Tunnel Rat

Chapter 220: Downward Path

Milo felt a sense of relief as he entered the hidden tunnels. As much as he loved being in the Hollow, he missed exploring the dark corners and tunnels of the world. Solitude didn't bother him at all, and for all he was learning to be around people, he still needed his time alone. His friends in the Hollow understood his need to go to new places and explore. The council had insisted that he keep his ring and remain the official Master of Scouts. Bleusnout had taken him aside to explain.

"The ring doesn't matter. We have extra rings now and not one but two good candidates to do your job. Frankly, most of us can't tell Ringtail and Tweedle apart and think of them as one person. By leaving you as officially their superior, it gives them room to grow. The responsibility can feel suffocating at first as you try to live up to your idea of how the job has to be done. Go explore and enjoy yourself. You can represent the Hollow in other places. You'll bring back knowledge and trade with other people."

So with a Scout ring on one finger and the General's ring on another, he headed to the hidden door at the end of the tunnel to satisfy his curiosity about the mysterious staircase. Everything was the same as he had left; the secret door closed tightly. Opening it revealed the crude stone stairs descending downward. Not wishing to be trapped on the other side, he blocked the door from closing with an iron spike and examined the area on the other side. It took him half a bell to find the hidden trigger. A small crack was filled with hardpacked dirt, but he could see the small button inside once cleared. Expecting a poison needle trap, he pushed the button with a piece of stiff wire.

The trap was there, but it wasn't a needle. A slim, razor-sharp blade shot out, severing the wire. He also detected the familiar scent of poison made from Red Spotted Eye-rot mushrooms. The true trigger was in a hole on the side of the crevice that he could access with the wire. Having found how to return to the tunnel, he closed the door and carefully descended. The stairs were well made but odd. They followed the crevice's outer wall that fell into the darkness. The spiral appearance was an illusion. The clever builders made the stairs wider in some spots than others. If you looked at the outer edge, you could follow the irregular shape of the natural crevice. But the inside edge of the stairs was a perfect spiral around a four-foot-wide space. Milo couldn't understand why the staircase builders would spend the time to do it this way, but he had to admit to their skill with stone.

This wasn't dwarven work. Even looking at the differently shaped stairs would have driven a dwarven stone wright to tear out his hair. Despite their look, the stairs were sturdy. Milo was careful to test each one, but nothing budged. He descended several rounds, moving downward over two-hundred feet, when he came to the first side tunnel. Further up, he had seen places where someone had dug into the rock in a dozen places, but only for a few feet. This tunnel was four-feet square and ran horizontally into the rock. He had to stoop just a little to move through it, something he was used to. A side tunnel branched off to the right and left every forty feet. Whoever had mined here had moved a lot of rock to find something. He found a little evidence of a mineral they valued and searched for. In one tunnel, he could see where an area had been dug out to expose a small ore node. A small bit still adhered to the rock—a silvery-white ore.

As he wandered the tunnels, Milo felt in the rock around him for pockets of the ore. He suspected he had seen this metal before. There had been a small bit of silvery ore the size of the last joint of his finger on the body he had found at the top of the stairs. After ten minutes of searching and several false alarms, he felt something. Digging with his pick into the hard stone, he found an egg-sized chunk of the ore. White veins ran through the dull silver of the ore. It was much harder than the rock around it. Identify only told him that it was Silverite Ore but nothing about its use or value. He pocketed it and kept searching for another half a bell before returning to the stairwell and descending again.

There were more short tunnels dug into the walls at regular intervals. Test mines looking for ore? And then another long tunnel a hundred and fifty feet further down. The stairs kept going. A large room had been carved out here, with a higher ceiling. A small, crudely made table and chair were in the room and two wooden chests. The wood was old and weak with dry rot, crumbling to his touch. One held nothing but a dozen decayed brooms and two broken shovels, while the other was filled with broken iron pick heads and dulled chisels. All of it rusted into a solid mass. Three tunnels branched off of the room. For the first time, he noticed places to hold torches and the scorched ceiling above those areas. The miners could either see as well in the dark as he could or had brought their own light.

Creeping through the abandoned mine complex led him to many natural caverns. Tunnels branched off from these, leading from twenty to a hundred feet in many directions. Stone stairways were constructed to reach parts of the roof, continuing up to a point and stopping. The caverns were very dry, will little life in them, with one notable exception. He heard the sound of water coming from a tunnel and explored in that direction, coming to a strange oasis in the middle of the dark mines. The little cavern was only about a hundred feet across, with a ceiling that formed a dome above it. Several large, glowing crystals provided light, and the area was filled with plants. A small trickle of water ran down one wall and flowed into a depression against the wall, forming a pond only twenty feet across.

Someone had lived here once. Flat stones made pathways between overgrown fields bordered with rocks. A small stone hut, only four-foot high, was next to a fire pit and clay oven. Nothing was inside the house except the nest of a long-dead animal, its small bones crumbling to dust. The hut was almost too small for Milo to enter. It was barely eight-foot across with a small door, only two-foot high. But the workmanship of it was curious. What at first looked like mortared stone walls proved to be rocks fused to each other using no mortar. Earth magic, perhaps? The walls and ceiling were solid and would last for centuries.

A complete search of the cavern showed no traps or dangers but more examples of the magical stonework. Stone pathways wound around the pond and through the tall plants. In one clearing, he found a stone table with two stone stools made for someone only two feet tall. The top of the table looked like a chessboard, with dark and light stones inlaid into the top. Nothing was dangerous in the cave; the largest creatures were the few cavefish swimming in the pond and large snails that moved slowly through the vegetation, eating their dinner.

Milo decided this was a good spot to camp and rest after exploring for hours. Rather than sleep in the stone hut, he pulled his small tent and bedroll from storage along with some food and fuel for a fire. When everything was set up, he used his Ring of the Swiss army to summon his watch lizard, Georgie. The lizard stretched his legs and yawned, then looked at Milo as if to say, "It's been a long time, boss. Where have you been?" Milo scratched him under his chin and apologized by sharing his meal. Georgie accepted the apology, then started moving around the area, inspecting this new domain. Spying a snail, he carefully came up behind it and pounced, grabbing the six-inch long mollusk and biting off its head before bringing it back to camp and setting it down on the edge of the small fire.

Milo watched with curiosity. The snail steamed as it cooked, the shell turning black. With a deft claw, his lizard pulled it out of the fire and rolled it to the water. A small hiss and a bit of steam indicated how hot the shell had become. His meal cooled off, and Georgie came back next to Milo and used his strong jaws to crack open the shell and begin eating. Milo sniffed twice, inhaling the scent and deciding he needed to go snail hunting himself. Walking to the area by the pond, he reached down and grabbed a large snail. It reacted poorly, squirting him in the face with a stinging liquid. He tossed the snail by his camp and washed the weak acid off in the pond. Georgie approached his snail from the rear, bit off the head, then went back to eating his meal.

Milo set his snail on the fire. Georgie ran off to get more, doing the hunting and sharing his bounty with the poor two-legger who didn't know better than to pick up a snail without eating the head first. The taste of the roasted snail was good, but it could be better. Milo set up his fondue pot and melted some Gruyere. Snail with cheese sauce was a big improvement. Georgie turned up his nose when offered a piece, preferring his snails to be cheeseless. Milo didn't mind not having to share his cheese.

The more he looked around the little cavern, the more he wanted to come back to it again. The thought of it being lost in the darkness was sad. He took out a journal and pen and detailed his journey, starting at the Hollow. He could remember all his twists and turns in the darkness, but it would be difficult for someone else, even with his notes. He sketched a map of the way he had come and made a small drawing of the little house. Georgie looked at his drawing of a snail and wasn't impressed.

Full of food and tired from exploring endless tunnels and caverns, Milo went to sleep, confident in his safety with his brave lizard on watch.

Milo didn't log out of the game when he went to sleep. Instead, he slowly relaxed and slept both in the game and his pod, giving himself a much-needed rest. Hours went by, and finally, he stirred and rolled to his feet, feeling much better. Georgie came running over, eager to show him a half-dozen fat snails sitting next to the fire pit. Milo lit the fire using the coals from the night before and pushed the snails close to it. While they baked in the heat, he went to the small pool to wash up. The water was cold and refreshing, and he felt better for washing off the dust and sweat of the day before. Floating in the cold water, he detected a slight current. He could see the small stream of water that came down the wall and made its way to the pond, be where did it leave?

The answer was along the rock wall, hidden by ferns that anchored themselves to the rock with their roots in the water. A small metal grate, only a foot square, was set into the stone wall. Overflow water entered into it, heading for someplace lower down. Milo tried to see if there was a cavern beyond the grate, but the old metal was clogged with mud and moss. He wiped it off, noted the layers of rust, and pulled it out from its opening. The rusted metal crumbled at the edges, and water poured more freely into the opening, clearing away years of accumulated silt. Milo stuck his head into the opening but only saw a narrow drain heading further down. But as he pulled his head back, he noticed a glimmer of something shiny on the drain floor. A nodule of Silverite Ore was lying in the sludge, as big as his fist. Digging deeper, he found more and more nuggets ranging from the size of his thumb to the huge rock he had first pulled out. He dug down, cleaning out the depression of its little treasures, cleaning them off in the water flow. Eventually, he found enough ore to fill a large bucket.

Was this someone's secret stash? Or the work of many miners? And why was it still here? He needed to go deeper into the caverns if he was going to find an answer.

His musings were interrupted by his watch lizard tugging on his tail. Following Georgie back to his camp, he found two snails left for him, cooling on a rock. The others had been cracked and eaten. He patted Georgie on the head and sat down to eat. Minutes later, rested and fed, he said goodbye to the little cave. He'd have to come back and show it to other people. Ringtail and Tweedle, for sure. He estimated that the pathway through the mines and up the stairs would only take him 2-3 hours if he weren't exploring along the way. Using a piece of chalk, he marked his route as he retraced his steps, leaving a string of clues that led to the little oasis.

Soon, he was back at the curious stairway and began to descend again. Twice more, he came to levels that were mined heavily. As before, the mine shafts ran in grid patterns, except where extra tunnels were dug into the walls. At the start of each complex were larger rooms with larger furniture. Small miners and larger overseers? He had a theory that the grid of tunnels were dug, and then a miner with something like his stone sense looked for the ore that might be hidden in the walls. Twice he'd found tunnels that moved along a random path as if following a large vein of ore. These tunnels were large enough for someone the size of a large human to maneuver them. The walls had been quickly hacked and weren't squared off like the other tunnels.

Down the stairway went further and further until he came to a curious area. It was a small cavern, well-lit with crystals, with stairs in the center and a large passageway that slanted down. The stairway descended still but entered a huge cavern that was partially lit with fluorescent moss and crystals. Directly below it, and engulfing the bottom stairs was a large mountain of loose stone. The loose rocks and dirt from the mines had been dumped into the center hole to fall to the bottom. The pile of crude brooms and shoves he had seen above were explained. As the stones fell, some would land on the stairway. Only constant sweeping would keep things safe for walking. In his mind's eye, he saw armies of small miners digging out the rock, others hauling it to the central shafts, and still more sweeping the stairs clean. All for a small amount of ore?

Milo could see far into the giant cavern from his vantage point on the stairs at the top of the pile. In four more places, he saw stairs that went to the ceiling, each with a mountain of rubble piled around it. Against the cavern wall, he saw a road leading up that disappeared into a tunnel. Retracing his steps, he took the large passage and followed it down until he emerged in the cavern on the road. Another twenty minutes walk, and he reached the bottom of the road.

This cavern was in a state of perpetual twilight. Mushrooms and fungi of all types grew everywhere, along with ferns, grass, and small trees. Rocky roads led from the bottom of the ramp in three directions. Milo took the rightmost road and started walking along the edge, staying as silent and stealthy as possible. He heard nothing but silence.

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