Warlock

which appeared to be bolted in place. Berlarak opened the topmost drawer of the cabinet farthest to the left reached far inside, as if searching for something. He found it, twisted it. The far right cabinet rose four feet into the air, giving view of a black portal in the floor and steps beyond.
        
        Berlarak led the way down the secret passage, urging them to mind their steps as the way got slippery with a film of water mist and lichens which grew from the stones. There was the smell of wet earth and of water, a large quantity of water somewhere near at hand. There were little round lights set into the rugged ceiling at intervals of ten feet, but they had grown so dim with age that they did little to illuminate the way. They could see each other and a short distance ahead, but little more.
        
        They reached the floor after descending more than a hundred feet into the bowels of the earth. It was a rock shelf, cut from the substrata of the land and polished in some unknown fashion to make it safe for human work and for the traffic of small vehicles which sat about at various places, unused for centuries, given over to fungus and rust in this deep place. In one of the little vehicles, large enough to hold four men, there were three skeletons, as if going to some meeting of demons and ghosts. They walked past these to a length of steps which terminated, after a dozen risers, at the edge of an underground lake. The water stretched a hundred yards across before the ragged stone cave wall ended it. The ceiling of the cave was only twenty feet high, dipping lower at some points on the flat surface of the water.
        
        “Just a little further along here,” Berlarak assured them.
        
        They followed him, walking on the lowest step beside the water, rounded a bend in the cavern, and saw the thing wallowing in the lake, just alongside the steps, as if it were waiting for them.
        
        It was fully four hundred feet in length and ninety feet wide, too large to fit the other way across the lake. It was like some immense cigar with a neck which thrust up from the very center of its rounded, gray body. Yet the neck was not tipped with a head. Instead, there were thrusting things like wires and an entire exoskeleton of impossible purpose. In the end nearest them, down near the water line but not now under it, there were two eyes. This, then, must be the head. But there was no maw and no breathing apparatus. Only two amber eyes, each four feet in diameter, deep and somehow melancholy as they focused on the men.
        
        “A dragon!” Crowler gasped, taking a step backward and almost crashing into the lake.
        
        He had voiced the fears of every man there, save Berlarak. If Berlarak could be said to be a man. No one wished to venture closer to such an awesome creature, even if it did remain perfectly still as if frightened of them and preparing to flee-or maybe pounce.
        
        “Not a dragon,” Berlarak corrected.
        
        “What else lies in the water, of such huge dimensions, waiting-”
        
        “A submarine does,” Berlarak said, cutting Sergeant Crowler short. “A submarine.”
        
        “What is that?” Crowler asked, looking at the dragon in a new light.
        
        “I know,” the Shaker said. “I have read of them in archaic texts. But if there was anything that I would yet consider mythical-even after I've seen the truth of many wonders-it is such a machine. Does it work?”
        
        “Indeed it does!” Berlarak confirmed. He then proceeded to tell the other Darklanders exactly what the marvelous machine could do. He was stopped often by questions and once or twice by scoffing disbelievers who wished to challenge a point or two. But in very little time, he had convinced them. Indeed, there was not much room to argue when the behemoth waited in the lake.
        
        “But why is it here?” Richter asked, examining the hull more closely now, even daring to touch it and feel that it was cold metal and not skin.
        
        “We supposed certain city officials, or perhaps a wealthy merchant guild, maintained the ship to escape from the city lest the Scopta'-mimas someday carry their war to Earth herself-as they did.”
        
        Richter frowned. “And why didn't they make use of it, then?”
        
        “You saw the bones,” Berlarak said. “There were more of