The stairs seemed endless as we circled the shaft moving upwards. They had been carved out of the side of the rock walls and spiraled around the perimeter of the area. There was no guard rail and soon we were fairly high above the stone floor below. We walked single file on the inside of the steps closest to the wall because even with my enhanced rate of healing I knew there was no way I would survive if I fell from this height.
Soon, the light I was producing couldn’t reach the floor below us, nor could it penetrate far enough above us to reveal our ultimate destination. In places, small rocks had flaked off the walls so we had to watch our steps because the footing was treacherous, at least at times. Climbing stairs while also concentrating on producing light was very tiring. After only fifteen minutes or so, I had to call for a rest break. Aleyda tossed a handful of the loose stone into the shaft and it took a couple of seconds before we heard the faint tinkling of impact far below.
“I hope we don’t encounter anything hostile on these stairs,” she said. “This would not be a favorable place to fight.”
“You have that right,” Bowen replied. “It’s a long way down.”
“I agree,” I said. “But I feel like were committed now. Someone obviously carved this out with a tremendous amount of effort. I hope that there is a payoff at the top.”
After I had rested sufficiently, we continued moving upward. I thought I was in pretty good shape but after awhile my legs burned with the exertion. Just as I was getting ready to call for another rest break, I noticed a grayness in the dark above us.
“Is that the ceiling?” I said. “I can’t quite make it out.”
Bowen and Aleyda peered upwards, straining their eyes.
“I think it might be,” Bowen allowed.
“Let’s push onwards a little more,” I said, continuing my weary trudge up the stairs.
As we ascended, the grayness resolved into a stone ceiling. As we got closer, we could see that the stairs ended at another tunnel that entered from the side of the wall. Finally reaching it without incident, we entered. After only a few feet, there was another flight of stairs. Thankfully, the heavily reinforced corridor had been dug directly through the rock so there was no risk of falling off the side. This flight of stairs was fairly short, no more than a couple of hundred steps. We came to the entrance to a room and entered.
I have not previously described the top of the mountain that was this island. It was incredibly steep, almost sheer. Very little grew on it as the slope was too extreme to hold any topsoil. I doubt that it had ever been summited, unless someone had packed some fairly extensive climbing gear.
When we stepped into the chamber, I realized that we were at the top of that mountain. We weren’t standing outside on the top of it, we were in a chamber that had been excavated from the surrounding rock. The place was small, perhaps twenty feet wide. A series of small, narrow windows had been cut into the size of the mountain, far too small to be obvious to the naked eye from far below. I wandered around peering out the windows. The fresh air, after so many days underground, invigorated me. I quickly realized that the way the windows were oriented, every side of the island was visible.
There were a few chairs in the room. The center was dominated by a small table with a map of the island carved from stone. Whoever had carved it had some skill because it was rendered with painstaking detail. I wondered how much had changed since the map was made. Obviously, there was no town on the map. Also near the center of the room was a large object covered by a leather tarp. Aleyda was fingering the tarp.
“What do you suppose this is?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “But we will never know until you get the covering off.”
She carefully lifted the cover off of the object. As the tarp started sliding upwards, I initially noted that whatever the thing was was mounted on a wooden tripod. As the tarp continued to move upward, I saw the familiar form of a brass telescope revealed.
“Oh, it’s a telescope,” I said.
“A what?” Aleyda asked.
“You hadn’t reached the technological level in your world to be able to produce them yet because grinding the lenses takes some real skill, but they magnify distant objects to make them appear to be closer.”
“How’s it work?” she asked, trying to look down through it from the bigger lens on the end.
“Here, help me move it and I will show you,” I replied.
We carefully picked it up. The brass body made it fairly heavy. We move it over to one of the windows.
“The big end goes towards whatever you are observing and you look in the smaller end,” I explained.
I stepped forward and peered through the telescope only to see nothing but a hazy film.
“The lenses are dirty. We will need to clean them.”
I carefully sprinkled water on the lenses and then realized that most of my clothing was fairly coarse. Finally, I settled on a woolen stocking and carefully wiped the moisture and accompanying grime from the lenses. Of course, the lanolin left over in the wool just made a smeary mess.
“Well, that didn’t work the way I intended,” I said. Then I had to repeat the whole process, this time using the corner of my shirt to try to clean things up. When I looked through the telescope, there was a little leftover residue from my first attempt at cleaning it and I realized that whoever had made it hadn’t been able to get the lenses ground exactly right. The resultant image was smeary and a little uneven but the thing worked, at least on a basic level. I quickly oriented myself to the cardinal directions and then we moved the telescope until it was facing the east side of the island. Sweeping it around, I was able to observe the harbor far below us. The ships were fairly easy to make out but the thing wasn’t powerful enough to focus on smaller details, like individuals.
“Here, take a look,” I told Aleyda.
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She looked through the eyepiece and immediately stumbled backwards.
“Is this some sort of magic?” she asked.
“No, it’s science. I’m no expert and don’t know exactly how it works, but I think the lens in the eyepiece controls the magnification level. It’s a technology that I haven’t seen in this world yet. Bowen, I think you might have been right all along. Someone new to this world obviously knew how to make one, and threw this one together. In my world, they are often used to study celestial objects.”
“Say that again,” Bowen said.
“Say what again?” I asked.
“The part about me being right all along.”
“You can see that this one is not particularly well made,” I said. “The magnification is uneven in spots, and the brass tube itself is fairly crude, but being able to make anything at all like this on the island is quite impressive to me.”
“So what was this, some sort of guard post?” Bowen asked.
“That’s what it looks like to me. Maybe not guards but an observation post. You could certainly spot an invading fleet well before it got here. Working up to this level of technical sophistication, building all the necessary tools and industry, it probably took decades.”
While Aleyda and Bowen moved the telescope from one side of the room to the other, observing whatever there was to be seen, I walked over and took a look at the map. The island itself was pictured but so was a small portion of the surrounding ocean. The locations of reefs and underwater obstacles were depicted, although due to the passage of time those observations were likely significantly out of date. I quickly located the main entrance to the complex and tracing the path down to the ocean I noted what appeared to be a shipyard of some sort.
“Let’s assume that the five-fingers, the ones who eventually invaded, did build this complex,” I said. “It had to take hundreds of people a remarkable amount of time to carve all this out of the jungle. Somewhere, they must have found a source of ore to mine unless they raided for it. The amount of effort involved in assembling this settlement is breathtaking to me. Why would they leave it, though. What provided the impetus to invade.”
“Maybe their population had grown to the point that food started becoming an issue,” Bowen said. “Seas can become fished out and prey animals hunted to virtual extinction. If this place was fully occupied, it could have housed several thousand people. From the descriptions of the invasion you mentioned, the invading force was several thousand people. Maybe they were bursting at the seams and starving. That would be enough to force them to act, especially if new people kept arriving on the island from other worlds. This island is not that large. Sure, the oceans are vast but traveling further and further from home to try to secure food had to be fraught with peril.”
“Well, they had the technological innovation of dozens if not hundreds of worlds to draw from,” I replied. “You would think they could have cleared out the predators and started farming or something.”
“On what land?” Bowen replied. “Although the native plants here are fairly lush, the ground doesn’t look all that fertile. Where would they get the seeds to start crops? Where would they grow the crops? How would they have protected the farmers? I assume that humans aren’t the only things that pop in here from other worlds. All these monsters had to come from somewhere.”
“Why do you suppose they didn’t try trade to begin with?” I asked.
“Maybe they did. But this isn’t the only place five-fingers enter this world from what you have read. Maybe, instead of trading with them they tried to enslave them. That would make me want to fight.”
“Why would they have left this telescope here?” Aleyda said. “They seemed to have taken almost everything else of value.”
“It’s heavy and it is fragile and it is a long way down those stairs,” I said. “Perhaps they didn’t think it would survive the trip. Or maybe they left some of their number here to have a place to retreat to if things didn’t go as planned. Perhaps this was a prototype and they ended up making better.”
“If they left people here, where are they?” Aleyda asked.
“Something Segerick said when we were talking was quite interesting,” I replied. “He told me that when new people arrived, they often brought sickness with them. That happened in my world as well when populations would meet for the first time. If the pathogens that cause illness came from different worlds, the people exposed to those illnesses from other worlds likely didn’t have any immunity to the sickness. If the wrong illness was introduced by a new arrival, the resulting sickness could have quickly wiped out the population, at least to the point that continuing to survive was impossible. I think when we introduce new people to our community we need to quarantine them for a period of time to ensure they don’t make the rest of us sick.”
“What’s a pathogen?” Aleyda asked.
“Tiny things that are too small to see that can make you sick,” I replied. “You can use a technology called a microscope which is somewhat similar to a telescope to see them. Well, some of them at least.”
“That makes sense,” Bowen said. “On our trip to the continent, when we were jammed together in close quarters in the hold of the ship, we lost people all the time to illness. But your illness theory doesn’t explain why there are no other artifacts to be found in this complex. If they left anyone behind, why do we not see evidence of their existence?”
“That’s a good question,” I responded. “Maybe when times got tough they fled to the surface of the island. Maybe some ships were left behind and they set sail for the continent. As we haven’t found any records, I guess we will never know. What I do know, however, is that we need to return to Segerick’s camp and get people moved into this place. Here, they have an actual chance of security, of not living like beasts in a cave. And the sooner we get them established here, the better. Are you two ready to head back?”
“I am,” said Aleyda. “Are we going back through the tunnels or do you want to try the outside?”
“As much as I would dearly love to travel outside, the cavern route seems safer,” I replied.
“I agree,” Bowen said. “If we can manage to find our way back. It was a good idea to mark our trail.”
“Let’s go, then,” I said. “I think we have seen whatever there is to see here.”
We all got back up and started making our way back down the stairs. The way down was only slightly less unpleasant than the climb up. We quickly made our way out of the complex into the entrance tunnel. Then, we started the long slog back through the mountain.
Our trail markers proved to be fairly effective. We took a wrong turn or two but quickly realized our error and made steady progress back towards Segerick’s cave. On a couple of occasions, we encountered more of the grubs. Both times, we were able to defeat them without further injury.
Finally, after another trip through the swamp of bat shit, we made our way to the barrier blocking access to the cave. I had to call out numerous times before I was able to get anyone’s attention but finally someone heard me. Soon, I heard Segerick’s voice on the other side of the barricade.
“Is that you, James?” he asked.
“Were you expecting someone else?” I replied. “Yes, it’s me. There are a lot of passages and caverns under this mountain and we have barely scratched the surface exploring them.”
“Did you find anything interesting,” he asked as I heard the sounds of the barricade being slowly disassembled from the other side.
“We have great news for you,” I said. “We found you a new place to live, one that appears to be much more comfortable. But I am not going to be able to tell you about it until we can get through and scrub all of this bat crap off. I swear I can almost taste it.”
“Bat crap?” he asked.
“Don’t worry, Segerick,” I said. “On our way to your new home you will get the chance to experience it firsthand.”