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Chapter 15: Onward to Altilluvia
The next day, Phyr and Vector mostly decompress in their room while Alice sees to her affairs. They eat free at the Loaded Die, so aside from their meals and an afternoon walk to clear their heads, they just relax. The following morning, they rise at first light for a simple, hearty breakfast and head out. Alice leads them in silence first to the ruins of Fort Roguelike, now almost completely dismantled per the terms of the treaty, and then along an inscrutable path whereby she stops at a landmark known only to her before reorienting herself and moving in a straight line to the next one. After six or seven such stops over the course of a crooked mile, they are in the foothills of the island’s mountain rim. Formations of layered sedimentary rock poke up from the landscape at similar angles here and there between the trees, ranging in size from a small pickup to a tractor trailer. Small caves and other depressions in the ground are also common, though markedly less so. On one of the larger rocky formations, a crude blaze is painted in faded crimson, nearly hidden by a sheet of moss clinging to the upper edge of the stone. She turns directly to her left and concentrates for a moment before leading the boys past a similar formation to a third, all in a nearly perfect straight line.
“Dispel.” At her word, the rocky formation disappears entirely to reveal a yawning hole sloping down into the Earth. The three then descend into a tunnel lined with the same glowing green moss that illuminated Noob Cave. A few dozen yards in, Alice stops at a peculiar looking stone clasped in a setting driven into the tunnel wall: a dark sphere of green-gray volcanic glass, about the size of a billiard ball, and etched with some half-dozen runes glowing a dim red. She places her hand over the stone, then looks back the way they have come and says, “Illusion.” As she pulls her hand away, the runes light up yellow in sequence, first in the center and then clockwise from the top. When the circle is complete, they flash a brilliant green before fading to the same color as the tunnel moss. Phyr and Vector look back to see the cave walls now appear to narrow before meeting just a few feet down the way they’ve come.
“Fancy,” Phyr says in an approving tone as they resume walking.
“Yes,” Alice agrees. “And expensive. Rayla and Aqu worked hard on this one.”
“Doesn’t seem so hard,” Vector says. “I mean, this is that old magic, right?” Alice gives a polite nod. “So most people can’t do it, and wouldn’t think to look for it in the middle of nowhere, but this kind of thing is all over fairy tales, isn’t it?”
“That it is,” Alice concedes, “But the tales that survive do tend to be the most remarkable.” Vector nods thoughtfully at this, and she continues. “The impressive part isn’t how the Illusion spell is maintained or how the stone is powered, though. Most passage-concealing illusions like this are in someone’s home. Or lair, as appropriate. The really tricky part is that it can sit on its own like this and still do its job for hundreds of years.”
“I thought Noob Town was just about to have its centennial,” Vector says, “And no one on the island had ever seen Rayla or Aqu.”
“That’s right,” Alice says with a patient nod.
Phyr gasps as insight strikes, and he says, “So they set this up before the colonists ever set foot on the island.” Alice winks an eyeless socket and clicks her tongue in assent. “And the ‘moneyed interests’ that funded the expedition - was that them, too? Working through go-betweens?” Another nod from Alice. “So this place being their fresh start, then… that goes back way farther than the Loaded Die, doesn’t it?”
“You got it,” Alice says with satisfaction.
”Scheisse,” Vector says quietly. “All that effort and planning, and they still lost everything. Remind me never to defy my destiny.”
“If you like,” Alice says with a shrug. “But if you ruled the whole of the civilized world, would you listen?”
Vector mulls this over for a tic, and says, “I’d like to think the power wouldn’t all go to my head, but who knows? Power changes you, doesn’t it?”
Alice nods, and Phyr says, “This isn’t about power, though. Dee’s always been stubborn as a lead-footed mule. She mellowed out when she got some life experience, but man, in school-”
“Didn’t I meet you two in high school?”
“Yes,” Phyr says, “But you met us on the internet, on moderated forums, at the turn of the millennium. School’s so different from that - it’s not strangers with common interests meeting as equals, it’s a whole pecking order. She hated that, and said so any time she ran into it. You couldn’t tell that girl anything without agreeing where she was right first - and she was always right about something.”
“Basic acknowledgment doesn’t sound like too much to ask.”
“It’s not, but remember: we were 90s schoolkids. ‘Treat me like an equal’ was heresy back then, and kids who didn’t fall in line were seen as stupid.”
“Right, I’d forgotten about that,” Vector says thoughtfully.
“Mind the gap,” Alice says, hugging the left wall of the tunnel. Beneath their feet, a small crack in the middle of the tunnel floor has grown imperceptibly wider and deeper over hundreds of paces. As they continue walking, it opens up into a rift between two shelves, while the ceiling above them slowly crawls away. In the silence, a gentle lapping can be heard rising up from below; but rhythmic like the ocean, not persistent like a river. Ahead, they can see late morning sunlight through a narrow gap, reflecting off sparkling water below. The wavy blue glow from the Pyrrhis Sea mingles with the green mosslight, and the smell of saltwater is soon unmistakable.
Half a mile further on, enough daylight reaches them that they can see jagged shelves rising above them and jutting out into the ever-widening tunnel. A hollow knocking can soon be heard, sounding in time with the ocean’s swell. A good deal further on - Vector and Phyr can’t tell how far - the echoing knock reaches its peak, and below them they can barely make out a sailboat. Hull and sail are both navy blue, making the vessel all but invisible in the semi-dark of the seaside cavern.
As Alice leads them down a precarious path to the boat’s mooring point, Vector says, “Please tell me this boat isn’t also centuries old.”
“No,” she says, “It’s how I got here with Rayla and Aqu, not long before you showed up.”
“They’re gonna be pissed when they find out it’s gone, aren’t they,” Phyr asks.
“As a drunk on half-price pitcher night,” she says with a grin.
They get squared away, and Alice steers them out into the middle of the passage. As they approach the cavern’s exit, they can see at last that the “narrow gap” is actually a quarter-mile high, and beyond it stretch the rocky roots of two adjoining mountains. As the Sun nears its zenith in the clear blue sky, they are away from the island at last, and they set sail into the ocean proper.
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