Chapter 348 - 339 — The Keep Beneath the Mountain II
Maeve walked forward eleven metres and stopped and looked at everything.
"This is a fort."
"It’s a fort," Ronan agreed.
She pointed up. Ten metres above the corridor floor, on both sides, there were openings in the wall — square, regular, spaced — and behind each one a ledge, and behind that darkness.
"Firing galleries. Both walls, the whole way down. And look at the doors."
The nearest side chamber had a door frame you could have driven a car through, with the hinge pintles still in the stone, four of them, each one the thickness of James’s forearm.
"They had a garrison in here," said Maeve. "A big one. You don’t cut galleries down both sides of a six-metre corridor for forty men."
`[FLOOR 35]`
`[FLOOR CLASSIFICATION: STANDARD]`
`[MISSION TYPE: DUNGEON EXPLORATION]`
`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: REACH THE LOWER KEEP]`
Far down the corridor, past a junction James could just make out, there was a break in the floor line and a rail, and the shape of steps going down.
"Well," said Finn. "At least we can see it."
---
James knelt and put his palm on the flags.
`[UNEARTH ACTIVATED]`
Fossor came up through the joint between two flagstones, which took it about four seconds longer than usual and made a noise like a shovel in gravel, and James understood the problem immediately.
There was maybe sixty centimetres of rubble fill under the flags. Under that was mountain.
He walked it out to the left, under the corridor floor, and it went — badly, slowly, dragging, but it went. He walked it at the base of the nearest pillar and it stopped dead.
"It’s got the floors and nothing else," he said. "Anywhere they laid flags on fill, it can move. Walls, pillars, anything cut into the rock — it’s not going through it. And it’s slow in there."
"So no scouting round corners," said Finn.
"It can do straight lines under floors I can already see. That’s the whole of it."
"Grand. So we do it the old way."
They did it the old way, which was Cillian checking every gallery opening before anybody walked under it, Ronan at the front, Finn on his shoulder, Maeve reading the architecture, and James walking in the middle with absolutely nothing in his hands because there was not one corpse on that floor yet.
---
The first encounter was at the junction, four hundred metres in, and the enemies were already in position when Cillian saw them.
"Front. *Front* — three big ones across the mouth, and there’s—" He tilted his head. "There’s things in the galleries. Left side. Two, three, four."
The three in the corridor did not come forward.
They were two and a half metres tall and built like the pillars — thick through the chest and thicker through the shoulders, grey-skinned, with slabs of old riveted plate strapped across the front of them and nothing on the back. Each one had a pair of horns coming forward and down off the temples, worn blunt at the tips, and carried a weapon that was not really a weapon: a length of shaped iron with a head on it, the sort of thing a person makes when a person has a forge and no craftsman.
They stood across the junction shoulder to shoulder and filled it.
`[HORNED SENTINEL]`
`[LEVEL: 52]`
`[HP: 9,800 / 9,800]`
And ten metres up, in the gallery openings on the left-hand wall, four thinner things leaned out with something long in their hands.
`[SPINE CASTER]`
`[LEVEL: 50]`
`[HP: 5,600 / 5,600]`
The first spine came down before anybody had finished reading the panel.
---
It was over in about four minutes and none of it was complicated, which was exactly the point.
Ronan got the shield up and took the front rank and did not try to go through them, because nothing that stands shoulder to shoulder in a corridor mouth wants you to go through it.
Finn went around the right-hand end of the line, which meant one Sentinel had to turn, which meant the line was not a line anymore.
Cillian ignored the Sentinels entirely. He put white into the gallery openings one at a time — four openings, four separate angles, and the fourth Caster pulled back out of sight before he got it, and he waited eleven seconds and got it when it leaned out again.
`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]` ×4
Maeve moved everybody once, three metres to the right, which put the pillar between Ronan and the last gallery.
And James got three bodies dropping from the galleries about ninety seconds in and stopped being a man standing in a corridor.
`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]` ×2
`[MANA: 2,980 / 3,100]`
`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +60]`
`[MANA: 3,040 / 3,100]`
`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×3`
`[MANA: 2,800 / 3,100]`
He put two skeletons into the corridor mouth beside Ronan, which meant three of them blocking a junction instead of one, and sent the third down the left-hand side passage to stand at the bottom of the gallery stair so nothing came down it.
`[HORNED SENTINELS SLAIN ×3]`
`[SPINE CASTERS SLAIN ×4]`
`[EXP GAINED: 2,820]`
`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +60]`
`[MANA: 2,860 / 3,100]`
---
Then they got to the stairway and it did not go anywhere.
Forty metres past the junction the corridor floor stopped and there was a stairhead with a stone rail, going down into the dark — and eleven steps down, the whole of it was gone.
Not blocked. *Gone.* Part of the vault above the stair had come in at some point and taken the stairwell with it, and what was underneath was a slope of masonry and rubble going down at forty degrees into a space Cillian’s light could not find the bottom of.
Finn stood on the eleventh step and looked at it.
"Can we go down that?"
"You could go down it," said Maeve. "You’d not come back up it, and if it moves under you it’s a hundred tonnes of dressed stone with you in the middle."
"So no."
"So no."
James walked Fossor down under the corridor floor to the stairhead and lost it in fill that stopped being fill.
`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: REACH THE LOWER KEEP]`
The panel did not care. It said the same thing it had said at the landing, and it did not say how, and there was no arrow anywhere in James’s vision pointing at anything.
"Right," he said. "We look."
---
They spent forty minutes on the side chambers and it was the least dramatic and most useful part of the floor.
The first one had been a barracks. Two hundred stone bed platforms in rows, in eight blocks, with a channel cut down the middle of the floor for drainage and iron rings in the walls at the head of every platform.
The second was a store. Shelving cut into the rock on three walls, floor to roof, completely empty, with the remains of wooden racking rotted into powder on the floor.
The third had been a kitchen, and had two ovens in it the size of cars, and a flue going up into the ceiling that Cillian put his head into and got dust in his eyes for.
The fourth was where Maeve found the thing that mattered.
It was a long narrow room off the western side of the corridor, and it had nothing in it at all except a row of five square openings in the floor with stone lips around them, and a hoist frame over the middle one with the wheel still on it.
"Supply shafts," she said. "They lifted things up. Which means there’s something down there to lift things up *from*."
She dropped a coin into the nearest one and they listened to it hit twice.
"Too far," said Ronan.
"Too far and too narrow. But if there’s a hoist room down there, there’s a floor down there, and if there’s a floor down there it connects to something." She was already walking. "That’s south-west. Everything we’ve searched is north and east. Come on."
---
It took another twenty minutes of corridors and two more skirmishes, which cost James two skeletons and gained him three, and then the corridor they were following opened onto a gallery.
They came out about twelve metres above the floor of an interior hall, on a stone balcony with a rail along it, and the space in front of them was the biggest thing in the fortress.
It was sixty metres by forty and the roof was thirty up. Eight pillars, four a side, each one wider than the corridor they had walked in by. The floor below was flagged and had a raised stone platform at the far end with steps up to it.
And at the far right-hand corner of that hall, past the platform, a wide stairway went down into the rock behind an arch, and it was intact, and it was lit by nothing at all.
"There," said Finn.
"There," said Maeve.
There was something standing in front of it.