The Khazad capital was deserted.
Granted, that was the only reason Hamlyn Ka was back. After the crackdowns and persecutions of nonbelievers began, he had been one of the first ‘encouraged’ to leave. At the point of a sword and even sharper words that still weighed on him. He had been warned to never return, and he had never intended to.
But now… the home he had grown up in was deserted. The silence of was deafening, cliché as it was to say. There remained nobody to prevent him from returning.
His companion looked at him with some concern. “Are you going to be alright, Hamlyn?” his Austrin companion asked.
Hamlyn cleared the cobwebs from his mind. “I am, Raida,” he said, giving her a grateful smile. They had shared many roads, taverns, and tents over the last year, even as they had both wandered for their own countries. But they were still close.
“Do you think anyone’s gotten in yet?” she asked, looking at the fearsome gates built into the mountain. With no one to guard them, prying them open would be a matter of time. But with no one to guard them, they couldn’t be opened easily except from the inside.
“A few,” he said. “Locals who know the in ways. Maybe a merchant or two with a private in way. But I think we might be the first national force to reach here.”
She nodded. “It’s probably only a matter of time before the HIppus occupy this place. My people have sent our swiftest to try and come and occupy it, but… if it comes to it, I’m not sure we could hold it, even if we did arrive first. We can only pray.”
“We can only hope and work towards it ourselves,” Hamlyn contested gently, but they shared a smile. Hamlyn was an early advocate and believer in Cassiel’s philosophy, even before the Age of Rebirth. Raida was an Austrin Empyrean, one who shared similar ideals for different reasons. The two of them always had something to discuss on the road.
“Anyways, how are we going to get in?” asked Raida. “I certainly don’t know the secret ways, and I doubt we have the time to search.”
“Follow me,” Hamlyn directed.
---
“A sewage entrance? Really?” Raida asked with a skeptical eye as they looked into a cave in the side of the mountain. “Isn’t there another way? And shouldn’t it be too filled for us to go through anyway?”
“No and no,” Hamlyn answered. “I suppose there might be other ways, but this is the easiest. And because no one has been adding to the filth since… whatever happened, the levels will have had time to drain. It’s probably shallower and cleaner since it’s creation.”
“Joy,” his companion said, blowing loose hair out of her eyes. “But don’t you dare complain when I smell like something a dog rolled in.”
---
They had made it in easier and cleaner than they had expected: because maintenance and repairs were expected, the Khazad had built a service lane above the expected level of filth, which had made a cleaner and faster route for Hamlyn and Raida. When they got back, they both agreed that they would recommend such a system for their respective empires. But for now… Eventually they emerged into the city and took stock.
“So it’s true,” Raida whispered as they looked at the empty streets. Only sewer rats had re-colonized the city so far. “There’s no blood, no signs of fire or violence, nothing. They just… left. Like the Alfions. An entire race… disappeared.”
Hamlyn threw her a look, but she didn’t see the former Khazad’s look. “There are still the Luchirp,” he simply said, and turned to walk off.
Raida trotted to catch up. “Yes, but, you know what I meant. They aren’t Khazad-“ she finally realized her mistake, and placed a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry, Hamlyn,” she apologized. “I didn’t mean to say that you-” She paused, tried to come up with a better way to say what she meant, and finished with “Hamlyn, I don’t care what anyone else has ever said to you. I think you are one of the best Dwarves, no, best men I have ever met. I mean it.”
“Good… Bad… maybe that Runekeeper was right after all; I’m just a traitor,” he said. “I mean, look at me. I’m here to rob the graves of my own people, people I grew up with. What does anything else matter?”
Raida tried to say something, but couldn’t. Instead, Hamlyn just kept walking on.
“Come, let’s do what we came to do.”
---
They didn’t bother going to the vaults. While there was unquestionably great treasures of gold there, and possibly magical artifacts as well, such trinkets would be impossible to take away with them in any real amount. No, the most valuable treasure wasn’t the heaviest or the shiniest, but far less material.
The entered the palace, walking through the servant’s entrance and going straight through the Throne room. It was all neat and orderly, as if they had been expecting this on one level or another. Not even a convenient explanatory note was left on the throne. Everything was just… there. War reports neatly stacked here, the last roundups of nonbelievers there. Tidy and organized, but left as if expecting to come back at some point.
They would look through those documents later, to see if any clues could be gained. But they had more immediate priorities.
“This is the Royal Technological Library,” Hamlyn explained as they walked into a mammoth cavern of stone rows. It was almost a library, one you could spend a lifetime lost in, except that instead of books and bookcases there were only bookcases of stone, on which letters and diagrams were chiseled into the rock itself.
“This room was commissioned by our first king as a place where even the most fundamental technical knowledge was to be recorded and stored as a precaution in case a catastrophe like the Age of Ice were to occur again, so that knowledge would be as lasting as the stones it was carved in. The fundamental basics of all technical and magical knowledge of the Khazad is stored here, even if understanding the applications and uses were left to society to develop. Here we can see the culmination of their knowledge up to the point they left.”
Both Hamlyn and Raida took off their packs and took out sheets of paper. Though only a tiny fraction of the size of any library shelf, these sheets were mage-crafted by the Amurites and Khadi, able to store and remember dozens or even hundreds of written items on each page. Ideal for books and government documents, it also came in handy elsewhere. Such as putting it against a stone wall and rubbing a graphite pencil across it, leaving a record of what was carved beneath it. After filling a page just so, they would move the page over, refresh it, and do it again. They had many such pages, and Austrin and Grigori messenger hawks alike were surely on their way with more.
Starting at the end of the cavern on the basis that the most advanced would be the latest added, the two settled into a comfortable patter. Raida took the higher writings and diagrams, while Hamlyn took the lower.
“So, do you understand what these mean?” she asked eventually. It was all dwarven to her, though what little she had picked up had allowed her to identify some of the earlier ones they had passed: processes of mining, diagrams of sea craft, the justification of the God King. Others, though, had been beyond her limited means.
“Not entirely,” Hamlyn said. “Some I recognize, but I think many of these later writing are in code. But here,” he said, pointing at one area he had taken care to copy twice, “I recognize it as an early dwarven description for mithrill, possibly how to find it.” He didn’t object when she immediately copied that section on another paper. “But some of these others? I have no clue what saltpeter is supposed to be good for, but I know that one was mostly in code. Lord knows how we’re expected to decode it, unless the key is somewhere in here. And here?” he said, indicating another area he had covered earlier, “you can tell that these came after the fanatics seized power. They aren’t coded at all, but advertise of all the ways they celebrate Kilimorph and Her blessings.” He shook his head. “Fanatics. Like any other religion would have similar claims and blessings. I doubt we will get much from them.”
Raida looked at that section with a critical eye. Her companion might be a committed agnostic, but…
“The Agreement is still in effect, yes?” she asked, even though doing so brought a pause and suspicion to her friend.
“Of course,” he answered slowly. “Cassiel promised that our people would share knowledge freely, just as you aided us. I have no reason to doubt he is recruiting dwarven citizens for translation even now. Why do you ask?”
Raida gave a smile to defuse the mood. “Our people have different needs, that’s all,” she said. “Even if you don’t get much good out of their religious developments, I think learning from them, and their mistakes, would benefit the Austrin.”
Hamlyn accepted it, and the air calmed. They worked until sundown, finding shelter in the palace. After exiting the city the next morning to receive new paper from the messenger hawks and send the previous days copying to home, they returned into the city to do it again.