“I wouldn’t do that again, if I were you, Your Majesty.” The Patryn spoke through gritted teeth. “I don’t know what’s out there, but I have the feeling someone heard you.”
Bane, eyes wide, had shrunk back against the wall.
“I think you’re right,” he whispered through quivering lips. “I—I’m sorry. What do we do?”
Haplo heaved an exasperated sigh, endeavored to loosen Jarre’s pinching fingers, which were cutting off his circulation. “Let’s go. But let’s be quick about it!”
No one needed any urging to hurry. By now, all of them, including Bane, were anxious to complete their task, then get out of this place.
The glowing sigla led them through the myriad hallways.
“What are you doing?” Bane demanded, pausing to watch Haplo, who had stopped for about the fourth time since they’d started down the tunnel. “I thought you said to hurry.”
“This will ensure us finding our way out, Your Highness,” Haplo replied coolly. “If you’ll notice, the sigla fade after we pass them. They might not light up again or they might take us another way, a way that could bring us out into the arms of the elves.”
He stood facing the arched entryway of the tunnel branch they had just entered and, with the point of his dagger, was scratching a sigil of his own on the wall. The rune was not only useful, but he felt a certain amount of satisfaction in leaving a Patryn mark on hallowed Sartan walls.
“The Sartan runes will show us the way out,” argued Bane petulantly.
“They haven’t shown us much of anything yet,” remarked Haplo. But eventually, after a few more twists and turns, the runes led them to a closed door at the end of a hall.
The glowing sigla that ran across the floor and skipped over other doorways, leaving them in darkness, now arched up and over, outlining this door in light. Recalling the warding runes on Abarrach, Haplo was glad to see the sigla glow blue and not red. The door was formed in the shape of a hexagon. In its center was inscribed a circlet of runes surrounding a blank spot. Unlike most Sartan runes, these were not complete, but appeared to have been only half finished.
Haplo registered the odd shape of the door and the sigla formation as something he had seen or encountered before, but his memory offered no help, and he thought little more of it.[24] It looked to be a simple opening device, the key being sigla drawn in the center.
“I know this one,” said Bane, studying it for a moment. “Grandfather taught me. It was in those old books of his.” He looked back at Haplo. “But I need to be taller. And I need your dagger.”
“Be careful,” said Haplo, handing the weapon over. “It’s sharp.” Bane took a moment to study the dagger with wistful longing. Haplo lifted the boy, held him up level with the rune-structure on the door.
Brow furrowed, tongue thrust out in concentration, Bane stuck the dagger’s tip into the wooden door and began slowly and laboriously to draw a sigil.[25] When the last stroke was completed, the sigil caught fire. Its flame spread to the runes around it. The entire rune-structure flared briefly, then went out. The door opened a tiny crack. Light—bright, white—flared out, the brilliance making them blink after the darkness of the tunnel.
From inside the room came a metallic clanking sound.
Haplo dropped His Highness unceremoniously on the ground, shoved the boy behind him, and made a grab for the excited Limbeck,’ who was preparing to march right inside. The dog growled, low in its throat.
“There’s something in there!” Haplo hissed beneath his breath. “Move back! All of you!”
More alarmed by the tension in Haplo than by the half-heard sound in the room, Bane and Limbeck obeyed, edged back against the wall. Jarre joined them, looking scared and unhappy.
“What—” Bane began.
Haplo cast him a furious glance, and the boy quickly shut his mouth. The Patryn paused, continuing to listen at the crack of the partially opened door, puzzled by the sounds he heard within. The clanking metallic jingle was sometimes a rhythmic pattern, sometimes a chaotic clashing, and other times completely stilled. Then it would start up again. And it was moving, first near to him, then advancing away.
He could have sworn that what he was hearing were the sounds of a person, clad in full plate armor, walking about a large room. But no Sartan—or Patryn, either—had ever in the history of their powerful races worn such a mensch device as armor. Which meant that whatever was inside that room had to be a mensch, probably an elf.
Limbeck was right. The elves had shut down the Kicksey-winsey. Haplo listened again, listened to the clanking sounds move this way and that, moving slowly, purposefully, and he shook his head. No, he decided, if the elves had discovered this place, they would be swarming around it. They would be as busy as ants inside this tunnel. And there was, as far as Haplo could determine, only one person making those strange sounds inside that room. He looked at his skin. The sigla still glowed warning blue, but were still faint.
“Stay here!” Haplo mouthed, glaring at Bane and Limbeck. The boy and the dwarf both nodded.
Haplo drew his sword, gave the door a violent kick, and rushed inside the room, the dog at his heels. He halted, came near dropping his weapon. He was dumbstruck with amazement.
A man turned to meet him, a man made all of metal.
“What are my instructions?” asked the man in a monotone, speaking human.
“An automaton!” cried Bane, disobeying Haplo and running inside the room. The automaton stood about Haplo’s height, or somewhat taller. His body—the replica of a human’s—was made of brass. Hands, arms, fingers, legs, toes were jointed and moved in a lifelike, if somewhat stiff, manner. The metal face had been fancifully molded to resemble a human face, with nose and mouth, though the mouth did not move. The brows and lips were outlined in gold, bright jewels gleamed in the eye sockets. Runes, Sartan runes, covered its entire body, much as the Patryn’s runes covered his body, and probably for the same purpose—all of which Haplo found rather amusing, if somewhat insulting. The automaton was alone in a large and empty circular room. Surrounding it, mounted in the room’s walls, were eyeballs, hundreds of eyeballs, exactly like the one eyeball held in the hands of the Manger statue far above them. Each unwinking eye portrayed in its vision a different part of the Kicksey-winsey. Haplo had the eerie impression that these eyes belonged to him. He was looking out through every one of these orbs. Then he understood. The eyes belonged to the automaton. The metallic clanking Haplo had heard must have been the automaton moving from eyeball to eyeball, making his rounds, keeping watch.
“There’s someone alive in there!” Jarre gasped. She stood in the doorway, not daring to venture inside. Her own eyes were opened so wide it seemed likely they might roll out of her head. “We have to get him out!”
“No!” Bane scoffed at the notion. “It’s a machine, just like the Kicksey-winsey.”
“I am the machine,” stated the automaton in its lifeless voice.
“That’s it!” cried Bane, excited, turning to Haplo. “Don’t you see? He’s the machine! See the runes that cover him? All the parts of the Kicksey-winsey are connected magically to him. He’s been running it, all these centuries!”
“Without a brain,” murmured Haplo. “Obeying his last instructions, whatever those were.”
“This is wonderful!” Limbeck breathed a sigh. His eyes filled with tears, the glass in his spectacles steamed over. He snatched them off his nose. The dwarf stood staring myopically and with reverent awe at the man-machine, making no move to come near it, content to worship at a distance. “I never imagined anything so marvelous.”
“I think it’s creepy,” said Jarre, shivering. “Now that we’ve seen it, let’s go. I don’t like this place. And I don’t like that thing.” Haplo could have echoed her sentiments. He didn’t like this place, either. The automaton reminded him of the living corpses on Abarrach, dead bodies brought to life by the power of necromancy. He had the feeling that the same sort of dark magic was working here, only in this instance it had given life to what was never meant to be alive. A degree better, he supposed, than bringing to life rotting flesh. Or perhaps not. The dead at least possessed souls. This metal contraption was not only mindless but soulless as well. The dog sniffed at the automaton’s feet, looked up at Haplo, baffled, apparently wondering why this thing that moved like a man and talked like a man didn’t smell like a man.
24
Undoubtedly the gates to the Sartan city of Pryan, which Haplo describes in his journal
25
Haplo should have recognized this from Pryan as well. The dwarf Drugar wore the very same sigil on an amulet around his neck. A common Sartan key and locking device, the sigla were more ornamental than they were functional, for—as Bane demonstrates—even a mensch could learn to operate the elemental magic. Places the Sartan wanted to truly guard and prohibit entry to were surrounded by runes of warding.