The Traveler in Red: Warlords of the Withered Land

Part Seven

Czarik Drameklion ran as quickly as he could down the rough-hewn stairwell, cut into the rocky foundation beneath The City itself, following the spindly figure of the Court's Claimsman, passing crackling torch after burning torch lighting the inky, oily stygian dark that led down to the depths of The Quarry.

"Something bad has happened.  The tally is not right.  Something is missing," the Claimsman had said, his beady, rat-like eyes dancing nervously.  "The Quarry has been compromised."

The Claimsman was an accountant of sorts for the warlord, Kolag Y’phree, but he was not a Tributarian nor a Tax Collector nor an Exchequer.  He was more a manorial steward tasked with accounting for the growth of the warlord's bounty.  His task was a simple one: keep count of and keep track of those special non-monetary possessions belonging to Kolag Y’phree.  The Claimsman counted swords and armor and shields and cannons and ammunition.  He counted the vials and bowls and types of chymikals used by the alchemical mathematicians.  He kept record of the number and contents of the many trunks of precious metals and jewels Kolag Y’phree "liberated" from his rival warlords and their plundered lands.

And he kept track of the contents of The Quarry.

Czarik Drameklion was the Quarry–master, he who kept the keys to the vast forbidden cavern beneath The City.  Admittance to and from the secret cavern was his sole responsibility.  Only the warlord himself could authorize permission to enter the underground mine and only Drameklion could provide access.  A monstrous, bronze, three-paneled door, twice the height of a man and thick as the trunk of an oaken tree, protected the gaping portal into the deepness of The Quarry.  The doors were old, dating back to nearly two centuries before the beginning of the Long Death and the arrival of The Wound, and no one remembered who had erected them or to which king they’d belonged.   But the outlawed Fraternity of Machus had, until recently, been the only guardians of the cold and gloomy place.  Now Czarik Drameklion and a special detachment of nine scarlet armored and helmeted sentries who answered only to the warlord kept and maintained access to the Quarry’s secrets.

Such security and such secrecy had nothing to do with paranoia or greed.   They had everything to do with the contents of The Quarry.

The Quarry held the most rare and precious, most fabulous planetary mineral ever found: Ikarenium, the Gateway Stone.

“As you know, we seldom mine here anymore, not since the demise of the Mage-Master, Kortinek the Lesser, some fifteen cycles past, but we always keep track of the number of processed ingots in the Blue Star vault and the piles of unprocessed raw ore in the Waiting Tank,” the Claimsman said breathlessly as he led Drameklion further across the Quarry floor to a huge rectangular obsidian cabinet resting atop a hexagonal dais cut into rock.

“So what is the issue?  Both the Blue Star vault and the Waiting Tank are triple-locked with lead knots.  There is no key with which to open them.  They can only be opened by someone who can unlink the metal loops comprising the knots,” Drameklion said.

“True.  And yet, there is a modest quantity of Ikarenium missing from the Waiting Tank,” the Claimsman said.

“How ‘modest’?”  Drameklion dreaded hearing the answer.

“Enough to initialize transit…”

Drameklion groaned aloud.   Ikarenium was, for the most part, an inert mineral.   It was, in its natural state, hard and brittle, striated in thin flaky layers, no good for building structures or for use in production of armor or weapons.   But when it was refined, a forbidden process that took unbelievable amounts of electrical energy, it became something astounding, a power that could change the fortunes of an entire world…