The mud around the ancient archway dried faster than anyone expected.
By the fourth morning of the drain tube’s operation, the Sunken Basin had lost seven feet of water. What remained was a shallow, sluggish pool gathered in the deepest hollow, ringed by wide benches of grey clay that hardened under the pale autumn sun into stiff, crumbly shale.
At the northern margin of the basin, the great portal stood fully exposed to the daylight for the first time in nine hundred years.
It was an imposing monument of pre-cataclysmic civil building. Two massive stone pylons of dark green red stone, each six feet square and thirty feet high, supported a flattened three-centered arch of dressed granite cut stone. Above the arch, carved into the stone with clean, steady care, ran a sharp-angled frieze of linked runic bands.
Between the pylons hung two huge leaves of cast glowing-bronze, each ten inches thick and twenty feet tall.
They were shut fast.
A foot of dried river silt was packed against the doorstep, binding the lower bronze flanges to the threshold stone like hardened mortar. Green rust coated the metal, streaked with white bitter-salt crusts from hundreds of years of stale marsh water.
Giles Croft walked the threshold with his folding wooden ruler. He scraped away dried silt with the tip of his boot.
“No load-bearing warping in the top door beam,” Giles said, inspecting the stonework joints. “Settlement is less than a quarter-inch across twenty-four feet of clear span. The Founding Age builders understood foundation bearing pressures better than modern church master builders.”
Master Borin Bronze-Lung stood ten paces back. His hands were pressed against his temples, his copper-braided beard trembling with holy dread.
“The Gate of the Deep Road,” Borin whispered, his voice shaking like an ungreased pulley. “The Great Seal of Karak-Varn. The high crags shook and the Black Fens flooded during the Cataclysm. Then, the High Elders threw the master levers from within and sealed the kingdom behind seventy arm-lengths of enchanted bronze. For eight hundred years, our clan has walked the northern blizzard trails over the ice cols, losing three caravans every winter to the frost-crevasses.”
Giles crouched by the central meeting seam of the bronze leaves. He tapped the metal with the brass metal ring of his rule.
“There are no enchanted levers here, Borin,” Giles said. “It’s a standard double-leaf swing gate on pivot pin pivot pins. The lower hinges are jammed with dried clay and calcium-carbonate deposits. The brass sleeves have suffered electric-shock rusting against the iron pintles, causing the bearing faces to seize.”
Borin stared at him, blinking rapidly. “Seized? The Great Seal of the Ancestors is... Jammed?”
“Fully seized,” Giles said. “If you don’t grease a hinge for eight hundred years, metal oxidizes. That isn’t divine judgment. It’s a failure of basic town lubrication.”
Lady Millicent arrived in a light carriage driven by Toby Karr, the wheels bumping over the dry clay benches. She stepped down onto a square of carpet laid by a runner. Then she opened her tally-book.
“If that tunnel leads where Borin claims,” Millicent said, adjusting her glasses, “we can bypass the entire northern tax barrier kept by Duchess Rowena’s frontier court guards. A wagon of salt that currently costs six sovereigns to haul through the blizzards could be moved for twelve pence in animal fat and axle grease.”
“And the coal,” Borin added, his chest swelling with dwarven pride. “The high seams of Karak-Thurn produce hard coal that burns without flame or smoke! We’ve had to leave forty thousand tons in the mountain pits because we couldn’t haul it over the crags!”
“Then let’s open the door,” Giles said.
Master Duncan Stone-Splitter stepped forward with four stonemasons carrying long steel scrapers and wire brooms. “We’ll clear the doorstep first, Lord Giles. The mud has baked hard as brick.”
“Don’t strike the bronze with chisels,” Giles warned. “Glowing-bronze can be brittle under shock loads after hundreds of years of low-heat full-body VR. Scrape the clay flush to the stone, then flush the groove with boiling water.”
Sister Teresa’s new students rolled up two iron cooking pots of boiling vinegar wash, ladling the steaming liquid directly into the doorstep channel. The acid hissed against the limestone silt. It dissolved the carbonate crusts in a froth of white bubbles.
Meanwhile, Giles prepared the penetrant.
He mixed two gallons of rendered fish oil with a gallon of stone spirits distilled from Mistress Pippa’s peat-tar retorts. That added a pint of powdered graphite.
“What manner of holy oil is that?” Borin asked, sniffing the pungent, rotten-egg concoction with a grimace.
“A seventy-thirty piercing blend,” Giles said. “Low water’s skin, high tiny blood vessel creep. The stone spirit carries the fish oil and graphite deep into the micro-fissures between the pintle and the bronze sleeve. Fill the hand-pump, Toby.”
Toby Karr pumped the brass metal tube, spraying the dark, greasy fluid directly into the upper and lower pivot sockets. The oil seeped into the rusted through seams. It hissed faintly as it displaced moisture trapped deep within the metal.
Giles checked his pocket watch. “Give it twenty minutes to penetrate. Caleb, set up the lever rig.”
Master Caleb Thorne-Wood and six joiners dragged two thirty-foot beams of seasoned white oak to the portal.
They braced the butt ends of the timbers against the red stone pylons, slipping the forged iron claws of two heavy cargo jacks between the bronze meeting stile and the center threshold stop.
“Five-to-one clockwork advantage,” Giles calculated aloud, jotting the vector lines on the margin of his blueprint. “Two high-pressure-screw jacks exerting twelve thousand pounds of level thrust at the center line will generate sixty thousand foot-pounds of torque at the pivot pins. That exceeds the calculated static friction threshold by forty percent.”
Captain Kenneth Drake deployed twenty spearmen across the apron in a wide semi-circle. Their shields were locked and their iron points lowered toward the dark seam.
“Kenneth,” Giles said, glancing up. “Are the weapons really necessary for an unsealing operation?”
“My lord,” Kenneth said steadily, his hand resting on his sword handle knob, “an eight-hundred-year-old door can keep things out. It can also keep things in. If there are ghouls or cave-drakes behind that bronze, I prefer them to meet six feet of cold ash-wood before they meet your transit.”
“Fair point,” Giles conceded. “Though if a cave-drake has survived eight hundred years in a sealed tunnel without an air-flow shaft, its living metabolism would defy every law of heat laws.”
“I don’t know heat laws, my lord,” Kenneth said. “I know teeth.”
Giles turned to the jack crew. “Take up the slack, Caleb.”
Four men seized the iron tommy-bars of the screw jacks.
Screeech.
The screw threads bit into the bronze plates. The heavy oak beams bowed slightly under the huge strain, their grain creaking like the ribs of a sailing ship in a gale.
“More,” Giles said, watching the pivot sleeve.
The men threw their full weight onto the bars. Veins bulged across Caleb’s forearms.
For ten seconds, nothing moved. The bronze portal stood as silent and unmoving as the granite cliffs above it.
Then, from deep within the left hinge socket, came a sharp, explosive sound like a pistol shot.
CRACK.
Borin flinched, clutching his beard. “The seal!”
“The oxide bond just fractured,” Giles said calmly. “Keep turning.”
Screeech... GROOOOAN.
With a deep, ringing shaking that shook the dry clay beneath their boots, the left bronze leaf shifted. It moved barely an inch. But a thin ribbon of black shadow opened along the center seam.
A rush of cold, dry air pealed out of the darkness. Air that smelled of deep mountain stone, dry coal dust, and ancient copper melted rock waste, entirely free of the marsh’s rot.
THUD-CLATTER.
The iron locking bar inside the gate, freed from its rusted detent by the opening movement, tumbled down its internal track.
“She’s free!” Caleb shouted, hauling on the beam. “She’s swinging!”
Six laborers threw their shoulders against the oak push-poles.
With a long, musical hum that echoed across the entire Sunken Basin, the twenty-foot bronze gates swung inward. It folded back into recessed wall pockets carved into the solid rock.
Borin Bronze-Lung stood motionless, staring into the yawning mouth of the tunnel.
Before them stretched the Khaz-Drak Under-Pass.
It wasn’t a rough-hewn mine adit. It was a royal underground thoroughfare, twenty-four feet wide, with a vaulted ceiling of dressed granite ribs soaring eighteen feet overhead.
The roadway was paved with spotless slabs of dark stone, crowned toward side drainage channels that were bone-dry. Every fifty yards, bronze lamp brackets projected from the stone walls, their oil cups long empty but their fittings gleaming beneath hundreds of years of dry dust.
The road stretched into the mountain in a dead-straight line, vanishing into the cool, black depths of the continent’s spine.
“Eighteen days over the blizzard peaks,” Borin whispered, tears welling in his red-rimmed eyes as he looked down the smooth stone floor. “Reduced to a flat afternoon stroll. We... We can roll beer carts through the mountain.”
“We can roll four-ton freight wagons,” Giles corrected. He stepped onto the dark rock pavers and inspecting the clearance. “The arch radius allows two standard cargo drays to pass each other with eighteen inches of lateral clearance. And look at the grade. It’s a nonstop point-five percent incline. Perfect for gravity drainage.”
CLANK. CLANK. CLANK.
From deep within the black throat of the tunnel, far beyond the reach of the autumn sunlight, came a sound.
It was rhythmic, heavy, and metal.
Kenneth Drake’s voice dropped to a razor-sharp whisper. “Shields up. Form on me.”
Twenty spearmen closed ranks, their iron-rimmed shields locking with a solid wooden clap. Kenneth stepped into the center of the road, his ten-foot pacing rod held low like a boar spear.
The sound grew louder. It was the timed together stamp of iron-shod boots, with the low, snorting wheeze of heavy beasts.
Out of the darkness, lit up by the daylight pouring through the opened gates, rode a vanguard of six armored warriors.
They were broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, and mounted atop massive, shaggy boars with tusks banded in forged steel. Each rider wore full suits of dark, oil-cooled chainmail and iron helmets with heavy cheek-guards.
At the head of the column rode a dwarf with a huge braided grey beard tucked neatly into his belt.
Across his chest hung a pair of heavy brass measuring tongs nearly two feet long, their silvered scales glinting in the morning glare. In his right hand, he held a notched iron war-pick, resting casually against his saddle-bow.
The boar snorted, pawing the clean dark rock pavers with an iron-shod hoof.
The lead dwarf reined in his mount ten paces from Kenneth’s shield wall. His fierce, slate-grey eyes swept over the spearmen, over the drain tube pipes on the ridge. Then he finally settled on Giles Croft, who stood holding a folding wooden ruler and a grease-stained rag.
The dwarf scowled, his thick brows knitting together like iron wire.
“Who in the name of the seven deep hearths,” the dwarf roared in an accent as thick as mountain granite, “just used fish grease on the Royal Gates of Karak-Varn?!”