The Book of the Gear

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 15:45:05 GMT

The hallway running at right angles to our current hall was somewhat narrower than this one. On the left, it ran back perhaps thirty feet and terminated in a stone wall punched with small round drainage holes, which had drooled rust stains in long streaks down the stone.

It was difficult to approach the back wall, however, because about ten feet in, rebar began to emerge from the concrete wall at head, chest, and knee height, stretching most of the way across the corridor, leaving only a narrow clearance with the opposite wall. The corroded metal bars were staggered so that it was possible to work one’s way around them, which I did, but Mirabelle and Heinrich had to stay back.

Hung from each bit of rebar were dried fish, two or three to a bar. They had flaky silvery bodies and bright, blank eyes. String looped the rebar, and then had been wrapped around the bodies of the fish with varying degrees of skill, ranging from simple double loops over the fins to a complex macramé adorning the largest of the fish. The string was an unbleached hemp twine, dusted with red where it was tied to the bars.

The corridor smelled faintly of seaweed and dried fish.

A drying rack? A religious icon? Some kind of peculiar icthyic wind-chime? Trophies left by a smelt serial killer? I don't know, and couldn't begin to guess.

About halfway down the hall, at chest height, one of the bars had corroded with sea-green verdigris instead of the red that marked the death of iron. Unlike the others, which were ramrod straight, this bar had been twisted into a kind of corkscrew at the end.

A single fish hung from it. I leaned in closer to take a look, half-expecting the fish to be different in some fashion, but it was the same as the others, with the same flaky iridescent scales and dark, stiff tail fins. For lack of anything better to do, I poked it.

The string was wet.

That was all. The fish was dry, the top of the string was verdigrised to the bar and discolored, the bar was dry, but the string was wet. I looked down at the floor under the fish and saw a faint dampness that streaked and dried at once when I scuffed a hoof over it.

I went through somewhat neurotically, feeling each string, but they were all dry, except for the one on the green bar. Lacking anything better to do, I took a small sample fish from one of the low bars, where it hopefully wouldn’t be missed. Nothing bad happened when I cut the string--the corridor didn't slam shut, the ceiling didn't fall, the fish did not come to life and attack me (which would have been a demise even more ignomious than the usual.) My sample fish hung from my string, turning slowly, like a pendulumn dowsing for hidden water.

We backed Mirabelle up and continued on our way, leaving the fish swaying slightly in our wake.

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 01:10:57 GMT

Left from the nexus this time, and past the fox’s cell, the hall continued a fair distance. A doorway opened on the left, and another hall crossed this one at right angles about fifteen feet past that.

The left hand doorway opened into a medium sized L-shaped room, with the familiar concrete walls and a flagstone floor. On the far wall, down at the end of the crossbar on the L, the wall had been cut away (or poured this way to begin with) in a large opening running the length of the short wall, from about waist height to a foot from the ceiling.

The opening, rather like a large picture window, looked out into a small, square courtyard.

Had it not been noon or so outside, I would have said the courtyard was bathed in moonlight. The gearworld being what it was, I can’t swear that it wasn’t. Granted some of my odder speculations, was it really that much of a stretch to think that this room was not really here, but someplace on the other side of the globe, under the moon instead of the sun?

Well, regardless. The light had a bluish-gray cast, perhaps from being filtered through particularly colored glass or some other method—it was hard to say. The ceiling in the courtyard was much higher than in the room overlooking it, and vanished into dimness overhead. There were no visible entrances or exits, and the floor of the courtyard fell some six feet below that of the main room.

The apparent-moonlight shown down on a dead tree planted in the courtyard, surrounded by exhausted, dead-looking grass, and a broad swath of mud. Moss had tried to get a foothold on the walls, and did not look as if it had entirely succeeded. Nothing appeared alive in that space, or even possibly alive, as if the tree had been planted dead to begin with.

It is not an objective observation, but the room felt very sad. Standing at the window wall and looking into the dead courtyard, there was a sense of great weariness and misery and frustration. It may have been some quality of the lighting, or some trick of the geometry that made it so oppressive, but after a minute or two, I had to back away.

There was one other thing in the room, which gave the whole experience a slightly more sinister cast. On the floor, near the corner of the L, there was a clock.

It had been a medium sized clock at one point. At least, I believe it had been medium sized, because someone had destroyed it with intense prejudice. It was not merely broken, it had been opened up and disassembled and every mechanism and assembly of gears had been smashed into bits. Shattered cogwheels and bits of spring littered the floor in every direction. Heinrich picked up the number “3” clear out in the corridor. The frame had been twisted into something more closely resembling an accordion than a timepiece, and we located the minute hand driven between two flagstones with such force that one of them had cracked.

It was hard to imagine what crime a clock could commit that it should be dismembered so. Reassembling it looked more like a task for all the king’s horses and all the king’s men than an antelope, a bear, and a mule, so we let it lie, and continued on.

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 14:24:42 GMT

I went out to our latrine pit this evening to attend to certain vital processes, from which explorers are no more exempt than anyone else—and saw red.

A lot of red.

Red is generally the last color you want to see when attending to said vital functions, especially when you’re a hundred miles from the nearest physician, but in this case, I hadn’t gotten even as far as the pit.

The trees were absolutely covered in a shockingly vivid scarlet, the color of fresh blood, hanging in great papery globes and inverted cones. For a moment, my mind flashed through shapes, looking for a match, and all I could come with was some kind of incredibly fast-blooming giant wisteria, or perhaps a colony of paper wasps with astonishingly colored nests.

It wasn’t until I realized that some of the papery red bits were coming loose and drifting like confetti in the mild breeze that I realized that they were butterflies.

The butterflies were scarlet, edged with black, with hints of fuschia around the body and a great black eyespot on the lower wings. They were not terribly large, with an average wingspan not quite as long as my thumb. But there were thousands—hundreds of thousands—possibly even millions of them, all hanging in great trailing chains from every branch in this one particular glade. The sound of their wings was a whispered “Shusshshshsh…”

I collected several samples—dead ones lay scattered on the ground like bright flowers—but I suspect that no sample can convey the impact on the viewer of the sheer weight of butterflies. They had become less like insects and more like some bizarre architecture, growing in vast buttresses and columns from the trees. Some monarchs behave similiarly during migration, settling on groves of trees in incredible masses, so it is not an unheard-of behavior, but it was one I did not expect to see out here.

We did have to move the latrine. There are some things you just can’t do when millions of tiny little compound eyes are staring at you.

The next day, a little after dawn, Heinrich woke me up, and gestured at the sky. I looked up, and saw a vast column of red butterflies, like a plume of scarlet smoke, drifting slowly west on the wind.

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 14:17:19 GMT

This page was misfiled. Again. It is from Terra Absurdium vol 4, and furthermore, it was folded into a very unflattering bit of origami depicting what appears to be a shrieking monkey wearing senior librarian’s robes. The acolyte responsible left three years ago to become a belly dancer, which job she was, in all honesty, rather more suited for, but she obviously could have had a lucrative career in creative paper folding, too. - Vo

Margin note from Acolyte Wen: I had to recopy this page from the archives. When I suggested it’d be faster to unfold the origami one, the old coot about took my head off. The origami’s got pride of place on his desk now. I think he’s finally going senile or something.

We had been traveling in the desert for weeks. The oasis we were shooting for had been dry, covered over with sandstorms, the palm trees dying and dead. We had little hope of making the next one. Our horses had died, all but two of our camels had died, and one of those camels was under our guide and going with all speed in the other direction.

It was hot, and it was dry. My nose was dry. There was sand under my eyelids, and I was too exhausted to care. Heinrich was in even worse shape than I was—my people are basically adapted to desert and savannah, and his are a people of mountains and streams and snow. His eyes were rimmed with red and his fur hung in dehydrated folds.

I had just about figured out how it was going to go. Probably tonight, the camel would die, and we would eat it. Sometime tomorrow, Heinrich would die, and I would tearfully eat him.* The day after that, I would make a last, tragic entry in my journal, and then I would die, and the sands would eat me.

I was wallowing in the mental image of the memorial ceremony that would be held for me back home, in absentia, when we staggered over a rise and ran smack into the middle of a bazaar.

It was being held in the ruins of an old city, a brightly colored riot of tents and brazen-skinned natives, and glory of glories, the glitter of sunlight on water. I sat Heinrich down—this last shock had been too much, and he was probably not going to make it another ten feet—and went to the water with the reverence of a worshipper approaching the altar of his god.

It was muddy and brown and the camel had its muzzle stuck in right next to mine. It was indescribably sweet. I couldn’t drink much, or I was going to be ill, but I refilled every waterskin we had, and stuck my entire head into the trough, so that droplets fell like jewels off my eyelashes, and stung like a scorpion in my chapped nostrils.

I walked back, sloshing and leaving a trail of dark drips behind me, to Heinrich, only to discover that he was gone. At that point, I was far beyond any capacity for panic—I looked around dully, wondering if perhaps I had mistaken the place where I had left him. Then I heard his voice raised, hoarse and dry and exultant.

Some things are stronger than exhaustion, stronger even than death. I found him swaying in front of a table full of small packets of spices, manned by a toothless crone as bald as a snake, who wore an eye-searing pink sari and was grinning the grin of one who is about to make a great deal of money.

“Give me your wallet,” Heinrich rasped. “She has curry.”

*Translator’s Note: He’s probably not joking. In the original drafts of the rather shocking 8th volume of Terra Absurdium, Heinrich and Eland are forced to eat one of their sherpas, who had frozen to death the night before. This was censored by the editors as too sensational for the readership of the time, and did not make it to print, although people did wonder when the narrative suddenly came up short a sherpa.

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 13:47:27 GMT

Heinrich grunted the grunt of being grudgingly impressed. I said “Whoa.”

The room was basically square, with a very high ceiling, and a large alcove on the far wall. Set partially within this alcove was an enormous spiral staircase that reached up into darkness.

The staircase was amazing. It appeared to be made of a single, solid piece of ivory, although where anyone could find a tusk that three men could walk abreast on boggles the naturalist’s mind. That by itself would be impressive enough, but every inch of the staircase, the railings and the steps and the central pillar, was carved and ornamented in elaborate organic designs, crosshatches and swirls and a repeating design of lozenge shapes along the outside sides of the railing that resembled the “eye” on the feathers of peacocks. Set into each lozenge was a cabochon ruby, framed in tortoiseshell, forming a spiral of gemstones up the sides of the stair. Further tortoiseshell embellishments, in the form of inset rosettes and broken lines, drifted across the steps and in winding veins up the central pillar.

It was a stairway fit for an emperor, sitting in a small concrete room at the end of a dirt path underground.

We approached closer. I ran my hands over the ivory, and took a rubbing of one of the lozenge designs.

I was working the chalk into the lines when Heinrich cleared his throat, turned, and carefully lifted me bodily away from the staircase.

”What…?”

He pointed.

Around the back of the staircase, directly in front of the first step, there was a smooth stone, and on it, a familiar metal plaque.

PLEASE DO NOT USE STAIRCASE
We regret to inform the traveler that this staircase
is in fact a predatory organism known as a stepweight
Scalaepensum snodgrassi. It is a carnivore. We suspect
from the size that this specimen is several hundred years
old. The apparent stair does not access any rooms above
but is anchored to the ceiling. We have provided a ladder
if you wish to examine this for yourself, but we strongly
suggest that you do not walk upon the stepweight, as this
will trigger its swallowing reflex. We have decided not
to close this room as we believe the stepweight lives
primarily on small birds and we do not wish to harm it,
and thus we can only hope that you will heed this
warning.

Respectfully,
The Monks of Perdition.

There was another small plaque underneath, which said discreetly “In Memory of Brother Snodgrass.”

Heinrich and I looked at each other. We looked at the plaque. We looked at the staircase. We looked at the rather rickety metal ladder bolted to the wall that was evidently what the monks had provided.

“I’ll go,” I said, once it became obvious that Heinrich wasn’t going to.

The ladder groaned alarmingly, but the bolts held. I had a brief notion about halfway up that if I were, in fact, an exceedingly clever predatory organism that looked like a rusted ladder, I would leave a note saying that the safe path was a predator, and the ladder that no one in their right mind would climb was safe—but I dismissed this as pure paranoia. Giant predatory staircases were one thing, but giant predatory staircases that wrote in crisply engraved sans serif was just crazy talk.

And indeed, in a matter of moments, I reached the top. There was no other room above it. The staircase ran directly up to the ceiling and then fanned out into broad ivory trunks sunk into the stone, like roots of a tooth anchored in a concrete jaw. Near the top, the regular patterns became more distorted, more organic, and looked more and more like the markings of a living creature than the carvings of an artist.

I went back down and told Heinrich that the Monks of Perdition appeared to be two for two.

He nodded, rummaged in Mirabelle’s pack, and came up with the large meat pasty that had been planned for our lunch. I retreated to a safe distance, and he tossed it, underhand, onto the third stair up.

The whole staircase gave a great accordion wiggle, and the step that our lunch had landed on cracked open longways, revealing the briefest flash of a pink gullet. Ivory lips closed over the lump of dough and meat, and yanked it inside the step. The stepweight heaved again, and subsided, and except for the slight lump in the third stair, looked normal.

Almost. As we watched, one of the cabochons winked, then the next, and then the next, the whole spiral of gems, that were perhaps not gems at all, blinking in a wave that ran from the floor up into darkness. I had apparently been making a rubbing of one of the stepweight’s eyes.

“You know, I think that’ll do it for me for today,” I said.

“And we don’t have lunch now,” said Heinrich, who has always had a very practical mind.

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 15:57:42 GMT

The lake path ran a surprisingly long way, close to half a mile, the wall to our left unbroken by anything more than the occasional small outlet pipe. (The third such pipe was marked with a set of the by-now-familiar white triangles.) We heard more bird calls, and the occasional splash of fish or frogs or other small marsh dwellers. Once, there was a startle of giant wings, and a great grim heron launched itself out of a stand of cattails and sailed low and slow across the water before vanishing into the fog. It appeared to be the familiar Ardea herodias but of course, without a specimen, it was hard to tell, and for once, Heinrich was too slow off the mark with the frying pan.

At last, the path ended, at a broad expanse of reedy islets, basically mud and grass and metal cut by meandering streams, stretching as far as the eye could see in the fog, which wasn’t very. It would probably be possible to walk a little distance across the marsh, but with the sharp wire root systems in the mud, I did not want to risk Mirabelle’s hooves—or my own!—on such a venture just yet.

A giant gear, twice as tall as I was, thrust out of the water at a slant, like an ancient shipwreck, webbed with dark weed near the waterline. The metal reeds grew particularly thickly in the shadow of the gear, which makes no sense at all, since the entire system is in a large room underground, and cannot possibly have harsh weather or winds or blazing sun or anything else like it, and anyway the reeds are made of metal to begin with. Perhaps it was simply an aesthetic decision by whoever placed these artificial reeds, like a meditation garden for someone who was not terribly enamored of raked stone.

There was a single doorway at the end of the path, in the lefthand wall; a plain, unadorned rectangle punched in the wall, with a single spar of rebar running across the top. We went in.

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 16:17:05 GMT

Right from the nexus, the hall ran twenty feet, and came to a threshold. We had to step down a few inches, and the concrete gave way to packed earth, although here and there, square blocks of cement protruding through the pathway indicated that we had by no means reached the bottom of the maze.

The path ran at a ninety degree angle to the hallway, breaking off to the left. It was perhaps three feet wide, with a wall on one side, and a lake on the other.

The lake—or pond, or underground sea, it was impossible to tell—was shallow near the shore, edged with reeds and softened with fog. Instead of vanishing into shadow, as other such rooms had done, the fog concealed the far side, and muffled the echoes of the slapping water, so there was no real way to get a sense of scale. The water reflected the pale grey of the fog, and so, despite being underground, it seemed more like a marsh in the early morning than a room inside a labyrinth.

As we stood in the doorway, the path ran off to our left. The wall it shadowed was the same as any of the other walls in the maze. To the right, a small inlet of the lake was choked with reeds, and the walls curved away into the fog, like great rough-edged ribs, marked with jagged bits of rebar.

The reeds were peculiar. Near where we stood, there was a broad swath that were dark red and completely uniform. In fact, they were made of corroded metal, hundreds of narrow, rusted tubes, moving slightly with the ripples, so that the soft slap of water was accompanied by a faint tink of metal on metal.

I pulled one of the “reeds.” It came up with a slight resistance, revealing a silt-clotted root system that appeared to be made of twisted skeins of razor wire, the edges sharp enough to draw blood. I no longer had any idea if it was a made thing, or somehow organic, or a combination of the two.

Mixed through these “reeds” in places were perfectly normal plants—clumps of cattails and tall mucky sedge grasses, swaying with seedheads, and near the path, a small dark groundcover with narrow, pointed leaves. A bird called in the distance, a faint, sleepy twitter, and was answered by another, close at hand. We watched as a small wren, charcoal grey with faint black bars, hopped from the normal grasses, and perched briefly on a high stalk, then flew away.

The stalk it was on was red, but had a seedhead. I waded out into the muck, careful of the sharp wire roots, and looked more closely. The metal stalk fitted to the seedhead by means of a small metal nut, bolt, and washer, and the feathery stalks were braided wire of an impossibly fine gauge. The seeds themselves were small and heavy, teardrops of smooth, almost oily metal. I shook out a handful and stored them away.

It is beyond impossible that these could be an actual plant. Real plants do not have washers! But I am still tempted, if we ever get back to civilization, to plant some of these iron seeds and see what strange crop might, impossibly, arise.

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 19:59:54 GMT

Deciding to give the foxboy plenty of time to get away, we turned instead to the round pipe leading from the small nexus up the hall from the fox’s cell.

The pipe was just wide enough to allow a mule entrance, but it was not wide enough to allow a mule to be turned, and while mules are fully capable of backing up if they feel like it, they generally exact a heavy price from their handlers in the process. We decided to take a very quick look inside the pipe, leaving Mirabelle at the nexus, and see if there were any immediate openings where a mule could be turned.

It turned out that our conversation about what we ought to do lasted rather longer than our actual exploration of the pipe. The pipe went in, made three tight hairpin zags, and then dead-ended at a large grille.

The grille appeared to open high on the wall of a room, with a split-level ceiling dropping low to the right. Below were the remains of a fire and a pile of random debris.

It took a moment because of the angle, but eventually I realized that we’d come out behind the grille high on the wall of the place where we’d stayed when trapped by the rising water in the room full of mussels. That was our old fire. If I craned my neck, I could even see the neat stack of nested mussel shells Heinrich had left next to the other debris.

The grille was relatively solid, despite the rust, but I suspected that Heinrich could smash it out in relatively short order, given a pressing motivation like approaching death. We couldn’t take Mirabelle, but in case something very bad happened, it was nice to know of an escape route.

Assuming the tide was out, of course.

The only other notable detail was on the inside face of the grille itself. At the very bottom of the tunnel, so small that I would never have noticed if not for the color, were a set of ten tiny line drawings of a bird in various postures--hopping, perching, in flight. The drawings were in bright yellow, and a band along the top of the bird's head was filled in with the same vivid color. I had to lay my cheek along the floor to get close enough to examine them. The bird's eye was no larger than a pinprick, and if there was a signature, it was so small that I could not make it out at all.

Terra Absurdium, vol unknown

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:04:17 GMT

The following was probably cut from Terra Absurdium vol. 31, as it bears a thematic resemblance to the tuber section previously located, but may also have been from an earlier work. The location where this section supposedly occurs is unknown, although several badly water damaged pages preceding it mention “the unspeakable east.” (Predictably, Eland has spoken about it anyway.) As with several other unpublished sections, the contents are so preposterous as to invite the question of whether Eland was serious, but as usual, if it was a farce, he kept a straight literary face throughout.

These pages and the accompanying drawing were brought to me by a temple rat, who found them in a crawlspace under the eaves. – Vo

…most disturbing of the settlements we encountered on the other side of the pass was undoubtedly that of Kolothon, the Rag Doll City.

Kolothon is located in a canyon surrounded by pine forests, in a temperate area above the high deserts to the south. Within this canyon are three giant…well, what to call them? Buildings? Statues? They are, in fact, megalithic rag dolls, the tallest of which is seated in the bottom of the canyon and reaches past the brim. Over the centuries, the locals have hollowed out rooms within the stuffing and live within them. Two of the dolls sit on the bottom of the canyon and house the bulk of the inhabitants, one is belly-down and draped over the side of the canyon. This one contains the great forges and stables within the body. Enormous cables hold the dolls in place, anchored with great iron hooks, although the dolls are so massive that nothing short of a glacier seems apt to move them.

The material these dolls are made of is most peculiar, being a sort of coarse weave burlap with individual threads thicker than a man’s waist, which has worn like iron. The stuffing is an unknown organic material, and has a consistency ranging between that of peat and sod. The “hair” on the heads of the dolls is made of steel hawsers as thick as tree trunks, as is the “stitching.”

The inhabitants are not the creators of the dolls by any stretch, and do not know who made them. The accepted myth is that these were dolls belonging to the daughters of Inganhoait, the Heron that Holds Up the Sky, which they dropped when they were kidnapped by the great Eel of Stars. The truth, whatever it may be, is unknown, or at least was not known to our guide or any of the scholars we asked. The natives do not appear concerned that the Heron’s daughters will ever come back for their dolls, and our guide looked at me like I was an idiot when I asked, so I suspect that this is well known to be a myth and not an actual explanation.

Currently living around and inside the giant dolls are about four thousand people, a respectably sized settlement for this area. The stuffing of the dolls is readily excavated, and packs into a material much like the interior of a sod house. As ventilation is problematic in the interiors, most of the rooms are just under the surface of the cloth. The cloth, despite its evident antiquity—the dolls have been inhabited for more than six hundred years—has not suffered significant damage from weather.

Cooking fires inside, and the great forges, are ventilated through chimneys on the heads of the dolls, and the interiors carefully constructed, sheathed in fired clay and ceramic tile and metal and stone, for uncontrolled fire is the great fear of the doll-dwellers. The stoves are rounds of sealed clay with hinged doors and wide tile hearths, and interior lighting is done entirely with lamps holding oil pressed from phosphorescent beetles. This light is of necessity a pale green, and they use it in vast quantity, so that at night, the dolls glow sickly emerald through the cloth, and more brilliantly along the seams, as if outlined in foxfire. This has the effect of making an already rather disturbing sight positively chilling. And yet the doll-dwellers are cheerful and productive and were friendly to travelers and not in the way that means they are planning on eating you later.

It is worth noting that they, themselves, do not make any dolls. Children are given stuffed animals representing bears and dogs and chimera and cameleopards, but no one makes dolls. It is a kind of superstition, based on old ideas of sympathetic magic, I suspect—children are hard on their toys and when one lives inside a doll, seeing a doll’s head twisted off could be a bit unnerving.

It goes without saying that this report has never been confirmed by any other traveler, and is quite possibly pure invention on Eland’s part. -- Vo

Sun, 25 Dec 2005 05:43:52 GMT

The square room that interlocked the room with the root wall was empty. On the far wall, another door opened into a very small nexus, perhaps four feet on a side. A corridor ran off in each direction, two unremarkable hallways of the common sort to the left and right, and forward, a circular pipe-mouth, tall enough for Heinrich to walk, and just wide enough for Mirabelle.
The pipe looked fairly intriguing, I admit, and I was just about to suggest that we head in that direction, when Heinrich put up a hand in a gesture for silence.

I cocked my head and listened. Mirabelle chose that moment to make a grumbling in her nose and shift her feet, but after a few seconds, I heard it too—a very faint clinking, the sound of metal on metal, or possibly stone. It was coming from the lefthand hallway.

We proceeded cautiously down the hall, Heinrich in the lead. It might be nothing, another suspended-object-on-a-chain clinking as it swayed perhaps. Still, with the steamjacks and all, we were more than a little jumpy at the moment.

Perhaps fifteen feet down the corridor, there was a wooden door. The planks were thick oak, with an inset barred window, and there was a heavy iron bar and heavier iron lock blocking it. On our side.

We considered this.

The clinking noise came again, from inside the room. Heinrich peered through the bars.
“Dark,” he rumbled, which provoked a flurry of agitated clinking from inside.
I was standing on the tips of my hooves (and this is harder than it sounds) to look through the door myself, when Heinrich shoved his muzzle forward so far it nearly jammed between the bars. He blinked into the dark several times, eyes narrowing, and then pulled back.

“Somebody in there,” he said. (Clink, clink.)

I couldn’t see much of anything. It was very dark. A high square window cast faded light down, with an almost yellowish tint, but this illuminated only a small patch of wall and cast a faint, brittle rim of light over flagstones and what looked like straw. It made all the shadows so dark by contrast that I couldn’t make out what Heinrich was seeing.

Generally when someone has put a lock on a door to keep something IN, there is a damn good reason. And I think that if there had been another polite note from the Monks of Perdition warning us that the being inside would eat our spleens and dance in our entrails, we would have let it alone. But there was no such note, and we had a perfectly good crowbar just going to waste, and so it took about three careful minutes and one very reckless one and we had the door open.

The inside was dark and dry and cool, and there was indeed ancient straw across the floor. The room was quite small, a circular construction of mortared stone that resembled an old well or cistern. It was at least thirty feet tall, possibly taller. The small, square window was perhaps twenty feet up, and did not illuminate anything that might be a ceiling.

We stepped inside, and the clinking went mad, a rattling of metal dragging on stone.

The light was so bad that at first I thought the thing crawling across the floor was a snake, or something’s tail. It was not until Heinrich set a foot down on it, and the clinking stopped abruptly, that I realized it was a chain.

I followed the line of the chain, and finally, in the indirect brightness of the door, saw the flat green glitter of animal eyes. They were set above the ground far enough that I had a brief, unpleasant vision of lions or tigers or bears less civilized than Heinrich. But the face was wrong, and the body underneath looked slender and huddled in the straw.

Eventually our eyes adjusted. The eyes belonged to something sadder, and much less threatening, than either of us had guessed.

It was a fox-faced youth, maybe sixteen. By fox-faced I mean he had the head of a grey fox, with huge, shaking ears and a narrow, angular muzzle. The rest was humanoid, mostly. Naked, ribs protruding, skinny arms clutching head. I have seen more flesh on mummies. No tail.

He was also apparently terrified or in shock, and nothing Heinrich or I could say achieved anything. We made soothing gestures, we tried every language the two of us knew, we sent Heinrich out of the room completely, and nothing. We offered him food, which he ignored. He stank with the rank ranginess of a fox, and we could not tell if he had been in there for a day or a year or a lifetime.

The chain ran to a shackle on his left wrist. The clinking when he moved had been the sound we heard.

After about thirty minutes of one-sided communication attempts, Heinrich did the only thing left to do. He reached down, grabbed the chain—the foxboy cringed—set the crowbar in one link, and made a quick twist. The chain parted. Heinrich dropped the free end at the foxboy’s feet, turned, and walked out of the room.

We moved Mirabelle back down the hall about ten feet and waited.

I was starting to worry that it was going to be the frozen deer all over again, when there was another flurry of clinking, and the foxboy poked his muzzle around the edge of the door. He looked at us both, still with those flat, emotionless green eyes, and paused. Fear? Gratitude? I don’t know. Then he tore off down the hall, running hunched over. The shackle and the two or three remaining links swung and clanked as he moved.

He turned a corner, and was gone.

The small room held only one more thing of interest. By feel only, I found scratches on the wall. They were even, regular marks under my fingers—four parallel lines, and a cross bar. Hatch marks. Counting marks.

I ran my hand along the walls, finding more marks, and more, until I lost count. They ran as high as my head, clear down to the floor, and along the walls as far as I ran my fingers. It was too dark to get any clear estimate of their numbers, but hundreds at least. Perhaps thousands.

What they might signify—days and weeks and years in the dark—could hardly be believed. There was no food, no waste, nothing in the cell at all. Someone had put the foxboy in there for a reason--probably. Maybe not. Maybe the cell had simply come into existence with its prisoner, fully formed. How could you tell?

Perhaps we’d done a good deed. Perhaps we’d set loose a monster. Likely we’d never know one way or the other.

We went on.

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 13:41:29 GMT

Past the three hanging stone blocks, the corridor opened into a sort of blunt rectangular hall, with three square concrete pillars running down the center. This intersected with another room, at the far right corner, so the effect was of a rectangle and a square with an overlapping open corner.

The hall itself was unremarkable, lacking anything but the pillars, but one wall was rather interesting. The far left wall was unlike anything we’d seen before, a peculiar fibrous material, somewhere between bread mold and a roughly woven cloth. Heinrich obligingly cut a small square from one edge. It cut like turf, with faint ripping sounds, and when I teased out a few strands of material from the palm-sized square, it became apparent that they were some kind of tightly matted roots. The entire wall was completely rootbound. The roots seemed alive—there was a slight spring when pushed—but they continued to grow into a tight, almost woven texture, instead of pushing out farther into the room, as if bound by an invisible pot.

Under the square that was lifted out was a chalky, clay-like surface, crumbling and faintly sticky. I brushed a hand across it and it fell away in several places, revealing the familiar concrete. It appeared the growth medium for the roots, whatever it was, was only about a quarter of an inch thick.

On the opposite wall, for no apparent reason, was a dried oak leaf with two puffball mushrooms growing on it, their pale tan skins spotted and mottled with chocolate brown. The oak leaf was dry and brown and curling at the edges, impaled on a rusted nail. Granted that the wall was easily thirty feet long and fifteen feet high, devoid even of graffiti, it assumed much more significance than such a small object deserved, a small bit of punctuation in the middle of the wall, like an exclamation point, with puffballs.

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 14:18:00 GMT

We were walking back from our latest exploration when we startled a steamjack.

It was sitting on the steps in the room where the large red frog sat sentry. Its long arms and legs were drawn up and wrapped around itself like a dejected spider, and it must have been woolgathering, because it seemed as startled to see us as we were to see it.

We blinked at each other for a moment. It had large eyes rimmed in black, the whites showing all around the pupil, making it look like an astonished lemur. There was no way to tell the gender on this creature—it looked even more painfully thin than the last steamjack, with straps tighly binding any distinguishing characteristics. It was very pale, the eyes a faded blue, and its matted hair was the indeterminate gray-brown color that blond hair gets when grown in dreadlocks.

It made a wordless exclamation and bounced to its feet, stood shivering with indecision, and then leapt over the far side of the staircase. Heinrich made an abortive dash after it, but it crossed the floor in a few bounding hops and dove into a shadowed tangle of gears. When I arrived at the spot, Heinrich was staring glumly at a hole in the floor, formed by the intersection of slots housing two large gears, that I would have sworn a child couldn’t fit through. We could hear a brief scrambling echoing up through the slot, and then it was gone.

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 15:17:31 GMT

The corridor took a left, and three more doors opened up, in rapid succession, another set of tableaus, except that these were all more or less the same. In three small, square rooms, perhaps nine feet on a side, three identical stone blocks, which must have weighed several tons, were suspended from the ceiling by huge rusted chains. Each one was at a different height, the first around chest level, the second over my head, and the third only a foot or two from the floor.

Tied around one of the chains, in the first room, was a small thong, and from it dangled a battered parrot feather, adorned with a bead of inferior faience, and one of the small gears. Other than that, the stone blocks were the only features of the rooms.

The stone blocks nearly filled each room, leaving only a few inches of clearance to a side, and were a good four feet thick, the edges scored with chisel marks. Heinrich pushed at one, and found that despite being suspended, it was extremely difficult to get any motion going. A second push was greeted by a warning screech from the chains, making Mirabelle shake her head and snort, and we decided to leave well enough alone.

There was a splash of graffiti on the floor, far back under the lowest of the three, where somebody had obviously risked life and limb to crawl back and make their mark, but Heinrich was too large and my horns couldn’t possibly fit, so whatever he had to say would have to go unread for now.

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 13:37:07 GMT

We were walking down the corridor, past the ichthyosaur, when Mirabelle balked.

Looking ahead, I saw it at once—what looked like a thin snake, rearing up, in the middle of the passage. It wasn’t until I inched closer that I saw it was, in fact, a piece of string, surrounded by what looked like scraps of dried leaves.

The string was moving. It danced and swayed and shimmied like a charmed cobra, with no apparent source of support whatsoever. As we watched, baffled, it uncoiled farther and farther, until at last it stretched three-quarters of the way up the wall, to a small, square slot. And there, a few inches from the wall, it hung suspended from nothing in particular.

The “leaves” began to hop and roil, a motion immediately familiar. They moved like small fish in shallow water. They WERE small fish. The leaves were…dried sardines? Yes. Six of them. Dried sardines that hopped up on their tails, still with a faded iridescence in their flanks, and which hopped in an awkward circle around the base of the string, three clumsy circles, making the faintest of taps, like someone blinking hard next your ear.

Then the fish began hopping up the string, a motion somewhere between a bounce on their tails and a spawning salmon leaping upstream. As Heinrich and I looked on in utter disbelief, the six sardines ascended the string, reached the top, and leapt one by one into the slot in the wall, six sardines doing the Indian rope trick for the benefit of two men and a mule.

The last sardine did a kind of shuffling circuit of the top of the string, and then bounced into the notch in the wall. It made the smallest of noises. It is almost certainly anthropomorphism to think that it said “Whee!” The string hung for a moment longer, and then collapsed, inanimate, an ordinary string no different from any other. We rushed forward, and discovered that the slot in the wall was less than three inches deep, and there were no sardines anywhere to be found.

And that was it. No matter how long we stared at the string, or where we tapped the alcove, nothing else happened.

Translator's Note -- This section does not appear in any of Eland's more polished drafts, and is reconstructed from his notes, which are in a sort of polyglot shorthand. In two places, translation is awkward--"men" would more accurately but less elegantly be rendered "male persons," and "anthropomorphism" is an approximate translation of two Greater Sable words meaning "personification" and "to assign a perverse intelligence to the inanimate," Eland himself apparently being unsure which he wanted. Both "men" and "anthropomorphism" have human-specific connotations in our language, which should be ignored as an artifact of translation. Since Eland himself made similiar choices in preparing his manuscripts for a predominately human readership, I suspect that this would have come in for similiar treatment, but may have been rejected as too patently absurd for publication. -- Vo

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 17:19:07 GMT

The hallway went up a flight of steps past the Bean Room, and gave the illusion of narrowing, although in actuality, the ceiling merely rose high into darkness. The remains of a rail up the stairs had rusted through, and left dangerous spikes hanging from the wall. We skirted them cautiously.

There was something on the righthand wall. My hand, trailing on the concrete, encountered a series of depressions and ridges, a shift of texture. I peered at it and saw lines, bumps, roughness, a discoloration. I went farther on, and the discoloration spread, became a great fanning blot shot through with lines, oddly familiar, but out of focus.

It took me a few minutes to see it, simply because it was so large, and I could not back up more than a few feet away. But all at once, I had a suspicion, and then, like one of those eye puzzles that suddenly turn a bowl of fruit into a general, or a young woman into an old man, it sprang into focus. I broke into a jog, excited, and lo, there it was, just as I had suspected, a great head longer than I was, an enormous eye socket, rows of small diamond teeth--a monstrous beast fifty feet long and apparently about an inch thick.

There was a fossil embedded in the wall. An ichthyosaur, to be precise. Regrettably, my copy of A Few Brief Observations on the Identification of Antediluvian Marine Fauna was back at camp—at 900 pages, I couldn’t justify carting it around on Mirabelle--but I believed it to be Shonisaurus popularis.*

It was also apparently fossilized in the concrete, a neat trick to be sure. While small intact fossils do occasionally show up in coarse concrete, part of the gravel mixed in to add strength to basic sand and cement, traditionally one does not include whole ichthyosaurs. But the texture of the wall was exactly the same as the rest of the corridor, and not ten feet down, a hole was bisected with red rebar set solidly into the concrete. It had definitely been poured. If it was the remnants of an ancient sea, it was hiding it awfully well.

But those were fossils in the wall. It wasn’t a casting. I checked several different points, and if it wasn’t a real fossil, it was a facsimile better than anything I’d ever seen. Somebody could have excavated the bones, arranged them, and then embedded them in concrete—I could just about see that—except that there were great dark rag-like stains and scars that I would swear were the hallmarks of long-vanished soft tissues. If they’d faked it, they were bloody amazing.

Anywhere else, this sort of find would change the world. If it held up to scrutiny, the chronology of the planet would have to be rewritten. But here—here it didn’t mean anything, except that there was an ichthyosaur in the wall of this particular corridor. Perhaps it was indeed a fabulous fake. Perhaps, like the moving rooms, things simply appeared in the walls from time to time, and the great reptile had been wrested from some dark fossil bed to hang in the wall and confound explorers.

Or perhaps the Gearworld really was millions of years old. I had found precious little information about the Gearbuilders themselves so far, certainly nothing to date them. For all I knew, the maze had been built by creatures more closely resembling the ichthyosaur than myself. (Presumably without the flippers and of a size to fit the corridors, although even that was pure guesswork.) I just didn’t have enough information to speculate.

*Would you believe that we’ve got nothing on proper identification of ichthyosaurs in this place? I’ve got acolytes who can differentiate between mosasaurs at fifty paces, but an ichthyosaur could flop around in the courtyard for a week and die unclassified. I’ve sent away for some books, but until they arrive, Eland’s judgment will have to stand.

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 13:25:49 GMT

The corridor from the Hopscotch Cathedral to the bean plants was the standard sort of corridor—large enough for two to walk abreast, with occasional gears and graffiti. We bore right out of the Cathedral, this time, and rapidly around a righthand turn. A small grill set in the floor drained some of the damp, and had a small white triangle and three wavy lines chalked above it. The corridor ran thirty feet, bent right again, and opened into a medium sized room with a freestanding wall, about ten feet high, in the middle.

On the back wall, six steps ran up to a broad, shallow dais. Two slender columns flanked the steps, concrete poured into rounded curves, and rotted hangings, like broken sails, formed a canopy over the dais, hanging in gathered, moth-eaten folds. The dais itself was empty, although holes and lighter patches on the stone showed where some large metal object had been unbolted and removed. (At least I thought it did. That a room in the gearworld might come into existence pre-looted was not only possible, but for all I know, standard.)

In front of the freestanding wall, blocked from the view of the dais, was the strangest element on the room—a wooden panel set on the floor, about a foot high, with five round depressions scooped out of it. Inset in the two smallest depressions were two glass marbles. Swooping lines carved in the panel connected these to the other holes. The next two had broken glass halves in them, as if there are had been large marbles in them at one time, broken in half.

The most impressive thing, however, and the one which immediately dominated the scene, was a great egg-shaped stone the color of curdled cream, larger than my torso, sitting in a carefully shaped depression in the wood. The size of the stone would indicate that if it was, in fact, symmetrical, the depression would have to be carved well into the floor as well.

Etched on the panel, circling the eggstone, was a phrase in Anuvian, which unfortunately, I don’t speak. I could recognize the characters, but the language itself requires a great many glottal clicks which anatomy forbids in my case, so I have never gotten around to learning it. I copied the characters down for later analysis.*

Being more than a little sensitive on the subject of eggs at the moment, I subjected the egg to great scrutiny, and I’m pretty sure it was actually a carved rock--there was a crosshatching of chisel marks--although whether that made it less likely to hatch, in this place, I have no idea.

*Eland apparently never got around to this later analysis, either, but the phrase he copied reads “This is the egg which brings the hope of a guest.” Had he had it translated, however, his inability to speak it would still have caused him to miss some of the meaning--Anuvian is a language riddled with wordplay, and the phrase “hope of a guest” is a pun on the name of one of the gods, a lion made of rain, believed to have storm clouds for entrails, which eviscerates itself during the monsoon season, and then sleeps for the rest of the year to regrow its internal organs. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the rain-lion’s egg, however—Anuvians are very fond of shaggy-dog stories of interminable length and questionable humor, and may simply have seen the opportunity for a pun. -- Vo

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 14:11:44 GMT

Another day, another corridor. This time it was through the door in the Hopscotch Cathedral, since I really wasn’t keen on the brick passage again so soon.

We went left down the corridor, and came almost immediately to a doorway on the left. This was an unusual doorway, shaped like a squared off keyhole, much wider at the top than at the bottom.

We emerged near the ceiling of the room, on a high platform, mirrored on the other side by an identical platform running the length of the opposite wall. Stairs led down to the sunken center, where two large squares of green were separated by a narrow ditch of water.

On our wall was a very faded mural, less like plaster and more like dried mud affixed to the surface. I touched it delicately with a nail, and colored powder flaked off. It was impossible to determine what was going on—there was a hint of sky at the top relatively intact, but it degraded as it went down, so that there were only shadows of what appeared to be awkward figures. Some small object hovered among them, although it was so badly worn that it was impossible to tell if they were hunting birds, playing ball, or worshipping a particularly low hanging sun.

Carved across the bottom, but very worn, was something that might have been free verse or a description, although it shed no light on the events.

“First going
I listen,
To the child yonder."*

The green below, when we crossed to look at it, was plants. Bean plants, to be precise. While I was unfamiliar with this particular cultivar—the leaves were broader, darker, and waxier than the bean plants from the family garden in my youth—they were unmistakable. The two squares contained ten rows each, all lashed to tall fence poles, evidentally irrigated by the sloping ditch in the center. They were carefully tended—or perhaps they weren’t, for all I knew, the Gearworld had no native weeds—but they looked healthy enough. The water was a clear, wet brown, and as I watched, a water-skimmer slid across it on five delicate pontoons of surface tension.

This was the first example I’d seen of actual crops in the Gearworld. It almost gave me hope that there might be a regular ecology down there—or at least, that if we camped here, I might actually catch one of the inhabitants. This thought was oddly cheering--not so much that there might be inhabitants, but that the Gearworld had not quite broken me yet, and I was still able to hope that a crop meant a farmer. Perhaps at some point in the near future, we will stake out the beans (ha!) and see what happens.

* A verse identical to this exists in the archives, bound together with an invocation either to or against “the people who sit upon their heels,” but it’s divorced of any context, and also badly degraded, on some kind of pounded mulberry pulp paper that did not hold up to the ages.

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 13:57:01 GMT

We had another encounter at our campsite last night—one baffling and a bit alarming, but not apparently threatening.

I was asleep, dead to the world, but Heinrich woke immediately at the sound of someone approaching. This was no silent mule-return, but a crashing racket, as a number of somethings came through the trees at high speed, blundering into things and making no attempt at stealth.

Heinrich slid out of his bedroll and crab-walked around the fire to shake my shoulder, bringing me groggily awake. The approaching noises woke me the rest of the way up. I sat up. Mirabelle snorted. I snorted too—there was a rank odor of wet dog hanging in the air, and it wasn’t Heinrich.

We didn’t have long to wait. The things blundered and crashed and finally ran directly through our campsite.

There were a lot of them—at least a dozen, maybe more. Our camp was briefly full of running bodies and pounding footsteps. There were noises—nothing recognizable as language, a gibbering glibbering set of sounds, random breathy vowels repeated over and over. “Heee-ee-eee-ee!” “Uh-huh-huh-huh!”

They were running like the blind—or, to be fair, like someone running in a dark forest—hitting trees and each other. Two ran directly into the sides of our tent, flailed briefly against the canvas, and tore off again. (Fortunately Mirabelle was picketed on the opposite side of the tent, and the creatures missed her completely.) One tripped over my legs, fell flat, and oblivious to both my squawk of dismay and Heinrich’s growl, scrabbled to its feet and ran on.

The blackness inside the forest was barely broken by the red lines of the banked fire, so we never got a good look at them—flashes of calves and shins, with damp, wiry hair, was about it. Even Heinrich’s night vision could only make out dark cutout shapes—bipeds, moving fast. We couldn’t even assign a general family to the shapes among the various races that walk upright.

Strangely, I got no sense of fear from the creatures. They were running, but not in the way of panicked prey fleeing a predator. It seemed almost as if they were running TO something. I don’t think they knew that we were there, or if they did, we were unimportant.

And then, just as rapidly as they’d appeared, they were gone. The entire encounter took less than fifteen seconds. We heard them crashing through the trees, heard a few last gibbering echoes—and silence. After a few moments, the smell faded in the light breeze.

In the morning, Heinrich could not make hide-nor-hair of the footprints—“Human. Ish. Probably.” was his final analysis. Some of the prints had claws, some of them lines drawn through lengthwise through them in a puzzling fashion, some of them were shorter and almost paw-like.

We were not in the gearworld. Was this completely unrelated? Some natural phenomenon of the area? Or had the creatures come from inside the maze, run mad through the outside, and sought a way back in? We knew little about this part of the world, even apart from the labyrinth, and while it was tempting to assume every strange local thing was related to the gearworld, the region might be odd enough on its own.

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 12:59:44 GMT

I was beginning to get the impression that this section of Gearworld was just plain bad.

A short corridor, made awkward by two large, staggered gears protruding from opposite walls, forced us to thread our way through single file. Mules don’t thread all that well. Still, Mirabelle was an excellent mule, and we got her through unscathed.

The next room, however, would put Mirabelle’s excellence to the test.

It was a large room, not particularly low-ceilinged, but so broad that the fifteen foot clearance seemed much lower than it was, giving it a heavy, oppressive feel. The floor was back to flagstones, although the mortar was tan concrete, as if the labryinth was reluctant to break too far from tradition.

Planted or sculpted or arranged or something around the room were bizarre constructions, like yucca plants made out of bone. Rows of broad, flat diamonds overlapped at floor level, rising up to nearly waist height, and from the centers, high, curving stalks with pointed, javelin-like “flowers” brushed the ceiling. Everything had the grey-white, pocked texture of old bone, the stalks sporting femur-like knobs, the flat diamonds resembling scapulae locked and interlocked between ribs. Some of the plants had sent out runners, long, slender threads that looked like articulated ropes of phalanges, terminating in miniature versions of the adult plants.

I wasn’t sure if they were silly, or horrible. Sometimes the line’s pretty fine.

They dotted the floor, sometimes in clumps, sometimes alone. Getting past them required going single file in places. I was reluctant to touch them, and so was everyone else.

What happened next happened quickly. I didn’t see most of it at the time, but put the sequence together after the fact.

One of Mirabelle’s packs was hanging loosely, the strap having a much longer slack end than usual, since she wasn’t fully loaded. Stepping delicately past one of the bone plants, in response to her fancy (for a mule) footwork, the strap swayed, and the end brushed against one of the yucca-like leaves.

The tall bone flower snapped around with a speed usually reserved for vipers, and struck. The sharply pointed tip drove like a javelin, and thank god, went into the pack instead of Mirabelle (where I would later discover that it had gone entirely through a towel, a small bag of jerky, and my copy of Elegantic’s Understanding Urban Fauna: A Naturalist’s View of the City as Ecosystem.)

Mirabelle shrieked like an injured opera star and kicked like—well, for lack of a better analogy, like a mule. Both hooves struck the bone flower squarely, it thrashed, but was firmly stuck in Mssr. Elegantic’s magnum opus, her top pack (containing our lunch) went flying, and the criminally loose strap whipped across her flank, the buckle at the end smacking her smartly on the hip.

Absolutely enraged by this second assault, she bucked and kicked out again. The bone flower shattered under her hooves, grey powder rose in gouts, and hundreds, if not thousands of tiny bones exploded outward under the attentions of one-mule wrecking crew.

Many of the bones disintegrated as they flew, but a lot of the bigger ones held up long enough to strike other of the bone yucca plants. These plants responded just as the first one had, striking at the unknown assailants. Our lunch landed in a large thicket of the flowers, which went insane. They ran the pack through so many times that the leather was a complete loss, never mind our sandwiches.

Within seconds, the three of us were surrounded by a bristling forest of wildly lashing bone spikes. We didn’t dare move more than a foot in any direction, and when an upset mule wants to move, it wants to move NOW.

Heinrich saved the day, by grabbing Mirabelle’s bridle, ripping his shirt off one handed, and slapping it over her eyes. Blindfolded, she calmed down immensely, although being a mule, she was smart enough to know that there was still something bad out there, and stood on Heinrich’s foot to prove that he couldn’t tell her what to do. He accepted this criticism with his usual grim stoicism.*

After a few minutes, the snapping bones settled down, with a sort of grim crackling noise, like erratic snapping of angry fingers, the stalks quivering but quiet, and we started breathing again.

It took us nearly forty-five minutes to get back out of the room, since we had to find a spot to turn Mirabelle around (she was not in a mood for backing up at the moment, and was anyway in a bad position to do so) and when at last we did, the sight of the headless statues was almost a relief.

*He hobbled for two days afterwards, too.

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 13:09:06 GMT

The next room was unsettling. Well, more unsettling than usual.

A hundred yards or so down from the brick section, another doorway on the right opened into a square, high-ceilinged room, about fifty feet on a side. In the middle were statues.

These were not the crude, groaning statues that had so bothered me before. These were white marble, carefully, classically sculpted statues of the male human form, exquisitely rendered, smooth and detailed and cold.

The statues—fourteen of them--formed a square horseshoe in the middle of the room. They were closely spaced, barely a handspan between them, each in different positions, and each one was missing its head.

Despite not having heads, they were all turned inward, and all staring—headlessly—into the center of the horseshoe.

There was a crumpled, boxy thing in the middle of the horseshoe. We had to walk around the statues before we realized that it was an unmade bed.

The statues were pressed tightly around a bed, which had a lavender blanket and sheets that were still mostly white. The bedding had evidentally been pulled towards the head, and then thrown back. One of the pillows was on the floor. If someone were lying in the bed, the headless statues would be staring at them, fourteen eyeless gazes focused intently on the sleeper.

“They woke up, and saw the statues, and clutched the blankets,” I said.

“Mmm.”

“Then they threw ‘em back and ran for it.”

“Mmm.”

“What a thing to wake up to.”

“Mmph!”

The sheets had faded to the slightly dulled cream, stiff and dry, of aged bedding, the creases set as deeply as geological features. The bed had been here for a long time, and of course, away from wind and weather, the marble was eternal.

One might ask who would place a bed in the middle of a stone room, devoid of other amenities. One might also ask who’d place such statues so unnervingly around a bed, but I didn’t. I had a feeling they’d moved there on their own. They were the sort of statues that, when you turned your back, you got the feeling they were moving around behind you.

Left unsaid was the question of whether, when the sleeper had bolted, they’d gotten away, or whether something…else…had happened.

I had a brief, horrific vision of going to sleep tonight, and waking up to find all those headless white forms crowded around my bedroll. I squelched it firmly. Imagination is great in an explorer. The ability to turn it off occasionally, however, is a necessity.

Still, I was definitely going to make sure I knew where the sledgehammer was before I turned in tonight.

Set in the wall behind the bed, another doorway led away into shadow, and we fled gratefully toward it.

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 12:41:08 GMT

As we continued down the hallway from the three narrow rooms, the walls changed briefly, from concrete to flaking reddish brick. Old plaster scaled and patched the walls, and the reticulated masonry was a few degrees colder than usual, the floor a seeping dampness. Mirabelle’s and my hooves went “clump” instead of “clonk.” The graffiti was uniformly black, a thin and spidery hand that ran across floor and walls and even briefly the ceiling, raving incoherently about the gasping groaning shores of bedlam, something concealed under plaster, out of which, large plaster bit, horizons chained, plaster, plaster, glistening walls of tainted meat!!!

I wasn’t sure what he’d been trying to say, the narrative being none-too-coherent to start, and not improved by the editing plaster bits, but it certainly sounded unpleasant, and the numerous exclamation points would indicate I wasn’t the only one who thought so.

The indirect light of the gearworld got darker and darker, and for a few moments, I was afraid it would fail completely. It seemed to be failing in clumps, leaving pools of dark and light, as if from unseen lamps. I stood in the last of the pools of dim light and looked into a deep gloom, wondering if I should break out the lamp in Mirabelle’s pack.

But a faint breeze came from farther down the passage, and the air was dry and warm, and Mirabelle was crowding forward, eager to be out of this dark, damp place. Within a few steps, I could see the light reasserting itself ahead. The plaster patches got bigger and sandier, and the mortar between the bricks grew thicker, and some of the patches now looked suspiciously like tan concrete, and within twenty feet, the walls were the familiar concrete again, and a gear poked cautiously through the wall, and somebody had written a huge, cheerful obscenity in bright orange across it.

A very large grasshopper, bright black and yellow, with large grey eyes, was sitting on one of the cogs. It appeared to be a Melanoplus differentialis, a species already well documented, so it was spared the specimen jar for now. Besides, I was feeling magnanimous--I felt as if the brick passage had let us go, and it seemed only right to return the favor.

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 13:34:00 GMT

So now we had Mirabelle back, and we weren’t going to lose her again. We packed her up with our day-trip gear, (including a bucket and small shovel for the inevitable mule byproducts) and lead her into the maze with us on our next expedition. I tried not to think what would happen if we ran out of accessible doors and had to engage in some serious climbing. The iris people had been good about saving Mirabelle twice, but three times was starting to push our luck.

Down the hallway from the locked door to the gong, and the hopscotch court, was an uneventful walk, studded here and there with gears set into the walls. Many of these were simply embedded flat in the wall, as if part of the stone itself, more art than machinery. There was no way they could move. I wondered if that would stop them, or if I might someday see them revolving, the stone around them parting like water, or tearing like paper around the teeth.

A cluster of three close set doorways on the right opened into three narrow rooms, each about four feet wide and twelve feet deep, and three different tableaus.

The first room had an articulated pig skeleton on a low dais. The bones were wrapped with rusted barbed wire, sometimes close around the bones, sometimes billowing out to form the outline of broad ears and a round snout. It was a very large pig, almost shoulder-high on Mirabelle and longer than she was. A plaque on the dais read “Ol’ Hieronymus – Killed six men and eighteen dogs and mauled a cow. Shot by Winifred Chester.” The skeleton had huge curving tusks and a loop of barbed wire running on a slant over one eyesocket gave it a sneering expression. Someone had painted “OINK!” over the ribs in red, which somehow only made it look madder.

The second room had two of the large gears laid flat in the walls, with a rusted axle running crosswise between them. Hanging from the axle was a thong, and hanging from the thong was a whole abalone shell, pierced top and bottom, that revolved slowly and flashed gaudy rainbows at us.

The third room had bare floors and walls, but the ceiling was a mass of tangled wire, bent bedsprings and old fences forming a dense mat of angular rust overhead. From the wires hung dozens of glass test tubes with black rubber stoppers, and inside each tube was a number of small black pebbles. One test tube had a slip of paper coiled up atop of the pebbles. Heinrich unhooked the cords holding it up and handed it to me. I pulled out the stopper with a pop, fished out the paper, and read: PUT THIS BACK.

I put it back.

“Is it just me, or has this place gotten really bossy lately?” I asked Heinrich.

“Mmph.”

“Yeah.”

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 12:52:32 GMT

I woke up in the pre-dawn hours when something went “Whuff!” and sprayed my face with droplets of...you know, let’s just not speculate.

I opened both eyes, drew breath for a yawp of terror, and the something snorted happily and began drooling weird colors on my bedroll.

Mirabelle had returned.

She appeared mostly undamaged by her three day sojourn. She had a few scrapes, but they were all clean, and her tether rope was...

...was unsnapped from the bridle, neatly coiled up, and laying at the foot of my bedroll. In the center of the circle of rope was a perfect pygmy iris, a deep wine-burgandy with yellow-orange tongues.

“Heinrich,” I said quietly, “did you see anybody?”

Heinrich shook his head slowly. He doesn’t have the hair-trigger senses of a guard dog, perhaps, but he’s pretty damn close. That someone could sneak into the center of the camp—and bring a mule with them!—without waking him was more than a little alarming. Mules can be surprisingly sneaky for their size, but this was unnerving.

Still, Mirabelle was back. It’s hard to hug a mule, but I managed. Heinrich went “Mmhmph!” and didn’t even do more than wince when she aimed a companionable hoof into his calf. Normalcy had returned.

Feeling slightly foolish, but also wanting to stay on whoever-it-was’s good side, I walked a few yards out of camp, cleared my throat nervously, and addressing a hawthorn bush for lack of a better target, said loudly,“Thank you for bringing her back.”

If the bush had replied, I would probably have had a heart attack, but it didn’t, so after a minute or two of pretending that I didn’t feel like an idiot, I went back.

I put the iris into a fresh jar of water, Heinrich limped cheerfully around making breakfast—Muffins of Celebration rather than Muffins of Consternation, an admittedly subtle distinction—and life was good.

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 13:16:41 GMT

The door at the end of the hallway past the hall of dog armor was chained and had a padlock in surprisingly good condition on it. Determined to explore it today, I had brought my lockpicks.

Lockpicking is one of those glamorous skills that you think would be really handy for an explorer, and turns out not to be. Surprisingly few cultures use conventional locks, and on the off chance you’re looking for a lost colony or expedition from one of them, generally by the time you find the lock, it’s been rusted or gummed up for so long there’s nothing you can do with it. The few times that one may have a working lock, it’s usually faster and more efficient to simply apply the proper tool (i.e. Heinrich.)

If one is looking to be an explorer, therefore, I suggest one take up darning. One may or may not ever encounter a lock in the darkest wilds, but it’s a given that one’s clothes will be more hole than cloth by the end of an expedition.

At any rate, finding my lockpicks in the jumble of our no-longer-organized camp was the hardest part. It was a very large lock with only two tumblers, and even as unskilled as I am, it didn’t take very long to pick. There was even a handy gear embedded sideways in the floor that made a convenient seat. I unwrapped the chain and pushed the door open with a creak.

The room revealed was a small cube about ten feet on a side, floored with flagstones (the walls were still sand-colored concrete) with a square stand in the middle of the room. On the stand was a gong, and hanging next to it, a mallet.

The gong was beaten copper, the only design a simple, tightly wound spiral, but as if to make up for this restraint, the metalsmith had gone completely overboard with the mallet, and not in a good way. The head was a kneeling, nude woman, mostly human but with the flayed, pop-eyed skull of some gnawing rodent. Enormous chisel-like buck-teeth made up one end, and squared off buttocks the other. Each of the six breasts that the artist had seen fit to bestow on this figure extended off the head of the mallet, and wrapped down the ebony haft in a tight spiral, holding it in place, and ending in an ornate fringe of nipples at the end cap. Perhaps feeling that his creation had not gone quite far enough, the artist had worked each nipple into the likeness of a screaming chisel-toothed mouth, except for one that was a tiny, ornate chrysanthemum.

“Yow,” I said.

Heinrich didn’t have to say anything. I could feel his eyebrows go up from across the room.

Bolted to the front of the platform was a metal plaque with carefully inscribed letters:

PLEASE DO NOT STRIKE GONG
While we fully understand that you are curious as to what
happens when the gong is struck, we must strongly advise
against it. The results are most unpleasant and dramatically
fatal. Human nature being what it is, we realize that this
warning may not stop you, and may in fact only drive you
to strike it, but since we are unable to destroy the gong,
and the lock was evidentally insufficient to keep you out,
we can only hope that you will take our advice. There are
neither riches nor knowledge here, but only an ugly death.
Respectfully,
The Monks of Perdition

Under this plaque was another, much smaller and more discreet one that said simply:

In Memory of Brother Wu

Heinrich and I read this plaque through. I made a careful rubbing of it. Then we left the room and re-locked the door behind us.

Our readers may be disappointed at this lack of adventurous spirit on our part, and perhaps rightly so, but one doesn’t get to be an old adventurer without learning when to leave well enough alone.

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 14:21:13 GMT

I had to do it. I’m an adult, but some things just call to you.

Heinrich gave a “Hmph!” of what I’ll generously call affectionate exasperation and went to examine the door carvings. I set my hoof in the first hopscotch square.

It was hard. I’m nowhere near as nimble as a mountain goat, but I’m at least as good as a human, and it was still a surprisingly tough course. It started easily, but soon I was having to balance on one leg for fairly lengthy periods, scouting out the next number from a complex jumble of squares.

I was up to about a hundred and eight—there were nearly two-hundred numbered squares—and a strange thing happened.

My vision went grey and sparkly, the way it does before a faint, or in the throes of a migraine headache, and when it cleared, I wasn’t down on the floor any more. Or rather I was, but I seemed to be watching myself from outside, as if I was hovering up near the ceiling, and far below me, a tiny toy antelope skipped and shuffled along. The only sound in that huge, vast cathedral was the blood pounding in my ears, and the thin, erratic tap-tap-tap of miniature hooves on stone, no louder than a mouse running across the floor.

If I’m up here, I thought, how am I able to still do that hopscotch board? That’s a complicated bunch of steps! Who’s running my body?

I had no sooner thought this unnerving thought when I had a brief, nauseating moment of vertigo, found myself reeling in the middle of the grid (I was now up to square one-hundred-forty-two) tried to catch myself without stepping outside the squares, and fell over in a puff of pink chalk dust.

I got up again, while Heinrich made the snide “Hm-m!” that denotes stifled laughter.
Undaunted, I went back to square one and started over again.

One might ask why I didn’t just start where I’d fallen. I could give you an answer that might sound fairly good, about how if there was some phenomenon at work, I wanted to begin at the beginning and see if I could observe the onset, but the fact is that when you miss a step at hopscotch, you start over. It’s the rules.
And sure enough, right about a hundred and eight, tunnel vision closed in, grey washed in and stole my peripheral vision, and I was watching a miniature Eland hop and prance through the board, while a toy bear stood and watched.

This time, I deliberately fought back panic and waited.

Faster and surer-footed than it ever was when I held the reins, the tiny antelope whirled through the steps, did a final pirouette, and landed outside the last square.

And I was back.

“Heinrich,” I said, “you’ve GOT to try this!”

It took some coaxing, but finally the world was treated to the rare vision of
Heinrich lumbering through the hopscotch court. It was...well, a bit tragic, really. Heinrich’s people are suited for any number of things, combat and cooking among them, but nature had had to made some concessions in the hopscotch department.
About halfway through, he became preternaturally surefooted for a moment, then jerked, grunted, and staggered out of the board.

In the end, we both ran through the board at least a half-dozen times, and the results were the same every time. For whatever reason, at square 108, you found yourself outside, watching yourself.

Except that apparently you weren’t. When I had Heinrich hold up a number of fingers behind his back, and examined the toy bear’s claws from my vantage point near the ceiling, our results were no better than chance. I could see the fingers, but the numbers didn’t match up to what he’d really displayed.

It looked absolutely perfect, but it was some sort of amazing illusion.

And the reason behind it? As usual, not a clue.