not iron, and was perfectly smooth. He ran a finger along its edge. It had the fine-cut profile of nishterlaub, a holy metal item from the Chaos Times, the nightmare days before the Law had been revealed to the priests by Zentrum, and the priests brought peace to the Land. Abel knew what to do if he found nishterlaub. Don’t touch. Tell a priest.
But the storehouse was in the midst of the Treville District temple compound. Everyone obviously knew about it. This nishterlaub had been collected by the priests themselves. So what could it hurt to—
Before Abel quite realized what he was doing, he turned the key.
Click.
The lock was well-oiled and offered no resistance. Turning the key caused a plate on the door to pop out from its recess by a finger span to reveal a small pulling ring.
Never saw anything like that before.
In fact, the lock seemed as complicated as the most complex thing Abel knew: the firing mechanism on his father’s musket. Abel had seen plenty of those. He was the son of a soldier, after all. But complicated or not, with a musket what it finally came down to was pulling the trigger.
So just pull it. See what happens.
Abel grasped the ring and leaned backward. The door didn’t budge.
The sand. The buildup at the base of the door was keeping it in place. Abel swept it away with the sole of his sandal.
He tried again, this time throwing all his might into the effort. The door moved, swung outward an arm’s length. Abel stumbled back a step as a whoosh of musty air escaped. It set him to coughing.
After he recovered, Abel glanced inside. Dark, but some light got in through window slits set in rows around all four walls. Still, pretty scary in there. Abel stepped away, glanced around the storehouse yard.
There wasn’t much by way of a weapon to carry along with him, not even a stick. There was a stone, a black rock from here in the Valley, sitting not far away that, upon further examination, Abel figured must have been intended as a doorstop.
It was all he could do to pick it up with both hands and carry it next to his belly, but any weapon was better than nothing. So armed, he returned to the door and slipped inside the storehouse.
The air inside was cool and stale. He looked up and saw that the window slits near the ceiling were covered with actual glass. Glass was not considered nishterlaub, but it was something you could only find and were not allowed to make, so windows were rare in the Land. Windows were for priests and high officials. Windows were for keeping out rain and wind from important places.
And I guess for some storehouses, Abel thought.
Anyway, you normally didn’t need windows in the Land. Strong gusts sometimes blew up the Valley before the spring floods, but usually the winds of the Land were light. Abel had never seen any rain, but his mother had sung him jingles about it. The songs were about water falling from the sky, as strange as that sounded. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in rain, it was more that he had a hard time picturing it. Abel imagined rain as thick and syrupy, falling brown and silty like the River’s water, and leaving everything with a fine coating of mud.
After his eyes adjusted, Abel stepped farther inside the storehouse. It was a large room, large enough to contain an average-sized house. The ceiling stretched a good twenty spans above him. The official residence he and his father shared could fit in here easily, with space to spare for an outhouse and stable.
This is sure no granary.
All about him were shapes. Twisted, strange shapes like midnight shadows. Large, square shapes. The glint of iron and copper and steel. Glass. Wood. In front of him, a white-colored pipe stretching out perpendicular from some sort of box with what looked like dead briars curling out. Odd. The pipe glinted almost a bit like metal, a bit like glass.
He reached out and touched it—
And recoiled in shock. Plastic.
The pipe was nishterlaub. Abel looked around again and realization dawned. The pipe, the strange shapes, everything in the storehouse. It was all nishterlaub.
His immediate thought was to turn tail and run, find a priest or his father, tell them what he’d found.
But that’s stupid, he thought. The priests know the nishterlaub is here. They must have put it here. But I’ll bet I