Read Online The Orphaned Worlds by Michael Cobley - Free Book Online Page B

figure shone like a temple carving brought to life. He followed it round the corner and down the hall to where the open archways of two tall corridors gaped darkly. Earlier, Chel and the others had explored them briefly before retiring for the night; one led to a stairway that spiralled up to a small level of connected rooms full of stone channels and conduits that once would have guided numerous vital roots back when vast forests had towered over even the mountain ranges of Umara, in the age of Segrana-That-Was.
    The other led down a short flight of steps to a pair of heavy stone doors which they’d found to be solidly jammed shut. Predictably, this was where the bright outline figure went, gliding from wall to door, undulating across stained surfaces, sinking in and fading from view. Chel sighed as he stopped before the doors, studied the beautifully intricate carvings of entwining vegetation, then slipped his hands into the angled gripping slots and pulled. Nothing, not the slightest hint of any give. Frustrated, he gave them another sharp tug – and heard a faint crack.
    Frowning, he stared at the door, clearer now that his eyes, original and seer, had adjusted to both the darkness and the underlying residual images of the past, fleeting glimpses of other hands pushing the doors open, other forms coming and going. He focused. The right-hand door no longer seemed so flush against the other, and Chel could just detect the thready glow of energy at the hinge pintles, floor and ceiling. This time he grasped the finger slot with both hand and hauled on it with all his force, felt movement, paused for breath and pulled again.
    With a scraping, grating sound the door gradually came open, a finger’s width, then a hand’s width, then finally a gap sufficient to allow him to squeeze through. On the other side he leaned against the wall, smelling a musty dankness amid the darkness, gazing at the stairs that wound down into the dark heart of the mountain. He felt the sheer weight of all the rock that lay above him, that great, cold downward-pressing mass, and for a moment he wavered. But he gathered his resolve, pushed the unease aside, and continued, following the stairs down.
    His footsteps kicked up dust and he could feel fine grit through his hide boots. Through the crumbly erosion of the walls his fingers could make out deeper grooves, not the details of ancient Uvovo depictions and bas-relief decorations, but something else. Then in a leap of conjecture he was sure that they had once acted as guides for creeper plants, a web of them trained throughout the Uvovo stronghold, bringing living greenery to its every corner. Perhaps even light, too, from ineka beetles and ulby roots.
    The stairs came out in a small room off a curving corridor. It was pitch black down here but his Seer eyes revealed the cracked walls, the regular chamber openings along the outer wall, the occasional pile of rubble, the dried-up corpses of insects with a few live ones scuttling away from his feet. But of the strange wall ghost there was no sign. At last he came to where a fall-in was serious enough to block the way, a mound of rock and earth that had spilled into the passageway quite some time ago going by the encrustations of dust and delicate, desiccated remains of plants. A big wedge of ceiling masonry had punched a hole in the floor through which Chel could see an empty room devoid of life.
    The curved corridor ran in a wide circle, and the inner wall had only two openings, intriguing recesses with steps leading down to square double doors. Resembling ceremonial entrances, they were set diametrically opposite each other but were blocked by boulders and large pieces of broken stonework which had been piled into the recesses. Standing before one of them, Chel frowned as he wondered who had done this and why, and what lay behind the doors. Then he retraced his steps back to the big rockfall and the hole in the floor which might just be wide enough