Beck's Guard pt. 3

         When at last the stairs did end it was not in a door, or a long hall, but in a smooth seamless wall. No mark of mortar or aging crumbling sediment here. Not of brick or cinder block, but of plain gray ashlar. As though the room beyond had long ago been filled with the liquid stone they knew to have once existed.
         The hand torch Teige had liberated from the halls above flared briefly in the darkness and then settled in a slow steady beam. He did not pause, nor his steps falter. He withdrew his arm from where it had come to rest at the hollow of his back and stepped forward. One hand sought the seam where aging stone of stairwell hall met this smooth obstruction, the other slid across it’s seamless surface.
         There was a click.
         And then a soft hiss of rushing air.
         The seemingly immovable wall slid inward so quickly that if Teige had found something on the empty surface to grab onto he would have been lifted from his feet and propelled into the darkness beyond.
         Teige did pause then, at the edge of that great darkness. The package at his side was removed and placed in a small leather duffle hanging from his back. The gloves and coveralls came next (the later of which he used to wipe away some small part of the grease that covered his features), followed by the cloth covering he had secured over his boots. From a second holder his mail was removed, the dark fitting form of his cloak, and his Guards uniform. He slid them on.
          In all he waited for perhaps a minute and a half after the heavy steel door, and yes that’s now clearly what it was as this almost indistinguishable beam came to sparkle over the edges where dust had been swept clear, came to rest upon it’s hinges before stepping forward. This time he wasn’t waiting to see if he had been heard, he was waiting for the traps to disarm themselves.
         The room beyond was narrow and short, walls lined with shelves met his eyes through the artificial light. Those on his right seemed to be made more of rust than of any kind of discernable material. Whatever wonders rested there were sheathed in a thick wet redness that indicated a leak from the levels above. To his left the shelves were full. Dry. Lined with tight packed rolls of crinkly green stuff that crumbled as he brushed his gloved fingers over them.
         Paper? What little there was in the world was thick and strained, full of the wooly texture of undissolved pulp. How old this must be, he thought passing, and then continued on.
         The shelves ended in a second door, its center taken by a large dial. Teige spun it clockwise, listening in the darkness as the tumblers reset themselves. He counted to five, and then grabbed two of it’s iron handles, jerking it to a halt. Inside the gears continued to spin, and in a rapid click-click-click, dropped into place.
         Teige shoved it aside, growing impatient now. Beyond, all was blackness, even the pale beam of the powered torch ( a small black cylinder he had pocketed in the rooms above. Another thing he had heard of, and never seen, but immediately recognized upon entering the barracks chambers above. More waste.) failed to illuminate the room beyond. As he passed through the doors he brushed the light over the wall. It was steel, all steel, a running stream of endless steel panels held together by lines of knuckle sized rivets every yard or so. The same steel that blessed their weapons, their knives and swords.
         The council had rediscovered these halls some twelve years before and had thought it in their best interest to salvage the metal from down here. To sell it for profit to the smithies. Only to find that when they had come to collect, with their picks, and axes, and shovels, and even a few, a very few, with their blazing cutting torches and plasma eaters, that is was impossible. Not a dent or a scratch could be forced, the great heating flames of the cutters only scorched it black, the plasma rays sizzled and sparkled and left bright white scorches which stank, but easily wiped away.
         Ah, how the council had ruled that day—
         BOOM!
         There was an explosion. Not a real explosion. Not an explosion which signaled the end of life, or the onslaught of death. Not an explosion of any physical sense. An explosion of light. So bright, so blinding, that in his mind it lanced like lightning. Teige heard it’s thunder, and he heard his scream.
         After a second of heart wrenching terror, Teige cursed softly. All hopes of escaping this night undetected had just vanished. The operating of the lights below would be signaled in some distant guard tower above by a blinking green diamond on a control panel. Some young cadet would go calling out for the sergeant in charge, a man who would no doubt be deeply asleep in his private barracks by this time, and an alert would be raised.
          On that same note, stealth was no longer required. He had a minimum of five minutes, but more likely ten, before the guard would be roused enough to reach the upper stairs. That left him at least four to find what he had come for, and make it back the way he had came. So far as he knew, there were no others that knew of the second entrance to the toombs, he hoped it stayed that way.
         “Lllliigghhhhts.” Teige jumped a second time as an eerily distorted voice called in it’s slow worn out drawl. And he recognized it, dear god he did! For a time, a very short time, after his birth the council chambers above had held the same wonder. It was a recording, badly worn and dragging, but a mechanical voice nonetheless. He hadn’t even realized there remained power at these depths. He’d gone over the plans in the council chambers, but had decided the risk was too great for an earlier venture into the tunnels beneath Central Guard. Now he wished he had, and that he had the time to study the marvels that remained here further.
         But he didn’t. His ever efficient mind reminded him. Three minutes and counting. He did however leave a note, a mental reminder, that if the time ever came that he was allowed a second glance at the chambers below Central Guard, it would be a much longer, and a much more thorough one.
         He slid from that room and into the next.
         The room beyond it held junk. Well, not junk, but not wonders (Or if there were, they were hidden) either. Supply crates had been stacked haphazardly across the expanse of glistening tile floor (not the worn marble of the council halls, but a deeply glistening red porcelain bordered in green, that but for the dust and decay of the boxes upon it looked nearly new), taking all of the empty space the room allowed and turning the rest into a crazy maze of wooden boxes and crates.
         Teige struggled through, several times forced to turn back when a box blocked his way that was too large to move, or a stack too high to tumble over. With the tiny flame of the hand torch he hadn’t been allowed to survey the rooms full expanse. Now it seemed never ending. Boxes all around blocked his view of the walls, here and there an empty line of sight might be revealed to the reflecting silver surface, but by nothing with which he could judge a distance. What he could judge, was that this room was much larger than the plans had shown. He should have already reached the doorway that would lead him to his prize, and yet, another turn, another turn, another dead end.
         He turned back, turned left, left again, and nearly tripped over the dead rotting lumber that had once covered the entrance to Camains ‘Central Repository’. A sign hanging from the silver surface of the wall next to empty opening proclaimed it as such.

         Two minutes. . .

         A black open maw awaited him. Either these too were motion activated, or the powers that operated the lights beyond had failed. He readied his beam, stepped forward and spoke hesitantly.
         “.....lights”
         The room surged into light. Bright, welcoming, telltaling light. So bright, that Teige had to blink back tears forming at the edge of his eyes. He hadn’t realized how dark the first room had remained after the pitch blackness of the stairwell. In the depot row after row of long white tubes rose from their endless sleep. Shaking off the long coat of dust they had received with a shimmer of hesitancy. Starch white walls reflected that light, multiplied it a hundred fold, and only the deep blackness upon them stopped it from being unbearable.

         One minute. . .

         Almost with reverence, Teige stepped into the halls of Camains armory, and never forgot what he saw there.