“That’s true,” Thurl said excitedly. “I saw that sword once. It looked as bright as the day it was forged.”
“So you think this city is close?” Bradok said. “That this is the symbol of Starlight Hall?”
Corin nodded. “My mother sang me the rhyme when I was just a child,” he said. “I never forgot the words: ‘Seek the eye of red, under branches twined. If the city of Starlight ye would find.’”
Kellik and Bradok exchanged glances.
“If he’s right, then the end of our journey could be no farther away than right behind this door,” Bradok said soberly.
“Well, what are we waiting for, then?” Kellik said. He put his shoulder against the stone door and pushed. It shuddered for a moment, then swung inward with a soft grinding noise.
A blast of stale air rushed into the hallway, stirring the dust on the floor and making some of them cough. A vast, dark space lay beyond. High above them, tiny lights flickered on the ceiling, like a field of stars in the black abyss.
As Bradok and the others moved out of the hall and into the cavern, their lanterns illuminated massive stone columns, carved with meticulous detail. A stone bench stood near them, richly detailed but lying on its side.
“The stars,” Rose gasped as she moved out of the tunnel. “The lights on the ceiling are laid out like the stars in the heavens.”
Bradok looked up. He hadn’t spent enough time on the surface to know much about the heavens above Krynn. But a single red star glowed off to one side of the display, and he knew instinctively that it represented Reorx’s Forge.
He took a lantern from Marl Anvil and moved deeper into the chamber. More columns rose up, like massive trees, reaching up to the hidden ceiling. Huge halls branched off to either side. Finally, the lantern lit up a massive building carved out of the living rock. In the center of the building stood an enormous clock, its hands stopped at 2:36. Above the clock, metal cables poked out of the building and stretched up into the darkness.
Bradok lowered the lantern and studied the base of the building. Enormous carved doors like the ones they’d just come through were lying broken and shattered on the ground.
“It looks like Starlight Hall is still a legend,” Bradok said to Corin. “A ruined legend. Nobody has been here for a long time.”
CHAPTER 18
Bradok made his way toward the big building with the enormous clock. He hadn’t noticed at first, but the floor of the cavern was littered with all kinds of debris: everything from scraps of clothing and bits of metal to fragments of wood and bone.
He climbed over the broken door and stepped into the clock building. Inside there was once-ornate furniture that had been smashed to bits and murals on the walls that evinced aging and deep gouges. Each painting seemed to depict one of the dwarf clans making their way to a shining city in the distance.
A spiral staircase of metal ran up to a second level, and another shattered set of doors led deeper into the building. Bradok wanted to see the workings of the giant clock. He tested the stairs with his foot and, finding them sound, began to climb.
The room above stretched up well over two stories. It housed the massive gears, chains, and cams that kept the time and moved the hands. To Bradok, there seemed to be more machinery than was necessary for a clock. He traced several of the gears and shafts and found they led to other mechanisms unrelated to the clock. Each of them had a set of metal cables running from a giant spindle that ran out through a hole in the wall. Despate the thick layer of dust and debris, all the apparatus seemed to be intact.
“I wonder how long this place has been here,” Corin said, coming up the stairs gingerly, followed by Much.
“Judging by the dust, I’d say a long, long time,” Bradok said, wiping encrusted grime from a large metal pulley.
The pulley had been painted black, no doubt to resist corrosion, but as Bradok looked at the stripe he had wiped clean with his finger, he realized there was no rust or corrosion anywhere.
“I’d guess it’s all still in working order,” he pronounced.
“Why not try it, then?” Corin said, taking hold of one of the massive gears and putting his shoulder into it. Nothing happened.
“Stuck somehow, I’d say,” Corin said with a grunt. “Pretty big machinery. What were they using it for, power?”
“Water is my guess,” Much said.
Bradok turned to find the old dwarf examining a long horizontal bar with what looked like flat metal gears protruding from its center. Below the bar, a metal trap door covered a hole in the floor that was cut just large enough to allow the bar to be lowered through it, using a winch assembly mounted to the wall.
“Give me a hand,” he said, pulling on the trap door. After it scraped across the stone with a noisy screech, Bradok and the others could clearly hear the sound of running water below.
“Hey, not so fast. Fooling with this stuff might not be a good idea,” Corin said. “We don’t know what any of it does. Some of it might be simply broken; some of it might be dangerous. It wouldn’t do for a frozen gear to bring the whole works down on our heads.”
“He’s got a point,” Bradok agreed. He leaned close to one of the giant mechanisms and wiped it with his sleeve. Tiny letters had been etched into a plate, to which was attached a movable arm.
“Some of the mechanisms are labeled,” he pointed out. “This one’s got a lever to account for something between summer and winter.”
“This one has levers for five irrigation zones and two different fountains,” Much said. “Maybe it’s the master control for the city’s water.”
Corin whistled. “It’s hard to imagine something like this existing here underground.”
“I helped design air shafts for some of Ironroot’s newer caverns,” Much said, stroking the machinery reverently with his calloused hands. “But I’ve never seen anything like this craftsmanship; it’s incredible.”
Bradok opened his mouth to say much the same thing when he heard Rose calling his name. Her voice sounded urgent and frightened.
“Here,” he called, running to the stairs and starting down.
Rose rushed into the room over the broken door. “There’s trouble,” she said then led him back out into the square.
The second lantern hung suspended from a statue in the middle of an elaborate fountain that Bradok had missed on his way in. Dwarves were gathered around the slumped figure of one of their group.
“Is it Lyra?” Bradok asked worriedly.
Before Rose could answer, however, the crowd parted to reveal Tal standing over Perin. The human seemed paler than usual, and he breathed in great gasps. In a flash, Bradok remembered the blast of stale air he’d tasted when they’d entered the cavern.
“We need to find a vent or something,” Tal said as Bradok arrived. “He’s dizzy and incoherent. For some reason he can’t breathe right. If this lasts much longer, he is in danger of dying.”
“What is it?” Much asked, coming up behind Bradok.
“We’ve got to take a chance,” Bradok said after a long moment.
“What do you mean?” Rose asked.
“This city is too big not to have proper ventilation, and it’s too deep to rely on just an open shaft,” Bradok said. “They must have had some way to move the air around down here, and I’m betting it’s controlled by the machine in the clock tower.”
“Get going, then. Give it a try,” Tal said. “I don’t know how much longer Perin can survive breathing like this.”
Bradok turned and raced back to the tower. Corin had stayed behind, using a glowsac to investigate the machinery. He looked up excitedly when Bradok and Much came pounding up the steps.
“You won’t believe what this machine does,” he said.
“Control the city’s ventilation system?” Bradok asked as he and Much moved to inspect the open slot in the floor.