They all had a sense for just how stupidly dangerous this was. They'd been hired onesie-twosie out of dive bars and forgotten hostels in the wild-lands in clear violation of 'the rules'. Nobody in the wild-lands had trust in another wild-lander unless they'd grown up in the same village with him/her. Life could be short when you trusted somebody. And yet, here they all were. They were trusting the smooth-talking foreigner. Fedir Brutko knew the answer as well as he knew himself.
Greed.
It was greed. They'd all lost their minds when the pretty stranger offered them real gold and fat jewels to help her with her little project. It was a tale as old as time. A pretty woman with money in her pockets could get stupid men to do whatever she liked. Kill an inconvenient husband. Dispose of an unpleasant rival. She could get her way if she flashed a little skin and a lot of money. There were men who might not even try to take what she had if she smiled just right.
Of course, they had quickly found out that taking anything from their mysterious patron was a poor joke. The fellow who'd tried to take her behind one of the tents had come up dead with a hundred holes in his gizzard. The fellow who'd been talking of poisoning the guards had died of a mystery ailment that involved shitting himself to death one night. She never even brought up the matter, and that was the most terrifying thing of all. No threats. No warnings. The message had already been delivered, and the men were terrified.
Just now the little woman was eating breakfast as the men toiled at digging out the most recent cave-in. She'd had to replace the four fellows who'd been buried. She'd left them alone here while she went hunting gullible fools willing to risk it all over a pretty smile and a handful of coins. Fedir thought half of them should have been gone when she came back, money or not. The reality was that they were more terrified of her than this haunted place. So, they worked. They worked onward, not in hopes of monetary reward or pleasures of the flesh, but in the hope that they'd simply be allowed to leave with their lives.
Unfortunately, the former Kingdom of Beauty seemed to have no interest in letting go of its secrets without a fight. Every inch of ground they covered in this place seemed to have been sown with poison. Every step they took risked falling into a trap of some sort. It sometimes seemed to Fedir that, did they not watch, pathways they'd already swept clean would sprout new traps overnight! Men found their feet stabbed by sharp little needles. Men found chunks of stone falling off of the buildings where they'd lain for centuries, giving them barely any time to dodge out of the way. And all of that before they reached the center of this nightmare of a city.
The Tower of Beauty lay empty and rotting, its halls choked with debris. Water had somehow been allowed to flood the former palace, burying its lower floors in much ten feet deep. When you managed to clear a pathway through the mud, sometimes mud from upper floors would flow back in or walls would collapse, burying men by the dozen. Fedir had long ago concluded that, whatever was in the Tower could damned well stay in the tower. He had no use of it, and he didn't think the little murderess could be trusted with it either.
Still, their nasty little mistress hardly intended for them to have a say in the matter. Men who decided not to work suddenly got new motivation. They showed up ghostly pale, looking as if they'd stared Death himself in the eye. Men who 'took sick' suddenly found miracle cures that left them more spry than when they'd taken to their beds. Of course, some small number of the holdouts simply disappeared, which helped to explain much of the survivors' new found enthusiasm.
They were getting close today. They were coming down into the Princess of Beauty's inner sanctum. Fedir, who's ancestors had dwelled here once upon a time, had grown up on stories about how beautiful and fair the kingdom had been. What he saw around him hardly struck him as a place of incalculable beauty and light. The hard walls were made of ancient cement, many feet thick in places, giving the inner sanctum the aspect more of a prison than anything else. Streaks of rust and corroded iron bars jutting out in places told that Princess Beautiful's sanctum had long predated her reign. The sanctum was nothing of the sort. It looked to Fedir as though the Princess had been guarding a secret.
"You there," snarled a nasty guard! "Put your back into that shovel!" The sound of a dart-pistol getting cocked announced to Fedir that break-time was over. He bent to the shovel once more, wrestling another gallon of the ocean of gloppy mud out of the hallway. That got deposited in a bucket. A bearer promptly picked that bucket up along with a second balanced at the end of his carry-pole, then hustled back up the hallway and out the door. One more bucket down. Their employers were in a bit of a hurry. Of course, with rumors saying that Princess Beautiful had come back from the dead and could sometimes be found visiting the courts of Ooo, they had reason for urgency.
Bucket by bucket, the crew made their way forward that day, digging from the hallway into the sanctum itself. And then, slowly but surely uncovering the great treasure that lay within. Fedir himself discovered the heavy iron door, rusted in its frame. His shovel jammed hard into the muck and came away dented and half-broken. Their patron insisted on coming forward herself to look. She had a peculiar gadget with her, and she waved it all over the heavy iron door. Nothing. "Open it," she snapped.
The work truly began then. The men were made to labor like mules. The guards no longer even maintained the pretense that the work was voluntary, kicking and beating anybody who slowed or slacked. The great door got fully uncovered. And then the guards hitched up chains and ropes, and sent the men back outside where they were made to haul and pull on those ropes until finally, finally that door came slowly creaking open. A light was brought, then, and the first of the guards ventured inside. Dank and smelling of filth, the place sounded like nothing Fedir wanted to see, and he was unsurprised to find the Tower of Beauty had one last trick to play. The hapless guard went in and went plunging to his death just the far side of the door, victim of a rusted platform.
Only then did their patron move in with her little toy. It's constant clicks and whirs–a background noise until this point–grew in volume and frequency until it was constant. "The bomb's here," she muttered, though only Fedir and the guards heard it. Fedir found his heart skipped a beat. What had they uncovered?! The chief guard had more news for her. "We've uncovered the library," he said. "The books are there." "Good," said the strange little woman. "I want to see them. Get together materials to build a platform. We're going to need to brace it against the walls of the shaft somehow." The chief guard acknowledged the order with a bow. As he turned to go, his mistress reminded him, "that shaft goes down over a hundred feet to the bottom. I need something stable enough to get the bomb off the tip." "It will be as you command, lady," he replied.
And then the little murderess was striding back through the group. Seeming to choose a victim at random, she singled out Fedir. "You," she said. "Grab a couple of sacks, and come with me." Fedir felt a chill sweep through him. Men sometimes failed to return from these little individual jobs. Whether they did something stupid or merely fell victim to the dangers of the city, nobody really knew. Nobody honestly wanted to know. Most knew that it was enough to try avoiding these little jobs. You couldn't avoid it if you got picked out though. Dreading what was coming, the hapless thug grabbed up a couple of sacks and stepped off.
A corner of his mind thought of turning the tables. A sack over the head and a knife, and she would be done for, poison or not, guards or not. She made that momentary thought just a small blip in his mind as she made sure that he walked ahead of her and not the other way around. "You're one of the smarter ones," she opined, as they walked. Fedir said nothing. "You might have been somebody important," she said. He found himself almost laughing. Nobody was important in the bad lands where each day could be a greater struggle than the last.
"You're smart enough to shut your trap," she said. "Not like the run of idiots I hired for this job. That says something to me." Fedir kept on walking. He was smart enough to be thinking of escape. He wanted out of here. He wanted out of this devil haunted city and away from this demonic woman. "If you please me, I might make you one of my guards," she said. "My standard trial. Sixty days or the first screw-up, whichever comes first. You survive that, and you're hired. What do you say?" Fedir was smart enough to respond, "I will do as you say."
Their library was nothing so grand as to merit the name. It was a tiny cubicle in a distant corner of the tunnel network, and nothing would have announced it as a 'library' at all. Characters in the ancient tongue spelled out the words, 'Engine Workshop' or some such. It was hard to tell. Fedir was only barely literate himself. He was no scholar. The murderess moved right in and picked up a book from a rusty metal shelf. "You saw something on the wall," she remarked. "What was it?" "This place," he replied. "It doesn't seem like a library." "It isn't," she replied over her shoulder.
Studying the book in her hand, she thumbed carefully through the worn and damaged pages. There were pictures there–pictures of the great engine of destruction in the shaft. She couldn't read the words, much less understand the meaning. "Do you read," she asked? "I'm illiterate," he replied. "But your people come from this land," she remarked. He felt the chill of death again. A thrill of terror shot through him to realize he could be called out so easily. She couldn't read the books she prized, but neither could he. He knew the consequences should he fail to deliver.
As Fedir was contemplating this deadly development, a terrified voice shouted, "alarm! Alarm!" It was the fat guard. He'd been posted at the entry because he was simply too fat and clumsy to make his way around the tunnels. He'd caused a collapse by himself once, nearly killing Fedir and two other men. Now, the little murderess stuffed the book and two others in the sack she had. As she contemplated what to do, the sounds of terror and fighting grew.
Without so much as a second glance, she stepped off into the tunnel, staring back the way they'd come. There was the sound of dart-guns and blades clashing–and the sounds of death. With a sigh, the little woman turned and fled in the other direction, tearing off down a branch. Fedir barely caught a glimpse of her before the skeleton tried to bash in his skull with a half rusted axe. The thug ducked that clumsy swing. A glance down the other tunnel showed that it was filling up with the restless dead. Fedir took off after the little murderess. Working for–or at least following–her seemed like his best chance today.
The tunnel was much like the tunnel leading to the death-shaft. Indeed, they passed another heavy, iron door like the first. The little murderess didn't hesitate to tear off the fancy dress she'd been wearing, bearing long, lean legs and an athletic figure. She'd come expecting this, or something like it. Sounds from down the tunnel told them that the guards were meeting their fates. The dead were killing them to a man. Fedir found his terror gave him wings to keep running. Finally, the little woman came to a third iron door–this one hanging open. Sunlight streaming in from above told that this shaft was open to the sky. The evil creature darted inside. Fedir darted in after and very nearly went careening over the edge to his death.
"Up," she shouted! "We're going up!" With a nod of her head, she indicated rusty pipe-work and corroded iron jutting out of the walls. It seemed a dubious escape route, but it was better than meeting up with the skeleton again. Fedir began the climb, following her up and up as they scrabbled along rusty metal and peeling cement. Below them, he could hear the undead searching, as they dragged their weapons listlessly through the muck. He thought that horrific screeching of metal on moldy stone would be with him all his days.
Finally, they climbed up and out of that pit. His patron wasted not a moment before tearing off into the woods, clutching the sack with her prizes. Fedir had no other options. He didn't even know where they were. The undead would have him and tear him to pieces! The hapless bandit tore off after his tormenter, praying to Glob that he survived this day.
Behind them, Princess Beautiful emerged at last into the secret chamber under her former home. Her bony fingers scraped along the sign for Launch Complex Pervomaysk. Her ugly, ugly home. She fancied she could feel the deadly energy that had ultimately taken her life, causing her lovely, lovely hair to fall out. It was still here, her lovely, lovely mushroom bomb. Issuing a silent command, she ordered her deadly guardians to continue the search. None could be allowed to leave with her secrets. In the now, she went to the door–the beautiful door–as she thought about that night, long ago, when she'd let curiosity get the better of her.
Well, the workers won't have to worry about getting a lethal dose of radiation now.