Vault of the Ages Read Online Free PDF

ancestors, puzzling dimly over things it could never understand—much less rebuild. He sighed.
    A great gong boomed solemnly down the air, echoing from wall to wall. It was Ronwy’s first summons, telling the witch-men that a council would meet in the afternoon.
    “Look, Carl. Look up there!”
    The Chief’s son craned his neck as Owl pointed. Up the sheer wall of an ancient tower, up, up,
up,
unbelievably far up. The stories said these buildings had been called skyscrapers, and indeed, thought Carl wildly, their heights seemed to storm the heavens.
    The scarred brick facing was gone after the first few stories, and only a skeleton of giant rust-red girders was left above, a dark net of emptiness through which the wind piped its mournful song. Clambering around on those mighty ribs were the tiny forms of men. The sound of their hammers and chisels drifted faintly down to the boys, and now and then the flame of a crude blowtorch would wink like a star caught in the steel net. The heavy ropes of a block and tackle reached from the heights down to the weed-grown street.
    “What are they doing?” whispered Tom.
    “They’re tearing it down,” said Carl, very softly. “Piece by piece, they’re ripping out the steel to sell to the tribes.” A shivering wind rippled about his words and blew them down the hollow canyon of the avenue.
    There was a huge sadness in it—the little men of today, gnawing apart the mighty works they no longer understood. In a few hundred years, or a few thousand, what did it matter? Nothing would be left, nothing but rubble and waving grass and the wild dogs howling where men had once lived.
    Sorrow wrestled in Carl with a slowly gathering anger. It was wrong, it was wrong. The ancient wisdom was
not
accursed! Men should be trying to learn it and use it to rebuild—not let time and thewitch-folk eat it away. Already a priceless heritage was gone; if this greed and ignorance were not halted, nothing would be left for the future.
    His gloom deepened as the three prowled further. So little remained. The buildings were gutted long ago. Nothing remained but empty shells and the clumsy things of today’s dwellers. Beyond this central part where the people lived, everything had simply been stripped of metal and left to crumble. The forest had grown far into the town.
    Owl would not be stopped from climbing several stories up one of the towers, and Tom and Carl followed him. From that windy height they could look miles over the dead City and the hills and woods beyond. To the north a broad river ran through the toppled ruin of a great bridge. Today, thought Carl bleakly, they had only a couple of wooden scows for getting over. He looked south too, after some sign of the Lann, but could see only waving, sunlit green of trees. They were waiting, though. They were waiting.
    It was nearly noon when the boys found the vault which was to mean so much to them. They were exploring the southern edge of the inhabited section, skirting a wall of bush and young trees that screened off the long low sides of caved-in buildings, when Tom pointed and cried, “What’s that?”
    Carl approached the thing gingerly, afraid in spite of himself. A pole stuck in the ground bore the skull of a horse—a common sign to keep off evil spirits. Beyond this were the two sides of a house otherwise fallen to heaps of brick and glass. At the rear of those parallel walls was a curious gray object like nothing he had seen before.
    “It’s magic,” said Tom, holding fast to his lucky charm. “The witches put up that sign because they’re afraid of whatever it is.”
    “Ronwy said there weren’t any ghosts here,” replied Owl stanchly. “He ought to know.”
    Carl stood for a moment thinking. In spite of having no great faith in the old stories of evil, he could not keep his heart from mumping. The thing brooding there in the hot, white sunlight was of the unknown. But—it was that fear which had kept men from learning what