Page 23 of Paladin's Hope
Up close, the wall was cut with many small holes, an elaborate filigree. The surface itself was not smooth, but had a swirling texture, shapes repeating themselves in dozens of variations, dripping with lozenges and soft-sided hexagons and sagging many-armed spirals.
“Did someone carve this?” said Piper, half to himself.
“That’s what I can’t decide,” said Thomas, clearly excited to share his enthusiasm with someone else. “Dedicated artisans have carved stranger things. But it doesn’t look carved, does it?”
Piper shook his head. “It looks…grown.”
“Exactly!”
“The clocktaurs were like that,” said Galen. “Covered in thousands of little gears. But nobody ever carved the gears, they just grew like that. Their insides were full of gears that actually worked, but then the outside was crusted with them too. As if the wonder engine just had an idea of gears and kept building it outward without stopping.”
Piper flashed him an admiring look and despite his nerves, it warmed Galen’s heart. And other places.
“Yes,” said the doctor. “Yes, of course. The ancients sometimes just grew things into a shape. If you asked a wonder engine to grow a wall, and didn’t care what it looked like, maybe you’d get something like this.”
“Reminds a gnole of bees,” said Earstripe. He abandoned his doorway reluctantly and came to stand beside them. He tapped one claw on the ivory and it made a soft tok! sound.
“Bees?”
“Burrow keeps bees.” Earstripe gazed up at the strange wall. “Make a…a…” He spoke a gnole word, ears flicking. “A gnole doesn’t know human words. Bees make honey, make more bees, in sheets?”
“A hive?” hazarded Galen.
“Hive is a bee’s house’s, yes?” Earstripe grimaced. “Bees make a hive in a tree, or a gnole makes a box for a hive. Inside the hive, though? Sheets of honey. Wax. If sheets are in a box, sheets are the shape of the box. If sheets are in a tree, sheets are the shape of a tree. Still little bee cells, over and over still the same, but fits a different shape.”
Piper was already nodding. “Like sheets of honeycomb. The same repeating patterns.” He ran his fingertips over a pattern of lozenges. “Only instead of wax, whatever they used made ivory. They just had to build a frame and let the…the ivory bees…fill it.”
“What kind of insect makes ivory instead of wax?” asked Galen, bemused.
“Not one we know of. And this is all just a conjecture.” Piper grinned at him, and it occurred to Galen that the doctor was actually enjoying this. I’m glad someone is, I suppose. “But imagine if there were. Or perhaps not insects, perhaps something like…like…” He made grasping motions with his free hand, as if trying to pluck a thought out of the air.
The wall quivered. Everyone stepped back hurriedly, except for Thomas. As they watched, the gigantic blade retracted smoothly into the ceiling with only a soft whistle of air. Two narrow flaps that had been pushed aside snapped back into place, leaving the ceiling marked only by a narrow line that blended in with the rest of the markings on the walls.
The far door opened.
“There we go,” said Thomas. He made for the open door.
“Are there more of these rooms?” asked Galen, struggling to keep his voice from rising. He could feel the black tide around his feet, tugging at him, whispering that there was danger, and he fought it down. There’s danger, but it’s nothing you can fight with a sword. This is like crossing a narrow bridge or skirting a cliff face. Running mad with a sword will not help anyone and will probably get you killed. The tide backed off grudgingly.
“Oh yes,” said Thomas. “At least six that I’ve been able to reach. Don’t worry, it’s all quite safe. Well, as long as you stand in the right place, anyway. And the traps won’t bother you going back the other way at all. We’ll just have to wait for the doors to open. In fact, that click you heard? If you listen very closely, you can hear a kind of soft whirring right before the click. I think that’s the mechanism firing up.”
Stepping under the line of the blade was utterly nerve wracking. Galen focused on his breathing. You have charged into a room full of enemies with only a knife before, he told himself. That was more dangerous than this.
Yes, but you had a chance of killing those enemies. How do you kill a wall made of the hardest stuff you know?
During the Clocktaur War, they had tried any number of ways of dispatching the clocktaurs. Sledgehammers worked if you had enough men and enough sledgehammers, but you always broke dozens of hammers doing it, and the men wielding those hammers said their shoulders were never the same again. Divine blacksmiths of the Forge God ultimately proved the most effective, probably because their god had a certain sympathy for the joints of His chosen.
In the end, if you could dig in the dirt, the best method turned out to be to dig a giant pit and then just roll massive stones down onto the clocktaurs. Siege towers were swiftly repurposed into ramps that could be dragged to the edge of the pits. It took many, many stones.
When the Dreaming God’s paladins cleaned up the remaining clocktaurs in the years that followed, they went out with the Saint of Steel’s paladins and a few of the Forge God’s people. Galen and his brothers dropped immense weighted nets on the clocktaurs and the smiths went for the legs. You just had to get them down long enough for the Dreaming God’s paladins to get hands on them and get the demon out of them.
“Right!” said Thomas. They passed through the door and into another corridor, identical to the first one, except for the lack of barrels. “Now, the next room—”
“We’re going into more of these rooms?” Galen was not pleased about this at all. “Is there some point to this?”
Thomas looked briefly stumped. “Don’t you want to see them?”
“Are you asking if I want to stand in rooms where giant blades fall on my head?”