Live and Let Drood

rung in the ladder with my foot. The ladder seemed to descend forages, long enough that my leg muscles had begun to cramp painfully by the time I reached the bottom. The moment I stepped away from the ladder, a bright light flared up, dazzling me for a moment. The others quickly joined me, and then we all waited patiently as the Regent took a moment to quietly massage his old leg muscles.
    We had arrived in a truly massive stone cavern stretching away in all directions. It looked to be bigger than the whole Hall itself, and I wasn’t even sure exactly where under the Hall we were. The huge stone walls were covered with line after line of carefully delineated mathematical symbols, none of which meant anything to me. The Armourer had called them mathemagics, the bastard child of supernatural equations and description theory. When people start telling me things like that, I usually just nod and move on because I know that even if I do ask questions, I’m not going to understand the answers.
    Strange machines rose everywhere, set out in no obvious pattern, packing the great cavern from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling, with only narrow walkways left in between. Technology so advanced that none of it meant anything to me. Just brutal and ugly shapes, with no obvious function or controls. Some of the machines appeared blurred or indistinct, as though human eyes couldn’t properly perceive or understand them. The result of one Armourer’s mad wisdom. Along with gifts from other worlds, dimensions, realities. Our best and craziest Armourers have always been pack rats, putting things we pick up along the way to good use. Drood knowledge is older and weirder than most of us care to admit. Mile upon mile of colour-coded cables held everything together and hung in a complicated web between the upper levels of the machines and the uneven stone ceiling. Sometimes they twitched dreamily, like a dog’s legs kicking in its sleep.
    I called out to the Armourer, and his voice rose from deep back in the cavern.
    “Over here! Whoever you are. Unless you’re a monster, and then I’m out. Leave a message.”
    I headed for his voice, past colossal machines whose intricate workings were constantly moving, rising and falling, turning this way andthat in endless variations, in pursuit of unknown purposes. Some of the structures seemed to lean and slump against one another, half melting, combining into some new and even stranger thing. Some changed shape right before my eyes, as though unable to settle, humming loudly to themselves in complex harmonies. And all the time I had the feeling of being watched and studied by unseen cold and thoughtful eyes. The cavern was comfortably warm and well-lit, but there was a bristling static in the air and the smell of iron filings and something burning, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that I just wasn’t welcome.
    None of the others said anything. They just stuck very close to me as I led them through narrow wandering walkways. Just as well, because I didn’t know what I could have said in return, except, Yes, I know. It creeps the hell out of me, too.
    And finally, at last, we came to Alpha Red Alpha itself, which looked just as complicated and disturbing and overwhelming as I remembered it. Big as a house, bigger than most houses, rising all the way up to the ceiling, so you had to bend your head right back to see the top of it. It looked mostly like a plunging waterfall of solid crystal with glowing wires running through it like multicoloured veins. Etched all over with row upon row of inhuman symbols. And all of this surrounded a massive hourglass, some twenty feet tall or more, fashioned from solid silver and glass so perfect you could barely see it. The top half of the hourglass was full of shimmering golden sand, with not one golden mote falling down into the lower half.
    The Armourer’s lab assistants were crawling all over Alpha Red Alpha, clinging precariously to outcropping parts, making adjustments, taking readings and occasionally just hitting it with hammers in a hopeful sort of way.
    The Armourer himself came bustling forward to meet us—a tall middle-aged man with too much intelligence and nervous energy for his own good, wearing the usual stained and slightly charred lab coat over a T-shirt reading Eat, Shoot and Leave. He was quite bald, apart from two tufts of white hair jutting out over his ears, from where hekept tugging at them while he was thinking, and bushy