“Are you really sure you want to do this?” said Tarfon. “I mean, you said that Shaa explicitly told you not to make a move until you’d had a chance to discuss it with him.”
“He never could have thought I’d have this chance,” Leen told her, “and anyway, he’s not my boss, I’m not his slave. We were just thrown together, that’s all, and -”
“But I thought he knew a lot more about these things than you do, and a lot more about Max in particular, and that’s why -”
“I think I see light up ahead,” announced Leen, in a tone of voice intended to declare definitively that this discussion was over and the subject closed. She did not want to be reminded again that Tarfon was most probably right, and that she herself was substantially out of her league and in the process of doing something quite unwise. In contrast to the usual state of the affairs for this sort of thing, her course of action’s misguided nature had nothing to do with the outcome. Well... to be fair, that wasn’t entirely true. The sheer scope of her folly might not be known unless she happened to succeed.
But Max wasn’t a greater hazard to the general welfare than the Scapula... was he? Certainly not. Only his good friends and closest associates, who had known him for who knew how many years through situations she didn’t even want to guess at, thought so. And she, herself? Clearly what she was doing was absurd, even granted that she had these unfamiliar... feelings toward him. Absurd? No, that was really most unlikely. Leen knew she was the most rational of persons. Everyone had always told her so, and they couldn’t all be wrong, could they? Especially since she had usually heard the assessment delivered in despair, just after an argument where she had been urged to be more human and less a creature of cold intellect, and just before the arguee (often a close relative) threw up their hands and stalked off in disgust muttering under their breath. It was not as though her friends and relations had been appraising her thus in order to flatter her. If this was as she had always been, then, surely a few... feelings wouldn’t completely remake her, couldn’t rob of her capacity for analysis and her common sense.
No, of course not. So it must be only a delusion that that was the way she felt.
In Leen’s favor on the scale of rationality versus dementia, she had given Tarfon the option of excusing herself from the enterprise. Leen had to acknowledge that Tarfon had been quite right to call her on that, though. “What,” Tarfon had said with resignation, “wait here in your Archives when you don’t come back, and starve to death? At least if I go with you there’s a chance I’ll end up in a cell somewhere with food, instead of dead out of hand to serve kids as a nasty bedtime cautionary tale.”
So here they were instead, far along the hidden passage the computer had revealed to them linking the Archives with the nearby dungeon; a quixotic librarian and a dragooned innocent. Squinting ahead past her lantern at the pale smear of light against the tunnel wall, Leen stepped carefully through another pair of side-path turnoffs and edged sideways into the narrow passage, straight into another tunnel-spanning floor-to-ceiling tangle of dusty cobwebs. She swept the stuff out of her eyes and cleared her nose and mouth enough to breathe but refrained from cursing; it was best to retain a stoical attitude as an example to her reluctant accomplice. “We seem to be on the right path, at least,” Tarfon muttered, examining the sketch-map they had drawn from the image of the computer’s display. “What luck.”
“You were the one who was appalled that Max was locked up,” Leen hissed at her.
“That was abstract.”
“Shh!” Stoical; remember, stoical. She could see the source of the light, now - a sliver at head-height where the cover had been incompletely replaced in front of a spy-hole on the blank end wall. At least the walls expanded out enough here to let her inhale without making her back and breasts scrape against the rock; the space was even generous enough to turn around or take a step to the side. Leen hooded her lantern, slid the cover fully aside with a low nerve-wracking creak, and applied her eye to the crevice.
The flickering light was cast by a torch in a sconce on the wall opposite the peephole. Next to the torch was the sort of thick wooden door studded with bars and nails and hasps one expected from a serious dungeon. Bulking humped and angular in front of the door was what appeared in the uncertain light to be some sort of torture rack, with the shape of a prostrate body reclining in limp disarray along its inclined surface. “Max?” Leen hissed through the spy-hole.
The body failed to stir. Had the person been flailed? Knocked insensible through blows to the head? Passed out through loss of blood or merely generalized agony? The current government administration - of which Leen was, to be frank, a part - held an enlightened attitude toward the treatment of those who found themselves within its grasp. Accordingly, torture was supposed to be entirely proscribed, but on the other hand where there were dungeons, and cells never accountable to the rule of light, it stood to reason that anything could happen. “Is there a door here?” Leen muttered, feeling about the wall.
“Try your other hand,” suggested Tarfon in a low whisper.
Her other hand? - oh, an interesting idea. She was still wearing on that hand her signet of office. As she transferred the lantern from her ring hand to the other, one of her fingers brushed the top of the signet, and she noted that the ring felt damp; actually more slimy, really. When she brought up the ring, furthermore, she noted in the thin beam that escaped the lantern’s hood a thin film of some sort of gray goo covering its surface. Sorcery she was used to; goo, on the contrary, was something to be scrubbed clean, but on the off chance that the substance had seeped through some cunning vent from the ring’s interior, rather than being something noxious she had scraped against on the way through the tunnel, she touched it to the rock wall anyway, then moved it about on the surface. She was rewarded by ... nothing. No rumble of hidden machinery, no spinning of cunning doors, no illuminatory flash revealing the path to a new exit. Nothing. Except... why did a line snaking down the wall appear to be bubbling?
Beneath the foaming trace, a deeper crevice was now coming into sight, a crevice outlining what could only be the shape of a door. Was it too absurd to hypothesize that the oracle back in the Archives had relayed a message to her ring, which was now passing it in some organic, half-alive fashion to the rock itself, which was now responding by recreating for her an ancient passageway? Surely this was not the sort of hypothesis in which one would traffic on a daily basis, but still it did seem to fit the facts. Examining the face of the rock a bit more closely, Leen now noted how certain patches of moss or lichen so drab as to have otherwise escaped the attention of anyone but a fanatically dedicated naturalist were squirming in a veritable frenzy themselves, exuding from their extended runners a dull ooze that appeared to be the source of the fizzling active principle.
It did seem like a lot of trouble to go to, though. Why not just provide a standard sort of secret door? True, masking the door by making it literally part of continuous rock was certainly a permanent way of keeping security intact and making sure that only someone who knew the trick could sneak through, but - really. Unless -
Who had built these secret passages? And using what means of construction? The network of creep-spaces indicated by the oracular computer was amazingly extensive, revealing the palace complex to be a virtual honeycomb of hidden byways. How had the oracle become so knowledgeable about the tunnel system’s ins and outs? Leen had a sudden, mind-boggling vision of hidden rivers of gray sludge chewing their mysterious way through the foundations of the city, under the command and guidance of the enigmatic machine she had uncovered in her own lair. If her vision was authentic, the potentialities were extensive... and the power implicitly wielded by the oracle distressing vast. More, in the ancient legends of the thinking machines, they were always represented as the bound slaves of their greater masters, with no initiative or capability for independent volition. If the lore also ran true, then, to whom did this computer report? Could anyone with her ring and the right answers to its questions become its commander?