The Problem With Hatches

As soon as they stepped off of the stairs the temperature in the room dropped precipitously. During the trek through the red sand Trick worked up a light sweat yet when he moved into cerulean glow emanating from the tall walls of the chamber he found himself shivering. Given the function of cobalt lumi that wasn’t surprising. Trick did wonder why the room needed to be kept cold.

Looking around there wasn’t a purpose to it readily apparent. The sunken pit was full of short, rough, squat pillars, each between three to four feet tall and two to three feet wide, scattered here and there at random intervals. They were mostly in an arc in front of the stairway. The closer to the walls or the stairway you got the fewer of them there were.

Warden Dart walked a few feet towards the center of the room and rapped his knuckles on one of the pillars. Nothing happened. “Is this like the pedestals you mentioned on the podium in the room you saw?”

“No,” Trick said, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling in discomfort. “I don’t recognize anything here.”

“Better not to tamper with those, then,” Norin said. From the expressions Trick saw on the three others that had journeyed through Steel Perilous he could tell they weren’t comfortable with the pillars either.

Instead Dart looked at Sari and said, “What do you think, brightest?”

The tall, blonde woman was also inspecting one of the pillars, lightly tracing her rings across the many surfaces of the pillar. “It’s forming symmetries. I think… I think these are reservoir crystals. Or they will be, eventually. This room is growing reservoirs.”

Trick frowned. “I didn’t realize you could synthesize reservoirs. Didn’t you tell me you had to harvest them from lumi wells?”

“We do.” Sari’s voice sounded a bit weak and her hands trembled slightly, which worried him. “This shouldn’t be possible.”

“Lots of things that happen below seem impossible,” Norin said. “On the surface they may be. It’s better not to think too much about what you see down here. It can drive you mad.”

“My kind of place,” Trick muttered.

“What was that?” Dart asked.

“The doorway to the hatch room was over there.” Trick pointed to the right wall and set off at a slow walk, taking his time as he navigated a rather slippery floor.

“Wait,” Norrin said, as he and Chestin slip-stepped up to him as quickly as they could, slotting crimson and cobalt lumi crystals into large, left handed gauntlets. “The Steel Perilous is dangerous everywhere but it’s worst at places where you move further up or down. Let us go first.”

“Right.” Trick let them pass him, unclipping the strap that held his sword in place and loosening the blade in the sheath.

Vara and Bertran followed behind them, lenses held in the odd, port arms position Casparians favored. Dart and the last of his guards, a man named Toff, spread out to the sides, each of them holding a large arrowhead shaped object with an ocher reservoir slotted into it. That left him standing beside Sari in the middle of the room.

He leaned over to her and whispered, “What are they doing?”

She leaned across the other half of the distance and whispered back, “I don’t know. I’ve watched the lensmen drill before but I’ve never seen them do something like this before. Maybe it’s something Norin or Vara came up with when they explored in the past.”

He took the opportunity to scootch a little bit closer to her, saying, “You’ve spent an awful lot of time studying things, haven’t you? Harvesting, lumicraft, lensmen drills… is there anything in Harbek you don’t know?”

“Plenty.” She moved a half step away. With both hands firmly on her staff he had no way to judge her mood so he decided not to press his luck at the moment.

“There’s a door here,” Norin called back, “but it’s closed and our guide rings won’t open it.”

Trick sighed and skated forward until he reached the door. Chestin moved to one side and let him through to open it. Before he did Trick looked it over, trying to remember what the exit to the hatch room had looked like. It definitely appeared to be the right size but he hadn’t seen it closed on his last visit. The gray looked the same as the hatch room.

“You can open it now,” the warden said.

“Just checking things.” The door responded to his guide ring in the same way as the previous one and Trick slid it open effortlessly.

As soon as the path was clear Chestin pulled him back and pushed through the doorway, gauntlet held forward. Norin piled through right beside him. As they charged forward the lumi in their gauntlets flashed and projected two curved shields forward into the room. Both men held small mining picks in their right hands.

Trick wasn’t sure whether these were meant as weapons or tools to force the door if they couldn’t get it open but they proved unnecessary in either case. The only thing on the other side of the door was the hatch room. It looked unchanged from when Trick left it several days ago. Empty, save for the racks of belts that emerged from the walls.

That didn’t stop Norin and Chestin from searching the room very thoroughly, walking the full perimeter of the room side by side. When nothing particularly interesting happened they lowered their hands. Their gauntlets went dark, the shields vanished and Warden Dart motioned the rest of them into the room. He left his other man at the door, watching things with his arrowhead device in hand.

“The hatch is back in that corner,” Trick said, pointing towards the back of the chamber. “It’s the round opening in the floor, about four feet wide.”

Chestin made an unhappy sound. Dart glanced at him with eyebrows raised. “Something wrong?”

“Hatches are the worst way up or down,” Vara said. “They’re almost always locked and, once you do get them open, it’s hard to scout through them without exposing yourself. Assuming you don’t make a racket forcing the hatch in the first place.”

Trick frowned, remembering that the hatch had no handle on this side of things. “You know, now that I think about it, I may need to unlock that hatch with my guide ring anyway.”

“Well, come on.” Norin waved for Trick to accompany him. “We might as well look at it right away. Unless you have something you want us to do first, Warden?”

“No. If the door is locked or needs Trick’s magic touch to open then I’m not that worried about it.” Dart glanced back towards the other room. “Especially if the key to the lock is tumbling about the Steel Perilous and may not return here for arcs or even full revolutions.”

So they picked their way through the racks to the hatch. Trick had just started squatting down to inspect it when the metal disc popped up, raising almost five feet out of the floor, to reveal a dual barrelled set of telescope lenses that swiveled to point at them. Norin grabbed him and threw him back one handed. With his other he projected a shield a split second before a wave of scorching heat from the lenses washed over them.