Chapter 22: the Ensorcelled Chamber

“Goodwin!” Drake broke the silence; desperately he was striving to keep his fear out of his voice. “Goodwin--this isn’t the way to get out. We’re going up--farther away all the time from the--the gates!”

“What can we do?” My anxiety was no less than his, but my realization of our helplessness was complete.

“If we only knew how to talk to these Things,” he said. “If we could only have let the Disk know we wanted to get out--damn it, Goodwin, it would have helped us.”

Grotesque as the idea sounded, I felt that he spoke the truth. The Emperor meant no harm to us; in fact in speeding us away I was not at all sure that he had not deliberately wished us well--there was that about the Keeper--

Still up we sped along the shaft. I knew we must now be above the level of the valley.

“We’ve got to get back to Ruth! Goodwin--NIGHT! And what may have HAPPENED to her?”

“Drake, boy”--I dropped into his own colloquialism--”we’re up against it. We can’t help it. And remember--she’s there in Norhala’s home. I don’t believe, I honestly don’t believe, Dick, that there’s any danger as long as she remains there. And Ventnor ties her fast.”

“That’s true,” he said, more hopefully. “That’s true--and probably Norhala is with her by now.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said cheerfully. An idea came to me--I half believed it myself. “And another thing. There’s not an action here that’s purposeless. We’re being driven on by the command of that Thing we call the Metal Emperor. It means us no harm. Maybe--maybe this IS the way out.”

“Maybe so,” he shook his head doubtfully. “But I’m not sure. Maybe that long push was just to get us away from THERE. And it strikes me that the impulse has begun to weaken. We’re not going anywhere near as fast as we were.”

I had not realized it, but our speed was slackening. I looked back--hundreds of feet behind us fell the slide. An unpleasant chill went through me--should the magnetic grip upon us relax, withdraw, nothing could stop us from falling back along that incline to be broken like eggs at its end; that our breaths would be snuffed out by the terrific descent long before we reached that end was scant comfort.

“There are other passages opening up along this shaft,” Drake said. “I’m not for trusting the Emperor too far--he has other things on his metallic mind, you know. The next one we get to, let’s try to slip into--if we can.”

I had noticed; there had been openings along the ascending shaft; corridors running apparently transversely to its angled way.

Slower and slower became our pace. A hundred yards above I glimpsed one of the apertures. Could we reach it? Slower and slower we arose. Now the gap was but a yard off--but we were motionless--were tottering!

Drake’s arms wrapped round me. With a tremendous effort he hurled me into the portal. I dropped at its edge, writhed swiftly around, saw him slipping, slipping down--thrust my hands out to him.

He caught them. There came a wrench that tortured my arm sockets as though racked. But he held!

Slowly--I writhed back into the passage, dragging up his almost dead weight. His head appeared, his shoulders; there was a convulsion of the long body and he lay before me.

For a minute or two we lay, flat upon our backs resting. I sat up. The passage was broad, silent; apparently as endless as that from which we had just escaped.

Along it, above us, under us, the crystalline eyes were dim. It showed no sign of movement--yet had it done so there was nothing we could do save drop down the annihilating slant. Drake arose.

“I’m hungry,” he said, “and I’m thirsty. I move that we eat and drink and approximately be merry.”

He slung aside the haversack. From it we took food; from the canteens we drank. We did not talk. Each knew what the other was thinking; infrequently, and thank the eternal law that some call God for that, come crises in which speech seems not only petty but when against it the mind rebels as a nauseous thing.

This was such a time. At last I drew myself to my feet.

“Let’s be going,” I said.

The corridor stretched straight before us; along it we paced. How far we walked I do not know; mile upon mile, it seemed. It broadened abruptly into a vast hall.

And this hall was filled with the Metal Hordes--was a gigantic workshop of them. In every shape, in every form, they seethed and toiled about it. Upon its floor were heaps of shining ores, mounds of flashing gems, piles of ingots, metallic and crystalline. High and low throughout flamed the egg-shaped incandescences; floating furnaces both great and small.

Before one of these forges, close to us, stood a Metal Thing. Its body was a twelve-foot column of smaller cubes. Upon the top was a hollow square formed of even lesser blocks--blocks hardly larger than the Little Things themselves. In the center of the open rectangle was another shaft, its top a two-foot square plate formed of a single cube.

From the sides of the hollow square sprang long arms of spheres, each tipped by a tetrahedron. They moved freely, slipping about upon their curved points of contact and like a dozen little thinking hammers, the pyramid points at their ends beat down upon as many thimble shaped objects which they thrust alternately into the unwinking brazier then laid upon the central block to shape.

A goblin workman the Thing seemed, standing there, so intent upon and so busy with its forgings.

There were scores of these animate machines; they paid no slightest heed to us as we slipped by them, clinging as closely to the wall of the immense workshop as we could.

We passed a company of other Shapes which stood two by two and close together, their tops wide spinning wheels through which the tendrils of an opened globe fed translucent, colorless ingots--the substance it seemed to me of which Norhala’s shadowy walls were made, the crystal of which the bars that built out the base of the Cones were formed.

The ingots passed between the whirling faces; emerged from them as slender, long cylinders; were seized as they slipped down by a crouching block, whose place as it glided away was instantly taken by another. In many bewildering forms, intent upon unknown activities directed toward unguessable ends, the composite, animate mechanisms labored. And all the place was filled with a goblin bustle, trollish racketings, ringing of gnomish anvils, clanging of kobold forges--a clamorous cavern filled with metal Nibelungens.

We came to the opening of another passage, a doorway piercing the walls of the workshop. Its incline, though steep, was not dangerous.

Into it we stepped; climbed onward it seemed interminably. Far ahead of us at last appeared the outline of its further entrance, silhouetted against and filled with a brighter luminosity. We drew near; stopped cautiously at its threshold, peering out.

Well it was that we had hesitated. Before us was open space--an abyss in the body of the Metal Monster.

The corridor opened into it like a window. Thrusting out our heads, we saw an unbroken wall both above and below. Half a mile away was its opposite side. Over this pit was a misty sky and not more than a thousand feet above and black against the heavens was the lip of it--the cornices of this chasm within the City.