Chapter 307 -300:Sealing the way
Elarion, the north workshop yard, before dawn
Ironbreaker came out of the council hall and walked down through the steep, winding lanes to the yard. The pre-dawn frost hung thick in the air, turning every lantern flame into a blurry yellow ball. He stood at the guard post, his coat buttoned to his chin, until the sentry inside noticed the dark silhouette against the glass.
"Master Ironbreaker."
Ironbreaker spoke handing the sentry a list"Wake these six men up for me and ask them to arrive as soon as possible."
The sentry blinked back yawning. "Now, sir? It’s still dark."
"Now."
Soon the men came up, pulling heavy woolen coats over unlaced boots, their breath billowing white in the courtyard light.
Ironbreaker looked at them and said "Good everyone present"
"Now listen to me clearly you are building a door," Ironbreaker said, not waiting for them to gather around. "Use Adamantine Coldsteel. Seven inches thick, cast in a single leaf. It will hang in a gateway twelve feet by nine, and the seats get cut fresh — the old ones are still in the rock and I want ours above it.You will also fit a custom alpha-numeric lock, sixteen characters. One wrong entry and the alarm sounds, and it does not stop until somebody with the right code comes down and fills it."
"One wrong entry?" Torvald asked, rubbing soot-stained hands together against the chill. "Master, a man’s cold fingers will slip on a bad night."
"Then let it be,at most the watch gets woken and is annoyed about it. That is the whole of what happens." Ironbreaker stood rigid, an unyielding block of shadow against the furnace vents. "Better it sounds the alarm false then be quiet when we need it."
"And where is this gateway?"
"Below is,the fifth level."
The wind whipped through the yard, rattling an iron latch against a shed wall. Nobody spoke.
"There is nothing below the fifth level, sir" the elder Halder said quietly.
"There is."
Kellen, the youngest of the group, shifted his weight, looking down at his boots. "Sir. What is it for?"
Ironbreaker looked at him,narrowing his eyes "It is the duke’s order. That is as much as you need."
Nobody asked again.
"Draw whatever you want out of the stores and you need not ask permission for any of it. If a storeman argues, send him to me." He turned toward the dark spire of the main foundry. "Start now. Use whatever it takes,i want to see the door as soon as possible."
They immediately moved to the furnaces casting the leaf in the north foundry, pouring white-hot alloy into a sand mold reinforced with iron straps. The heat off the pit was blinding, drying the sweat on their skin as fast as it broke, keeping the winter chill twenty feet back from the doors.
Casting it took them most of the day and the day after too.
Soon torvald elbowed bosk and asked
"Seven inches. In Coldsteel. Has anybody ever cast seven inches of Coldsteel?"
"He has bosk spoke pointing to kellen."
"When?"
"Ask him."
"Well let it be if you don’t wish to tell."
Bosk took two apprentices and a stone-lantern down to cut the seats.while Halder spent four hours arguing over the hinge pins beside the cooling pit, cursing each other’s ancestry from midday until dark, and then settled on what Ironbreaker had drawn on his slate in the first place.
They took it down the braces following night,laying if flat on a low, iron-wheeled trolley, eleven men leaning back against the ropes to keep three tons of dead metal from running away due to momentum.
Soon they reached the place and started carrying the door down the main stair , past the bright lanterns of the first gate, then the second, through the colossal pillared hall of the third level where their lamps couldn’t reach the dark ceiling above.
They stopped talking somewhere around the fourth.
The ancient city pressed in on them from both sides, cold and vast. Streets branched off into pitch darkness, lined with door frames cut cleanly into the living rock at the height of ordinary people. They bypassed a wide plaza with the stumps of carved columns standing like broken teeth, a dry stone channel running down the center where water had flowed thousands of years ago.
Kellen kept his hand on a haul-rope, his knuckles white. "Somebody lived here."
"Yes."
"How many?"
"Nobody knows." Ironbreaker laid a palm flat on the cool metal of the trolley. "Keep it off the edge."
The sixth gate was cut square into the grey basalt like material.
Soon bosk powered used his drill to cut the seatings,chiseling rhythmically against the stone. While Halder hung the leaf on the pins; it took four attempts, two jacks, and a great deal of low, bitter swearing before the hinges took the weight. When it finally seated, the massive door swung on its bearings as smooth as oil, stopping dead the instant it reached locks.
Torvald fitted the brass alphanumeric lock into its recessed housing. Sixteen characters,no second key, no bypass, no override.
Gandalf came down the stairs near midnight, his iconic beard always just an inch from touching the floor. He carried no tools, only a small horn dish of powdered silver and salt.
Then he came to the door and laid the detection array into the frame rather than the door leaf itself, tracing the grooves with a fine needle. "Alright boys Magic is set,The first time anything into a door breaks the first time the door swings," he muttered into his gray beard. "Magic set into stone stays where you put it will alarm everyone."
He then worked methodically, laying a second ring into the rock on either side of the arch, and a third further up the passage toward the fifth level stair.
Ironbreaker watched from the shadow of the door frame. "Three lots."
"The frame tells you the door has been touched. The rock tells you something is standing in front of it. The passage tells you something is coming down toward it." Gandalf straightened up slowly, his old back creaking. "It also tells you if something is coming up."
"Both directions."
"Both directions."
Then they test ran the code eleven times, the iron tumblers clicking like clockwork, and each of the eleven times the heavy door swung open without a sound.
Then Ironbreaker stepped up to the panel, rested his thick thumb on the keys, and deliberately put a wrong character in at the fourteenth position.
The alarm erupted — not a bell, but a harsh, grating mechanical shriek embedded in the frame, echoing through the living rock and vibrating down the stone passage above. It hammered against their eardrums, relentless and ear-splitting, until Torvald lunged forward, keyed the full sixteen-character code right and cut the power.
Every man in the corridor had his hands clamped over his ears, breathing heavily in the sudden, ringing silence.
"Good good good this works," Ironbreaker grunted, lowering his hands.
Malen came down before first light with eight Commandos. They wore unpolished grey coats and carried short-barreled carbines, their faces set in the dull, disciplined masks of men who follows orders to the point.
Malen walked the arch, inspected the fresh mortar where the hinges met the basalt, and pressed his palm flat against the cold face of the Coldsteel leaf.
"Will it hold?"
"Seven inches of solid Coldsteel, seats sunk three feet into living rock, pins as good as anything I have ever forged." Ironbreaker rested his hand on the frame beside him. "If something comes through it, it will take time breaking it, and you will know a long time before it finishes."
"That will do the work." Malen turned back to face his squad. "Sixth gate. Permanent watch. Eight men on duty at all times — four awake at the barrier, four resting in the niche,any questions."
"How long a posting, sir?" a corporal asked.
"One month. Then you rotate out to the surface and another squad comes down. You do not return to this post, and you do not discuss what you hear down here with the men who replace you either." Malen looked each of them in the eye. "Now listen the instructions clearly for one last time you do not open that door. You do not touch the panel. If the alarm sounds, you send a runner up and you hold this passage."
"And if something comes through it, sir?"
"Then as I said you send a warning up," Malen said softly, his voice carrying down the dark, ancient street behind them, "and you make certain that whatever is on the other side of that door never gets past this stair unless and until all of you are dead."
"Any other questions?"Maled asked moving his head to one again scan all the commandos
"What if someone approaches us sir?"
"Follow the standard procedure ask him for the authorisation"
"And after it?"
"Put a bullet through him if he refuses no second question"