I shook my head, still trying to comprehend it. “But it looks like standard flowstone—deposited over thousands and thousands of years. How the hell can you possibly replicate that?”
“I could attempt to explain it,” Rokhaset said, after some consideration, “but in truth, without taking much time indeed to instruct you, all that I could tell you would boil down to saying ‘it’s magic,’ a most unsatisfactory explanation. Suffice to say that this is the way it must be for us.”
“So some of those natural-seeming caverns we see around the world are really your doing?”
“Undoubtedly. Sometimes your people intrude upon us by exploring what you think are natural caves and are, instead, our dwelling places. Only in the great cities and central places of the Earth do we build places such as the throne room and its nearby environs.”
I rubbed my temples. Running into the Nomes themselves, well, I’d always known they were there. So it was more like just meeting some aliens. This, though, was magic—a kind of magic that affected stuff I really did know a lot about, and direct enough to hit me in the gut. The threat of the Lisharithada’s great quake was real enough, but too huge to grasp, really. Seeing stone that, by rights, ought to have taken a million years to form be spat out in seconds by some crawling centipede-thing, that was different.
I remembered, suddenly, the rushing water I’d heard when the great doors to the Throne Room opened. “You don’t even use machines like we do. You just channel water and maybe use levers or something to move those doors and other things.”
“Correct. In nature, sometimes water does move great boulders, so we can construct a device that takes advantage of that.”
“Well, Clint, now we know why we’ve never seen any traces of these things before in caves around the world.”
I nodded to Jodi. “Ayup. We did see traces, more’n likely. Problem is that there was no way to tell the traces from the original stone. Y’all even make stalactites and stalagmites and all the trimmings, right, and make sure the water’s there to keep it alive?”
Rokhaset seemed pleased that I’d picked up on the last part. “Exactly right, Clint. I see you have finally penetrated the significance of your original ancestor’s find.”
“In a cave, water flowing represents life to you just like to us. So you keep your diamonds and other stones in those pools so they stay a part of Nowë’s essence, right?”
“Very good. Yes, precisely so.”
I noticed Rokhaset was staying carefully in the deepest shadows under the tree, and remembered his prior comments. “Hey, you said your eyes might suffer in the sun. I could get you something that probably will help.”
“Indeed?”
“Yeah. I’ve done some work with multispectral optics, off and on, and you mentioned your eyes get messed up slowly. I’ll bet the crystals are being affected by the ultraviolet rays, which you’ll never run into underground.” I handed him a pair of UV-blocker sunglasses.
He put them on and glanced around with his odd sight. “Extraordinary. There is minor interference from these glasses in how well I turan, but I can tell that the faint pain from the light here is considerably lessened.”
“I wasn’t sure if the plastic would interfere with your own senses, but the fact that it blocked UV made it worth a try. UV’s generally the culprit in most damage sunlight does.”
“I believe you are correct in this case. Thank you.” Rokhaset glanced into the pit. “I do not suppose you have a few dozen pairs of these?”
I chuckled ruefully. “Nope, and can’t get any until we get to town.”
“Then let us arrange that as swiftly as possible.”
* * *
The next few hours passed quickly. Rokhaset drove his people and their seradatho twice as hard, pausing only to listen when we clarified how the terrain would have to run in order to permit the cars to pass. Before our eyes, the landscape healed; it was the only way to describe that incredible sight. Stone and soil literally growing up out of the bowels of the Earth, a foundation of limestone covered by soil, and trees and brush somehow moving in over the scar through careful manipulation of the soil and roots.