Lojen sighed and kept climbing. His arms were growing tired and being this close to the fortress, he expended that last little bit of energy and forced himself to move quicker, regardless of his fear.
Ten to fifteen minutes later, the opening yawned over them like a giant fish swallowing a baited line. It was black within the portal, but he was thankful to be away from the sheer openness of Drenth below and surrounded by stone once more. The tether leveled out and, in the darkness, Lojen made out the anchor. Similar to the one on the ground, the link looped around an eyehole. Just below the anchor, he spotted a door, a tiny square that might be too tight for him.
His alarm rose.
Ruane, who was planting multiple bundles of bombs near the anchor, hopped off the link and made toward the door. She pulled on the circular handle, the door groaned—or the stone itself did to be more precise—as she lifted. A shaft made of steel and stone, a ladder led down, a soft glow of dull light.
“Well?” His sister looked at him.
“Guess this is our way in.” The shaft might fit his shoulders, it would be tight, but he could probably squeeze through.
“You first.”
“In case there are guards, you want to throw me into them?”
“Stop acting like a hatchling, Lojen. Fine. I’ll go first.” She put her boot to one of the rungs and looked up at him again, the shadows made her look daemonic with her grinning teeth and narrowed eyes. “You know, for the heir to Father’s horns, you sure are a Scurred Hatch.”
He was about to retort, but she had already disappeared down the shaft, leaving him sulking in the dark.
Father, what am I to do with her?
Lojen took to the ladder and his shoulders were, indeed, too large to fit naturally, so, he sucked in his breath and curled his shoulders inward to make him as small as possible and shimmied his way down. The ladder opened into a tunnel, and it was a tight fit, not large enough for him to walk upright. He was bent, shoulders hunched, and he shuffled more than walked, trying not to drag his horn stumps along the ceiling.
“You any idea where we’re going?”
Ruane was ahead in the dully lit tunnel, bent like him, though not as drastically. She glanced over her shoulder. “Didn’t that humir give you the map?”
“Emre said the anchors would lead us into the innerbelly of Gargantua.”
“Where do you think we are, Lojen? Krylen?” She whistled through her teeth in annoyance. “There’s no tunnel but this one, it’s gotta lead somewhere.”
For all Ruane’s bluster, they could be walking into a trap for all they knew. The emptiness and the silence didn’t make Lojen comfortable. In fact, the exact opposite. “I feel like a rat in a maze.”
A sound. A beep. A scrape against stone.
“Hsst.” Ruane froze in place, her longknife rigid. Head cocked, listening.
Lojen’s heart raced. If anyone found them in the tunnel, he’d be useless. He was like a stuffed sausage, unable to move. “Ru?” She held up a claw. Then she was moving again, slow and deliberate. “What is it, Ru?”
“Be quiet and listen, you dolt.”
He snapped his jaw shut and strained his hearing. The noise was ahead, a beeping sound, and it grew louder because it was accompanied by the scraping of metal on stone. Ruane crouched, giving him a better view ahead. He drew forth the wheellock pistol and aimed it into the yellowed burrow. He hated firearms, always trusting a drakken longknife or good old-fashioned talons instead.
A flashing orange light appeared ahead. Beeping grew stronger, faster. The metal screeched louder.
And then Lojen saw it; an aethecite-powered automaton.
Eight legs like those of a spider poked out from a cylindrical body, each leg ending in a pointed metal cap. A series of tools along each leg, everything from screwdrivers to rivet punchers. Each attached via a rotating gear, able to click into place as needed upon the leg’s end. A small engine attached to the automaton’s back left little puffs of grey smoke. A head-like apparatus with the blinking light and a glass orb bobbed like a bird walking along the ground as it skittered through the tunnel.
The automaton was only about three feet tall, Ih made the tunnel shape logical now. But it also was coming at them fast and there wasn’t anywhere to hide from the thing. They were still far enough away, and with the dim light, there was hope it hadn’t seen them yet, but that didn’t leave them much room for escape.
“Lojen?”
They couldn’t turn back; the automaton would be on them before they could flee to the ladder back by the anchor. They couldn’t press against the wall and hope the metal bot would simply pass by them without turning its little head. And if they disabled the thing, that might bring even more eyes down upon them.
They were proper buggered, as humir might say.
“Ru, we gotta climb.”
“The ceiling?”
She looked at him questioningly. He pointed up, calculating the foot or two of space from the ceiling and the highest point of the automaton, then nodded. Sheathing her longknife, Ruane dug her claws into the walls near the ceiling. Her boots scuffed as little tendrils of dust trickled to the floor. Lojen braced himself, jammed his own claws into the walls with force and lifted his body off the ground and squeezed it against the rounded ceiling, wedging himself in tight.
The automaton’s beep was just ahead. Lojen couldn’t see it, so he sucked in his breath trying to make himself even smaller and waited.
But that’s when the wheellock pistol fell from his belt and clattered below.
The metal carapace on legs skittered below them. It stopped, beeped in clicks and clacks, only mere inches from belt buckle to the automaton’s glassy noggin. Metal arms prodded and examined the dropped wheellock. A series of blips not the same frequency as the automaton’s beeping resounded in the tunnel. Then the automaton moved again, arms scratching the stone walls as it flitted away, the beeping proceeded down the tunnel the way they had come, disappearing. The pistol was nowhere to be seen.
Ruane dropped down. “That wasn’t too bad.”
“Let’s get out of this place.” He pushed her the opposite way from the automaton.
The purr of Gargantua’s aethecite engines was steady now, and they could hear the gears turning within the man-made beasts. He hadn’t seen too many large engines up close, but he did know that the amount of combustion within the internal furnace was intense. And with the sheer size of Gargantua, the engines probably could heat an entire city from the convection. His tongue hung out of his mouth as he sought to cool himself. Unlike man, drakken didn’t sweat, but in that moment, he wished they did.
So, he was stuck with a lagging tongue, looking like a fool.
Up ahead, Ruane moved through the alternating shadows and overhead lights, stopping abruptly a pace from the mouth of the tunnel. Chitters and beeps sounded beyond, and as Lojen neared, he hoped that the first automaton hadn’t called for backup.
