They scrambled down the bank to where the path ran closest to them, then followed it down to the base of the crater and up the opposite side. The footing was treacherous in places. They had to watch that they didn't twist an ankle on the jumbled rubble that covered the ground. Thomas paused at one point to get a closer look at a strange metal box lying nearby. It had holes drilled in it in strange places, obviously part of its original design, and inside it contained the badly corroded remains of some kind of intricate machinery, so small in detail that it might have been made by midgets. He wondered what it had been and what it had been used for, but the answers wouldn't come from just looking at it. He left it behind, therefore, meaning to ask the felisians later. They'd learned some of the Masters' secrets. Enough to allow them to repair and use their ships. Maybe they knew what the strange box had been.
Lirenna was waiting for him by the entrance to the basement. "Doesn't look as though there's much in there," she said doubtfully. "A floor of packed earth, litter and rubbish like we expected."
Thomas squeezed in through the exposed hole in the wall and carefully lowered himself down to the floor. He lifted the wand to get a look around. Lirenna was right, he saw. There was nothing here, but maybe...
He looked around for the original entrance and found it up in the ceiling, but he doubted they'd find anything up there. If it led anywhere, it would be up into the Masters' building. He wanted to see what had been left by the original citybuilders.
The room they were in was small. Far too small to be the entire basement of the building above. There had to be other rooms adjacent, or below. Below would be better. The further down, the likelier they would be to have survived the ages intact, along with their contents. He scrubbed at the floor with the toe of his boot. The soil was hard and probably a couple of feet deep. They'd need spades to dig through, then picks and hammers to break through the floor. Unless...
He grinned and waved Lirenna back, handing her the wand, then began casting a spell. The soil below his pointing fingers flashed an incandescent white, forcing the demi shae to shade her eyes with a slender hand, but when the light faded there was a circular hole in the floor three feet across, its sides as smooth as if it had been drilled.
Lirenna's eyes widened with astonishment. "What in the name of... What was that spell?"
"Tollhausen's Tunnel," replied Thomas, grinning with delight. "One of Tak's spells. I managed to recreate it a few days ago and I've been aching for a chance to use it ever since. Good isn't it?"
"You didn't tell me! Why didn't you tell me you were working on it?"
"I didn't want to disappoint you if it didn't work out. I've been trying to recreate lots of his spells, but so far this and Fist of the Father are the only ones I've succeeded with. I'll teach it to you if you like."
"Yes please!" She looked down the hole. "But first, let's see what's down there."
She approached and sat down on the edge, her graceful legs dangling, but Thomas pulled her away. "I should go first," he said. "It might be dangerous down there."
"How could it be?" protested Lirenna, but she stood and allowed her husband to replace her on the edge. "It's been sealed up for thousands of years. Or are you thinking of zombies or something like that?"
"Possibly," replied Thomas, "but we can't even rule out conventional monsters. We don't know the room's been sealed up all this time. There could be underground tunnels, the burrows of tunneling animals, anything. Let's not be fooled by this planet's similarity to Tharia. This is an alien world, and we have no idea what nasty surprises it might have in store for us." He smiled up at her. "Okay?"
"You're right, of course," agreed the demi shae, "but that doesn't necessarily mean we're safer if you go first. If I go first, I might meet something I can enchant into submission. I'm as good a wizard as you are, remember?"
"I know that," conceded Thomas. "Just pander to a foolish old man's chauvinism, okay? I feel the need to be chivalrous and protective towards my beautiful wife."
Lirenna giggled and waved to him to go first, and Thomas let himself slip down into the hole.
His Autumnleaf ring slowed his descent so that he drifted down as slowly as a snowflake, and as he did so he saw that below the layer of soil was a floor composed of the now familiar blue material that the citybuilders had favoured so much. It was just a few inches thick, and below it was a large, open chamber with a smooth, level floor. Lirenna was already lowering herself after him and as he reached the bottom she let go to drop beside him, bending her legs to cushion the impact. Thomas took the wand back from her, then raised it and looked around.
He was delighted to see that the room appeared to be in pristine condition. There wasn't even much dust to be seen. What there was had settled to form a thin layer over everything and there had been no movement or activity to generate more. There were some traces of fungus and mould covering the walls and floor, but so completely had the room been sealed against the damp that there wasn't even much of that. It was an archaeologist's dream. The sort of find they lie awake at night fantasising about. It was the kind of find that lifetime reputations are made of, and the two wizards stared in wonder at the relics of a civilisation that had disappeared thousands of years before.
The room was easily a hundred yards across, with thick pillars in places to help support the weight of the tower above. It appeared to have been used as a shelter. A refuge in times of danger. Beds lined the walls. The iron pocked and rusted, the sheets disintegrating to layers of fine powder. Each bed was occupied by a mummified corpse, with others lying on the floor and heaped up against the only door; a thick slab of iron that looked as though it had been designed to withstand a siege.
They must have been sealed in by falling debris during the disaster that had destroyed the Citybuilder civilisation, thought Thomas, and he felt his heart going out to the poor survivors as he imagined their last hours of terror and desperation. He could almost see them frantically attacking the door in growing panic as they felt the air growing stale around them. It seemed he could almost hear them crying out for a rescue they knew would never come, intermingled with shouts of anger as they blamed each other for their predicament. How would it have felt as the knowledge slowly dawned that they had simply delayed their end and prolonged their suffering?
He shut the thought out of his head and looked at Lirenna to see how she was taking it. "They wanted a safe place," she said, staring around in horror. "A place to wait out the danger. And it turned into their tomb. They forgot to allow themselves another way out."
"Saturn'll want to see this," said Thomas. "We've got to get a message to him."
"You go," said Lirenna. "I'll stay here to make sure the felisians don't tamper with anything."
Thomas knew what she meant. If there was anything they didn't want the Tharians to see, (and Thomas still thought that was unlikely but why take even the smallest chance?) then this was where it would be. Clues to unravel the ancient history of their race. Neither of the wizards wanted to have to face Saturn if they came back to find the place cleaned out, the bodies removed ‘out of respect for the spirits of the dead'. Lirenna was right, therefore. They couldn't risk letting the felisians get their hands on this site before they'd had a chance to examine it properly.
"I don't like the idea of leaving you alone," Thomas said, however. "It would be too easy for an 'accident' to happen to you."
"Nothing's going to happen to me. Go, I'll be okay."
"No," repeated Thomas. "No, I've got a better idea. If we are being followed, then they're keeping back, aren't they? They don't want to risk us seeing them. That means they're probably in the crater but haven't approached the entrance to the basement. They don't know what we've found here. So if we go back up to the basement and cover over the hole..."
"They might look in, just to see if we'd done anything, but they wouldn't see the hole in the floor," cried Lirenna in delight. "Unless one of them steps on it and falls through." She chuckled at the thought.
"We'll have to hurry, though. The longer we're in here, the more suspicious they'll be."
Lirenna nodded and they returned to stand under the hole. Thomas boosted her up, then found an empty bed, turned it up on its end to make a kind of ladder and climbed up.
Fortunately, there were plenty of long pieces of wood amongst the rubbish in the basement, which they laid across the hole and used to support the layer of litter they laid across it. When they'd finished the rubbish formed a suspicious looking pile in the middle of the floor, but it was the best they could do. They would just have to be satisfied with it. They squeezed back out through the hole in the wall, therefore, back out into the open air and, walking slowly so as not to appear in any great hurry, they strolled arm in arm back to the centre of the city.
They tried chatting to each other as they walked, to try to give the impression of casual normality, all the while trying very hard to overcome the almost overwhelming desire to look around, to see if they could spot their shadows. It was with great relief that they finally arrived back in the square and saw the familiar shape of the Galtalista sitting beside the much larger bulk of the silver ship, and they hurried towards it, conscious that any felisians tailing them would now know that they were up to something. They shouted up at the lookout, who stared down in surprise and went off to get Matthew.
Meanwhile, two felisians had appeared and were hurrying towards them. "Is there a problem?" the first asked, staring at him suspiciously. Lirenna cringed away behind Thomas, bringing the words of an enchantment to the forefront of her mind while praying fervently that she wouldn't have to use it. "Surely you wish to return to your rooms?"
"In a minute," replied Thomas, meeting his gaze eye to eye in an attempt to brazen it out. "We just need to pop back on board for a moment. Something we forgot."
Matthew appeared at the rail, took in the scene at a glance and lowered the rope ladder, allowing the two wizards to hurry up. "What's wrong?" he asked as he raised the ladder again and turned his back on the anxious and confused felisians below, who were now being joined by two more from the guest house. "What's happened?"
"We need to speak to Saturn," said Lirenna. She hurried down the stairs to the below decks area and through the galley to the chart room, where she closed the door to the dormitory to shut out the noise of the sailor snoring on one of the bunks. Matthew followed them there, anxious to know what was going on, but then he stopped.
"My place is up on deck," he told Thomas, who'd followed him down. "I don't think the felisians'll try anything, but..."
The curiosity on his face was almost painful to see, but he had responsibilities. Thomas gave him a nod to tell him he'd explain as soon as he could and the Flignt Leader nodded back. Then Matthew roused the sleeping sailor, told him to get dressed quickly, then trotted back up the stairs to put the ship on alert.
In the chart room, Thomas spoke the words to activate the scrying mirror and used it to create a link with the mirror aboard the Trill-Dal. There was no-one in the other ship's chart room at the time, but Thomas's loud, urgent shouts soon brought a bleary eyed cavalryman from the neighbouring dormitory wearing only his underclothes.
"Get Saturn!" cried Thomas. "Quick!"
"He's still down on the ground, I think," the soldier said, "and we can't land 'cos of the trees."
"Just go get him!" commanded Thomas urgently. "I don't care how you do it, just get him!"
The man stared, then disappeared. Thomas gave a sigh and rubbed his eyes. "I hope we aren't overreacting to this," he said. "After all, it's just a room full of corpses. The felisians probably couldn't care less what we find out."
"Probably," agreed Lirenna, "but we're right to assume the worst. They did go to our world and take hostile action against us, after all. They may be trying to make up for it now, but the fact is that they started out as our enemies. We have to be cautious in our dealings with them."
Thomas nodded. "Yeah, thanks. That makes me feel a bit better. I'm just afraid I'm making a big fuss about nothing and making a fool of myself."
"A man who never does anything in case people think him a fool never does anything. Never accomplishes anything. You have to risk seeming foolish once in a while. It would be foolish not to."
Thomas looked around to see her grinning at him and found himself smiling in return. "And to think I married you for your cooking," he said, chuckling.
"Just for my cooking?"
"Well, there may have been one other reason. Maybe I'll remember what it was when we get back to our room."
"I look forward to reminding you."