The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [79]
It took several minutes, but they eventually succeeded in locating a narrow spiral stair that extended both up and down interminably into the dark. “I’ll go first,” offered Valentine immediately, and enthusiastically. Beckett might have been resentful of the offer if not for two reasons: firstly, Valentine always offered to go first, especially if it meant going somewhere dangerous. Secondly, Beckett noticed a weakness in his knee, and he didn’t want the younger man to see him struggling with the stairs.
The staircase seemed impossibly deep. As they descended deeper, Beckett’s ears began ringing. It was a strange, distracting but not painful sound that grew stronger with every step, and made a journey of what could not have been more than minutes seem like it took hours. The heat grew worse towards the bottom of the stairs, though it was now occasionally interrupted by a strong gust of icy wind. Beckett was finally obliged to take off his suit coat.
The stairs ended abruptly on a stone landing. The phlogiston lanterns showed the two coroners a hall that appeared to be covered with ice, in defiance of the waves of dry heat washing over them. Beckett noticed something along the wall, a brass knife-switch. He groped towards it, and threw it.
Immediately, a string of dim, yellow, electric lights blossomed into view, running off down the long, ice-covered tunnel, above a floor made of heavy flagstones. Runnels along the sides of the tunnel collected water that dripped from the walls and the ceilings, draining it to somewhere out of sight.
“Put out your lantern,” Beckett said.
“Why?” Valentine asked, even as he turned the agitator at the bottom of the phlogiston sphere all the way down.
“Electric lights? These are expensive. Why wouldn’t you use phlogiston?”
Valentine shrugged. “I don’t know. Why not?”
“I don’t know, either,” Beckett replied. “But until I do, I don’t want to chance doing something stupid.” He began to make his way down the icy tunnel; the sound of his boots on the flagstones was very loud, compared to the faint, constant sound of water dripping from the ceiling. “You notice something weird about the tunnel?” Beckett asked.
Valentine hurried after him. “Well, it looks like it’s covered in ice. I’d call that pretty weird.”
“No.” Beckett shook his head. “It’s not covered. I think they dug it through the ice. All this,” he pointed to the slowly-melting ice above them, “all this is glacier.”
“Oh.” Valentine gulped, as waves of dry heat continued to assail them. “What do you think holds it up?”
“I don’t know. A kinetic engine, maybe?” If Beckett was concerned about the prospect of a hundred tons of ice crashing onto their heads, he didn’t show it.
The tunnel ended at the top of a huge, round chamber, that sank even deeper into the glacier. The chamber was ringed with a series of wooden platforms and narrow stairs, and crudely divided with partitions and more platforms throughout its volume, raised on scaffolding made out of the same, dark wood. The sheer scale of the construction was remarkable: the cave was at least two hundred feet across, and descended several stories into the ice, and the wooden constructions seemed to occupy as much space as a whole second castle.
The platforms and partitions obscured whatever rested at the bottom of the chamber, but Beckett was sure he knew what it was. That dry, infernal heat wafted up from the bottom, burning his eyes; he closed them, and dreamed about swimming in a great, stormy black sea…
“What is this?” Valentine called. He’d climbed around the wooden platforms ringing the upper-most level of the cave, and had found a small room. Beckett carefully picked his way around the not-especially-sturdy-looking platforms. “It’s some kind of control center, I think.”
The young coroner was right. The small room—not really a room