Children of The Underground

Chapter 9: The Descent

    The Cherenkovo device's sudden sparking had caused the entire party of five to halt. They arrived at the base of a mountain, this one much taller than the cliff face that Drazhek and Misha had gone down the previous day. But after navigating along the mountain's circumference, dead drunk for that matter, they decided that they should continue their search after sunrise. The party of five laid down camp, four bedrolls laid together in a row. Boris and Lena shared a bedroll. Vera was lying farther off from all four of the vedmaks. Drazhek and Misha, on the other hand, had separate bedrolls but lay beside one another, so close that they were almost touching.
    Boris, Lena, and (blissfully) Vera, were all softly snoring. But Drazhek and Misha were still awake. They were lying on their backs, staring at the night sky, a bluish-black tapestry studded with stars that gleamed like diamonds.
"Drazhek," Misha asked softly. Her voice was barely a whisper. "Tell me about Dolinamirna. About the pogrom."
For a long time, Drazhek was silent. Misha rolled over, expecting that he had fallen asleep, but  as soon as she closed her eyes Drazhek began talking.
"They set it on fire. Set the whole tvastrian wagon train on fire, and then shot anyone who came put. When they ran out of bullets, they gutted them with bayonets. All the while they yelled 'Brass-Beaters, Warlocks, Monsters!' Why? Because papa fixed their mill. It was an orichalc contraption, powered by a battery made of vajra. And did they realize, that their mill was an automaton, that it wasn't a blessing from the gods, but simple orichalc and vajra? No, they called my father a warlock and a conjure-man, then tried to murder the whole damn wagon train. Because when people who look like them make things like that magic mill, it's 'thaumaturgy'. But if people who look like me do it, then it's witchcraft."
Misha also was silent. But then she asked him another question:
"So then why still be a thaumaturge? If thaumaturgy hurt you and people close to you, then why are you pursuing it?" It was a dirty question. It was like the one that Drazhek first asked her in the tavern: whether or not Misha was a vedmak just for money. And like Drazhek's question to Misha about money, it made her feel petty for asking it. Drazhek rolled over and faced towards her, brown eyes locked on her green eyes.
"Because even if they hurt us, we can't change the things we love. Or anything else that make us the people who we are."
He leaned in closer to her, lips slightly parted, raising a hand cautiously to her face, as though it was a hot coal. She batted it aside and instead grabbed his head, her thumbs on his cheekbones, her fingers, curled through his black hair around the nape of his neck, and kissed his lips fiercely. Drazhek tensed up for a moment, taken aback by the sudden weight and warmth of the taller girl's body against his, and then, wrapping his arms around her waist, relaxed to accept it.
The darkness and stillness of the night was as warm and as comforting as a woolen blanket. But sweeter still was their acceptance. They made peace with the fact that they desired, even loved, one another. They accepted that their hopes and dreams, the futures each desired, might be incompatible, and neither one was willing to make the other compromise. 

They accepted, that once they finished exploring the depths below Koshei's peak, they might never see each other again.

    They awoke early that morning, still a little groggy, but nevertheless, excited. They ate a light breakfast of potted porridge, nobody speaking a word. They then returned to the exact same spot they reached yesterday, using Drazhek's Cherenkovo device.

    "It's here," Vera finally uttered. "Somewhere. It's waiting for us to just come and find it." The party of five stared at the grey, slate colored mountain, tracing it with their eyes from the base to the snowy peak. "The fact that you can feel the magic so palpably, means that there must be some kind of mechanism disguising the gate, hiding it from us."

    Boris and Lena snorted.

    "It's a mountain, Vera." Lena said. "Rockslides, erosion, even an avalanche could have buried the entrance. Since the doodad—" she pointed to Drazhek's Cherenkovo device, with its sparking, dipped point, "—is going off, there's wild magic here somewhere. But since we haven't triggered any anomalies, I can conclude that whatever magic here is obscured physically."
    "Then what do you suggest?" Vera asked. Her tone was testy, but she was wise enough to defer to the wisdom of her guides. Boris first pulled his gas mask out of his rucksack, then lifted his thumper, the pneumatic hand-cannon he called a weapon, up to shoulder-height.

    "Stand back. Back when I was a sapper for the army, we had this one motto: if there are no open doors, then make your own."

    The rest of the group rushed several paces away from Boris, following his example and putting on their own gasmasks.

    Boris was silent, moving the large and probably quite heavy hand cannon with an unexpected grace and ease. He lifted it slowly and levelly, as if it wasn't a man raising the weapon, but a machine.

    Boris pulled the trigger. Drazhek could hear the loud click of the hammer, but rather than a bang, there was a dull whump and a sound like a cork popping from a bottle. Something flew out of the cannon's barrel. It looked like a ceramic egg the size of a man's fist. Wisps of white fog trailed behind it like a cloud of condensation.
    It landed at the base of the mountain with a fiery explosion. Rather than explode, the wall of the mountain crumbled. An oval hole, perhaps five meters high and three meters wide, appeared in the mountain.
    The party entered inside the cave, wordlessly taking their marching order. They entered in an x-shaped pattern. Boris and Lena were in the vanguard, guarding the left and right flanks. Drazhek and Misha had taken up the rear. They both wielded their blunderbusses, and looked around nervously.
    What the morning sunlight revealed looked superficially like a cave. But it looked too...clean. The floors were smooth, and while they were shiny with some dampness, they weren't particularly wet. Save for some overlong stalagmites and stalactites, which seemed molded into columns and arches, the surface seemed flat.
    "It looks more like a crypt than a cave," Vera finally uttered. Her words, rendered flat and toneless from the gasmask she wore, made everybody flinched.
    "Maybe somebody's been living here." Lena replied "Or used to live here... Either way, best be prepared for a fight.". She unholstered two pistols, holding them in front of her. Boris in turn was reloading his thumper. Drazhek noted with some interest that rather than loading at the muzzle, the cannon's barrel broke open at a hinge that let Boris slide in ammunition. Instead of the egg-shaped bomb, however, Boris had loaded what looked like an oversized paper cartridge. He thought to later ask Boris if the propellant was not burning fuzz but thunderdust-a yellowish crystalline powder produced from airspring anomalies that when subject to sufficient mechanical force, exploded in a gust of wind.
    "While we're underground, I'm going to stick to canister shot," Boris announced. "Explosives could cause a cave-in, and if we meet anything that gives us trouble, this should be enough to take care of it."
    Drazhek looked at Misha and cocked his head quizzically, afraid of looking stupid in front of Boris.
    "Basically, a canister is a clay bullet which explodes on contact into a cloud of buckshot." She whispered. Then, saying louder to Boris, "Sounds like you've traded up, Wolf. When you, me, and Lena were together, you were using a rogatina." Boris chuckled. Drazhek chuckled, too. A 'rogatina' literally meant a 'bear spear', but in modern parlance referred to a long, high caliber musket that could be tipped with an especially long bayonet.
    "It's courtesy of our benefactor," Boris replied. He motioned to Vera, who had knelt down to light a burning-fuzz powered lantern.
    "Well, I won't skimp on hired hands," Vera replied. Her chest puffed out, and she stood a little straighter than before. "Lord knows that this daughter of a Baron needn't be a skinflint. Especially for her own security." With a wave of her hand, she signaled her entourage to start moving.
    The vedmaks started moving forward, still enveloped in the patch of light that came from the sun peeking through the cave's entrance. As they reached the edge of that pool of sunlight, Drazhek felt deja vu swooping through his stomach like an eagle on a rabbit. It was just like the plunge that Drazhek and Misha first took into the forest. They were crossing the same boundary, out of the light and into the dark. 
    Finally, the group slipped into total darkness. The lantern cast several meters of yellow-orange light around the party, improving visibility. But in the darkness of the cave, the light seemed to make the shadows darker. It made the shadows bigger, so that even a distance an arm's length away felt like a kilometer. The shadows were enveloping them, as though they were alive with their own malicious intent. Even the party's own shadows, the shadows of tough, dangerous, reliable comrades, were sharpened and distorted by the lantern's light into feral, dogheaded stalkers.
    They trekked forward with great trepidation, silent except for the steady footfalls of one another's boots. They were descending down an inclined tunnel as narrow as a catacomb. It felt like they were traveling down the throat of some monster's gullet.