Was all of Sacor City buried? How had this come to pass? And when? She had to keep reminding herself she was in the future, but she could not draw herself away from the enormity of it, the sense of loss. Her time, her world, was hidden, literally buried. She shook her head and released a rattling breath.
The only one who could explain it to her was down here somewhere in this strange, but familiar, muted world, and now she was more eager than ever to find him. The way was not difficult, for footprints over the dirty, dusty cobblestones had made a clear path she could follow.
She passed buildings she recognized, though sometimes she had to think about which one was which, because of their new setting and the damage to otherwise familiar facades. There was the harness shop that made the special lightweight saddles of the Green Riders. It was next to a blacksmith’s shop. She peered through the cracked window and spotted an anvil and forge still intact. If ghosts wished to visit her, she thought, this was the appropriate time and place, but not one so much as whispered past her ear or fluttered among the ruins.
More buildings were crushed beneath rubble, actually cutting off the Winding Way. The footprints veered off to a gaping doorway. There was not much inside the building to suggest what it had once been, but some broken shards of pottery littered the floor. Karigan racked her brain but could not remember.
Plain wooden stairs ascended to an upper level. They were not old, these stairs, but of a more recent construction and covered with dirty footprints. She followed them, climbing into an upper story and landing in a room that could have once been a bed chamber. She discovered another set of stairs that led into the attic. Up she went again and, once in the attic, discovered steep, narrow stairs that rose through a square cut in the roof, through which faint light trickled.
She gathered herself and climbed again, clutching a rope that served as a handrail, and rose through the roof, the roof of the old city, as she thought of it, and for several lengths through a vertical shaft of stone and rubble braced with cross beams. Eventually she emerged into a long chamber of bricks with barrel-arched ceilings. The room smelled dank, of wet stone. Her light fell across hulking metal contraptions that shone with a dull green gleam, rust eating painted surfaces. They’d valves and levers and gears, and she had no idea what they were supposed to be used for.
The faint light she’d seen had not originated here but spilled down the shaft of a stairwell behind her. Got to keep going. She entered the stairwell, took a deep breath, and climbed again, her feet ringing dully on wrought iron steps, the handrail clammy to her touch. When she spiraled up to the top of the first flight, she found a lamp at low glow and a door hanging open. She stepped out onto a wooden floor splotched with dark stains, the air thick with dust and a metallic, oily tang.
Even at full brightness, her taper could not begin to illuminate the vast space. She couldn’t tell how far the long room extended, but support beams marched down its length like lines of soldiers before vanishing into the dark. Shafts were attached to the ceiling, and wide belts of looping leather dangling down from pulleys swayed in subtle air currents like beckoning nooses. She shuddered.
Deeper in the room, her light glinted on square-framed skeletons of steel heaped in a jumble of parts: rollers embedded with fine metal tines, toothy beveled gears the size of cart wheels, rods and pipes and chains, and many other unidentifiable pieces. She could not fathom their purpose or how they might all fit together—an impossible puzzle. The building groaned and complained with settling noises, and its listless air currents stirred loose tendrils of her hair.
To Karigan it was as if the building echoed the energy, activity that it must have once known; that something of it remained captured here, restless, contained by boarded up windows and disuse.
She shuddered again and backed into the stairwell. No one was in that darkened room of derelict mechanicals. More light shone from above, so she climbed up the spiraling stairs yet one more level, and when she stepped through the door into the dazzling light, she stood blinking some time before her eyes adjusted. When they did, she could see the actual proportions of the room. It was longer than even the king’s throne room, and wider, too.
Chandeliers, half a dozen of them, hung down the center of the room between whatever shafts were still attached to the ceiling. The floor, unlike the rough one below, shone to a high polish, and it was almost like standing in a ballroom, though the battered support beams and brick walls were clues to the room’s more utilitarian past. The windows were not simply boarded up, but were hung with heavy velvet draperies. Lamp sconces provided additional light.
She was not alone.
About halfway down the room and to the left, Cade Harlowe, stripped down to his trousers and quite unaware of her, punched at a heavy oblong bag hanging from the ceiling, the sweat gleaming on his muscles. The wall near him held racks of swords, pikes, staffs, and other weapons. Weights were lined up along the wall, as well.
Standing near him was the professor, watching his student as critically as any arms master, still dressed in his fancy attire. He noticed Karigan first, his gaze alighting on her. Then Cade Harlowe paused what he was doing and followed the professor’s gaze. The three of them stood frozen like that for a long time, just staring at one another, then the professor broke the spell by striding toward her with his arms outstretched.
“How very good to see you up and about, my dear,” he said, his voice ringing out across the large space. “I see your curiosity finally got the better of you.”
SANCTUARY