Chapter Ten
Recaro pulled open the door until it was as open as it could go, making a loud bang as it hit the walls. We went inside, Recaro taking the lead, Sarrol taking the rear. What lay beyond was a narrow hallway with bare, stone walls. An archway at the end led to a single door sprayed with chrome.
Our presence made it automatically open as the sound of gears shifting approached my ears. Past the door was a small, square room. Two gas lamps were situated at the ceiling, and a rustic, water-damaged wooden floor sat beneath my feet. The door closed on its own, trapping us inside the box.
On the wall to my right, I could see two blinking lights, one with an arrow pointing upward and the other pointing downward. Beside this were two, black buttons.
“You might want to hold onto something,” Recaro warned me.
I held on one of the three metal bars that were situated on each wall, cool to the touch. Sarrol did the same on the wall next to me, and when he nodded to Recaro, the lead patroller pushed the higher of the two ominous buttons, next to the arrow pointing skyward.
The room instantly lurched, and I could feel an immense pressure coming down on my entire body. It was like an invisible force was pushing me down. I didn’t weaken my grip on the bar, holding onto it like a life preserver. I managed to steal a quick glance at Recaro, who was sitting in the very corner, bracing against the unbearable compression.
I knew what this contraption was even before the movement occurred. It was some sort of bizarre, super-charged elevator, and although it felt like an eternity, the entire ride only lasted for about five seconds. It stopped abruptly, flinging my body up in the air for a brief second before I fell back to the wooden ground.
The elevator door unlatched and flung open at a steady pace. “What . . .” I began to say.
“Yeah . . . not really a convenient way of transportation,” Recaro jested without any hint of humor in is tone.
I tried to fathom the reason behind the lift, and why it was necessary to get to the Empress’s “headquarters”. But then I remembered the large, stone tower some ways away from the entrance to the aqueduct. It made sense that we would have to use an elevator to be lifted from underground. The aqueduct waterway must have snaked underground until it met at an area directly below the tower, an area where the elevator was located.
“Let’s get the hell outta here,” Sarrol said as he shook off the paralysis-like sensation, which was created by the immense upward movement and the gravity that held us down.
We followed Recaro out of the contraption and we found ourselves in a circular room. Much like the buildings in the courtyard, the walls were made of dainty, tan stone, and light of numerous colors streamed in through mosaic windows at the base of the walls, gold lamps dotting every inch at the upper walls. When looking up, I noticed that there was no barrier between the inside of the roof and the room we were currently in. The circular walls just thinned out into a perfect cone up above, where cobwebs and spiders nested. A bronze chandelier of webs and bare light bulbs hung from the very center of the cone, flickering due to poor maintenance.
Furniture dotted the area, all of which were a Victorian style, including the artwork that seldom hung upon the curved walls. But where was the Empress? I looked around towards one of the many glass-stained windows. This particular one was much larger than the others: One main window with two smaller ones hugging its sides. The colorful glass depicted Efaque City from the outside; a large, metallic pyramid, its upper half floating above the first, with the golden gazebo and statues of two kids.
