“Any luck?” asked Matthew hopefully.

     Lirenna stood up after yet another careful examination of the door and shook her head dejectedly. The young soldier slumped back against the wall in disappointment, but he hadn’t really expected anything else, any more than any of the others had. If there had been some minute button or lever that would open the door, her sharp half shayen eyes would have spotted it the first time she’d looked, several hours before. Still, hope springs eternal, and there’d always been the chance that she’d missed something, no matter how unlikely, and before long she’d probably try again. There was nothing else to do.

     They’d been trapped in the room ever since being teleported into it following their narrow escape from the blue skinned kimmats in the Underworld. It was about the size of a small crofters cottage and made entirely from polished metal, walls, floor and ceiling; completely flawless and unblemished despite having to be at least five hundred years old, having been made by the Agglemonians, a long vanished people whose relics could still be found all over the world. Its seamless surface was broken in only three places; two massive steel doors in opposite walls, one of which they'd come in by, and a metal plaque next to the other door which, being made from a different metal from the rest of the room, was corroded to almost complete illegibility.

     Thomas’s first thought, when they’d found themselves in the room, had been that the mechanism for opening the door lay on its other side, another precaution against the inhabitants of the Underworld using the teleportation chamber to escape into the World Above, and he’d sent his invisible servant through to find it, as it had with the first door. This time, though, it hadn’t worked and the spell had expired a few minutes later without having accomplished anything. Undaunted, they’d reasoned that there had to be some way of opening the door, if only they could find it, and had therefore applied themselves to a minute examination of the entire room from floor to ceiling, looking for pressure plates, touch sensitive surfaces and magical proximity activators.

     They'd had no success, though, and they were now faced with the frightening prospect that whatever mechanism had originally opened the door had failed with age, leaving them with no way out. The only hope they had left was that the corroded plaque contained some clue as to a means of escape, and Thomas had been struggling to scrub away the powdery green encrustation that covered it. Whatever message had once been etched into its surface had been irrevocably destroyed, though, leaving just the odd word and fragment of a phrase here and there. What does ‘decompression’ mean? wondered the wizard, racking his brains. Compression meant to squeeze things up, so decompression presumably meant to release them, to let them become unsqueezed, but what was it that was squeezed up? It didn't make any sense! The only word that offered even a grain of hope was ‘patience’. It seemed to suggest that something would happen if only they waited long enough, but they’d been waiting for hours already and nothing had happened yet.

     “How long do you think we’ve got until the air runs out?” asked Jerry, even the usually cheerful nome being morose at their present predicament.

     “Well,” replied Angus, looking down at his writing tablet, “according to my calculations, it should have run out two to three hours ago.”

     “What?” said Shaun, suddenly hopeful. “That means there must be fresh air getting in somehow! If we can find out how the air’s getting in...”

     “Sorry,” interrupted Thomas, “but the air’s probably refreshed magically. If there was an air vent, we’d have found it.”

     Shaun looked crushed. “Yeah,” he agreed reluctantly. “You’re right. I was just grasping at straws, you know?” Thomas nodded, understanding.

     “I wonder if that’s why my ears keep popping?” wondered Jerry, who kept swallowing to relieve his discomfort. They were all suffering similarly, but compared with the prospect of a slow, lingering death it seemed too trivial to dwell on and the tiny nome’s words were ignored.

     “Well, at least we won’t suffocate,” said Matthew, trying to lighten the mood a little. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

     “Yeah,” agreed Shaun. “It means we’ll starve when the food runs out, and we’ll have a lot more time to think about it. Weeks instead of hours.”

     "We'll die of dehydration before we starve," pointed out Thomas. "We're losing water from our bodies with every breath we take." He fingered the cold metal wall, damp with condensation, and wondered whether they could gather the moisture up somehow and drink it.

     "We've got plenty of water," said Shaun, irritated by the wizard's correction. "Enough for days." His tone of voice suggested that this wasn't a good thing.

     “Days!” said Matthew, now beginning to look really frightened. So much for lightening the mood. “I don’t mind dying, I’ve sort of gotten used to the idea over the past few months, I suppose all soldiers do, but I never imagined... I mean, days?”

     The idea hung in the air like the fetid smell from a rotting corpse. They all knew what dehydration was like, how it dulled the mind and weakened the body until they became as helpless as babies, shivering and delirious, eventually being driven to such an extremity of desperation that they would resort to measures from which they would normally have shrunk in horror. Thomas had heard of one man slitting his brother's throat so he could drink his blood. No way! thought the wizard fearfully. I won’t go that way! I won’t let myself! He tried to tell himself that it wouldn't come to that, that they would find some way out, but as his eyes darted frantically around the confining steel walls he failed to find anything he hadn't seen a dozen times already. It was getting to the point where he had every tiny mark and stain memorised, so that he could still see it clearly with his eyes closed.

     He felt Lirenna shivering where she was sitting beside him, her shoulder against his, and he put his arm around her to give her a comforting squeeze. "We're not going to die here," he promised her. "We're going to find a way out."

     She smiled gratefully up at him. The demi shae trusted him completely, trusted him so much that she believed him despite the evidence of her own senses. He felt her relax a little, but it only left him feeling worse because he knew it was a promise he might not be able to keep. "We'll find a way out," he repeated, trying to convince himself this time. We've got time. That word ‘patience’ on the metal plaque kept coming back to him. It had to mean something!

     The loud click, followed by a clunk, came so suddenly that they all jumped in alarm and looked around to see what was happening. Nothing had changed, though, and after a few moments they settled down again, the brief moment of hope making their despair even deeper and darker, but then the door slid open with a faint grinding sound, revealing a larger room beyond with more doors in it.

     For a moment they simply stared in disbelief, frozen in astonishment as if they’d been turned to stone, but then they all leapt to their feet and scrambled out before the door could close again, trapping them once more. It was a shameful, undignified rush in which elbows were jabbed into sides and feet trodden on, but Thomas retained enough self control to make sure Lirenna was out before him, almost throwing her out so that she slipped on the shiny floor and almost fell.

     A moment later, though, they were all gathered together in the corridor, staring back into the room from which they'd just emerged, unable to believe that the terrible end they'd been facing just a moment earlier could simply evaporate so quickly, and then they were laughing in relief and holding onto each other, trying to convince themselves that they'd never had any doubt, that they'd always known they'd get out. It turned out there’d been no need to rush as the door remained open, and indeed all the doors in the larger room were open, all leading through to small metal rooms identical to the one they’d just escaped from.

     “Teleportation chambers,” said Thomas, staring around as his fascination with the new and unusual flared up again. “This is the centre of an old Agglemonian teleportation network, like the one owned by the Fellowship. Every chamber must lead to a different part of the old Empire. All we’ve got to do is find one that leads to a place near Ilandia.” He moved over to the nearest to get a better look inside.

     “I’m not going in there!” protested Matthew. “The next time, we really might never get out!”

     “Oh come on,” said the wizard reasonably. “It’s obvious that the network is still functioning perfectly or we wouldn’t be here. The one we came here by obviously has a delay deliberately built into it for some reason, but there’s no reason why any of the others should have. You can probably walk straight through them, like the Fellowship ones.”

     “Why should one room lock people in for hours and none of the others?” asked Matthew. “What makes this one different from all the others?”

     Thomas looked thoughtful. “The others all teleport people between two points on the world’s surface, whereas this one teleports people from a cavern five miles underground. That has to have something to do with it." Try as he might, though, the answer wouldn't come to him and in the end he was forced to give up in frustration.

     Angus, meanwhile, had walked up to the door adjacent to the one they’d come in by. “I’ll try this one,” he said. “If I don't come back, you’ll know not to follow me.”

     He began to enter, but Shaun jumped in beside him. “I’ll come as well,” he said. “It’s probably not wise for one person to go off alone in a strange place like this.”

     The trog nodded in agreement, and so the two of them entered together, the soldier giving the thumbs up to his brother and sister as he closed the massive metal door. When Matthew opened the door again, the soldier and the trog were gone.

     While they waited anxiously for them to return, Thomas used the time to have a proper look at the room they were in. It was more than just a room really. It was a long corridor resembling the corridor of a grand hotel. The floor was carpeted, but the carpet was damp and sticky with mold. The walls were panelled with wood, now cracked and rotten with fungus. The air carried a fetid stench of centuries of decay.