The Doktor's Spyglass

Chapter 11.2

Standing amidst the glow of it felt like floating. The air itself seemed buoyant, crackling with energy that Thijis could feel running across his skin, prickling the tiny hairs on his arms and shoulders and neck.

Both his own suspicions, formed from the inevitable turning of his obsessive mind, and Keynish Helg's meandering account of his life had led him here, but neither had prepared him for the sight of it. He stood amidst the wealth of the world—more, really—the wealth of many worlds, if you believed the more metaphysical theories that scientists put forward about the stuff. It was enough to take his breath away.

Stretching out before him, packed and sorted into rank after rank of stone shelves that stood four times the height of a man, was a horde of elekstone the likes of which the world had never seen. He could have bought Oridos with it, many times over; bought the whole of Westalen, in fact. With this a person could build a fleet to cross the sea and explore the legendary eastern continent, lost to the turbulence of the Abyd Ocean and the slow decay of history. With this, a man could change the world.

His mouth felt dry, and he suddenly wished he'd brought a canteen with him. The glowcoal did indeed glow, and apparently all the more so when brought together in great amounts. No other light was required in the great chamber.

He walked into the nearest aisle, looking around in wonder at the riches surrounding him. A chunk the size of his fist could set him and everyone he cared about up for life—in style—and the lowest shelves alone were stocked with slabs and beams of the stuff. Further down the aisle he saw small boulders of it, glowing from within as if a fire had been lit inside them.

This was more than even the companies in the Forge could dream of. The great steam generators they ran were fed with bricks of elekstone protected like the emperor's ransom they were, each of which produced enough energy to power the city's industry for a month. How was it that a veritable world economy in commodities was sitting in storage in a secret cellar?

The nodes of this case had been laid out before him now; he had the parts he needed to construct an explanation. This amount of wealth—it was a motive for anything. Murder. Genocide.

Helg's story had been somewhat vague on the present status of this trove, focusing primarily on the man's youth, but he'd known the names Orban, and Tolvaj, and Hevrany. Oh yes, he knew Hevrany.

Thijis didn't know the details of the scheme yet, but it almost didn't matter. This amount of wealth could easily be an end in itself. But more important than seeing it was proving it, and his word was as good as the scum on his boot when it came to going up against men like the Sheriff and his spymaster. And from the doktor's rambling diatribe he had heard a word that stood out to Irik beyond all others: records. Down here, in the dark, were records, most likely in the form of books, a set of histories that purportedly went back hundreds of years, an ongoing journal of the use and storage of this substance in the city. That was what he needed to get his hands on. That was what he could use to prove that the Sheriff was complicit in not only the greatest theft that Oridos—or the world—had ever known, but more importantly the lives of some seventy-odd young people in Helg's basement.

The old man, much like the core of the secret Thijis was prodding at, was still an enigma to him. The tale of his life was far from an innocent one; in fact, it centered on, in many ways, one of the more grievous crimes Thijis had heard of. But the bodies in the basement were not Helg's doing. Not his alone, anyway. And what Thijis did know suggested that there was a level of corruption at the heart of Oridos that would surprise even the most jaded heart.