Tumbling Chambers

“So there’s always red sand around an entrance to the Steel Perilous?”

“Oh yes,” Dart said, waving a hand at the bizarre red dunes that extended to the distant horizon. “I suppose there might be some places where that’s not the case. However, not counting this one, there are four ways to descend into the peril within a week’s travel of Harbek and they are all in the middle of the red deserts.”

Trick took the scarf Dart offered him and wrapped it around his face. It wasn’t quite as easy to breathe through as a dust mask like you’d use in a woodworking shop but it kept the worst of the red grit at bay. All things told Trick was glad to have it. He hadn’t enjoyed his previous trip through the red sand.

“You’ll want to cover your hair, too,” Bertran said, turning sideways and demonstrating how to do it using his own scarf. “Your hair may be red but it will still stand out against the red sand.”

There was no doubting that. Trick’s hair was a bright Irish red and the sand was a much duller, rusty color which the scarf was dyed to match fairly closely. He pointed at his poncho, which was dark enough to stand out, too. “What about this?”

“Too dim to attract attention,” Dart said. “The time the ninth sphere sees fit to come all this way to investigate something that dark is the moment we’re all doomed anyway.”

He hesitated in the process of tying his scarf down, trying to figure out why that nagged at him. Trick felt like the warden had just handed him the last piece to a puzzle. Problem was, the seventh sphere had been nothing but puzzles for the last week and he was losing track of what pieces went where. He’d been very focused on lumi for the past few days but the bright and dim elements played into that, too. Didn’t they?

“Ready?” Dart asked, shattering his train of thought.

Trick gave his scarf a final tug to settle it into place and said, “Whenever you are.”

The trek through the sands was the trickiest part of the journey, mostly because, color aside, the sands were much like a desert on Earth. They didn’t have landmarks to navigate by. Worse, although Trick had a sextant with him, he hadn’t had any way to orient himself by the stars because none of the star charts in the book he’d brought matched the night skies of Caspar. So he hadn’t been able to figure out a precise route back.

To make up for that the expedition had brought a number of bright green pennants to serve as waypoints. Unfortunately, while that would be useful on the return trip, that didn’t help them get back to the doorway that Trick had used to exit the hexagon complex in the first place. He spent a few minutes staring at the sky and studying the landscape. Eventually he found a copse of bushes he thought he recognized and they planted a pennant there as a starting point then made their way into the desert.

After some four or five hours of searching they eventually found it.

“How long did this take you the first time?” Bertran asked.

“Fifteen minutes, give or take,” Trick said, running his hand over the doorway until he found the part in the center that lit up when his guide ring got close to it. He waved the door open then stepped back. It remained tucked into the wall for about twenty seconds before sliding closed again.

“Is there a reason you’re not going in?” Warden Dart asked.

“I want to see if you guys can open the door with your channel gloves or not,” Trick said. “If not, you should all get new ones once we’re inside.”

“A wise precaution,” Dart agreed. It turned out to be a good idea, too, since no one else who tried could get the door to respond. Not a huge setback but not one they could deal with as easily as Trick had hoped, either.

It turned out that once they passed through the featureless black chamber inside they didn’t arrive in the holographic podium room Trick expected. Instead they found themselves standing at the top of a stairway leading down into a sunken area. The room was lit in a pale blue but the stairway was tinted violet. He stared at the strange place in consternation. “I don’t understand. This can’t be where I came from. It’s too big!”

“No, it could be,” one of the guardsmen who came with them said. “It’s called tumbling. Sometimes people who delve the Steel see rooms move before their eyes, as if a room or even groups of rooms are attached to a giant gear that moves them from place to place every so often. If you watch it happen enough times there’s supposedly patterns to it.”

Dart had paused on the threshold between the entrance chamber and the sunken room and was studying it. “I thought tumbling chambers only occurred below the surface level.”

“I’ve never read about where they were located,” the guardsman replied, “although the one time I saw them myself we were about three layers deep.”

Tricked wracked his brains for the man’s name. “You’re… Norin, right? You’ve been down the Steel Perilous before?”

“Down and back eleven times, that’s why I’m here. Vara and Chestin, too,” Norin added, gesturing to a man and woman wearing goggles around their necks. “And I gotta say, for surface level rooms this place is pretty well preserved. I’d guess nothing from the higher spheres has ever touched down here, possibly no one has ever even been inside.”

“The door was intact,” Dart said. “And it only opened for a channel glove that came from the inside so I doubt anyone from Harbek could have entered without destroying it.”

“Is that something you do a lot?” Trick asked. “Make doors that only unlock to the right kind of channel rings?”

“The craftsmanship for something like that is pretty complicated and difficult,” Bertran said. “I think the cap of the well is the only place in town that has that kind of door. There’s not much call for it elsewhere, especially when regular locks work just as well.”

“The junction between the doorways here has worn down quite a bit,” Dart said, tapping one finger against a thin groove that ran down the middle of the threshold all the way around. “Norin may be correct. It certainly looks like this room tumbles on a regular basis.”

“Swell,” Trick said. “Does that mean this room can just up and spin with us in it?”

“That is just one of the many delightful things it means,” Vara said, pulling her goggles up so she could study the stairway. “It also means the place you found your channel glove and reservoir crystals could also have tumbled somewhere else. There’s no way of telling when things might tumble again.”

“This place is too big to be the podium room I saw last time,” Trick replied, studying the far wall. “If anything the podium room and all six of the color rooms might fit in here. Could all of them be a section that tumbled? And how long do you think it would take to tumble back, hours? Whole watches?”

“Sometimes hours, more often watches,” Norin said. “Although the records say there’s at least one place where a tumbling takes a full arc.”

“That’s twenty watches?”

“Twenty one,” Sari corrected. “It corresponds to the time a constellation takes to move thirty degrees in the sky.”

“Right, right.” Trick knew he’d heard that before but it hadn’t stuck and he wasn’t sure it would stick this time, either. He wasn’t used to judging everything by stellar movements.

Well, there was the one star. But just that one.

“The stairs are safe,” Vara said, getting to her feet as she pulled her goggles down. “Do we want to go in and take a look or shall we set up camp outside? We have the supplies to last a few watches, if we want to see how long it takes for the rooms to tumble.”

The warden thought for a moment. Then he turned to Trick and said, “Do you think the hatch you came through was in the set of rooms that tumbled? Or could it still be there, on the other side of this room?”

Trick studied the distance again. “It’s still there, I’d say, unless that room tumbled separately.”

“Then we’d better go and look at it,” Dart said, starting down the stairs. “If there’s a back door to other spheres this close to Harbek at all times I want to know about.”

The other seven of them formed a line and followed along behind him.