I put my hands on my hips, gave the contraption a suspicious look. "Think it'll work?"
Deebs grinned broadly. "If it doesn't, you'll be the first to know," he chuckled. Sobering, he stepped over to where a makeshift rack had been bolted to the side of the mangled tank, and pointed to the clumsy valve assembly atop the two oxygen cylinders strapped into the rack. "Now, you remember to take it easy with that lever; it won't take much to snap the regulator right off these cylinders, and believe me, things'll get real bad at that point."
I thought of what it would be like, sharing close-quarters with a 2,000-PSI oxygen cylinder with it's neck snapped off, and suppressed a shudder. "Don't worry; I'll remember."
"You do that." He glared at me for another second, glanced at the tank, then back at me. "So, uh, when are you gonna try this?"
I gave it a moment's thought. "Now," I replied.
"Now?"
I shrugged. "Why not? Nothing's happening right now; we're all just standing around, waiting for Dithra to finish wrapping this thing up, if she can. Plus," I gave Deebs a wry smile "it isn't my turn to cook dinner tonight."
"But-- but shouldn't we tell someone, first?"
"Why?" I shrugged. "It isn't like anyone can come after me if something goes wrong, you know." I paused. "Sorry, Deebs; I'm just in a weird mood, and I've been waiting for weeks to get a look at that base."
The Texan stared at me in exasperation, opened his mouth, closed it again, then sighed. "Anything goes wrong, anything looks like it might go wrong, you come straight back here, right?"
"Right. . . . You need to back up a bit more, Deebs. Thanks." I shifted to my proper form, then allowed myself to expand to normal size. I opened my eyes to see Deebs shaking his head as he peered up into my armored face. "Y'know, I don't think I'm ever gonna get to used to that," he stated.
I chuckled. I gazed at Deebs for another moment, my amusement being replaced by melancholy as I thought of Deebs and the others aging, dying, crumbling into dust while I myself just kept going on and on, alone. . . .
. . . .How long do you wish to live, my lord?. . . .
"Something wrong?"
I blinked, then my mane jangled quietly as I shook my head. "Sorry; just going over a few things," I rumbled. I summoned the sphere of the Lung, popped it into my mouth, then, moving carefully within the barn's suddenly-cramped space, I picked up our mutilated water tank.
"Good luck, buddy."
I glanced at the Texan and gave him a wink, then concentrated on the image of a stone pagoda, drowned beneath an subterranean sea. . . .
Snap.
Instantly, the warm, dry interior of the ranch's main barn was replaced by icy water. The tank immediately tried to yank itself out of my arms, the air trapped inside it seeking the surface. I wrestled with it for a second, then thought to tilt the contraption until enough air escaped to make the tank controllable. Getting a better grip on my field-expedient diving helmet, I turned myself around until I found the pagoda not-too far away and headed for it.
There was a bad moment when I thought that the tank was too wide to fit between the unevenly-spaced columns, but after some maneuvering and much silent cursing I managed to get the tank into the central chamber, where I released it to float up into the space beneath the building's roof. Head pounding, I grabbed a gulp of air from what was left of the little pocket that had kept Ashadh alive, then tinkered with the tank. Using a single talon, I gingerly moved Deeb's valve handle, and was gratified to hear a loud hissing noise as the bubble of air within the tank grew rapidly larger. I shut off the valve when the bottom edge of the bubble neared a strip of duct tape Deebs had slapped onto the side of the tank. Any more than that, and the thing could capsize in spite of all the chunks of scrap metal Deebs had bolted around the contraption's lower edge to keep it upright.
Another pause to refill my lungs, this time using the tank, then I descended back down to the pagoda's floor. Ignored until now, the second sphere of the Lung was still there, hovering precisely above the center of that stone bowl set into the floor, glowing softly.
I stared at it; it looked exactly like the one I still held in my jaws. Slowly, and very gingerly, I reached out and laid my hand against it. Nothing; just the same warm smoothness as my own sphere. It wasn't until I wrapped my talons around it and tried to pluck it from it's station that I received my first surprise. The pagoda's sphere wouldn't budge. Frowning, I pulled again, this time with far greater strength, but it was fruitless; the sphere was fixed in place just as firmly as if it were set into a block of concrete. Puzzled, I studied the stubborn sphere briefly, then took another trip to my air tank and turned my attention to columns that surrounded the central space, using the silvery light of my sphere to study the marks upon them.
The marks were indeed writing, inscribed deeply into the stone of the columns and in many ways resembling Chinese ideograms. The strokes that made up each glyph, however, weren't the broad, brush-like strokes the Chinese seemed to favor, but instead were long, thin slashes and elongated commas. It was as if . . . . I extended a talon, used it to follow the strokes used to construct a glyph. . . . Yes; as if they had been carved by the point of a dragon's claw.
The Lung had a written language.
After a few more pauses for air, I had determined that the glyphs, like most Oriental languages, were arranged vertically, the lines in turn wrapping around each stone column. Then I realized that the arrangement of the columns wasn't random, as I'd thought at first, but that they themselves spiraled outward from the center chamber like the shell of a nautilus. In fact, I was hard-put to find a single straight line in the whole place.
And there was where I had to stop. I had reduced my size to scarcely that of a human in order to cut my air usage, but even then the air supply began to run out far too soon. Frustrated, I glared at the symbols. This trip had been a waste of time; it was still just a bunch of chicken-scratches to me. I'd probably have to get some sort of linguist to look at the stuff, assuming someone could translate it at all, and to do that I would have to come up with a way to photograph the symbols, which would mean something along the lines of an underwater camera, which meant I'd probably need a human here to operate it, which meant insulated scuba gear, more trips, more oxygen cylinders. . . . Damn it, I wish all this stupid water would just go away--
--And all hell broke loose.
I don't know why it happened, perhaps having two spheres so close together made them more sensitive. Maybe the mechanism the place used to keep itself drained just needed a little nudge to kick back into operation. Whatever it was, the results were impressive. Both spheres flared briefly, then an enormous thrum like distant thunder went through the place, and the water went crazy. One moment, it was as still as the water in a bathtub, the next it was whitewater rapids.
Too small at the moment to resist the current, I found myself swept up and tumbled helplessly, finally fetching up against a column with enough force to knock most of the air out of my lungs. Stunned, I instinctively grabbed the column and held on, fought to clear my head enough to tell the sphere to get me the hell out of there--
--Then, just as abruptly, it was over. I found myself dangling roughly three meters off the floor, my talons hooked into the deep incisions of the spiraling glyphs. Water was running down the sides of all the columns around me, and raining down from overhead to spatter into the puddles scattered about the pagoda's floor.
But the lake itself was gone.
The burning in my chest reminded me that I was still holding my breath; I let it out in a gust, then breathed in cold, wet, fresh air. I stared about myself for a long minute, then released my grip and dropped to the floor. Slowly I padded my way back to the center of the chamber. There, my tank now sat squarely on the flagstones, and next to it the stationary sphere still hovered over its stone bowl, which now held a mirror-smooth pool of water. I looked at the calmly swirling artifact, took my own sphere out of my mouth and stared at it, then back to the other sphere.
Well, I guess that solved one problem. . . .
Shaking my head, I allowed myself to return to a more comfortable size as I went back to study the columns once more. I sat back on my haunches and eyed the characters speculatively. What had just happened had started another train of thought for me, and the more I pondered it, the more likely it seemed. Slowly I put the sphere back into my mouth, paused for the moment to re-orient myself within its strange point-of-view, then thought directly to the sphere. Please; help me to understand this. . . .
For several long seconds nothing seemed to happen, and I began to write the hunch off. Then, however, the sphere in the center of the room seemed to flicker, and the light from my own began to change in hue. Sliding gradually from its normal silver-gray to a blue-white, the light brightened as well, causing the glyphs upon the column I was looking at to cast sharp shadows--
--Wait a minute; the characters were carved into the stone. How the hell could they be casting shadows?
But they were indeed casting shadows; shadows that floated above the glyphs, like dark oil floating upon water. And like oil, they began to drift into different shapes, morphing. . . .
. . . .and the mountains of flame rose up from the depths, flinging red rock into the skies to fall, hissing its spite, down upon what had once been trackless sea. . . .
I felt my eyes widen, exultation swelling in my breast as I realized that the ancient glyphs were suddenly beginning to make sense. I could read them. God, Ancestors, I could read them!