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   “Some days I come here just for the bread…”

  But he was also fascinated to hear several conversations about Eva Hyllis’s healing:

   “and this boil on my arm just kept coming back. My regular healer would lance it and it’d be better for a few days, but then it’d grow right back. I come down here and Ms. Hyllis and that beautiful daughter of hers leaned down over it. They were, mumblin’ for a while. It started to feel better right away. Then there was a tiny bit of pain, but nothing like having it lanced. I even dozed off at one point while they was workin’ on me. Then they said they’d drained it again. They told me it kept coming back because there was still a piece of wood in it. Showed me the splinter and everything.” The man with him expressed doubt, saying they probably showed the same splinter to everyone, but the fellow just laughed, “Maybe, but my boil hasn’t come back. I’m happy.”

   “I felt like I was slowly going blind. I’d been to some of the antiquities dealers and tried what spectacles they had as well as some of the spectacle lenses and even the pieces of broken lenses. None of them ever helped enough that I could read again. When I went to Ms. Hyllis, she had a whole row of little lenses she had me try until we found the one I liked best. Then her daughter went back around behind the cabinets to see if they had a bigger one like the one I’d chosen. They did!” The man held up a lens with a little handle that’d been dangling from a string around his neck. He said, “I’m thinking of getting a lens for each eye and having them mounted on those spectacle frames Soh jewelers are making.”

  This last conversation really piqued James’ interest. He’d always prided himself on writing his accounting figures with a small hand to save paper. Recently, he’d found himself having to write bigger just to be able to read what he’d written. He was having trouble when he had to go back to some of the old accounts he’d written fine in the past. Maybe I’m slowly going blind the same way this fellow was, he wondered. I think I’ll come back and see about getting lenses for myself. His eyes widened, And I’d better do it before I make any recommendations about raising the taxes on this place. If these people moved to Murchison before I could get the lenses, that’d be a disaster.

  James took a place at one of the tables, holding a seat for Nantz as well. While he waited, a slender girl wearing rough mannish clothing came out of the kitchen and went upstairs. She had arrestingly blue eyes. Her shaggy, dirty-blonde hair looked like it’d been cut with an ax and combed with fingers. Still, he thought, that’s undoubtedly the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. Must be the daughter they’re all going on about.

  When his pizza came, it was just as amazing as Nantz had promised…

  ***

  Tarc walked down the long underground hallway, wondering whether this was the day he’d finally get into the big rooms. The day after he’d gotten into the long hall he’d brought Daussie and had her port oil into the locks. A few days after that he’d gotten into the small rooms and the short hallway that led to the big rooms.

  One of the small rooms had looked like it’d been for cleaning supplies. At least it had a bucket with what he thought were the remnants of a mop standing in it. There were several brooms, fragile with age, and shelves with bottles whose contents had leaked or evaporated away. It all suggested janitorial work to him. The other small room was full of wiring and cabinets containing what Henry Roper would’ve called “electronic gear.” Tarc had already harvested big bundles of the heavy gauge wire for its copper. The insulation had proved to be so fragile with age he could remove it by beating the wire against a wall.

  The heavier locks on the big doors from the short hallway into the large rooms had resisted his attempts to open them so far. As usual, he was wondering whether he would have to ask Daussie to cut the tumbler pins but still hoping he wouldn’t.

  It proved to be his day. The pins moved and he was able to turn the locks. As the door finally creaked open it struck him that there was something weird about the huge room beyond. It took several seconds for it to register with him that the weird thing was… light.

  The dusty room was lit.

  Dimly, but nonetheless, lit. Though he knew it was, Tarc still sent his ghirit up to confirm that the room was indeed below ground.

  The light diffused from a large area in the center of the high ceiling. Tarc focused his ghirit above the light. The base of one of the buttresses from Clancy Vail’s tower stood directly above where the light came in. Is some of the ancients’ electrical lighting technology still working? he wondered.

  The corner of the big room bulged out directly under the cylinder of the tower.

  It had a door.

  Frustratedly, Tarc thought he’d probably have to get Daussie to come down and port oil into more locks. As he picked his way across the room to the door, he looked around the chamber itself. It appeared to be some kind of meeting room with built-in chairs. It had a stage on one end. There were clusters of freestanding tables and chairs around the periphery of the room. Even better, there were stacks of folded tables and chairs against the walls. If those have as much metal in them as I think, he thought with satisfaction, they’ll be worth a lot of money.

  He arrived at the bulging corner of the room. As expected, the door had a lock. He sent in his ghirit but then realized the bolt wasn’t thrown. Gripping the knob, he turned and pulled. The door creaked open.

  It was a dark stairwell, with stairs climbing into the tower above in one of the spiral tubes he’d sensed inside the concrete.

  He went back for his lantern.

  In the small space of the stairwell, dust puffed from under his feet and made him cough. Tarc lifted his kerchief over his nose. He started climbing the spiraling staircase. His ghirit told him it was fairly deep within the concrete cylinder. Certainly deeper than any of the holes people had chipped, trying to find a way into the tower. When he’d made two circuits, he came to a landing. There was a door on one side that led outward, into the buttress. On the other side, a hallway led toward the center of the concrete cylinder.

  He opened the door into the buttress and found another hallway. At the end of that hallway, another door closed what his ghirit told him was an opening into a big tube running up inside the buttress toward the central tower.

  There was a shelf beside the door but the only things on it were several pairs of what looked like spectacles. Bizarrely, the glass in them had turned black.

  Tarc opened the door, totally unprepared for the eye-blinkingly bright light in the tube. Even squinting and holding his hand before his eyes, it was still so bright it hurt his eyes.

  He stepped back and closed the door. Now, however, his eyes had adjusted to the bright light in the tube and the hallway seemed very dim even with his lantern burning. He cracked the door open a little and the bright beam of light from the crack fell on the shelf full of black spectacles. Oh, he thought, smoked glass spectacles. He’d heard about people who wore such things in bright sunlight.

  Wonderingly, he picked up a pair of the spectacles and put them on. They rendered the hallway completely black, but the light coming in through the crack in the door now seemed merely bright. He opened the door and looked into the tube. The tube looked like it was lined with some mirror-like substance. The tube came down and ended on a dusty floor.

  Frowning in puzzlement, Tarc sent his ghirit into the floor. It took him a few minutes to realize that the bottom of that floor was, in fact, the lighted area in the ceiling of the auditorium beneath… With amazement he realized, That tube’s bringing sunlight down from the top of the tower to light the rooms below.

  Tarc knelt and wiped the thick dust off the floor.

  It was glass.

  Glass several centimeters thick. If I mopped up this dust, the lighting in the room below would be a lot better!

  He looked up the tube. His efforts wiping the glass had suspended a little cloud of dust in the air but he noticed that none of it was sticking to the mirrored walls. They seemed to repel the l
ittle particles. He wondered what they were made of.

  Tarc backed out of the tube and took the hallway back to the center of the tower. At the center, four hallways split, one going into each of the buttresses. Each buttress had a mirrored tube and a dusty glass floor directly over one of the big rooms below. Another tube came down the center of the tower and took off horizontally. He followed it with his ghirit but it disappeared into the distance beyond where his ghirit could sense.

  Tarc went back and started climbing the spiral staircase again. Just when he was tiredly wondering if the staircase was endless, it stopped at another door. This one opened into more bright light. When Tarc stepped through the door he realized he was standing in ordinary sunlight at the top of the tower.

  He was looking down over the huge domed mushroom cap onto the city of Clancy Vail. He was so fascinated by seeing the town from this perspective that it took him a while to turn his eyes back to the rounded top of the mushroom. It tilted down away from him to the south.

  Glass! he thought as he reached out and rubbed at the dome. There was dust on it, though not as much as at the bottom of the tubes inside. Presumably, the wind not only carried dust up onto the dome but also blew it away. He wiped away the dust from as big a swath as his sleeve could cover. This entire huge cap’s made of glass! He sent in his ghirit. Enormously thick glass. Much thicker in the middle… like a big lens!

  Tarc had learned enough about lenses from his mother and sister to know that lenses that were thicker in the middle focused light. This design gathers all the light that falls on this mushroom cap and sends it down those mirrored tubes into the rooms below! He realized then that electrical lights wouldn’t have lighted the rooms below when the ancients’ power failed. Someone planned for disaster with something much simpler. Too bad they don’t seem to have survived themselves.

  He thought about the medical and research facilities at the other end of the long underground hallway. The entire place seemed to have been built to weather the kind of crisis that could destroy civilization.

  This facility was intended to survive the end of the world.

  And, he realized with respect for its designers, it did, just not its people…

  Chapter Four

  Vyrda swallowed. Josie Allwood, a young woman in her twenties, had come to Vyrda’s office complaining of fever, nausea, and pain in her abdomen. She’d lost her appetite the afternoon before and the pain had come during the night.

  When Vyrda had sent in her ghirit, she’d immediately zeroed in on a hot, inflamed offshoot of the large intestine in the right lower part of the woman’s abdomen. She’d encountered this problem twice before in her career and both times the patient had died. In the second patient, after the little offshoot ruptured and a large collection of pus formed, Vyrda had lanced the abscess despite how deep inside the man it’d been. It’d drained copious quantities of horribly foul-smelling purulence that made everyone in the room nauseous. Vyrda’d been briefly optimistic for the man because of the successful drainage, but despite it, her patient died horribly.

  Leaning down to look her patient in the eye, Vyrda said, “Josie, we need to get you to the Hyllis Tavern. There’s a new healer there, Eva Hyllis, and she can do amazing things. Can you walk?”

  Josie frowned, “I walked here, didn’t I? But I’d really rather you took care of me. I don’t want some stranger doing it.”

  Vyrda shook her head, “Josie, I don’t have a good treatment for this problem. I’m not sure Ms. Hyllis can cure it either, but we need to see if she can.”

  Josie glanced over at her husband, then back at Vyrda. “If there isn’t a good treatment for it, I’ll just have to wait till I get over it by myself. How long are people usually sick?”

  Vyrda bit her lip for a moment, not wanting to give bad news. She slowly began, “I’ve only seen two patients with this problem before.”

  “How long were they sick?”

  Vyrda sighed, but realized she couldn’t sugarcoat the situation and expect them to go to see Eva. “For the rest of their lives. Both of them died. That’s why I want to take you to see Ms. Hyllis.”

  Josie’s face had paled. Vyrda glanced at the woman’s husband and saw he looked pinched as well. He asked, “Does everyone die?”

  Vyrda shrugged, “I don’t know. This problem is a lot like being stabbed in the gut. You may have heard that everyone stabbed in the stomach dies, but recently Ms. Hyllis took care of one of the guardsmen who’d been stabbed in the stomach. She kept him alive.” Vyrda felt momentarily guilty for not revealing that Jimmy Nantz’s wound hadn’t actually penetrated the intestine. But she felt it was a white lie, told for the purpose of getting the patient to the only person Vyrda thought might be able to keep her alive.

  Josie nodded, “Okay, I’ll go.” She stood, but couldn’t straighten all the way. As she crossed the room to the door, the limp she’d had when she came in seemed to be worse.

  Her husband stepped to Josie’s side and took her arm around his neck to provide support. He looked at Vyrda, “Can you take her other side?”

  Vyrda said, “I’ll do better. You start toward the Hyllis Tavern at whatever speed you can make. I’ll get a stretcher.”

  She started running.

  ~~~

  Josie and her husband had only made it about a third of the way to the tavern when they were met by Daum and Norman Soh, coming from the tavern with a stretcher. There’d been a brief debate about whether to send the wheelchair, but the road was deemed too rough.

  Back at the tavern, Vyrda and Eva were up in the little clinic room doing their best to prepare. Eva had told Vyrda that the inflamed small offshoot of the large intestine was called the appendix. And, most importantly, it caused no harm to remove it, an operation that had been done frequently in ancient days.

  “But if we remove it,” Vyrda protested, “it’ll leave an opening into the bowel! That’d be just as fatal.”

  Eva looked grim, “Before Daussie takes it out, we’ll have to tie it off down at its base.”

  “We’re going to have to wait for Tarc to get here.”

  Eva shrugged, “You could do it.”

  Vyrda felt panicked, “Oh! No. I’m not ready. Besides, I don’t think my telekinesis is strong enough.”

  Eva nodded again, but as Daussie entered the room, Vyrda saw Eva shoot her a meaningful glance.

  They’d set out jars of sterile saline they planned to use to wash out any abdominal contamination. Eva said it’d probably help if Daussie ported some of the saline into Josie’s veins as well. Daussie laid out several of her packs of sterilized suture with the short needles.

  Then it was time, Daum and Norman were carrying the stretcher up the stairs, looking exhausted. Eva took one look at them and said, “We need to buy a small wagon so we can move patients without killing you guys.”

  Daum rolled his eyes and said, “Come on Norman. With the ladies busy up here, they’re going to need us in the kitchen.”

  Norman had his eyes on Daussie, “Can I stay to watch until things get busy down there?”

  Eva shook her head, “This isn’t a spectator sport. Besides, you need to be making sure everything’s ready in the kitchen before things get busy down there.” She looked at Daum, “Take Mr. Allwood down to the bar and give him a beer to calm his nerves.” She looked at Allwood, then down at Josie, then back at him. “As Vyrda told you, this’s a very serious problem. We think we have a way to treat it, but we can’t be worrying about you, we have to be completely focused on Ms. Allwood.”

  Allwood still looked tense, but Eva’s words seemed to calm him. Then Vyrda noticed Kazy had stepped over to usher him out of the room. When Vyrda last glimpsed him he looked nearly placid.

  Then they were all bending over Josie. Kazy by her head, murmuring pleasant little nothings. Daussie crouched by Josie’s right hip with Eva next to her and Vyrda across. Knowing they were sending in their ghirits, Vyrda sent hers in again, hoping the appendix hadn’t ruptured.
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  The appendix seemed extremely tense. It hadn’t ruptured yet, but Vyrda worried it could burst any moment. Suddenly it deflated, the pressure released.

  Vyrda frantically searched for the rupture with her ghirit.

  She couldn’t find where the pus was leaking out!

  A foul odor rose in the room, reminding Vyrda of the stench that’d come when she had drained the abscess from her other patient’s ruptured appendix. It’s definitely ruptured! Wait, how’d the smell get all the way out of the body when I can’t even find a hole?!

  Eva said, “Phew, that’s… really stinky! Next time you do something like that, put it in a closed bottle.”

  Vyrda’s eyes went to Josie’s, worried that she’d be embarrassed to be chided about the smell, but the young woman was asleep. Then she looked at Eva and saw Eva’s eyes were on Daussie. Oh, she realized, Daussie teleported the pus out of the appendix to relieve the pressure. Daussie was holding one of the pans she ported stuff into against Josie’s flank. It had a lid, but that lid obviously wasn’t tight enough to contain the reeking odor.

  Vyrda looked at the young woman. Daussie’s eyes were watering. For a moment Vyrda thought she was crying, but she spoke, breathing her words as if she were trying to do it without inhaling. “Great idea. If you’ll get a bottle, I’ll port it out of the pan and into the bottle right now.”

  Eva bustled off to the alcove coming back with one of their screw cap bottles. As soon as she got it near Daussie, a disgusting spatter of pus appeared inside of it. Wincing, Eva waved her hand in front of her nose, “Is that all of it?”

  Daussie nodded and grinned weakly, “All but the molecules in the air.” She turned and set the pan on the table behind her, then looked back at Vyrda and Eva. “The pressure’s off, so maybe we can wait for Tarc, but I’m really worried about that thin spot on the back side. I think it was just about to rupture and I’m worried the tissue’s in such bad shape it might just fall apart. Bacteria could still leak out and contaminate everything.”