Part Two — The Keys · The Threnody
Chapter Seventeen
Kel-Varesh IV — Present Day
Worf did not like the Vault.
He had not liked it from the rim, when the shuttle's engines cut out and the sound had come through the hull. He did not like it now, four hundred meters down a lava tube, in a pressure suit the temperature of a cooking pot, with sulfur in his filters and the orange glow of molten stone throbbing through the walls like the pulse of a beast that was not yet aware of them.
It was not the heat. He had crossed the fire-fields of Gorath in ritual armor at fifteen. It was not the depth. It was the question.
The phrase had grown louder with every turn of the tube. Seven notes, rising and falling, every nineteen seconds, without variation. A thing that wanted an answer. Worf was a warrior, and he understood what it was to be asked something by an enemy he could not see. He did not trust an enemy that asked so politely.
"Forty meters to the hall," Tobin said over the link. The technician's voice was tight. He had carried a scanner the whole way down, never once looking away from it. "The tube opens up ahead. There's a big chamber. It's a void, no floor I can read."
"How large?"
"Sixty meters across. A cavern. There's a channel running through the middle, and it's hot. Real hot. Eleven hundred degrees."
"Lava," Vash said.
"Yes."
"Wonderful."
She was third in the line, behind Worf and Tobin. Her voice, in the suit link, was dry and slightly breathless, the voice of a person who had decided to be amused because the alternative was worse. Worf had come to respect her, over three days, with a reluctance he would not have admitted to anyone. She did not flinch from things. She simply put a little more of herself in front of them.
Dara walked last. She had said nothing for some time.
The tube opened.
Worf stopped at the lip and let the others come up beside him. The chamber was a vast dark cathedral of stone, its ceiling lost in smoke, its walls running with heat. Through the center, forty meters below, a river of fire wound slowly through a black gorge, and its light rose to fill the cavern with a dim red glow like a forge. Across the gap, sixty meters off, he could see a second ledge. A small platform. On it, catching the light, a cradle of dull bronze and something pale.
Between here and there hung a bridge.
It was not a bridge in any sense he knew. It was a line of bronze bars, each a meter long and a hand's breadth wide, strung from iron cables across the abyss like the keys of an enormous instrument. They hung at various heights. Some sloped. Some were spaced close, some far. A few were missing altogether. There was no railing. As he watched, the heat rising from below made the bars shiver, and they gave off, very faintly, a low ringing note.
"Sweet Mother," Tobin breathed. "It's a xylophone."
"It is a trap," Worf said.
"It's both," Dara said.
She had come up beside him. Her voice was very calm. She stood at the lip with her hands at her sides and her face turned toward the bars, and he saw that she was listening with her whole body, eyes half shut, head tilted a little, in a way he had seen a singer do once, long ago, in the moment before she began a long aria.
"Each bar's tuned," she said. "If you step on one, it rings. The right sequence opens the path. The wrong bar drops."
"Into the fire," Worf said.
"Yes."
"How many are right?"
"Seven." She did not open her eyes. "It's the fifth phrase. The one with the long turn. I've been rehearsing it all day. I can give you the order. Follow me exactly. Step where I step. Do not hesitate and do not look down."
"And if we miss?"
"Then we miss," Dara said, "and I'd recommend not missing."
She went first.
Worf watched her go out onto the first bar, a slight small figure in a bulky suit, arms a little out from her sides for balance. The bar rang beneath her boot. A low clear note. She stepped to the second. A different note. The third, a leap across a gap of a full meter, a bar that swayed and sang and held.
It was, he thought, a remarkably steady gait. She moved like someone crossing a stage she had crossed many times. Her voice came back over the link, low and even, calling each step in turn. This one. Now the high. Skip the next. Left, then left. The bars rang under her as she passed, and their ringing joined, and the cavern filled with a slow stately melody, not quite a tune, not quite a song, like a hymn played by a cathedral of bells.
"Go," Worf said to Tobin.
Tobin went. Vash followed. Worf came last, his boots finding the bronze, the heat from below striking up through the soles of his suit. He kept his eyes on the next bar and on nothing else. He had learned, long ago, that the warrior who looked at the fire was already burning.
He had crossed perhaps half the span when he noticed it.
It was a minor thing. He saw it only because he was looking at her back. At the fourth step from the middle, Dara paused. It lasted less than a second. She stopped, one foot raised over a bar, her head tilting sharply aside as though someone had spoken in her ear. She stood like that, poised above the dark, while the cavern's ringing faded around her and the phrase in the distance rolled on toward its next repetition.
Then she set her foot down on the bar beside the one she had been about to step on.
She had corrected herself. He was certain of it. A half-second before, she had been intending to go left. She had gone right. The change had come not from uncertainty but from attention, as though a voice he could not hear had prompted her.
He let it pass. He placed the observation in the cold, patient part of his mind where he kept such things, to be examined later, and moved on.
"Tobin!"
Vash's voice. Sharp. Worf looked up.
The technician had frozen on the sixth bar. His scanner was in his hand, the light of its display shining on his helmet. He had glanced at it, only for an instant, to check a reading, and the bar beneath his left foot had begun to tilt. It was a very slow tilt, barely perceptible. The bronze dipped, and the cable beneath it groaned, and the note that rang from it was not the one that had rung from the bars before. It was flat.
"I didn't, I didn't move, I just—"
"Don't look at the scanner!" Dara called.
The bar dropped.
It went all at once, a single clean fall, and Tobin went with it. He shouted. He hit the cable, swung, caught the next bar with both hands, and hung there over the glowing gorge with his boots kicking at empty air. The bar he hung from began to sag.
Worf was moving before he had decided to. He went forward along the bronze at a run, three steps, four, every one of them off the path, ignoring every warning in his body and every note that rang wrongly under him. He flung himself flat, reached down, and caught Tobin by the harness.
The bar beneath Worf's chest gave way.
He felt it go. A dull crack of metal, a sudden terrible lurch, and then his whole lower body was hanging out over nothing, one arm wrapped in the cable, the other locked around Tobin's harness, both boots dangling above the fire. Something hot closed around his right calf. A jet of white steam had come up from a vent in the gorge wall, and it struck the suit's leg like a blowtorch. He heard the armor crack.
He did not cry out. A Klingon did not. But he drew a breath through his teeth that was not entirely silent.
"Worf!" Vash. Close. "Hold on. I've got your harness."
"I have Hale."
"I know. Hold on."
Hands took his shoulders. Another, smaller pair took Tobin's collar. He felt himself lifted, heaved, hauled up onto the next bar, and the next, and then the bronze was solid beneath his chest and he was lying on his back on a platform of dull metal, looking up at the smoke, with a pain in his right leg that was bright, clean, and entirely dispassionate.
"Report," he said.
"You've got a broken tibia," Vash said. She was kneeling over him with her hands at his leg, tearing the suit seam. "And third-degree burns from the knee down. You're an idiot."
"It is a Klingon virtue."
"It's an idiot's virtue." Her voice shook. She pressed a sealant patch across the wound. "Tobin. You all right?"
"I'm alive," Tobin said faintly. He was on his hands and knees, retching into his helmet. "Thank you. Thank you, Commander."
"There is nothing to thank me for. You would have done the same."
"I wouldn't have been able to."
"That is also not a thing to be ashamed of."
Dara knelt on his other side. Her face behind the faceplate was white as bone. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm so sorry. I should have seen the tilt. I should have called it earlier."
"You called it in time," Worf said.
"I heard it a second before. It wasn't fast enough."
"You are not responsible for the bridge."
She watched him, and for a moment something moved behind her eyes that he could not read, and did not like. Then it closed, and she was only a frightened young woman kneeling beside him in a cavern of fire.
They finished the crossing because there was nothing else to do.
It was a slow, ugly business. Worf walked. He would not be carried. He leaned on Tobin on one side and Vash on the other, and his right leg dragged behind him like a thing that belonged to someone else, and every bar rang under his weight and every note was a needle in his spine. Dara went ahead, calling each step. She did not pause again. He watched her, carefully, all the way across.
The platform at the far end was small and very hot. A cradle of green bronze stood at its center, and in it, hanging in a hair's width of nothing, turned a single pale ring.
Not a Key. Worf had seen two now, and this was neither. It was one ring of seven, the outermost, a lone hoop of pale metal about the width of a dinner plate, carved with a single continuous line. It turned very slowly in the firelight, singing the seven-note phrase. The question. It was, he understood, the last question, and the ring was the place where it ended.
"It's a fragment," Vash said. "The Vault's not a Key. It's a part of one. The rest of it's somewhere else."
"Somewhere else on the list," Tobin said hoarsely.
"Yes."
Vash moved toward the cradle. Dara, to Worf's slight surprise, stepped in front of her. "Let me," she said. "I'm the one who can read it. Let me make sure it's safe."
Vash hesitated. Then she nodded.
Dara reached into the cradle. She lifted the ring. Worf watched her hold it, turning it carefully in both gloved hands, her head bent over it like a woman studying the face of a sleeping child. The phrase ceased. The silence in the cavern was abrupt and total. The bars across the gorge hung still.
And Dara said something.
It was low. He caught it only because his hearing was keener than a human's, and because the silence had left the air so empty. She did not say it to Vash. She did not say it to anyone. She spoke it to the ring, in a language he did not know, a low murmur of soft sounds that rose and fell like the phrase it replaced. And then, in Standard, so softly that it was barely a breath:
"Not yet."
She turned. She held out the ring to Vash with both hands.
"It's safe," she said. "It's only a fragment. It won't hurt anyone."
Vash took it. She wrapped it in padding and clipped it to her belt. Behind her, Tobin was already helping Worf to his feet. No one else had heard. Worf looked at Dara for a breath, and Dara did not look back at him, and he filed the observation beside the first, in the cold place, to be examined later.
He did not like what the two made when he set them together.
"Let us go," he said. "I would prefer to be out of this place before the next question."
They climbed. Behind them, in the dark, the bronze bars rang once, softly, as though in farewell, and then hung silent over the fire.