Cenotaph of Bones: Chapter 37 (Patreon)

Chapter 37: Bread

“How are the hands?”  I was inspecting the damage to Donny, once again getting rebuffed by the scar tissue.  Jamila and I had returned to our little hideout without any issues, and checking my cousin’s injuries was the first thing I wanted to do.  “I haven’t seen anything like this before.  Something about the infection makes the scar tissue seem more… resilient.  I can’t even soften it to make the scars more flexible.”

“It’s a little painful, but nothing I can’t handle.”  Donny winced as he flexed his hands.  “They are just really stiff.  Some practice fighting and stretching should help.”

“Don’t forget to practice carving formations a bit before you try it on the real thing.”  I gave up trying to heal the damage, and stood to get my skewer of roasted murder goat meat and vegetables from Chu.  “Making a mistake on a plate you want to power up could lead to some real problems.”

“I will, don’t worry.”  Donny grabbed his own skewer of food, and used it to point at a pile of stone disks sitting nearby.  “I was practicing while you were gone.  The only thing I really need to watch out for is how deep I carve the runes.  My hands aren’t as sensitive, so going too deep is easy to do.”

“He isn’t giving himself enough credit.”  Chu flopped down next to me, two skewers clutched tightly in his hands.  “He hasn’t taken a break since waking up.  I bet he will be carving and fighting circles around the rest of us again in no time.”

“That just means the rest of us can’t slack off.”  Valerie came over to join us.  She carried two skewers as well, but handed half of one to Donny before sitting next to him.  “I have to admit, I think the strain of cultivating with all of this dark and metal qi around us has forced me to improve my rate of absorption to a new level.”

“I noticed that too.”  Jamila snatched a piece of goat meat off the end of Chu’s skewer and popped it into her mouth.  She only grinned as he glared at her in silent protest.  “Well, don’t cook so good if you don’t want people to eat it.”

“Fair.”  Chu smiled at the compliment, but angled his skewers so she couldn’t steal any more from him.  “I agree about the cultivation speed, too.  It might suck to be stuck underground, but it has definitely forced all of us to get better at collecting the different elements, no matter how faint they are.”

“That’s what separates the good from the great.”  I took a bite from my own skewer.  “Finding the advantage even in a terrible situation to make sure you improve yourself is the way to always move forward in life.”  I stood up and went to check on the barrel that I had set out to collect condensed liquid qi.  It was close to overflowing, so I plucked the focusing stones out of the formation plate and stored them away.  The funnel-shaped formation plate went into a different storage stud on my belt, and I sealed the barrel before any of the liquid qi could start evaporating.  “Is everyone about ready to go?  I want to check over your armor and then we need to head out.”

“Just a few minutes!”  Chu jumped up and went to go and store his cooking implements.  “Are we going to that tunnel we found?”

“That’s the plan.”  I eyed the horses, trying to think of a way to get them through the small entrance.  “It might take some work to get us all down.  And I think we need to come up with a way to protect us all from roaming bands of undead, especially the horses.  Do you remember those expanding blocks of wood meant to patch holes in ships?”

“Sure.  We should still have several pieces left.”  Valerie was packing up the hay and water trough left out for the horses.  “What are you thinking?  A wagon or something?”

“There is something they use in the North called a Battle Wagon.  Field Generals use them as a kind of mobile command center.”  I used my finger to draw a rough sketch on the dusty floor.  “They aren’t utilized very often, because they move so slow.  I want to try and make a smaller version.  Something that only two horses could manage to pull.  Instead of focusing on communication and offensive formations like they use, we could do only defensive formations.”  Another rough sketch beside the first outlined what I was picturing.  “The wood won’t be very strong, so we will have to interlock the designs on plates instead of carving into it directly.  Powering them will be a strain, but we can use the liquid qi for the more basic designs.  If we -”

“How about you take a breath, and check this over.”  Donny dropped his armor next to me, the clatter cutting me off.  “We can worry about that once we get to the lower level.  For now, make sure we are good to go, and then we can move forward.”

“Right.”  I picked up his gear, and sat down again.  “I’ll focus on one thing at a time.  You guys make sure everything is packed up.”  I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts.  The invisible clock ticking away inside my head was making it hard to think straight.  I shoved down the pressing urge to go sprinting off on my own to kill the necromancer and meticulously checked over everyones’ armor.  The thin lines of malachite that transferred energy from the core on the back of the helms were all showing signs of scorching.  They weren’t thick enough to handle the amount of power needed to empower the shield formations on the oversized rivets.  I patched in some additional wire to make them more robust.  It was only a temporary fix, meant to get us through the next few battles.  That’s all I was hoping we would need before we got back to the surface.  “That should do it.  Everyone just do their best to avoid overloading too much damage in one place.  Spreading out the strain should help keep the wires from burning out.”

“We will try.”  Chu gave me a sharp nod before strapping his armor into place.  “If we stick together this time, we can watch out for one another better.”

It was a subtle dig at my decision to split us up earlier, and I could only give him a chagrined smile.  Maybe I was expecting too much from my friends.  They weren’t me, and depending on one another in combat had become second nature for them.  I needed to keep that in mind for future training sessions.

“Okay, no more splitting the party.  Can we go now?”  Jamila was already leading Cloud for the door to coax the horse up the stairs.  She had her armor on much faster than the others.  “We are supposed to be in a hurry.”

The rest of us strapped our stuff on, and made our way toward the small tunnel that led toward the river of lava.  After several minutes of walking, we reached it without having to fight any undead.  The tunnel was more of a hole in the floor, which required us taking turns to widen it enough for Scout and Cloud to fit.  Taking our time to reinforce the surrounding stone was an exhausting endeavor, and we all took long breaks to cultivate in between.  I made sure to top off the charge on my batteries while I was at it, but it wasn’t easy keeping the balance right in the thick environment of dark and metal qi.  We managed, but it took longer than any of us liked.  Shaping a ramp took even more effort, and by the time we were finished it was past time for another meal.

“I don’t think we should stop to cook something.  Cold rations while we explore deeper.”  The others nodded in agreement, and we headed down.  We emerged into another cavern, this one with a steep-sided canyon splitting it neatly in the center.  It was shaped like someone had dropped a rectangular box on top of a floor with a thick crack running through the middle.  It was obvious the space was artificially shaped, and I was a little curious why they had built it to capture so much heat.  The stink of sulfur combined with a stifling heat that rose in waves from a small stream of lava far below the ledge we came out on.  It made the whole place almost unbearable, but we continued over to the edge to inspect what we were dealing with.

“Guys, just throwing this out there, but you probably shouldn’t trip.”  Chu kicked a small pebble over the edge, where it disappeared into the slow-moving trickle of molten rock.  “I don’t think our armor would hold up to that.”

“You don’t say!”  Jamila thumped him on the shoulder with a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.  “You are overflowing with good ideas, you know that?”

“I am to please, my future wife.”  Chu’s comment was said in fun, but Jamila’s sudden blush caused him to redden in return.  “I mean, uhhh…”

“What he means is, he is going to shut up now.”  Donny shook his head at the two.  “What are you two doing, anyway?  This isn’t some love story.  You are warriors, not blushing brides.  Let’s go kill something so you can get it out of your systems.”  We all had a laugh, and backed away from the stream of lava.

“There doesn’t seem to be anything on the other side, but those ancient dead skeletons up above had to come from somewhere.”  Valerie pointed to the dark corners of the cavern on the opposite side.  “I’ll check those with Donny, and you guys check this side for an exit.”

I felt Donny and Valerie spin up their cores before leaping across, the light from the lava gleaming on their armor in dramatic fashion.  Chu and Jamila went to check upstream, and I went downstream.  The chamber was small enough that a loud shout would bring us all running to help each other.  Scout and Cloud stayed by the ramp we had shaped leading down, clearly not enjoying the smell of this new space.

The section I was searching didn’t have any exits or tunnels, so I turned to head back and pulled out a trail ration to eat.  As I chewed on dry biscuit laced with some kind of herb meant to fortify the body, I felt a cool breeze brush past my face.  Freezing in place so I didn’t lose it, my eyes drifted to the wall near the canyon.

“It was a bakery!”  I jerked my head around at the sound of Chu’s shout.  “This whole place, it was a giant bakery!  The walls are lined with ovens!”  I inspected my part of the wall, but I didn’t see any ovens.

“It’s the same over here!”  Donny jumped back across the narrow canyon, a large stone long-handled peel in his hand.  “There were a few of these just laying around.  I think it’s some kind of spatula to take loaves out of the ovens.”

“Peel.”  Valerie corrected him as she jumped over the canyon.  “The big spatula with a long handle is called a peel.”

“Well, whatever it is, it means this place was basically a giant oven.  They must have had a lot of people underground to need all this.”  Chu took the hunk of stone from Donny to inspect it.  “The question is, how do you get out of here?  And why were there guards protecting an oven that a bunch of miners broke into?”

“Maybe they were low on food, and the miners were hungry?”  Jamila took the peel away from Chu and stored it in a ring.  “If they were using this as some kind of industrial bakery, it had to have been controlled by some important people.  My guess is, being underground like this would make food production a vital part of life.  Control the food, and you control the people.”

“That’s… pretty dark.”  Donny flexed his hands, stretching the scar tissue.  “Do you think hunger was what made the people that built these ruins leave?”

“It’s as good a reason as any.”  I didn’t expound on the idea with my friends.  They had never been in a position where food was scarce.  More than one winter campaign in the North I had been on had run low on provisions.  The shipments of food from the South were frequently interrupted by storms, and I knew exactly the kinds of problems empty bellies could cause for those in a position of leadership.  “If they were running out of food, it could have led to riots, and eventually the people would have left for greener pastures.  Literally.”

“I’m sure all of that was important a really long time ago, but what do you say we find a way out of here?  It isn’t getting any cooler in here.”  Valerie nodded at the horses.  “They won’t be able to put up with the heat forever.”

“Well, they had to get the bread in and out somehow, and keeping in the heat to bake things means there has to be a door.  That side doesn’t have any ovens on it, and I think I felt a breeze.”  I moved toward the area I had been searching.  “This has to be where we need to go.  If we search, there has to be some kind of lever or something to open it.”

The five of us spread out along the wall, looking for anything to indicate a mechanism to open a part of the wall.  After searching the soot-stained floor I noticed faint parallel lines from a cart or wagon running along the edge of the canyon.  At some point, there had been a bridge running over the chasm, and it led from there straight up to the blank wall I had felt the breeze from.  After ten long minutes of searching, Donny gave up and knocked a big hole in the wall.

“Well, that’s one way to do it.”  Chu looked through the gap in the wall, as chunks fell from the ceiling around him.  “Oh, there it is.”  He stepped through the hole and a loud crack echoed through the chamber.  The sound of gears thunking heavily into place somewhere under our feet caused dust to fall from the ceiling, and the entire wall section slowly lowered into the floor.  “I guess it was only on this side.”

“I don’t know about you guys, but I’m ready to get out of this heat.”  Jamila led the way forward, her katanas unsheathed and ready for a fight.  “I’ll scout forward while you bring the horses up.”

Valerie was already heading back to get them, but Scout and Cloud were more than ready to get out of the giant oven we had been standing in.  The two horses walked right past her, chuffing in aggravation as they stepped into the much cooler tunnel that angled deeper underground.

“I guess we should follow them.”  Donny shrugged, and quickly followed behind.  I was going to shout a warning for him to stay clear of Scout’s hooves, but he made sure not to get too close to the violent horse.  I guess he was starting to learn his lesson.