The Pillars of Eternity

There was a topological oddness to it all. While it obviously existed in the normal three dimensions of space, it reminded him more than anything of sketches and models that were meant to represent forms in four-dimensional space. The thought gave him a feeling of excitement that subjectively, he guessed, was much like Romrey’s delirium of greed for wealth.

He looked back. His ship was a small grey shape against the golden balloon of the Meirjain giant. It was already some miles away, and there was no saying whether there might not be materials in the ‘city’ that would prove impervious to its beams, or at least that might attenuate them. He issued a silent command: Follow. Obediently the ship lifted itself, soared past The Sedulous Seeker (which unlike Boaz’s ship had a horizontal landing attitude) and put down half a mile away.

Romrey observed the move in silence. ‘Let’s move,’ Boaz said. ‘If we find any doors, we might be able to tell what kind of place this is.’

Romrey stepped down from the sledge, which dutifully trailed after them as they moved deeper into the ‘city’. Soon it engulfed them. The sky seemed to disappear, its colours merging with those of the structures that rose and danced all around them. His surroundings began to seem forbidding to Boaz. He was telling himself that they were wasting their time here, and that they would do better to search elsewhere, when a cry of ‘Hey!’ came from Romrey.

He had found an entrance to one of the blocklike buildings, shaped like a man-sized door. The aperture was too small to admit the sledge. Leaving it parked outside, Boaz followed his companion through.

Inside, the darkness was almost complete. Boaz switched on a torch and held it aloft. By its fierce radiance he saw that they were in an empty chamber, cube-shape but with rounded corners. In the opposite wall was another entrance, this time oval but also of a size to admit a man.

Romrey peered through it. ‘It’s a tunnel.’

Boaz joined him, twisting the ring on the torch to produce a beam. There was nothing to be seen in the tunnel, which after a few yards curved out of sight.

Pausing, Boaz told himself that poking into any chance corner was perhaps not the best way of persuading this fabled world to reveal its treasures. A more reliable method might be to trust his ship’s spy beams. While Romrey urged him to go down the tunnel, he summoned up the ship, asking which way he should go.

The ship spoke, but mingled with the message was a note that was unfamiliar: Go forward.

He stepped through the opening, beckoning Romrey to follow.

They moved cautiously, for what seemed a long time. There was no apparent sense to the oval corridor’s convolutions: it turned this way and that, it dipped, it rose, it slanted at random oblique angles, it turned – so Boaz suspected – back on itself. Then, as he was about to suggest they retrace their steps, it delivered them to a low-ceilinged, boat-shaped chamber, about the size of the lounge in Radalce Obsoc’s yacht.

Returning the torch to an all-round lamp, he took quick stock of the room. The walls were of a matt lavender louvred with close-set ribs which followed the curve of the chamber like the ribs of a sail-driven water boat. Placed along the center of the chamber were about half a dozen closed chests, or coffers. A storage place, perhaps?

Romrey dashed to the chests and threw open the unresisting lid of the first one he came to. He drew his breath in sharply, dipped in a hand and pulled out something that glittered.

It looked at first like a silver spider’s web. But its threads seemed to flow and reorganize themselves constantly as Romrey held it up to the light, turned it over and examined it through an eyeglass.

‘I don’t know what this stuff is. Never seen anything like it before.’

Boaz was not listening to him. He was receiving a message, which at first he thought came from his ship – but no, it was that other, unfamiliar note which minutes before had mingled with the ship’s voice.

Here, little Mudworm, is the treasure you seek.

Mudworm! That hated name – the name he had not heard all these years, the original name he had been given by his enemies – where had it come from now? What was speaking to him?

With the words, there was an instruction. He was directed to the third chest in the row. Moving to it, he saw that it had a transparent lid. Not only that, but a square in the ceiling over it was also transparent, and light – daylight, as far as he could tell – shone down onto the cask below.

Through the crystalline lid, he saw a layer of what appeared to be large diamonds.

The use of his earlier name had provoked turbulent and unpleasant feelings in Boaz. Nevertheless he forced himself to be calm, and lifted the lid.