A belated Merry Christmas to all my readers!
4 – Canyon
The vast tear in the orange, rocky ground of Voltaic was truly magnificent. Even Maddy, who had developed a fear of heights after her fall in Channelwood, was more awe-struck than fear-struck by the canyon.
It was a huge valley, at least a hundred metres from top to bottom, completely covered in the orange rocks and soil that were characteristic of Voltaic. Jordan, Rachel and Maddy stood on the spindly catwalk that stretched across the canyon, a silver thread supported by massive iron beams hanging halfway up the rocky cliff face. One end of the catwalk stretched out through the end of the valley, over the ocean and ending at the rocky island where they had linked in. The other end of the catwalk was suspended close to the entrance of a vast cave at the end of the valley, with a spindly ladder leading down to a catwalk closer to the floor of the cave. A shallow but fast-flowing river gurgled along far below the three of them as they walked carefully towards the ladder and climbed even more carefully down.
So far the three of them had explored what they could find of this Age without crossing the canyon, and had not been able to make much progress, apart from picking up a few loose pages of Saavedro's journal. The entire Age, it seemed, appeared to be a colossal generator, with the main power source being a waterwheel, and a complex network of electrical circuits connecting it with the various different devices scattered across the islands. So far, they'd managed to start the waterwheel (which was something) and hook it up to the rest of the Age (which was also something), but had failed to actually make any progress on making anything work, let alone finding the symbol that Saavedro had spoken of in his message.
What they had discovered was a taunting message from Saavedro, hidden on a smaller version of the J'nanin imager near the waterwheel. Still believing them to be Atrus, the message seemed to taunt their inability to work the machinery, whilst also striking them with guilt over the events that he described from twenty years ago on Narayan. That was enough to make them work just a bit quicker.
With their only lead so far being a tall, narrow, red-handled door, locked from the inside, in the wall of the rocky tunnel that led to the waterwheel, they had decided that the only way for them to make any progress was to find another way into this room was to brave the catwalk over the canyon and ignore the acrophopia-inducing river rushing below.
Brittany collapsed onto the couch in Tomahna's kitchen. What a day... she had spent half the day looking after Jane and the other half picking up burnt books. Fun.
She pulled her journal towards her, picked up a pen and wrote for several minutes. Jane gave a slight snore and rolled over in the cradle next to the couch. It wasn't long before Brittany had fallen asleep as well.
At two in the morning Jane woke up. She sat up in the cradle and looked over at Brittany asleep on the couch. It was foggy and raining outside, she saw. Without a proper door on the kitchen, the fog had flowed slightly into the room, slightly obscuring things. Brittany's shadow was on the couch asleep, but in the doorway was another shadow. Jane squinted at the shadow. It was tall; too tall to be the funny man with the glasses or his wife.
"Brittany, wake up," said Jane, although it came out as "Goo goo gaa". Nevertheless, Brittany woke up and saw the shadow in the doorway. Her tired eyes couldn't quite discern that the shadow was too tall to be Atrus or Catherine.
"It's just Atrus, Jane. Go back to sleep," Brittany murmured.
"Young Jane is more observant than you are, my dear Brittany," said the man in the black coat, stepping forward out of the fog and shaking the rain off his hat, "because she knew I wasn't Atrus." Brittany's tiredness vanished temporarily and she sat upright.
"What the hell are you doing here?" said Brittany, temporarily losing her composure. The man, as usual, smiled, which only served to irritate Brittany more.
"Good morning to you as well," replied the man. "I popped in to see how you are coming along with young Jane. Mind you," he added thoughtfully, "I do have a delightful tendancy to show up at annoying times, don't I?"
"You do. And as for Jane," replied Brittany, sinking back into the couch, "don't ask."
"That bad, huh?" said the man sympathetically, sitting down next to her. She nodded. "Well, I apologise for waking you up. Before I go on my way, would you like a cup of tea? I brought some with me." He pulled out a flask and offered it to Brittany. She shook her head.
"No thanks, I'll never get back to sleep if I have any tea."
The man shrugged. "Suit yourself," he said as he stood and put the flask away. "Say hello to Atrus from me." He disappeared out the door and back into the fog. Brittany looked at Jane, who put her head on the side and looked questioningly at Brittany. Brittany smiled.
"I'm as much in the dark about him as you are, Jane," replied Brittany, "so don't ask me." Jane smiled.
"So... who's going across?"
Jordan, Rachel and Maddy were perched at one end of a long pipe that stretched across the canyon. This, they had discovered, was the only way forward, and one of them had to go across.
Rachel looked at Maddy. Maddy took a step back quickly.
Maddy looked at Jordan. He put both hands up and shook his head.
Jordan looked at Rachel. She looked at Jordan and Maddy, shrugged and crawled out onto the pipe.
The pipe was quite wide, and as Rachel crawled out across the pipe she kept her eyes fixed firmly on the far end of the canyon, avoiding looking down at all costs. Eventually she reached the other side of the canyon without having thrown up at all (she became very proud of that afterwards) and immediately saw a small hatch in the side of the wall leading into what appeared to be an air duct.
Despite the horrible metallic smell inside the duct, which was wide enough for Rachel to crawl through fairly comfortably, she preferred it to outside on the pipe, as she could look down without potentially dying. Nevertheless, the smell was not appealing, so she was quite glad when she reached a grate in the floor of the vent, leading down into a well-lit room. She pushed against the grate with both hands, expecting it to be difficult to open. This was a mistake, it turned out, as the grate opened easily, and she fell through.
After picking herself up and brushing herself down quickly, she surveyed the room quickly. On one side was a small window overlooking a huge underground room containing what appeared to be lava, as well as a large platform attached to rails on the wall and several large gears – slightly reminiscent of Riven, thought Rachel, except for the lava. On the other side of the room was a tall, narrow dorr with a large red handle in the centre and held firmly in place by a wedge off to the side. Rachel guessed immediately that this was the other side of the door leading out into the rocky tunnel, and her guess was confirmed when she unlocked and opened the door and stepped back out into the tunnel.
"Right," she muttered to herself, "I'd better go get the others. But I'm not going back across that pipe."
When Brittany woke up again, it was to the smell of bacon being burnt. Although she herself made a point of cooking bacon for breakfast every Saturday (or more often if she had guests), she was always the one doing the cooking (mainly because Rachel had never tried to cook bacon again after her first attempt). Only once had she ever woken to the smell of cooking bacon, and she had enjoyed that time. Today was rather different, however, because it rather smelt like the time that Rachel had attempted to cook bacon – except that here, there was no smoke alarm to go off mistakenly. Brittany nevertheless got hurriedly to her feet and went over to the stove, where she found a very dishevelled- and disappointed-looking Atrus.
As a councillor, Brittany was well versed in handling awkward situations – being taught how to handle such situations was what the council called "on-the-job training". Utilising these skills now, she rearranged her face into her best sympathetic look, walked over to Atrus (who still hadn't noticed her) and put a hand on his shoulder. He jumped and looked around, before blushing slightly under the soot that was on his face and smiling unconvincingly at Brittany.
"Nothing to see here... Sorry I woke you."
Brittany also smiled. "Nice try, Atrus. But I don't think Catherine likes bacon flambé, and I know that I don't. Do you want a hand?"
Atrus smiled genuinely this time, albeit tiredly. "Thank you, Brittany... that would be very helpful."
The two of them together managed to get the mess that Atrus had made cleaned up fairly quickly, and Brittany then proceeded to cook the bacon herself, whilst Atrus busied himself with a task that Brittany believed not even he could mess up – making toast using the electric toaster.
"I take it you don't cook breakfast very often," said Brittany between slices of toast at one point.
"I don't cook very often," replied Atrus, "full stop. Catherine doesn't like to have me in the kitchen. Apparently cooking appliances simply detest me. The only thing I can cook is toast. And," he added, as the toaster began to smoke lightly, "sometimes I burn the toast." Brittany sprang over and flicked the toaster lever up before something bad happened.
"Perhaps," she said politely as she returned to the bacon, "you could set the table?"
"Rach, you have blood on your knee." Maddy had a knack for bringing up things like that in the most conversational of ways.
"Do I?" Rachel looked down and saw that Maddy was right. "I must have grazed it when I fell out of the air duct. Never mind."
Jordan put his stern-and-concerned-husband face on. "Never mind, indeed. You should at least wash your knee if it's bleeding."
If Rachel had learnt anything from her three-year marriage to Jordan, it was that when he looked at her like that, there was no way she was going to change his mind. At all. Nevertheless, she did still like to tease him by trying.
"What, in the ocean, Jordan dear?"
"No, Rachel dear, with water from the lake on J'nanin. Go on. Mop and I will play with the lava whilst you're gone."
Rachel smiled. "As you wish, Jordan."
As Rachel left, Maddy and Jordan turned to look at the window that overlooked the lava room. Unsure of exactly what they were trying to achieve here, they surveyed the room from their high vantage point until Maddy spotted something.
"Look," she said, pointing into the room. "A fan."
Indeed, there was a fan set into the far wall of the room, high up on the wall.
"Why on earth," said Jordan, "would anyone want to ventilate a room which nobody ever seems to set foot in?"
"Perhaps," replied Maddy, "they're trying to get the hot air out, so it can be used for other things."
Jordan paused, contemplating. "Like inflating airships," he concluded finally, remembering the airship that they had seen earlier.
"Yes," replied Maddy, "like inflating airships. Now, what do you think this does?" She indicated the pillar with a small red knob on it. The knob appeared to be able to move around the pillar as well as across the pillar, however the track across the pillar had a large nail jammed in it, meaning that the knob could, in reality, only move around the pillar.
"I reckon," guessed Jordan, "that that makes the platform in there go up and down." He pushed the knob in one direction. It wouldn't move, so he pushed it in the other direction. With a click, the knob made a full circle around the pillar, and the platform inside the lava chamber descended with a clatter to meet the floor as the lava drained away rapidly, leaving the room empty and apparently safe.
"Shall we go in?" Jordan led the way down the ladder into the entrance chamber, where a small switch was set into the wall. Jordan pressed on the switch and the wall split in two, opening out into the lava chamber that now had no lava in it. The metal platform sat waiting on the ground next to them, and on it stood a second pillar, identical to the pillar in the room above. Jordan hopped onto the platform and turned to Maddy.
"Coming, Mop? I imagine it's safer up here than on the floor." Needing little encouragement, Maddy joined Jordan on the platform as he twiddled the knob again, causing the platform to slide smoothly upwards, stopping about halfway up the wall.
Maddy, who chanced tapping Jordan on the shoulder, managed to convey what she wanted to say to Jordan. "If we get right up there, we should be able to turn the fan on. That way we might be able to fill the airship."
Jordan nodded, and fiddled with the knob some more. The platform slid upwards again, and as it did so, the floor of the chamber flooded with lava again. This had the benefit of suddenly throwing an eerie orange light onto everything in the room, including a large painting on the wall closest to the platform. The painting depicted what appeared to be a war, or remnants of a war, whilst two figures rode away on what appeared to be an airship or gondola of some description. One of the men on the ground resembled Saavedro. More disturbingly, however, the two men in the gondola appeared to be Sirrus and Achenar.
"My God," murmured Maddy, "what did those two bastards do?"
When you are little more than a month old, bacon tends to be quite difficult to eat. This, however, is of no consequence, as you probably wouldn't like bacon at that age anyway. Toast, too, is difficult to eat at that age. Brittany, therefore, had the foresight to cook something slightly more appropriate for Jane and Yeesha, so that they didn't feel left out when the adults were eating breakfast. Catherine remained blissfully unaware of Atrus' previous failed attempt to make breakfast.
"Atrus," said Brittany, breaking a silence that had only been punctuated by Jane and Yeesha, "do you know a man who always wears black, by any chance?"
"I've met a man who wears black," replied Atrus slowly. "Can't say that I know him, per se, but I have met him, I think... I can't for the life of me remember where, though."
"Only he dropped by at two this morning and said to say hello to you," said Brittany. "He seemed to know you."
"Yes..." Atrus scratched his beard, evidently in an effort to remember.
"We met him whilst restoring the cavern," cut in Catherine. "I've no idea where he came from. After the disaster on Sedona he was waiting in the library on Chroma'agana."
"Oh yes, of course," said Atrus. "He offered us help with the restoration, but we declined politely, as we had plenty of manpower as it was. He was very polite about it... didn't seem offended at all. He just wished us good luck and left."
"We met him on Riven, in a manner of speaking," said Brittany thoughtfully. "What did he say his name was?"
"He didn't," replied Atrus, "although we did ask."
"Typical..." muttered Brittany. "Well, he said hello."
The newly-inflated airship bobbed quietly and invitingly in front of the three travellers, but they were busy discussing the painting on the wall of the lava chamber. That, combined with the content of Saavedro's journal, was enough to make them think that there was something else going on here – something that they had been cast into without really knowing what was going on.
"I think we can say one thing for sure," Jordan concluded, after they had all run out of things to say. "Saavedro hates Sirrus and Achenar because they did something to him a long time ago."
"And," added Rachel, "he is now trying to get revenge on them by taking Atrus' book and expecting him to come after it, rather than us."
"That quite possibly means," Maddy piped up, "that he will be rather irate when he sees us arrive on Narayan instead of Atrus."
Nobody expanded on that; instead, they all crowded into the airship which had waited so patiently for them (but which was clearly only designed to seat one), and one of them pulled on the lone control on the dashboard, causing the ship to slide forward. It followed the river upstream, through the narrow mouth of the canyon, around a tight bend and directly over the waterwheel (something which made Rachel close her eyes briefly), before docking at a small strip of metal just in front of the small island. All that the strip of metal appeared to house was a large lever set into the ground.
Jordan squeezed himself out of the ship and walked slowly over to the lever. After receiving no protest from the others in the ship, he pushed the lever forward.
There was a rattling clank from within the depths of whatever was below the lever, and the ship began to inch forward, dragging the strip of metal around with it. The ship moved only about a foot, but that was enough to push down on a small switch below the ship. There was a crackle of electricity, and Jordan retreated to the safety of the ship in case the metal suddenly became live. What actually happened was even more bizarre.
Power darted across the lines running from the waterwheel directly into the small island, and a rumbling noise eminated from the island. A long crack appeared at the base of the island, about two feet above the waterline, and extended completely around the island. The top part of the island then proceeded to lift into the air, trailing wires and dropping dust, as a large amount of rubble rose up into the air under the floating island and drifted there as the echoing of the rumble died away, leaving three observers stunned.
"Well..." said Maddy after a few seconds of silence, "you don't see that every day."
The airship took its passengers just a little further – up to the floating island, where its guidewire ended at the small stone building. Disembarking, the three travellers approached the only really interesting feature of the island – the previously locked door into the stone building. The previously blank indicator light on the door was now glowing bright green, presumably indicating that the door was now unlocked – a guess that was confirmed when Jordan pulled the handle on the door and it swung open to reveal a large hole in the ground leading down through the island, ringed with ladder rungs to allow easy descent.
The three of them descended the rungs to a small door at the bottom of the island. Rachel turned a small wheel at the top of the door, which opened with a small squeak, revealing a dizzying view down to the base of the island. The three of them, though, were more interested by the pattern created by the floating debris – it was very distinctive, forming a very obvious shape.
Jordan, balancing carefully on the rails and supported by Rachel, extracted his journal from his back pocket and his pen from his top pocket. Quickly, he drew an accurate sketch of the pattern formed by the debris, before stowing his journal and pen back in his pockets.
"Let's get out of here," muttered Maddy, "before I throw up." She grabbed at the wall of the shaft to steady herself, and her luck made itself evident once again.
The panel which Maddy's hand fell upon slid backwards, causing her to wobble. Rachel grabbed her to stop her falling. A small book stand slid smoothly out of the newly-uncovered hole in the shaft wall and turned so that the J'nanin linking book faced the three of them.
"Maddy," muttered Rachel as she opened the book, "trust you to do that."