Here are two related scenes that I deleted at the editing stage. The second scene is what I call "obstacles for the sake of obstacles" - the characters have some problem to solve, but whether they succeed or fail has no effect on what happens in the rest of the story. That means I can take the scene out without affecting anything else. Such scenes are usually the first ones I cut when I'm editing - they're the easy wins in terms of reducing the book's length. (Yes, I cut things out of my books to make them shorter. Hard to believe, I know.)
The first scene is from the middle of chapter 11, and is supposed to foreshadow the second. The cauldron-like object Raltarn finds in the forest is one of the machines that guard the Canal, but I'm not sure that comes over very well in the text.
The next morning, I told Uncle I wanted to go ashore to stretch my legs and feel steady ground under my feet. As he thought there was nothing to do or see on the beach, he was happy to let me go, while he stayed on the ship to guard the mirror.
I persuaded the sailors to let me ride in the dinghy. I sat in the stern, along with the carpenter and Okhraam, the bo'sun. The early morning sun glittered off the wavetops, and I had to close my eyes for fear of being dazzled. I soon found that not being able to see how the boat was moving made me queasy. I solved the problem by looking over the side. In places, the water was clear enough to see the bottom - mainly pale sand with the occasional dark rocky outcrop. Halfway to the beach, I glimpsed a much larger pile of rocks, smoother than the others. It had passed out of sight before I thought it might be a sunken ship. Perhaps this land wasn't uninhabited after all. But the ship might have come from elsewhere - might have been there for centuries.
As soon as sand crunched under our keel, we all jumped out. The cold shock of water pouring into my boots made me squeal, which prompted laughter from a few of the crew. As they pulled the boat clear of the sea, I splashed onto the beach and pulled my boots and socks off. Once my footwear was dry enough, I put everything back on and headed inland. Nobody asked where I was going.
The first thing I had to do was find a safe and easy way to the top of the cliffs. About a third of the way between the water and the trees, I passed the tide line, a belt of detritus about six feet wide.
The trees were taller and straighter than those in Asdanund, and seemed to shed fewer leaves - or else someone was picking them up. There wasn't as much undergrowth as in an Asdanundish forest.
I came to a clearing, an almost perfect circle perhaps fifty feet across. Right in the middle was a shallow crater, and right in the middle of that was a cauldron of deep blue metal, big enough that I couldn't have put my arms around it. Instead of a lid, it had a set of overlapping vanes fastened around the rim. My guess was that these could be raised or lowered to control the size of the hole at the top.
I wondered at the cauldron's precise placing in the middle of the clearing. The crater made me think someone had dropped it, but then wouldn't there be fallen trees nearby? Whoever was removing the leaves might have taken them, but why leave the cauldron there?
As I approached the cauldron, I saw heavy chains attached to its base, which disappeared into the ground. That explained why nobody had taken it, but what was it doing here in the first place? Perhaps it wasn't for cooking food after all. The chains would prevent it from being lifted more than a few inches off the ground - too low to light a fire under it.
I touched one of the vanes, finding the metal much smoother than I expected of something that must have been outdoors for years. I wondered if there was anything inside, but it was too tall to look into, and the vanes seemed to be stuck. As I lifted my hand from the metal, I felt a faint prickling, like the sensation I sometimes got from stroking a cat. I touched the vane again, but this time there was no prickling.
Having apparently exhausted the cauldron's possibilities, I crossed to the other side of the clearing. Further into the forest, I glimpsed a suspiciously straight line of trees - no, two lines next to each other. That arrangement had to be the work of men. I hastened towards them.
This scene comes at the start of chapter 18.
We came to the Canal five days after leaving Krothtror. The north coast had been getting gradually nearer and its cliffs taller. The day before, another coast had become visible to the south-west, so my first thought had been that we were heading into a bay or perhaps an archipelago, but then I realised it was the north-east of Elangir. The cliffs drew steadily closer together, until at last they formed a channel, no more than two hundred feet wide, running almost due west. This scratch in the land was the boundary between Trethark and Elangir, and the only passage between the Tian Ocean and the Great Ocean. Without it we would have had to sail east from Asdanund to reach the west coast of Elangir, tens of thousands of miles across open water. No ship could carry enough provisions for such a journey, and probably no crew had the discipline to endure it - certainly not this one.
The Canal ran straight for as far as the eye could see. Its sandstone walls rose smooth and flat, leaning outward slightly, higher than the clock tower of the Mazorean temple in Symeera.
Legends said the Canal was the work of the Gods - a concession to sailors made when the world was young, by whatever nameless deities called Mazor and Kashalbe sibling or cousin. Scholarly opinion was that it was Elangic. I'd believed this, in the uncritical way I'd believed most of what I read. Now that the thing was actually in front of me - bigger than any building, bigger than I'd imagined any man-made thing ever could be - I began to wonder whether the scholars were wrong.
Rymad estimated it would take us about a day to traverse the Canal, so we waited overnight before entering it - in the dark, the risk of running aground or hitting the walls was too great.
As the sun rose, a breeze started along the Canal, more constant than any we'd experienced thus far, which carried us steadily down the middle of the waterway. Every so often, I saw shapes carved into the south cliff, about ten feet square, that reminded me of the writing around the edge of the mirror. Some elements of the carvings repeated, and I wondered if they were mile markers. An odd booming sound came from further along the Canal, like the sea crashing into a cave, but much less regular.
About an hour in, a series of broad ledges were cut into the north cliff. These were about two hundred feet long and connected by ramps and staircases, also cut into the cliff. Rubble on several of the ledges suggested this had been a settlement - perhaps a way station. In the days of the Empire, the Canal must have been crowded, and passage through it slow.
In the water in front of the settlement, pillars jutted - the remains of wharves, no doubt. Barnacles clung to these, a good twenty feet above where I thought the high tide mark had to be now. I could no longer deny that the sea had been higher when the Elangic Empire had existed. I pointed this out to Ingryn. He agreed the sea must have fallen, but neither of us could imagine how it had happened.
Once we passed the settlement, Ingryn went up to the poop deck to make observations, and the ship started taking a zigzag course. Before I could find someone to ask why, I discovered the cause of the booming. It had been getting louder all this time, and now a deep thud shook my bones, and a mass of water erupted ahead of the ship. It reminded me of a whale breaching, but nothing came out of the water. As the spray spattered the deck, a huge wave made the ship buck like a frightened donkey. I lost my footing and crashed to the deck.
A sailor helped me back up. The deck still rolled, and I feared I'd fall over again.
"You'd better go below, young sir. There's plenty more where that came from."
"What in all the heavens was it?" I asked.
"Nobody's really sure. Some sort of Elangic machine on the bottom of the Canal, that's most people's guess. They blow off like that about every four hours. We've got charts showing where they are, but some of them move around - broken loose from their moorings, most likely, and drifting with the tides and currents."
"And what happens if we happen to be above one of these machines when it decides to... blow off?"
He grimaced. "A ship our size, we'd probably survive the hit. But I wouldn't like to sail in her afterwards. We're not likely to have one blow right under us, but we could get slapped about by the waves from them. It's a nice little problem. Most of the things are in the middle, but if we stay near the sides, we're more likely to be pushed into the wall."
I thanked him and went to our cabin. An hour or so later, I became aware of a low-pitched humming, almost felt rather than heard, that seemed to come from all around.
"What's that?" I asked Uncle.
"What's what?"
The humming grew steadily louder, to the point where I thought it should be shaking the nails out of the floor. Still Uncle said he couldn't hear it. I was about to find a sailor to ask about it when an Elangic underwater machine blew off.
"Hold tight!" I shouted. Even as I dropped to the floor, the ship rolled enough that I thought we'd capsize. As it was righting itself, another wave slammed us from the opposite side - reflected off the side of the Canal. This continued for some minutes, the waves gradually becoming weaker, until the ship was stable at last. From above, I heard orders being shouted and men running about.
Looking green, Uncle lifted his head from the pillow. "Can I get off and walk? I'll meet you at the other end."
"That might not be necessary," I said. I went up to the deck to find that a man had fallen overboard. Okhraam was supervising the rescue. Ingryn and Rymad stood on the poop deck, arguing about whether they should still trust his charts of the Canal.
"Your charts are ten years old," said Rymad.
"I sailed through here last year and they guided me through safely," said Ingryn.
"Did anyone hear the humming?" I said.
Both officers stared at me as if I was mad.
"The Elangic machines make a humming noise before they blow off," I said.
"I've never heard it," said Ingryn.
"It's louder below decks," I said. "And I think it's partly magical, so land folk would be more likely to hear it."
Rymad stroked his beard. "How much warning do they give?"
"I noticed this one about two minutes beforehand."
"That's not long enough to bring us to a dead stop," said Rymad.
"It's about two hundred yards," said Ingryn. "If we try to stop as soon as Raltarn hears the noise, we might be a hundred yards further away when the wave hits."
Rymad nodded. "That could make a difference. I'll have a man standing by to relay your warning."
I went back to our cabin. Rymad stationed a man in the corridor outside, within shouting distance. After about an hour, I heard the humming again and shouted, "Blow!" The man repeated this, and I heard the crew leap into action. The ship wriggled from side to side, struggling against its own momentum. The humming grew steadily louder, until I feared the blow must happen right under our keel. When the detonation came at last, it was quieter than before, and the waves were milder. Uncle still grumbled about wanting to get off the ship. I hurried upstairs to meet Rymad.
"I don't know how you did it, young sir," he said, "but I think we can judge this a success."
"Now you just have to keep it up for the next fifty miles or so," said Ingryn.
I frowned. I hadn't thought of that.
"It's going to be a close-run thing," said Rymad.
"Why?" I said.
"We need to be out of the Canal before sunset. It's not safe to sail in such a narrow channel in the dark, and if we stop for the night, we risk one of those machines blowing off under us before we can move out of the way."
"In that case," I said, "you'd better see if any of the crew can hear the machines preparing, so they can relieve me if I start to doze off."
None of the crew could hear the humming, so I spent the next fourteen hours listening for it. At first it was easy - there was a machine roughly every three miles, and their cycles seemed to be staggered so that they would blow one after another from east to west.
But then the pattern became less regular, and tiredness began to catch up with me - Uncle had to elbow me a couple of times to keep me awake. After that, the crew forced me to drink cup after cup of strong red tea. Even so, I was late noticing two machines, and nearly vomited after the second had thrown us about. After that, we had several false alarms, when I thought I heard humming, only to have it stop after a few moments. Once, I shouted "Blow!", and we stopped for a good ten minutes before I decided nothing was going to happen.
We got out of the Canal as the sun dropped below the horizon. Rymad took a chance and sailed on in the dark for another hour, until the booming of the machines had faded to a low rumble. When Rymad came down to our cabin and told me I could rest, I flopped onto the bed without bothering to undress.
Uncle shook me awake in the middle of the next afternoon, a big grin on his face and a big mug of tea in his hand. He offered me the tea as I sat up and stretched.
"Well lad, if this treasure hunt comes to nothing, you could make a respectable living guiding ships through the Canal. Rymad's just told me yesterday was one of the slowest crossings he's ever done, but also the safest."
I blew on my tea to cool it, then took a sip. "Any landsman could've done it." I yawned. "Any landsman who paid attention in magic lessons, anyway."
"Sssh. Never tell your customer what's behind the curtain."
"Customer, eh? Where's my share of the profits, then?"
Last update: 25/7/2020 17:09