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I looked at them for a long time before finally moving on.
The light dimmed as I went deeper, becoming murky. Especially once I found a narrow area, like a tunnel, branching off from the main cave. But that was easily remedied.
I switched to night vision, and everything abruptly brightened.
Now I could see glints of crystal throughout the stone, white bits that sparkled like ice. And small, furry creatures, looking more like voles than rats, which scurried into their hiding places as I passed, only to peer out at me with bright, black eyes. There was also a surprising amount of driftwood, with its smooth, silvery fingers stretching toward the ceiling in a great mound.
There were no more spectacular, opal-like fossils. In fact, I almost turned back, because there did not appear to be anything of interest down here at all. It was more like a cave I would have expected to find on Earth, with a faint smell of mildew, a fainter odor of mineral water, and the distant but sharp reek of guano, or something very like it.
The voles weren’t the only things that lived in this cave, it seemed.
But something kept me going. Perhaps it was just the contrast: the outer cave so flamboyant and interesting, almost as if designed to make this little detour seemed drab by comparison. I’d seen spells on Earth that functioned much the same way, wards created to hide something, not by making it invisible, but by making it seem so boring that people automatically turned away.
There was no magic here, or if there was, it was of a kind I could not detect.
But my instincts told me there was something.
I pressed on.
It was another few minutes before I saw anything of interest, and even then, I wasn’t sure what it was. It was more than half buried in the dirt, but what I could see looked man made. Fey-made, I corrected myself, and squatted down to dig it up.
It wasn’t easy. It separated from the ground reluctantly, as if it had been there for a while, with limestone-like secretions having all but glued it in place. But it finally came free, and after brushing off the sand and knocking away the limestone by smacking it on a rock, I found myself holding something strangely familiar.
It was a wrench.
I frowned in puzzlement at it. It looked a little different than Earth wrenches, being longer and heavier, I supposed to fit the feys’ bigger hands. But it was recognizable nonetheless.
I liked the heft of it. It would make a good cudgel. I decided to keep it.
And then I wondered the obvious question.
Why was there a wrench in the cave?
There were a few other items scattered about that could have been flotsam, washed here during a flood: part of an old wooden bucket, fuzzy with black mold and serving as a house for a vole; a tattered bit of cloth that might once have been part of a sail; and some bones that could have come in on a flood or been brought here, still struggling, by a predator. But they were lighter in weight. I did not see how—
I had managed to miss that, I thought, staring at something right in front of my face.
I had been pushing through the enormous pile of driftwood, to see if there were any more potential weapons to be found, moving slowly and looking at the ground more than ahead. Which was why my new find surprised me. If it had been a fey—
Well, if it had been a fey, I would have bashed in his skull in with my wrench.
But it was not.
I did not know what it was.
I moved some of the driftwood, which was beginning to look like it had been piled up deliberately. There was a great deal of it, and it was woven thickly together, so it took a while. In the process, I ended up knocking much of the surrounding dirt away from the object, enough to see a gleam of metal.
With patience, more of the crusty covering came off. It was odd, because it looked like it had been there for years, perhaps centuries, until the accumulated dust of ages turned into a good facsimile to stone. But the more I chipped away, the more prefect, gleaming metal met my eyes. Until I finally found myself looking at . . .
Well.
I stood there for a moment, doubting myself. I had been through a good deal recently, and I did not have Dory to help ground me anymore. Perhaps I was having some sort of episode?
Either that, or I had to explain why what looked like a spaceship was doing in a cave in Faerie.
Or part of a space ship. It reminded me of the capsules that astronauts used to splash down in. It was big enough to hold perhaps four people, had metal sides, and had some sort of writing on the side that I couldn’t—
It lit up.
