Chapter 18. "The Cursed Old House"
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Every good deed starts in the dark. As they used to say in the Wastelands, the first ray of the sun kills a work. If you hadn't done anything good before it came (or at least, you hadn't started), you couldn't do it afterward either. In the argo of the brigades, there was even a special word to define a worthless, empty person, who seems to do something, but still will not make any difference. Literally, it was translated as "midday slacker." All this and more, Lena remembered as the team gathered for the swamp raid. The girl thought it would be scary. In fact, preparations began with disgust and double disgust.
First, Biso briefly described for the uninitiated (that is, Elena, the soldiers, and Charley) who the "jelly" were and why the marshes were so dangerous. So, according to the alchemist, the swamps were inhabited by small and disgusting creatures, similar to jellyfish, blind and one by one completely harmless. They would have been good for everything except one thing-the creatures were collective predators. Black wasps only banded together when someone disturbed their nest or killed a congener. Jellys attacked anything larger than a piglet. The translucent lumps of jelly quickly formed into a single organism, like balls of mercury merging into a large blob, and they came down on their prey in their entirety. Biso mentioned that the creature, when fully "assembled," could reach the weight of ten "dry barrels," that is, more than a ton. The most disgusting thing was that, as far as the twentieth-century girl understood, the jelly was saturated with oxygen. Therefore, the victim, having been devoured, did not suffocate and often did not even lose consciousness during the very slow digestion process.
Running away from the jelly monster was extremely difficult, and killing it was impossible because you can't hit a jellyfish that has no organs or even blood. Only some alchemical acids and very rare herbs, whose smoke steadily deterred the enemy, saved the day. It was still possible to walk in a special way, avoiding rhythm and using woven swamp skis, bypassing dangerous places, but these tricks had to be learned over the years.
Matrice and Santelli found a better and simpler way. They approached the question from the position of rational knowledge and began to try everything, hoping to find a remedy that would reliably deter the jelly and, at the same time, be somewhat cheaper than the herbs that must be collected twice a year during the waning moon, committing a lot of ridiculous actions in the process. They searched and found it. More precisely, Santelli found it. He pointed out that the Jellys digest and absorb almost everything in a person, but only "almost." And Matrice put the production on stream. A magnificent, very effective substance that reliably repelled transparent death. You just have to coat yourself with it and renew it as it evaporated.
Elena was already sickened by the alchemist's colorful description of the process of digestion of the victim and the thought that she had signed up to go straight into the jelly beast's mouth. Then Santeli, looking like a snide Mickey Mouse, broke the wax seal with his dagger and opened the first jug of the magic potion.
Kai did not react in any way; it seems that the improvement in his nose only affected his appearance without adding to his sense of smell. Shena said many words that Lena had never heard before and couldn't even understand the roots. Biso looked at his colleagues with undisguised gloating. Zilber and Einar looked at each other, sighed heavily, and said they would not demand more payment than agreed. But if the brigadier at the end of the campaign did not make them a gift from the heart, in compensation for this ... they will not understand the brigadier and will harbor unkind thoughts in their hearts.
The foreman reassured him with the message that at least they wouldn't have to worry about clothes. Everything irreversibly spoiled by the nightmarish smell will be reimbursed at the employer's expense. So time is of the essence. It is time to get smeared, gentlemen travelers.
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What is a trip for Profit?
Before the trip began, Lena knew exactly that it was a danger. It was also pain, injury, and probably death. With very good luck, money, and pleasure. Women, men (for connoisseurs or fighters like Shena). Wine, narcotic elixir, simple gluttony, finally. The girl appreciated what she saw directly - the wounded on Matrice's table, the dead men on the wagons, the tar men wasting the proceeds.
Over the past few days, she had discovered a new aspect of brigade work - careful planning, the procurement of a variety of equipment, and the desire to avoid all sorts of problems by eliminating the very possibility of their occurrence. Now, it turned out that going after Profit was all of the above plus hard work. Unthinkable, exhausting hell of monotonous movement when you no longer care about any danger. You just want to lie down and die because even death seems easier than a few more steps on this road. And a few more. And some more. When there is only fog and puffing Biso behind, a dim sun disk overhead, which is sinking in the clouds, and ahead is Einar's shield, hung on the belt behind the deserter's back.
Lena had never seen swamps before, only imagined them in movies. It reminded me the most of Infinity Story and Fury Road. It was a sea of mud, alternating with strips of more or less clear water, and the top was covered with a brown-green carpet of tangled vegetation. The grass is common, grass long and short, grass with smooth stems, thorny stems, with shoots that look like daggers or worse. Reeds, reaching to the waist, growing in dense groves and hiding myriads of flies. Lianas, twisting underfoot in treacherous loops, turning into dense balls like bundles of rats' tails. Spiders the size of the palm of my hand lived there, their venom not lethal but leaving behind twisted joints and chronic pain for years to come.
Occasionally a gray-green streak glided by, which meant a snake had been spooked. A couple of times, they met small leeches. One Zilber pulled out of his boot, and the creature managed to stick into the skin and inject an anticoagulant, so now "brother-soldier" squelched a boot full of his blood.
The brigade walked in a chain and tied together with two ropes. Santélli was first, and Charley was last. At irregular intervals, obeying some reason of his own, Zilber drew from his sack the fine milestones he had brought with him in the cart and marked the way. Every third or fourth one, Biso would call out, leaving a mark to be found later in the fog.
"Take a halt," Santelli said quietly, putting aside the pole.
Einar looked around to see if the people behind him had heard. In the fumes of the swamp, the yellow lenses of his glasses looked opaque, like the eyes of an underwater monster.
Lena was about to throw off the ponjaga, but stopped in time, remembering that the "Vietnamese footlocker" was taped to the frame, which was not to be squished. It was the medicine chest that caused the medic the brunt of her suffering. Elena, absorbed in gathering and express-mastering of the road wisdom, did not think at all about how she would carry both the luggage and the box at the same time. No one, of course, did not think about it for her either, as a person knows better how to encase themselves with equipment. In the end, the box had to be carried over her shoulder on the belt and then, in the second resting place, taped to the ponjaga, on top of everything else. The box was no longer dragging under her arms and hitting her in the side, but her center of gravity was completely displaced behind her, so she had to lean forward and put tension on her lower back. Her back was already aching and cramping despite the corset belt. This was bound to get worse.
The girl took a sip of water from the flask. She slid her hand down her thigh, tucking the flask into the braid on her belt, and felt the texture of her skin change. She glanced down and realized that, after hours of walking through thorny thickets, the malignant flora had literally worn away the top layer of skin on her pants. It was as if she'd been sanded down with a big sandpaper and hadn't missed a single crease.
Biso, meanwhile, was checking the direction with a cup of water and a steel needle, but he was whispering something over it and throwing grains of salt into the cup. The sight of the alchemist made Lena jealous and inferior. The sorcerer was older than she was (and by far), well-fed, short-legged, and not at all strikingly fit. At the same time, he was moving along the swamp quite briskly, keeping up with the foreman and canting his traveling bag and dragging his traveling bag and the chest with alchemical ingredients by himself.
Lena leaned back on the bump, stretching out her heavy, lead-lined feet. The boots had long ago been soaked to the last thread and lint, as had the windings. There were still socks, but the girl decided to wear them at the next resting place. Einar took his shoes off altogether, hanging the tied boots around his neck and yellowing his calloused heels, stiff even to the touch, like goat's hooves. Zilber checked the leech-infected leg, saw that the blood was still dripping in tiny droplets, and whispered a curse. He would have liked to go barefoot, too, but Santelli had expressly forbidden it. Blood in the water was the last thing the brigade needed right now.
The swamp was never quiet. All the time, something was squelching, clucking, and squawking. Amphibious creatures rustled, and water splashed under the carpet of densely intertwined grasses, reflecting some incomprehensible underwater life. From time to time, from a distance, the wind brought an eerie sound like a wistful dreary moan. It must be how banshees howl, foretelling one's doom. But the tarred ones paid no attention to the moaning, nor did Charley, apparently judging that everything was going their way, as it should.
The background noise was sharply different from anything Lena's ears were used to, which only added to the anxiety. All the time, it seemed as if someone was rustling, sneaking up on her. The haze muffled the sounds, turning them inside out and putting them back in so the footsteps and other noise made by the brigade seemed to swirl around, becoming distorted. It seemed as if an entire battalion was marching in the distance, rattling its armor. Or a column of heavy cavalry was speeding up for a lance strike. Exhausted ears even caught separate words and commands in a half-forgotten language. And involuntarily listening, Lena began to doubt - and whether it's just a quirk of the acoustics?
It was said that the swamps were once a convenient plain where all the major battles for the Wastelands took place, which were then still a paradise. Like on Kawanakajima, where Takeda and Uesugi would have their interwar games time after time. Perhaps the cursed swamp captured the souls of the murdered and has not let them go for centuries? Again and again, the ghosts converge in endless battles, reliving the last moments of their lives...
But most frightening, of course, was the realization that at any moment, the green carpet could swell and break up in shreds, releasing a gelatinous tumor driven only by the instinct to devour everything in the world.
Ugh, that's disgusting... Lena reached into her bag, without a command, for a bottle of repellent liquid. The stock in the jugs was dispersed into special bottles, five bottles for one person. This should have been enough to spare because the bottles were solid, and the smell was persistent. Unscrewing the cap, Lena grimaced and turned away - though she was partly used to it by now, the smell of concentrated urea mixed with chlorine hurt her nose like a good boxer. Covering her face with her hand, she sprayed herself diligently, trying not to waste too much and, at the same time, treat as many areas as possible. Her stomach was tearing out, sourly lodged somewhere near her throat in a clump of wriggling muscles.
"Let's go," said the foreman as he lifted the ponjaga on his back. The tightly rolled blanket and the two burlap rolls were soaked through. The brigadier's beard hung in sad icicles with a few grasses stuck in it. One braid was tucked behind his ear, the other stuck to his sweaty forehead like a schoolgirl in the rain. Combined with the brigadier's bestial appearance, it looked like a surreal kawaii.
Lena wiped her wet face with her wet sleeve and only now realized that the water was brackish. It must be true what they said - the marshes are not fed by the main river, which after the Cataclysm went underground, leaving a chain of lakes on the surface, but communicate directly with the sea so the deep springs mix their water with ocean salt.
God, when will it end... and will it ever end?
As she tried to stand up, a sharp pain shot through her lower back, as if a chisel had been thrust between her vertebrae. She remembered Grandpa, who had been suffering from sciatica in recent years and had tried everything, from a wool belt to the Kuznetsov applicator. Lena clenched her teeth and decided to let her spine endure this day. Just this day. And then she would definitely be smarter...
The tarred ones passed by the corpse of a taguar that had gotten here. No one knows how, and no one knows why. The ferocious ambush predator, capable of one-on-one killing even an armed man, found an opponent scarier than itself. The beast was left with its head and hind legs completely intact. And the spine between them was stripped down to bare bones with cartilaginous veins. Judging by the fact that the small scavengers had not yet covered the remains, the tarantula had been eaten quite recently.
The sun was climbing across the sky like a yellow bug. It had been a warm day, so the swamp slurry was steaming like a bathhouse. At a distance of fifteen or twenty meters, it was impossible to see anything. The fog was a wispy wall behind which ghostly figures glided. It was as if someone was extending whitish fingers toward the people who were walking, which blurred into a haze beneath their gaze. But as soon as she turned away, the fog was again throwing up disembodied tentacles, wriggling between the bumps.
Shena fell into a hidden swamp and went right up to her chest into a water well hidden under a false bump. The first safety rope, brand-new, personally tested by Santelli on every inch of it, tore instantly. The fibers came apart like a rotten rag. She was saved by ahlspis, which she managed to deploy as a rescue pole, and a second rope, which was woven on the road Bizo from the grass. With a concerted effort, the lancewoman was pulled back and immediately lavished with stinky essence to replace the one that had washed away in the forced bathtub.
The first bottle of decomposed urine ran out. She had to open the second one. Lena decided that now she would make her way to that tree, lie down there, and not go anywhere else, let them drag her, let them beat her, let them deprive her of pay, and let her have to slave for Matrice for the rest of her life, no matter what. She would go no further. But when the cherished point was near, it became clear that there was still a little strength left in her exhausted muscles, like drops of wine left out in a flask of dried pumpkin by a drunkard.
All right, forget it. But over by that bump, that's it.
That's it.
"Here we are," said the foreman without excitement or emotion.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
The Swamp House was not as legendary as, say, the Crystal Cave, the Spring, the Coastal Labyrinth, the Bone Pit, the Golden Garden, or any of the other interesting places whose names are always on everyone's lips in the Gate. But it was known, and some had even tried to get around. No one has succeeded. The "tarred ones" either returned empty-handed or disappeared in their entirety. Gone were those who dared to spend the night within the walls, which for more than four centuries had no way of escaping into the bottomless swamp. And so Santelli decided to take a risk, extracting Profit in a place where previously only death had been found. Or worse. The brigadier did not look mad, so he must have known something special which promised at least a shadow of a chance for success. That was what the brigade would have to find out in the coming hours, for the day was drawing to a close.
"Everybody take off your clothes," the tired Santelli handed out commands as if barking. And the first began to unbuckle the straps of the leather cuirass, squelching with swampy sludge and bubbles of someone's caviar. No one questioned; it was clear to everyone that the first thing to do after such a crossing was to check for lurking parasites and other crap.
Lena thought she would feel some embarrassment, maybe hear some slurs, but everyone was exhausted to the point where their naked bodies evoked no emotion. People as people, primary sexual characteristics, and everything else God intended. Or Pantocrator. Except that Charley was a bit of a surprise. The older man, whom Lena would have given a good forty-something, was as thin and wiry as a twenty-year-old. The brether's abs could be scanned and taken as a benchmark for photoshopping the bellies of Hollywood stars. Judging by the scars, the maître had been hacked a lot and hard. And very professionally stitched, including masterful stitching of severed tendons. Except for the last wound, the freshest-looking one. It left a wide pinkish scar across his chest, with distinctive stitches. Lena had seen this before - it meant the wounded man had sewn himself up with the wrong hand.
Another leech was extracted from Zilber's second boot. This time the swamp creeper had no time to get under the pant leg, so the archer, with great pleasure, stomped the creeper into the mush and got into the leather case, pulling the wet bowstring. The brigade collected a dozen ticks from each other, and Lena treated each bite with great care, for some of the symptoms of the local fevers resembled encephalitis. A lone jellyfish climbed into Shena's pram - Lena had expected to see something jellyfish, but the swamp horror resembled a cute yellow-bellied creature with two short legs made of translucent glass with thin black veins. They trampled the creature together and poured a generous amount of urine essence over it. Each traveler had another bottle to examine the house and two for the way back.
The evening crept up quickly and stealthily, like a taguar to its prey. Or something that, in turn, stole the unfortunate cattle, nibbling them like an ice cream stick. The thought of having to spend the night in the house was so obvious that no one even spoke it out loud. Except in the glances that fell on the Santelli, there was a collective mute question - what cunning trick had the foreman come up with this time?
"Put the luggage here," Santelli said curtly. "We'll go on the light. We'll haul it in later."
Lena hung the medical box on a belt over her shoulder. Behind and to her left, Shena clinked steel muffled, pulling on flat-ringed gloves. Next to the lancer, it was... calmer. With Shena behind her, Lena felt as if she were in a warm cocoon of invisible protection.
While the crew looked at each other and took a breath, Lena did not perceive the house as something separate. It was just an object they had finally reached. Now it was time to take a closer look at the house.
The first close look immediately brought to mind the word "colonial." It was unclear why. The house did not have what is usually associated with the proverbial "colonial style." No white walls, columns, or open floor plan let in a refreshing breeze. The house was once three stories high and, judging by visible features, was built around four corner towers with balconies. Most likely, there was even an atrium inside. Now the first floor was almost completely buried in the damp earth, so the house seemed to be about two stories.
And yet, for some reason, the building gave the impression of a country residence. Something light, entertaining, built not for defense and not even for a simple life, but for a pleasant pastime in good company. Too much carving on the eaves. Too thin, decorative shutters - those that have not yet crumbled and decayed in the dirt to a state of semi-liquid chaff. Too wide double doors. Lots of stairs, on whose rotten steps not even a fly would lay its paw now, but in the past, you could walk up them to practically any part of the house. Windows, real ones, not stained-glass windows in lattice frames. In some places, there are even individual nicks of broken glass.
What was most surprising was that the house did not give Lena the impression of something dangerous or threatening. Perhaps, because it was too intact for a structure more than four hundred years old. Just an old house, abandoned by its owners, resisting the oppression of time as best it could.
Except that no one has ever survived a full night here - from dusk to dawn.
"Let's go," Santelli said as he ran his fingers along the blade of the axe.
Einar moved his shield from his back to his hand and slammed his sword against the broad umbo strap. Quietly the saber hissed as Charley drew it from its sheath.
The foreman took the first step toward the house.
John Carpenter's Vampires... Or something like that. That was the first thing that came to Elena's mind. And Santelli, indeed, was something subtly similar to James Woods of the ninety-eighth year, only bearded. He was the same thin, alert as a cocked crossbow, with a face that bore a grimace of anxious readiness. The foreman's clenched teeth seemed about to crack.
A gap between the flaps allowed them to stick their hand in and try to unlock the door from the inside. It seemed that only a thin chain could lock it from the inside. But Santelli acted for sure and, unlike the vampire hunter, did not cut the lock but simply kicked the door open with a mighty kick. The brigadier was not going to give his more than likely opponent inside a single extra chance.
Kicking the door open, Santeli stepped back, and Einar shielded them both and put out a gladius. Biso held a vial of green mist over his head, ready to hurl it into the dark abyss. Zilber, with his bow half drawn, peered through the second-story windows.
There was a tangible whiff of dampness and draught from inside as if the house had exhaled stale air. The breeze carried scraps of debris that looked like scraps of decayed paper outside. Silence... The noisy background noise of the swamp receded into the background, silenced. Consciousness simply cut off everything else. As one of Napoleon's marshals used to say, "Think of them as being on the moon." Everything that did not concern the house was now on the moon and beyond for Elena.
Santelli stepped onto the porch that had once been a balcony. The wood creaked, and the sound came out ringing, new. The brigadier held his axe at the ready. Einar crouched and raised his shield even higher, swinging his sword like a hornet's sting. With a fine "goose" step, the two warriors plunged into the deafening shadow that flooded the house from within. Behind them, after a brief pause and without command, followed Biso, who did not let go of the vial. The plump alchemist had picked himself up, and even though he wore a comical robe and an equally comical hat, he looked quite militant.
And he'd been down with the crew on common ground, thought the cure. The fat, funny-looking, overweight Gandalf had seen horrors she'd never imagined. And he was still alive. Could she?
"Come in," Santelli called.
One at a time, Charley and Zilbert were the last to go, their backs to the front, looking to see if anyone had snuck up behind them. The archer still had his arrow on a string. The arrow was short literally point-blank, but the point was yellow with oily streaks. The tip was poisoned.
"Stand and listen," the foreman said quietly.
It was dark inside. Lena belatedly thought that she should have had one eye shut outside. Then she would have seen much better. It smelled like old leaves and more paper. The distinctive smell of yellowed pages. The smell of Time itself.
Biso, without looking back, handed Helena the vial. She took it with both hands. Her fingers trembled a little; now she knew what was inside. The alchemist drew a long wire from under his robe, breaking off a piece of two palms or slightly longer by eye. He twisted it into a figure that looked like a horse with a tail. He lifted it on his palm and snapped the fingers of his free hand. Greenish flame immediately engulfed the wire beast, darted to the high ceiling with a long tongue, and immediately extinguished so that only a handful of weightless ash remained on the dirty palm of the alchemist. The next moment a draught scattered it as well. Biso licked his lips, grimaced, and then announced:
"Nothing. No magic beyond the usual."
This meant they could cut off at least a third of the possible opponents who were emitting tangible magical emanations one way or another. Which was certainly a good thing. On the other hand, there were still two-thirds of the list with plenty of creatures that didn't become any less dangerous because of their natural nature.
Santelli opened his mouth, bowed his head, and turned it sideways just like a dog strenuously tracking a hidden game. The brigadier seemed to perceive the world around him, with his whole body tense like a sensitive membrane.
"Shena, Hel, wait here. Maître, keep an eye on them. The rest of you follow me."
The battle group, led by the brigadier, moved forward. The boards under their boots creaked in every way. Not like wood, which should be rotting away by now. Shena shoved her ward to the side with her right shoulder, pressed against the cool wall. She froze, swaying slightly on her half-bent legs. The tip of the ahlspies, on the other hand, seemed to stiffen. Charley stood between Shena and the doorway with its bowed sash. He lowered his sword with seeming carelessness. The black braided cords on his sleeves looked like thin snakes. I wanted to ask - what were they for? The laces had too utilitarian and simple a look to seem decorative.
As is often the case, the house seemed much larger on the inside than on the outside. From here, from the vast corridor that transitioned to the reception room with access to three sides at once, Lena could not appreciate the layout in its entirety, but she immediately noticed two things.
First of all, the house - here's a fresh and original thought! - is abnormal. On the outside, its condition could somehow be attributed to the special materials and the miraculous preservative properties of the marsh miasms. Inside ... It seemed that the house had been left ten years ago at the latest. And it had been left. Inside reigned the desolation of the place, which quietly and dignified deteriorated naturally.
Secondly, the layout, the furnishings, and everything inside did not correlate at all with the way of life Elena was already accustomed to in the Gate. The house seemed to have been built and arranged on Earth in the seventeenth century, maybe later. Everything about it was different, different from what she'd seen in the Gate, even when she'd lived in a house of her own. The ceilings were too high, the windows too large, and the wooden panels on the walls definitely served for beauty rather than insulation. Remnants of carpets on the floor. Parquet instead of normal boards or plain stone sprinkled with straw. Exquisitely wrapped candlesticks, seemingly bronze, protruded from the walls. There were no torch-holders, though the height of the ceilings allowed them to be lit without fear of scorching the rafters. A yellow object in the corner looked like a ball, clearly decorative.
So that's how they lived before the Cataclysm... Maybe they live now, somewhere far beyond the mountains that ring the Wasteland.
Judging by the creaks and noises, the crew in the house had split up. Someone went to the second floor, the stairs crackling peculiarly as if someone was breaking bundles of thin splinters. And someone, on the contrary, tried to go down to the place where the first floor went underground, turning into a basement. This was reassuring - if Santelli decided to split up the group, it meant he no longer saw any immediate threat.
Her eyes finally got used to the semi-darkness, and Lena realized that the yellow, round thing, hidden in the deep shadows just behind the kicked-out door, was a human skull. Very neatly placed, clean, and similar in color and shape to an old "ivory" billiard ball. A simple skull... Yet something about it caught her attention. There was something strange and unnatural about the bone. Although, what in this house is natural?
Against her own will, the girl returned her gaze to the skull until, at last, she realized that the proportions were correct, but the bone structure itself... The side of her forehead and the right side looked as if they were covered in hard fleece, like the fur of a meowr, only more often and sharper in appearance. A multitude of bone needles grew out of the skull plates, precisely grown, making one with the base. Thousands of needles fused into a yellow, hard imitation of fur. Around the eye socket and on the cheekbone, the prickles lengthened, and flattened, forming tufts of long, flat warts as long as a fingernail.
It looked absolutely beyond disgusting. Lena couldn't explain why, but the skull literally exuded an abomination, worse than a gangrenous leg, worse than the feeling of rotten blood on her fingers.
The girl silently pointed to the dead head, and Shena only shook her head in displeasure with a clear message "don't get distracted!"
"No shit down there!" Zilber proclaimed rather loudly from behind the wall. "It's all flooded!"
It took about half a minute before Santelli finally responded:
"Go upstairs. It's quiet up here."
Inside, the mansion gave the impression of a frozen, unfinished renovation. The building had certainly not been ransacked or even robbed. There was a lot of furniture and small items like broken flowerpots and torn trellises, which seemed to have been used instead of mats and bedspreads. Apparently, the brigade's predecessors.
Lena could not see the details - the sun was setting, the light behind the empty windows was pouring in thick shades of gray, and the house was painted in the same gray tones. And she could not divide her attention equally among the different senses. Now the main thing was hearing, which caught the slightest creak, rustle, painfully responded to the quiet clinking of iron. But the impression of riches remained and even increased.
But there was no atrium in the house. The first, now underground floor, was completely flooded with water. Still, dead water stands in the stairwell. The wooden railings on the posts, in the form of intricately curved spirals, went straight into the greenish liquid, and no one dared even to come closer. There was no telling what was lurking below.
On the second floor, in the center of the building, there was a windowless library. It was lit - judging by its massive three-legged supports - by a combination of mirrors transmitting sunlight from the outer gallery. It was now dark and humming.
Zilber immediately made a stand for broken mirrors, and Lena noted to herself that if she could collect them and return with the loot, the trip would at least pay for itself, maybe even taking into account all the equipment. Even though they were fragments, the quality of the mirrors was outstanding, just like in their former life on Earth.
The library looked more like a reading room, too large even for such a respectable house. Tall shelves of pale yellow wood, covered with stingy carvings, alternated with long tables of darker polished material, one-and-a-half stories tall. The elongated six-legged tables seemed plastic, so monochrome and smooth did their surface appear. If it was wood, it had been treated in some unknown way.
Some of the bookshelves had been knocked over, the books scattered like dead bugs with their wings crumpled. Elena's greed trembled here, and she wanted to make a grand raid on the books immediately. Especially since the written language hadn't changed since the Cataclysm, and she had more or less learned how to read. Sheena noticed her ward's faltering step and nudged her back with the shaft of an ahlspise, not hard but palpable.
"Afterwards, we should check the folios," the brether said softly, echoing the cure's thoughts. "There may be wonderful treasures here."
Which, so far, no one has taken out of here, thought Elena but remained silent.
The parquet on the second floor was special, made of palm-sized rectangles in black and green squares, polished and coated with a glassy film of perfect transparency. Not stone, but clearly not ordinary wood either. Even the lightest step on the two-colored glass produced a melodic clang. Charleigh stomped, clinked the edge of his sword against the black square, and decided approvingly:
"There's no way to approach us unnoticed. It's like the "singing floors" in the houses of the Bonoms."
In the center of the reading room, a wide twisted staircase spiraled up to the top, to the top floor. It seemed to grow up from the floor thanks to steps of the same color and material. Compared to all the other stairs in the house, this one was much narrower, barely big enough for two people, and the railings were very simple, with no carvings or scrolls, plain white metal, like aluminum.
The library seemed to be a place where a lot of people gathered regularly (or at least that was a possibility). And upstairs, there was clearly something very private, a room that was off-limits to outsiders.
"This way," Biso called from above. The alchemist's voice trembled with impatience.
"You first," said Shena. Her eyes sparkled in the half-darkness of the reading room like the shards of a magic mirror. Lena could feel the shivers of impatient excitement running through her body. Whatever the brigade, led by Santelli, was looking for was very close, only a few steps away. The brether was the only one who remained completely unperturbed, at least outwardly.
One by one, they went up. The steps rattled quietly beneath their feet.
The upper hall really looked like the office of a stargazer - twelve-cornered, with a transparent roof in the form of a polyhedral pyramid on radial pylons. Lena noticed at once that all the glass was intact, not a single break in it.
And it wasn't a stargazer who lived here. Under the glass prism, over which time and nature had no control, was the artist's studio.
"That is," said the foreman quietly. "We found it."
* * *