This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

“The trees are inside an extradimensional entad,” said Alfric, not quite sure how to deal with this sort of man. “You access it through a stone.”

“And how large are the trees, kworma?” asked Besc. It was a Chelxic word of affection, one of only a few that Alfric knew, and meant something like ‘friend’, though was used more casually.

Alfric held his arms out. “Three feet wide, about.”

Besc whistled. “A good haul then.”

“Hopefully,” said Alfric. It was quite a lot of wood, overshadowed by the bear but probably the most valuable thing in that dungeon. “They’re of the growth variety. You handle that here?”

Besc nodded. “Wilch probably told you we have a better setup here. This one is the family business, the one in Tarchwood was taken over by Wilch about ten years back. It’ll take time and effort, and growth is harder to process than the others, but I can handle it.”

“Getting it out of the stone is the first thing,” said Alfric. “It felt like a miracle that we were able to get them in, and I’ve been worried about whether or not we’d be able to extract them.”

He took his pack off and extracted the book, quickly flipping to the page that had the stone and then pulling it out. The stone itself was also heavy, but with the book, it wasn’t so bad. He set the stone down on the ground, thankful that it took a tiny mental push to activate, and looked at it for a moment. It was pale, with lots of vesicles. He touched it and felt himself transported to the garden, though he knew that he was still present in the normal world. The two trees were exactly where he’d left them, immense and probably impossible to move without cutting them up, which was a problem, given that you had to stay touching the stone in order to stay ‘in’ the garden. The trees were huge, a valuable find that they wouldn’t have been capable of removing without the stone, and it had only just barely been done, with this further complication.

It was the kind of thing that had attracted Alfric to dungeoneering, the same as the uncomfortably large wardrobe. He couldn’t quite explain what the appeal was.

“You can touch it,” Alfric said to Besc. “See what we’re dealing with.”

Besc moved forward and tentatively touched the stone, then kept his grip there for a moment. He stayed right where he was, but it was clear that he was looking around at things that the rest of them couldn’t see. He moved his hand from the stone, then stopped to look down at it.

“Well,” he said. “Any secrets to this stone, or is this what we’re working with?”

“You can bring in organic things,” said Hannah. “And take organic things out. Entads work, if they’re completely organic, and ectads work too. Not glass, not metal, not stones unless they’re unworked. You’ve got to keep your hand on the stone though, or you’ll end up out of the garden.”

Besc whistled to himself. “Thorny,” he said. “Chengu. But with what’s there, I see profit in it for both of us.” He let out a sigh.

“We’ll try getting the trees out the easy way first,” said Alfric. He looked around the area. “We should be able to put a tree along this road, if I can get it out. If I can’t, then I think we move on to raising it up high enough. The way we got the trees in was by momentarily ‘catching’ them as they fell.”

“Seems dangerous, kworma,” said Besc, rubbing his hairy chin.

That wasn’t the half of it, since Alfric had been working with Mizuki, and she was using whatever was available in the aether, namely, immense amounts of tightly focused fire. He’d been lucky she hadn’t killed him in the process.

Alfric picked up the stone and repositioned it so that if the first tree came out, it would be lying across the road, then went into the garden, made sure that it was lined up, and reached over to touch the tree. He tried to set his mind on it, to will it into his grip and bring it out.

This didn’t work, but Alfric hadn’t been optimistic enough to think it would.

“All right,” he said. “The easy way didn’t work.” He turned to Besc. “Do you have floatstones I can use?”

Besc grimaced. “I do, but what happens to them when they’re in that space? Besides, it’s a delicate operation, using them, and usually I’d have chains, but I don’t think that would be possible.”

“Ropes then?” asked Alfric. “They’re made of hemp or flax and should be fine to go through.”

“How much buoyancy would you need to lift one end of those?” asked Besc. “We’re probably talking in the hundreds of pounds, and that runs some real risks, especially with just rope to hold things down and a hand on the stone at all times.”

“A foot should work too,” said Hannah. “That would leave two hands free.”