Chương 139: Hidden In A Cave

Nobody answered him at first. No, the voice said eventually, taking longer to answer than the half-second Ant had actually given it. I still don't have anything more specific than that. It gets stronger the closer you get, apparently — that's all I can tell you until we're actually moving.

"That's not exactly a starting point." I know, the voice said. It's not much to work with. Mahkir's ears had gone flat against his skull, the way they did when he was listening to something Ant couldn't hear directly. Ask around, he said. A town built into a mountain usually has a way into the mountain. Miners don't dig one hole and stop. It turned out to be an easy thing to ask about.

The old man running the feed store at the square's edge didn't so much as blink at the question — just pointed a thumb over his shoulder toward the mountain's western face and said the old shaft mouths had been sealed for two generations, all but one, which the town still used for storing root vegetables through the cold months because the temperature never moved down there no matter what the weather did up top.

He gave directions without asking why a stranger with an enormous red cat wanted to know, which told Ant more about how often strangers came through Grinenfeld than anything the man actually said out loud. The entrance was a black seam in the rock behind a row of drying racks, wide enough for two men walking shoulder to shoulder, the wood bracing along the first stretch old enough that moss had claimed most of the grain.

The air coming out of it was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the season, and underneath the cold sat the smell of wet stone and something mineral, faintly metallic, the kind of smell that got into the back of the throat and stayed there.

"Storage cellar," Ant said, mostly to himself.

"Not exactly the setup I was picturing." It won't stay a storage cellar for long, Mahkir said. Not once you're deep enough that nobody's stacked a turnip crate against it in fifty years. He was right. The first hundred feet still had the marks of use — cart ruts worn into the stone floor, iron brackets bolted into the walls where lanterns had once hung, a scatter of rotted barrel staves nobody had bothered clearing out.

Past that, the tunnel narrowed and the ceiling dropped, and the marks of use thinned with it until there weren't any left at all. Just raw rock, old enough that whoever had cut the first stretch of passage hadn't bothered continuing, or hadn't lived to. Mahkir walked half a step ahead the whole way, nose low, tail carried straight out behind him instead of curled loose.

Every so often he stopped at a fork Ant wouldn't have noticed as a fork at all — a crack in the wall barely wide enough to call a passage — and waited, ears back, for something Ant hadn't said out loud yet.

"You waiting on me?" Ant asked, after the fourth one. I'm waiting on it, Mahkir said. It's the one doing the choosing. I'm just the legs. Left, the voice said, without being asked. That one feels more like the mountain we're looking for. I don't have a better word for it than that.

"That's not much of a word." It's what I've got, the voice said. I've told you both everything I actually know. There's a cave. It exists. I don't know why I know that, and I've stopped pretending otherwise every time you ask.

"I wasn't going to ask again." You were, the voice said. You always do, eventually. It's a reasonable thing to keep asking. I'd ask too, in your position. They kept walking. The passage dropped in a long, uneven slope, doubling back on itself twice in ways that made Ant lose any real sense of how far under the mountain they'd actually gotten, or in which direction the town sat relative to wherever they were now.

His own breathing had gone loud in his ears somewhere along the way, the tunnel narrow enough in places that his shoulders brushed both walls at once, cold stone through the fabric of his coat. It was close to an hour in — long enough that Ant had stopped trying to track it exactly — when the voice cut through the rhythm of it. Stop, it said. Mahkir stopped mid-stride, ears swiveling back though there'd been no sound to react to.

"Stop why?" Ant looked around. It was the same tunnel it had been for the last twenty feet, same rough grey stone, same dark ahead and behind. I don't know. Just stop, the voice said. It's stopped feeling like more mountain the last few steps. It came in slower this time, quieter, working through something instead of reporting it. Use his vision. Not your own eyes. His. Ant looked at Mahkir. Mahkir looked back, amber eyes catching what little light made it this deep, and didn't wait to be told twice.

"Enhanced Vision." The tunnel sharpened around him, every crack in the stone suddenly distinct instead of a blur of grey, dust motes hanging visible in air that had looked empty a second ago. Ant turned in a slow circle, scanning the walls without knowing what he was actually looking for, until his eyes caught on a patch of stone at roughly shoulder height, a few feet wide, that wasn't holding its color the same as the stone around it. It kept moving.

Not shaking, not glowing — just failing to settle, the grey sliding into other shades of grey and back again in a slow, restless drift with no source Ant could see. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"There," Ant said, pointing.

"You seeing that?" I'm seeing it through you seeing it, so, yes, Mahkir said. His tail had stopped moving entirely. That's not normal rock. It isn't, the voice agreed. I can't tell you what it is. I can tell you what to do about it, if you want to know.

"I'm assuming I'm not going to like it." Cut your hand, the voice said. Press it to the wall, the patch that isn't settling. It has to be blood. Ant let out a short breath through his nose.

"Of course it does." I don't make the rules, the voice said. I'm only telling you what I can feel about this one. Mahkir hadn't said anything, which Ant had learned by now meant he didn't like it either but didn't have a better suggestion. Ant drew the knife from his belt, turned his left palm up, and cut along the base of his thumb before he could think too hard about doing it — a shallow line, enough to bring blood up fast without doing any real damage. It stung more than a cut that small had any right to.

He pressed his palm flat against the drifting patch of stone. The wall stopped being solid. There was no sound to it, no light, nothing dramatic at all — one second his hand was flat against cold rock, and the next it wasn't against anything, the stone simply no longer there to push back, and Ant had to catch himself before he pitched forward into the space that had opened where a wall used to be. The fur along Mahkir's spine had risen and stayed up. Well. That's new.

"You're telling me." Beyond the opening sat a room roughly the size of Ant's bedroom back at HQ, low-ceilinged enough that he had to duck slightly to clear the threshold. The air inside was different from the tunnel — drier, older, carrying the faint dry smell of paper left somewhere it should never have survived this long. No dust moved when he stepped inside, none stirred by his footsteps, as though the room had been sealed too completely for even the mountain's own air to reach it. It was mostly empty.

A metal box sat against the far wall, small enough to carry under one arm, its surface dark and unmarked. Beside it, laid flat on the bare stone, sat a book — round-cornered, thick, its cover gone leathery and stiff with age, a single letter embossed across the front in a script too worn to place: B. Ant? Mahkir said, from just behind him. Any of this feel familiar to you?

"No." Ant crouched by the book instead of answering more than that.

"None of it." He opened it carefully, the spine stiff enough that it cracked faintly with the motion, and the first pages held nothing but faded diagrams he didn't recognize — circles inside circles, notations in a hand too cramped to read easily. Further in, the writing opened out into something legible, and Ant found himself reading without meaning to stop. It was about magic. Not skills, not the kind of thing a system screen showed him — magic as a study, broken into what the book called schools. Fire. Water.

Earth. Ice. Life. Shadow. Draconic. Lightning. Soul. Void. Death. Space. Each one had its own short section, dense with claims Ant had no way to check: what each school had supposedly been capable of, once, before whatever had happened to make all of it sound like rumor instead of record.

"Says most mages only ever managed three," Ant said out loud, mostly so Mahkir would have something to react to.

"Any more than that and it says their —" he squinted at the word, "— their cores start to erode. Lose the ability to use magic at all, eventually, if they push past it." Three schools. Mahkir's voice had gone thoughtful. That's not a lot.

"There's more." Ant kept reading.

"One line here says one species managed to get around that. Didn't have the same limit the rest did." He turned the page, looking for which species, looking for anything past the claim itself. The next page had been torn out. Not damaged, not lost to age — torn, clean along the spine, a straight line where someone had deliberately removed exactly one page and nothing else. The page after it picked up mid-sentence, already past whatever had been said.

"You've got to be joking." Ant flipped forward, then back, checking the same gap twice as though it might resolve itself the second time. It didn't.

"One page. The one page that actually says something." Convenient, Mahkir said, dry.

"That's one word for it." He sat with the frustration a moment, then set it aside. There was no fixing a torn page on the spot, and he'd stopped wasting energy on problems that had already decided themselves. There was plenty else in the book worth coming back to when he had the time to actually sit with it properly — whole sections he hadn't touched yet, notes in the margins he hadn't tried to read. It wasn't nothing. It just wasn't the one thing he'd actually wanted.

He set the book down and turned to the box instead. It wasn't locked. The lid lifted on a hinge that hadn't seized despite however long it had sat here, and inside, resting on a bed of cloth gone brittle and grey, sat a gem the size of his thumbnail, orange shot through with something that moved. Not a reflection, not a trick of the light — the color inside the gem was actually drifting, slow currents of it turning over on themselves, contained entirely within the stone. Ant picked it up. It was warm.

[MAGIC GEM DETECTED] Unable to absorb this gem currently. [ERROR] Evolution criteria not met. 0/2. Ant stared at the gem in his palm for a long moment before he said anything.

"Evolution criteria." Mahkir hadn't moved. I heard it.

"Zero out of two." Ant turned the gem over. The orange kept drifting inside it no matter which way he tilted it, indifferent to his hand entirely.

"That's not a level requirement. That's not anything I've seen it say before." I don't have anything for you on this one, the voice said, and for once it didn't sound like it was holding anything back — just genuinely without an answer. I told you the cave might hold what you were looking for. I didn't say I'd know what it meant once you found it.

"That's a hell of a caveat to leave out until now." Would it have changed whether you came? the voice said. It wouldn't have. Ant didn't bother saying so.

"Well," he said instead, closing his fist around the gem before setting it back in its box, "we might not have an answer. But at least now we've got a direction." He fit the lid back down, tucked the box into the storage space alongside the book, and felt both settle into whatever unlabeled corner of himself held things he couldn't otherwise carry.

"Two somethings. We just don't know what either of them is yet." Progress, Mahkir said, in the tone he used for things that weren't actually progress at all.

"Don't start." He straightened, ducked back through the opening the wall had left for him, and the moment his shoulders cleared the threshold the stone closed itself behind him the same way it had opened — no sound, no light, just there and then not-there and then, a heartbeat later, solid grey rock exactly as it had looked before, the drifting patch finally settled and indistinguishable from the wall around it.

Ant stood in front of it a long moment, palm still stinging faintly where he'd cut it, and understood with total clarity that he had no framework at all for what had just happened to him. None of it fit anything he'd read, anything Kalsar had taught him, anything the chip screens back in the city had ever hinted was possible. Maren would know what to do with a torn page and a gem that spoke in numbers instead of names. Maren always knew what to do with the things that made no sense yet.

His communicator buzzed in his coat pocket.