Free Vision Quest (The Demon's Apprentice Book 3) by Ben Reeder Page A

elevator car at his gesture. The car itself looked like a metal cage. The Dwarf pulled the outer door shut, then an inner door, and when he pulled the lever on the stand beside him, I could see that it really was basically a metal framework around a steel mesh platform. Junkyard sat next to me and leaned against my leg.
    “My name is Brad by the way,” the Dwarf said, suddenly dropping the Dwarvish accent and sounding almost exactly like someone I would hear on TV. Everyone turned to look at him, and I wondered if my own expression was as dumbfounded as Shade’s. Seeing our faces, he let out a deep, booming laugh that seemed to shake the car. “Nay, pay no heed to my jest. I am Brand Firebeard, of Clan Hengist, alemakers to kings. Now, mind your lunch, lady and gentlemen. The view changes soon, and you’d best brace yourself for it.”
    “What view?” I asked. A metallic clang sounded, and I saw the concrete walls suddenly replaced by iron, then another clang sounded, and the walls fell away. I looked up to see the iron doors closing above us, with another set dropping open to let us pass. At each corner, a steel shaft ran down the sides of the car, with iron filigree work connecting the shafts to each other at regular intervals.
    “That view, lad,” Brand said with a wave of his hand.
    Below us lay the Underground. We had to be at least three hundred feet up. The cavern was huge, narrow at one end, widening out to encompass the buildings, then narrowing again before the floor rose as if it was going to meet the ceiling. But it never got there. A huge oval opening gave us a view of a second chamber, this one less historic looking, and much more Dwarven. The sides were steeper and closer together, and most of the buildings were carved directly from the living stone.  Quonset huts were arranged in neat rows below us in an almost perfect grid, with larger buildings that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a World War II era military base set up in the middle of the whole thing, bisected by what I first took to be a railroad track. It looked like a normal city at night, with lights shining in every window and street lights guiding the way. Even the railroad track looked like it had been laid in the Forties. Then I spotted the third rail in the middle. The railroad track disappeared into a tunnel that ran below the larger opening at the far end. Junkyard, never one to miss a good view, put his front paws on the railing and looked out over the subterranean city alongside me. On the opposite side of the track, another elevator like ours was ascending, and I could see the tall, impossibly narrow framework that supported it from the outside.
    “You’re in luck,” Brand said and pointed to the narrow end of the cavern. A light appeared in the tunnel that the tracks emerged from. “You’re just in time to see the Silver Phoenix arrive.” I looked to the tunnel, expecting to see and hear a train. A horn sounded that reminded me more of a semi than a locomotive, sending a wall of sound ahead of it that seemed to say in no uncertain term that something big was coming. What emerged from the tunnel wasn’t so much a train as a jet on rails. The first car, what I figured had to be the locomotive, was a silver cylinder that tapered down at the front. The whole front end was dominated by a huge air intake for a giant turbine engine. Unlike normal trains, this one had a glassed in cockpit at the front that reminded me more of Dr. C’s pictures of the old B-29 bombers, basically a smooth surface with the windscreens set flush to the metal. This one curved up from the front and ran back in a widening rectangle. A single line of glass panes ran back from the cockpit for the length of the engine. I caught all of that in a single instant as it rocketed out of the tunnel, pulling shiny steel cars with windows that ran along the sides and tops of each car. Another row of windows ran along the sides of the car, and I noticed that the