Theodora's Ring

Through the door the tide had let them open was a chamber someone had lived in: a stone bed frame with the mattress long rotted away, a stone desk whose surface had been preserved by careful wards, an ink pot and a quill, a wooden chair, bookshelves. And a letter.

M — I will not be coming. I cannot leave the work, and I cannot leave the cave, and I have begun to suspect that I cannot leave the things that have started to attend me here. I do not know if you ever existed in the way I remember you, or if I have made you into the shape of a person I needed when I needed her. Either way, I am sorry. Say that I died doing what I came here to do. T.

Randy went through the shelves and came away with a stack of heavy reference texts on the weave, the sort of thing that would be worth real money to the right scholar, and handed them to Worm to carry. In a small wooden box somebody found a silver locket holding a pressed flower, which crumbled the moment it was opened. Flint walked the walls and floor and was satisfied there were only the two doors. Somewhere behind them, far off, they heard bats.

The next chamber was the largest they had seen. Black stone workbenches under corroded instruments, stone pedestals at varying heights, and at the centre of the room a pedestal raised three feet off the floor with a ring of dark metal on it, about the width of a dinner plate, etched with concentric channels. Aelion's lens began to hum, loudly enough that everyone in the room could hear it, and louder the closer he carried it to that pedestal. The plate matched the clay apprentice-grade disc from the lab. Whatever the lens had been pulling him toward for the last several rooms, this was it.

There were two other doors: one off to the left, and one on the same wall they had entered by — thick brass, no handles of any kind. Flint studied that one long and hard, and deciphered the markings cut into it.

Conduit heart. Remove the throttle and proceed in. Be wary of the tide.

Randy, who is not a magical man, worked out the rest by elimination: the most magical thing in the room was almost certainly the throttle, and the throttle was almost certainly the plate on the pedestal. Which was the thing Theodora's last entry had begged whoever found it not to move.

Then Worm, feeling along the back wall for trapdoors, pressed on a stone and opened a doorway onto a shaft four feet across with good iron rungs climbing up into the dark — and a faint seam of daylight far above. Randy went up it, a minute and a half of climbing in the black, and shoved. Grass and soil that had grown over the trapdoor gave way and daylight came down the shaft. He kissed the dirt and got some in his teeth, then climbed back down. They had a way out.

The room off to the left was a smaller near-twin of the workshop, with the same benches and instruments and its own central pedestal — this one holding a large ring of dark metal scored with concentric circles, far too big for a finger. Aelion's lens got nothing at all from it. Another prototype, then, and one worth something to a collector. Flint turned up two intact archaic instruments among the shelves while Randy filled his hands with common junk.

With time still in hand, they went back — a careful ten minutes of backtracking through winding corridors — to the room with the column, meaning to open the door with the bestial scratches on it. There they found the plaque they had missed the first time.

The basin admits seawater at flood. The central column carries float triggers calibrated to the tidal cycle. At full rise the column actuates the inner doors automatically. If you are pressed for time, the triggers can be released manually from the column itself: climb to the appropriate band and depress the float. The mechanism is robust, but not infinitely so. I am pleased with this room. It is the only piece of the work that does not require the weave to function.

Randy went up the column again and this time the mechanism fought him. He failed once, and again, and while he was up there the rest of them shouted across the hall to ask which way to go. He told them left, and they went. Then the lock gave — and the arm that swung open was the scratched door, while the one his companions had just walked through came down with a heavy thud behind them.

The corridor they were now in descended steeply. The brass channels did not run this far, and the hum of them fell away; within twenty paces they were in complete darkness, and the silence had been replaced by slow, wet breathing. Biz went ahead quietly and found what they had been wondering about all day — the bodies. Piles and piles of bones, and hunched against the far wall a slumped figure, skin drawn tight over it, decaying, crouched over something on its own finger, turning it. Four more corpses lay prone beside it.

Randy, alone in the column room with the water at his thighs, climbed back up and worked the mechanism a third time. The door his friends had gone through opened again. He came down and joined them, and then went straight at the thing.

It lasted about twelve seconds. The creature wheezed like a man with pneumonia. It got its hands on Randy and drew the life out of him — not much, but enough that he could feel what he had lost. Worm, who tried to pet it, was bitten for his trouble. Flint tangled the floor and the four corpses got up anyway and came at them, and Randy and Worm took hits from three of them. Then Aelion put a widened cone of fire through the middle of it. The creature burned down, and the corpses it had been holding up fell and withered with nothing left to sustain them.

In the ash they found a ring bearing the same concentric rings they had seen throughout the caves — a human-sized one this time. Aelion put it on. Nothing happened.

Biz, going over what was left, reached a conclusion he was fairly sure of. That thing had been draining the life out of everyone who came into these caves, and living off them; anyone who got past the tide and the fish and the brass corridor met their end here instead. And it had, once, been Theodora. He then told the others something else entirely — and Flint, watching him do it, knew he was lying. There had never been a Maladora down here. There had only ever been the one.

Back in the brass hallway, Biz heard voices somewhere down the corridor to the left and went alone to look. The others pressed straight on.

They came into a long room, forty feet by twenty, with three tiers of stone shelving down both walls holding some thirty glass tanks. Most were shattered and their contents long rotted; a few were intact, the fluid inside clouded, with the faint shadows of specimens suspended in them. From the door at the far end came a rhythmic tapping. They were two hours in and the water was climbing, so they went through without stopping to look.

The chamber beyond was a twenty-five-foot box holding two tanks eight feet tall and six across. The left one was half drained and cracked, and the thing inside it was curled up, tapping on the glass. The right one was intact, with an identical creature in it. The moment they entered, the one in the cracked tank locked eyes with them, went from tapping to hammering, and came through the glass in a rush of water.

It was a giant centipede, and it had been folded up small in that fluid. It hooked two arms into Worm's shoulders and put a poison in him that left him unable to move. Randy cut into it, Flint sickened it, Aelion missed, and Flint finished it with a beam of light that sent it screeching and shrivelling into the rising tide. Worm shook the poison off. On a shelf beside the tanks they found a single potion of water breathing — a day late for the argument they had had about it in the shop.

Meanwhile Biz had crept up the sloping supply corridor with the water at his waist and seen, at the top of it, five or six figures. He knew them. They were the crew from the Rusted Mermaid.

Then Worm began wading off on his own toward them, and Biz had to physically hold him back.

Sloshing came from both directions at once. They went left, the corridor wound right, and they came out into the room with the column — and so did the others: five of them, and the small boy riding on the shoulders of the big one.

"Well, well. Worm. Good to see you again." Greedy Ghent did the talking. He and Moxie had got worried after the confrontation the night before, he said, heard the party was headed into the Harrows, and thought they would come and give them some backup. Then he made the actual offer. Worm should come back into the family. They had not known he was alive; had they known, they would have welcomed him. He had grown into himself, plainly, and become quite capable. But they were doing important work now, and there was no room in it for his friends. A woman in a robe pushed her hood back and said, evenly, "Worm. Come on. Quickly now. We don't have much time."

They were not relic hunters any more, Ghent said. They had a higher calling. They were here to recover the artifact, and it was imperative it did not fall into the wrong hands. Isn't this what you wanted? You spent so long looking for us.

Then the tide came up and took the decision out of everyone's hands. The float levers tripped. The brass doors swung shut on the room the crew had come from and on the scratch-marked hallway behind the party, sealing them all in together — and the basin under the column began to drain as the third arm lifted, opening the path ahead with water pouring through it.

"Just like we had intel on. That door's opened up. A few rooms down there's the artifact we came to retrieve. We can all proceed forward. I don't see a need for violence — but be clear that we are here to recover that artifact and make our way out of here." Biz tried to talk his way around it and was not believed for a second. "The kid stays with us. He's safest with us. And we have to recover that artifact. You have no idea what you're up against."

They were still standing in that room, facing each other across the draining basin, when the moment broke.