Episode CXLIX - The Secret Isle

Ellis was astonished when he was told the story of how they had survived the ships of the Lakhmaspawn.  The Former Baron had explained it as he lay there on the deck, feeling tired, his arm numb but for a faint tingling sensation.

"And you think this... forcefield-"

"-it was much more like a wall than it was a field, dear boy-"

"-or whatever it is-"

"-In fact it was entirely passive, exerting no direct force whatsoever-"

"-was set up long ago to prevent these things from reaching the obelisk?"

"Yes.  I'd love to know how they did it.  It could save us a lot of time in the future." he scratched his head beneath his hat, then raised a finger excitedly.  "Stopwall!  That's what we could call it!"

"We can only hope that whatever is powering the barrier continues to do so now that it's under direct attack," Rockspark said in his sobering, gravel voice.  He had just come back from a tour of the deck, sorting the dead and the mortally wounded from those who might stand a chance.  Miss Barkcastle was overseeing their transfer below deck.  His taloned hands were still slick with Ellis' blood.

"Well it has lasted this long," the Former Baron replied, "so we can only hope.  But you're quite right.  Whatever we need to do here, we had best hurry!"

Ellis struggled to his feet and then did his best to help clean the deck, removing shrapnel and debris, whilst the blood was washed away.  Corpses taken down into the hold, until there was time to give them a proper burial and those with the skill attended to the wounded.  Whilst he cleaned he watched the cavern drift by as, slowly and carefully, they made their way into the heart of island.  Eventually the natural rock walls were replaced by artificial ones, made of great blocks of red granite, carved with details which resembled hieroglyphics, although they were never quite the same as the ones Ellis remembered from a school visit to the British Museum which almost certainly never happened.  He wondered, for the first time in quite a while, why there were so many similarities between Shadow and Earth.  Did such coincidences arise naturally, via a sort of inter-dimensional zeitgeist or was there a relationship between the two worlds, a sharing of ideas somehow.  The thought niggled in the back of his mind like an itch waiting to be scratched.

The assumedly man-made tunnel did not stretch on for long, ending instead at a spacious dock just a couple of hundred metres in.  The Absolution was brought to a halt, its wheezing, fuel starved engine given a rest and ropes were cast out onto the stone jetty to begin tying her up.

"We'll need to split up," the Former Baron said once those who were not required for medical or repair duties had assembled on dry land.  "Judging by the ruins on the surface of this island, there is a substantial complex here and we do not know exactly what we are looking for, so I propose we break into small teams, say twos or threes, head off in different directions and report back here in one hour."

As Siren elected to stay with the ship and despite her obvious torment, Ellis could not bear to be aboard a moment longer, he found himself grouped with the Former Baron and Gulliver.  It felt almost like old times, except that his arm was still numb and tingling and Gulliver seemed even more morose than usual.  As a consequence they began their exploration in silence, but it wasn’t long before the Former Baron began commentating their every slightest discovery.

“These hieroglyphs are all in the style of the district of Dunewall, you know,” he said conversationally as they passed through tunnels rising ever upwards.  “They must have been fairly instrumental in constructing the obelisks.  There is very little documentation about it, however.  The Lakhma cult may have had something to do with that over the years.”

“How long do you think they’ve been conspiring to bring Lakhma back?” Ellis asked in reply.

“Oh, I would imagine ever since he/she was banished from Shadow.  Who knows what influence they have had over the centuries?”

“And what about the creatures on those evil-looking ships?”

“The Lakhmaspawn?”

“If that’s what they are called.”

“Oh, they are produced by Lakhma his/herself, from his/her mucousy body.  They fall from the sky in shells like meteors and hatch within minutes.  They will have been multiplying during the months we’ve been in hiding, concentrated in the places where Lakhma feels they are most useful.”

“So we’ll encounter more of them?”

“Almost certainly and we won’t always have a Stopwall to keep them at bay.”

“Excellent.”

“Isn’t it just?”

Such intermittent conversation continued, with Gulliver plodding along in silence beside them, until they reached a level of the complex high enough to open out into one of the structures they had seen when approaching the island.  Ellis saw the gloomy daylight streaming in through glassless windows and a hollow doorway and felt compelled to approach.  Beyond lay the lake, a perfectly mirrored starscape in the middle of the cloud-shaded day, speckled with urban isles - most smaller than the one they were on - and rimmed with tall mountains and deep cut valleys, all laced and iced and crusted and filled with the bustling streets of the endless, eternal city that was Shadow.

“It’s just so huge,” he said.  No matter how much he saw of this vast, yet claustrophobic, grimy yet gleaming world, it never seemed to diminish in its infinite variety, its craziness, its incomprehensible complexity.

“It’s nothin’ compared with the ocean,” Gulliver said, stepping up beside him.  “I miss all that freedom.”

“I meant the city.”

“So did I.”

“And no one knows why it reflects the stars, like that,” the Former Baron said as he joined them. “I mean it.  It has Hypostatick Philosophers everywhere completely baffled.  They thought there might be some sort of ancient machine which projected the night sky on the surface, or which allowed rays of starlight to pass through interference and cloud cover to create a perfect reflection, but no one has ever found such a thing.  They’ve sent divers down, dredged the bottom, explored all the islands they could reach and still, nothing.  It’s one of Shadow’s great mysteries.”

He gave one of his thin smiles and rubbed his hands together as if to say, ‘and I fully intend to solve it one day’, but then his gaze was caught by activity a little closer to the island’s cliffs.

“Look, there are our Lakhmaspawn!  There appear to be another three of their tentacular vessels now.  I swear, they’re worse than the rotfly on my Great Aunt Betilda’s carnivorous laceflowers.”

“They appear to be testin’ the defences,” Gulliver added glumly.

“I guess that means we have no time to waste, then,” said Ellis.

“Oh my, yes!  Shall we explore a little deeper?”

They passed through many such chambers over the surface of the island, with many such vistas of the inexplicable Lake Nightglass and the surrounding city.  Each time they looked out they saw more Lakhmaspawn probing the limits of the island’s forcefield and once there was even a tentative tentacle lowered through the clouds, only to pull back, as if stung, after hitting the invisible barrier somewhere far above them.  Despite the lack of success, Ellis found the sight unsettling and they advanced through each new room a little faster than the one before it.

Eventually they seemed to have covered most of that side of the isle and the Former Baron gestured for them to begin descending.  He explained that whilst what they were looking for was likely much further beneath them, it often paid to explore a place more thoroughly first and Ellis got the sense that the old philosopher had been paying attention to little details on the surface which had eluded him.  Certainly he had often stopped to admire the heiroglyphs, although he made no further comments about whatever it was he was seeing in them.

The hour passed sooner than Ellis had been expecting and it was the Former Baron who, fob watch in hand, alerted them that they must return to the dock at once.  Ellis and Gulliver obliged in silence.

The others were already there, and they seemed to be waiting rather impatiently.

“We’ve found it!” cried one over-excited young crewmember as they approached, “the door!”

“I don’t recall ever saying that we were looking for a door,” the Former Baron muttered a little testily as they crossed the final few metres to join the waiting crowd.

“We found it five levels down,” Harker said, once the trio had come to a halt, “a massive door, covered in hieroglyphs and opened by some complex hypostatick mechanism.  We couldn’t figure it out.”

“Oh, a mechanism, now that’s much more interesting.”

Ellis resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the Former Baron and instead joined the weary, yet eager crowd as they made their way to see this door.  It didn’t take them long to reach and once it was in sight Ellis found he was very glad to have made the journey, for it was truly magnificent.

The two massive doors of gold-plated, hieroglyph-carved stone lay at the end of a long, wide tunnel, clearly designed to make the portal at the end seem all the more impressive.  To either side of the tunnel, turning it into a sort of avenue, stood a line of proud statues, intricately carved and painted in ebony and gold to resemble animal-headed deities, much like the gods of ancient Egypt, only with all the jackals replaced with barrowhounds and the crocodiles with velocignaths.  They seemed to grow taller and more impressive as the ling approached the doorway, creating a false perspective which made the doors seem ten times bigger than they already were, at the end of a corridor a mile long.  Then, when the statues ran out, the corridor opened into a sort of antechamber filled with glittering, golden machinery: flywheels and gears covered in glyphs, pulleys on gold chains, each weighted down with an elaborate stone cartouche.

The machines were clearly designed to open the doors in the least efficient way possible, for they were connected through tortuous mechanical pathways to a series of enormous gearwheels sticking out of slits in the walls to either side and next to these were a series of keyholes, each identified with a symbol and beneath them a series of canopic jars, each styled after a different scared beast.

Ellis thought it was impressive.  The Former Baron, however, was practically drooling.

“We tried to work out what we needed to do,” Harker said, standing before the mechanism.  Even in abject failure, he still somehow, managed to look dashing and heroic.  Ellis tried not to hate him.

“Well, it is really complex-looking,” he replied, “I mean, I wouldn’t know where to begin and I’m sure even the Former Baron must be scratching his-”

Whilst Harker and Ellis had been speaking, Von Spektr had taken a quick dash back up the avenue to glance at the statues and now he was marching back with such a look of determination that all Ellis could do was trail off and watch.  The old philosopher approach the first load of jars, smashed the one which resembled a velocignath and another with a head like a Grinder, then, picking two pieces of twisted metal from the eggshell remains, pushed them together to form a key.  The key went into one of the locks (the symbol above it resembled a cross between an ampersand and a drawing by Picasso) and there was a solid click, followed by a series of rhythmic thunks, but the Former Baron was not hanging around.  He was already striding across the doorway to the other jars, smashing another two (Ellis thought one was some kind of bird), formed a second key and clicked it into it’s equally unintelligible lock.

Click.  Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.

The doors started to open.

“But…” Ellis began.

“How on Shadow did you…?” Harker continued.

“I’m not sure I even want to know…” muttered Gulliver.

“Oh, it was quite simple, really,” the Former Baron said with one of his enthusiastic, thin smiles, “it’s all based on a well-known fable from Dunewall, of course, about a merchant (whose patron deity resembles a velocignath, for obvious reasons) who chases a golden treasurebeak to an oasis in a deserted part of the city, but what he doesn’t know is that that same oasis is the preferred mating spot of a pod of Grinders and then-”

“Yes, I see it now,” said Ellis.

“Of course,” added Harker.

“I definitely don’t want to know…” muttered Gulliver.

“Well, the doors are open now, anyway,” the Former Baron said, with just a hint of huffiness, “so I suppose we’d better find out if this obelisk thing is all it’s cracked up to be.”

For once, everyone agreed, but it was decided that it would be best if only a handful went in to the actual chamber of the obelisk, not least because the Former Baron was complaining of not being able to think with so many pirates grumbling around him.  So, the party which ventured forth through the massive doors consisted of the Former Baron, Lord Blood Dragon (who, as was his habit, had been watching in silence from the back), Gulliver and Ellis.

Together they stepped through into the chamber beyond, and then the doors shut with a suddenness that took them all by surprise, and they were plunged into darkness.

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