globes of white marble, filling the passage with a pearly radiance. Doors ran along both walls, and again they weren’t the kind of doors you’d expect to find in a mine. They were well made and attractive looking. The kind of doors you might expect to find in a public building. A town hall, for example.
“This was once a mine, obviously,” said the young soldier to himself, “but when it closed, someone came to live up here and rebuilt it into his home, but who, and why?” It was also obvious that no-one else had occupied the place since the original owner had left. The place had been empty and abandoned for a long time, centuries at least. He opened one of the doors and looked inside.
Unlike the rooms of the old observatory upstairs, all of which had been stripped bare when their original occupants had left, the room he found himself looking at now was still fully furnished, exactly as it had been when its occupants had been alive, except for the dust and the tattered remnants of ancient cobwebs. It appeared to have been some kind of storeroom, being almost filled with wooden packing crates except for an open space beside him that contained a desk and a wall cabinet full of rolled up scrolls, probably containing lists of whatever was stored here. He opened one of the crates and found it full of old ledgers and records that appeared to list the lands and possessions of an old Agglemonian family, as far as he could tell. Thomas would no doubt have found it fascinating, but there was nothing to interest Matthew. He left the room and tried another.
After he’d tried a few rooms, Matthew decided he’d have to revise his original ideas about the purpose of this place. It wasn’t a place where anyone had actually lived. There were no living rooms, no bedrooms, no kitchens or any of the sort of things you’d expect to find in someone’s home, not that he’d found so far, anyway. Instead, it was as though he were wandering around the rooms and corridors of a town hall. A place where people came during the day to work and then left to go home again at night, but why would anyone dig a series of tunnels in one of the moons and turn it into a town hall? For the mine? No, ridiculous. A mine wouldn’t need all this administration. Nor would the observatory upstairs. It just didn’t make sense.
As he was puzzling over this mystery he came to a set of three doors quite unlike any others he’d seen so far, standing side by side in a wall that blocked the corridor ahead of him. They were made of steel, several inches thick, and looked quite capable of withstanding any kind of assault indefinitely. They had large windows in them at about face height, the glass looking to be several inches thick. Below them were two wheels connected to the massive hinges and the locks by thick steel rods and bars. Stepping back to get a better overall look at the weird doors, he noticed that they didn’t go all the way down to the floor but had a six inch sill below it over which someone going through the door would have to step. Had he known it, they bore a striking similarity to the watertight doors of a submarine.