My third day in the Deep started the same way—splashed awake. Again I rolled onto the floor, sat and waited out the splashes. The pipe stopped splashing. But when Loquar didn’t come, I dressed, went to the forges for the coals and made my own way through the levels, hotting the lights by myself. When I got back to the workshop, all our rat-traps had been taken from our station and a bowl of steaming tashi had been left at my bench.
All that day, the Deep was teeming with noise and busy movement, and yet I saw almost no one. At some point of the morning a pair of “overseers” – a man and woman – discussed some plan at the table, but mostly the workshop was empty. Loquar did come eventually, but built only one trap before making some lame excuse for a break, and simply not coming back. So I worked away on my own: sawing, pedalling and knocking in nails the way he’d shown me. Purposeful feet thrummed back and forth outside the door, while whatever was happening far below on digging level shook showers of stone and grit and dust from the ceiling bricks. The hours were slow.
In the evening, as instructed, I took my scuttle of coals and hotting tongs down to that lowest level and lit the fading lights there. It was a changed place in the hush after the day’s work was over; the great, clawed hand of the rubble-raiser lying still among lax cables like a sleeping, captive ogre, and only a few weary sappers climbing out of the pits. The two overseers I’d seen in the morning were there, talking on the scaffolds, and when one looked in my direction she seemed to recognise me. Pintle and Gudgeon I’d heard them called, though those didn’t sound like real names.
A steaming supper was waiting in the workshop again: a meal of minced beef, diced okra, some other Vedish white vegetable I’d never eaten, a wedge of peppered bread. The Deep went quiet. No footfalls or voices in the tunnels; even the grumbles of the hill all around it turning sleepy, it seemed. I finished my supper and widened the panes of the lantern.
I wasn’t tired, not just yet, so I went over to the box-contraption that had so puzzled me before – the one with the half-circle dial. It was called a “clepsydra” - a hydraulic clepsydra – and now I knew what it did. Loquar had showed me how a mechanism of gears, floats and stoppers, as well as a steady feed of water from the pipes, would make the dial slowly rotate behind its pointer. By means of pictures on the dial ‒ suns, stars and moons, birds, lizards, lions, giants and mythic creatures ‒ the device would tell what time of day it was. Useful down here, where you’d have no other way of knowing. I found its keys behind the finials, unlocked one of its tiny doors below and, just as Loquar had showed me, opened the valve to refill its tank and keep it going another day. It was still a miracle to me that, in this city, water flowed at the mere turn of a screw.
Hands to myself, I walked the room. The “fusil” I’d spotted on my first visit to the workshop, and which Rusper had tried to present to the Sanhedrin council, had been moved to the workbench where he most often worked alone. I lifted its cover. The thing still undergoing constant changes to its design, he’d both added and removed since last I’d looked. Soldered to the front was now a lateral metal bar. From it, cords of hide stretched from each end to the very back. He’d taken grips off, handles too, but I guessed that was only to make it a bit easier to work on. Other parts like levers, triggers, wheels, chains and gears lay scattered around it like so many organs he’d pulled out. A yellow dusting of chrozite lay on the surface as well, and one of the jars of leaden balls was sitting open on the side. He called them “schot.” It was tempting, but I didn’t touch. Didn’t dare. He’d know for sure if it was tampered with or moved even an inch. I dropped the cover and stepped away, towards the middle table.
The piping parchments had been left a little tidier today. I looked more closely at the pictures, all drawn in different mediums: ink for the lines and the labels, graphite for shading, some kind of stain, I guessed, for grades or types of pipe? I didn’t know. My reading was slow anyway, but here the handwriting made words impossible to make out. Almost. That one word “Transcript” was always clear in the headings.
Transcript Four, Transcript Five . . .
The smaller sheets were even harder to make sense of; crowded so thickly with corrections that at first glance they looked little more than a mess of silly squiggles. I challenged myself to understand at least something from those pages. Knowing I probably shouldn’t, I started leafing through the sheets. Slowly, through the tangle of the levels I saw depicted, I started finding landmarks, points of the city I knew. There were outlines of the districts in what were called the “circuit grids.” And maps made up entirely of criss-crossing lines, showing the “aqueducts.” And yes, that’s what they were, I realised: updated versions of the Transcripts.
‘Any ideas?’
I spun around.
Rusper wore a thobe of olive-green with grey brocades; Viceroy again. He stood with his arms behind his back and I felt a fool that I hadn’t heard him come in.
‘Bored with traps, I take it.’
‘I’ve used the wood up,’ I said, flustered. ‘The metal too. Nearly, almost.’
‘How many today?’
‘Eight,’ I said and motioned towards my station. His eyes followed my hand without much interest.
‘Where’s Loquar?’
‘Had to leave.’
‘Leave?’
‘This morning.’
He cocked an eyebrow. ‘You built eight traps by yourself, then. In a day.’
‘Well, seven,’ I confessed. ‘The eighth was Loquar’s.’
He stared at me; I looked away, then back in time to catch his glance at the piping parchments I’d disturbed.
I took another step away from them. ‘Sorry, I was—’
‘Curious? Don’t blame you,’ he said. ‘It’s a most curious problem.’ He came over to the table where I’d been standing before, hands still clasped behind his back as if restraining himself.
I had to ask: ‘What is the problem?’
‘Hm?’ His eyes stuck to the pages.
‘The pipes . . .’ I prompted. ‘Is the city running out of water?’
He turned and looked, not at, but through me. Had he heard what I’d said? Then, ‘No, I don’t think so. Not yet at any rate. Though some of my planners have begun to fear as much.’
I remembered the quarrel I’d overheard. ‘You told the Captain that the city had five more years.’
‘Well remembered. I was trying to shake him.’ Only now did he put a hand towards the sheet that I’d been studying, but jerked it back as if stopping himself just in time. He shook his head. ‘The real problem, Flint, lies in the loss of a legacy. These pipes, they are unique, the system that feeds Antissa from beneath the desert unlike anything you’ll find in all the realms. Not even Ered, with its renowned crafts and high science, has anything to match it. As far as we know.’
He left the table and went to where I’d eaten my supper. From the ewer of water, he filled my cup and walked back, drinking deeply.
‘The pipes were here before our time,’ he went on, licking his lips. ‘Before my predecessor’s time. Before the founding of the Guild. Before the first dynasty of the satraps or the chieftains before them. They are the product of far greater, ancient masters. And the more our city changes, the more obvious it becomes how little we’ve retained of that mastery.’
It was only when he pinned me with his eyes that I realised I was gaping as he spoke. ‘You’re talking about the Builders,’ I said, to take control of my face. ‘The builders of the fortress.’
The stern eyes softened. ‘So you’ve been listening.’
‘And the pipes?’
‘Especially the pipes,’ he said. ‘The Builders were the first. Unrivalled engineers and true perfecters of the industry on which they founded our city.’
‘So how old are they?’
‘The pipes?’ Rusper raised the cup and sipped his water. ‘We’ve made additions of our own, but for the most part at least five hundred years. That’s the delivery circuits. Chamber’s older.’
‘What chamber?’
‘This one.’
Setting his cup down, he fished a sheet out from the mass by a corner almost black it had seen that many thumbs. As he laid it between us, I recognised the rows of sausage-slice circles from before. And realised, too, that I’d come back to the table.
‘The Hub Chamber,’ he said, a little grandly, as if the words were sacred. ‘The nucleus of the system on which Antissa depends. And not just our pipes, mind. Building a Deep where we did would have posed a rather steeper sort of challenge without the Hub’s structural advantage. We believe it could be as much as two hundred years older than the network around it. And now, very likely, the root of our problem.’
That wall of slimy green stone—this was that wall, the one I’d seen at the centre of every level of the Deep, and which towered enormously over the scaffolds and pits on digging level. With new eyes I scanned the page of weird circles, each one presumably representing a cross-section of the cylinder that ran down through the Deep like a pillar. The first pillar. Giant and hollow, seven hundred years old.
I had a worrying thought. ‘Um . . .’
‘Don’t mumble.’
‘Only, was . . . was I meant to hot the lights in there too?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘Light the lanterns, I mean. Inside that chamber.’
He fixed me with a frown as breath seeped out of him slowly. ‘There aren’t any,’ he replied.
‘No lanterns?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’ He looked puzzled, and I returned the puzzled look. We shared it like that for a moment. Then, ‘It’s sealed, Flint. There’s no way into the Hub from outside. Didn’t I say?’
‘No you didn’t.’
‘How remiss. Well, there you are. It’s impenetrable. No way into the Hub.’
‘So, it doesn’t have an entrance?’
‘How many ways would you like me to put this?’
‘But why not?’
‘It just doesn’t,’ he shrugged. ‘Not anymore.’
‘So how d’you know about that?’ I said, pointing at the sausage circles.
‘That,’ he said immediately, ‘is the copy made by Meck, the Chief Engineer before me, of renderings the Builders themselves left behind. Parchments no longer available to the Guild, regrettably. Almost all our estimations are based on what Meck believed to exist behind that wall.’
That couldn’t be right. ‘But how . . . how do you—?’
‘We don’t,’ he said, guessing my question. ‘The system has never so much as wobbled until now.’
‘’Cos now there’s too many people?’
Rusper answered with a scowl. ‘If that’s what you think. I disagree. The so-called legends of early Antissa continually lead us to believe that a population this size subsisted here long before the delivery circuits were complete. Which would suggest—strongly suggest—that water was conveyed to more than ten thousand people directly from these—four—channels—here.’ He jabbed a finger into the four largest circles displayed inside one section.
No, inside all the sections.
‘Artan . . .’ I tried to read. ‘Artor . . .’
‘Arterials.’
‘They draw up the water?’
‘From an aquifer more than three miles under the hill, according to the Transcripts. Now, after seven hundred years, I call that proof of a capacity to sustain greater numbers than have ever lived here.’ He cleared his throat, seemingly aware of how intensely he’d been speaking. ‘The problem’s balance. Somehow, from the outside, we’ve offset central pressure.’
I peered in closer and tried to make more sense of what I was seeing; the cryptic numbers, codes and symbols. Every section was unique, but on each of the sections lines made exits through the circumference of the circle I now knew to be the green wall. Suddenly, I had to know what was inside.
‘Can’t you turn them off?’ I heard myself ask.
‘Turn what off?’ he said.
‘The pipes.’
‘Some pipes, what of it?’
‘I could go in. Through a pipe.’
‘Wha—?’ he gushed. ‘No, Flint. Sadly you could not. Even the largest of the laterals are much too narrow for that.’
‘But I’m small.’
‘Not small enough,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You’d end up trapped in the line. Besides, there’s no way to open the pipe once inside. And even if you did squeeze yourself as far as the Hub interior, you’d only plummet to pelkh knows what death at the channel elbow.’
I persisted. ‘Aren’t there spaces?’
‘Spaces, what do you mean?’
‘Inside that green wall, around the pipelines.’
For just the tiniest moment he studied the air above my head. ‘There . . . are cavities around some of their entry-points, yes. But they’re inconsistent, very unlikely to penetrate the estimated forty feet of that wall.’
‘Let me follow them then,’ I said. ‘I’ll find out for you.’
I caught the way he sized me up; he saw me catch it. ‘No, much too narrow.’ He was firm. ‘Too dark, too wet inside those cracks and likely choked full of rust.’
He drained the cup and strode back to the ewer, refilled it with a splosh and quaffed a gulp. Eyes faraway, he stood there tapping the cup with his guild-ring, chewing the inside of his mouth. Well, that was that.
‘And unpredictable!’ he blurted, coming back to himself. ‘Meck never finalised the routes those pipes take through the Hub wall, never had enough to go on. We know where they go in and can be fairly confident of where they come out. In theory. But between those two points . . .’ He scratched his scalp. ‘Flint, we don’t even know if the circuit zones align with the levels of the Deep. Probably not!’
‘You said you wanted me to help you,’ I pushed.
‘And you will, but this is—’
‘Dangerous?’
‘Deeply.’
We locked eyes. His single-minded glare was the first to soften, if slowly, leaving in its place the same hungry look he’d given the Transcripts. As he kneaded his knuckles, something made me think of Erik; hand on my shoulder as he told me to be brave.
Danger. I’d seen it. And survived.
I could do this.
Rusper flattened his lips and breathed out through his nose. ‘The Guild has never sent children into the Hub. For good reason.’
‘It’s never had to,’ I reminded him. ‘You just said so.’
----------------------------------------
After hotting lights next morning, I pored over the charts on the piping Transcripts and soon began to understand what Rusper meant when he said proof. A walled city Antissa might have become, but it seemed that at any time in its history its inhabitants could have migrated to the gulf coast. They never had. Instead, the city’s builders had chosen to remain here in the harshness of the desert and plunge pipes into the earth.
By noon, the diagram of the Hub Chamber was back inside its tube, secured to Rusper’s belt, and bobbing against his thigh as he walked. I had to skip to keep up.
‘What’s a Deep for?’
‘Hm, what’s it for?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘A range of things. We owe the first level to Meck himself, of course, fifty years ago, to make room for the expanding industries of the Royal Guild under his ordinance. As for the extended Deepworks that we’ve since undertaken, they are royal decree. The Satrap commands we dig, so we’re digging.’
‘But digging for what?’
‘Protection.’ He almost spat it. ‘It’s to be our shelter should the Rath move further south. We’re no longer fighting a war, as you know. The army is withdrawn by royal command. Engineering having been thus pushed to the fore, that makes me Viceroy in wartime—I saw you up there in council, weren’t you paying attention?’
I dodged his glance.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
He sighed, shaking his head. ‘But even without the threat of invasion’—he looked behind us, at Loquar who shuffled with his scuttle of coals—‘the Satrap is not as he was.’
We came to a room full of pipes, here all exposed. Brown, red, pink, orange and flaking, and ribbed with clefts like fishes’ gills, they delved through the floor and through the ceiling from the face of the green wall. One of them Rusper followed to where it passed through a seal of iron, which he knocked with his knuckles.
‘Two-bee-three,’ he named it. ‘A common lateral feeder. Pipes such as these enable us to regulate a marginal degree of water-pressure.’
I came closer, eyes glued to the seal encircling the pipe. II-b3. That seal was barely wider than the length of my arm, and now Rusper raised an eyebrow at me as if to ask what I’d expected.
Loquar arrived and put his scuttle on the floor. ‘Chief,’ he said, gritting yellow teeth. ‘It’s off the boil sending the kid—’
‘A hand please, Loquar.’ Rusper shoved the scroll-tube at my ribs—forcing me to catch it—and stooped to get a grip on the seal. Then Loquar also pushed a bundle at my chest—I caught that too—and stooped to help him. ‘You still reek of daskh, man!’
‘Sorry, Chief.’
With a jerk they freed its wheel, spun it three times, then slid it out over the pipe. Damp air rolled into our faces and we stood back together, staring after the peeling line that ran on and disappeared through the crevice. It was tight: very tight.
I swallowed, steeling my nerves. ‘What do I do when I get in?’
‘If you get in,’ Rusper corrected with a severe look.
He snatched the tube back from me and popped its lid, pulled out the scroll. Spreading the sheet on Loquar’s back, his finger guided my eye across the plan of “Circuit Two.”
‘Entering from here, you should be able to reach this zone. From there . . .’
‘Three-ay-one and three-bee-seven,’ I recited from memory. He’d already versed me in the laterals he suspected.
‘Correct. Should be open. What else?’
‘Everything on the sixth zone,’ I replied.
A nod. ‘That circuit’s been obsolete for decades. Try those valves. Should any be open, seal them. If you can do that, it may increase pressure on this channel over here, Arterial-three. If we’re lucky.’
Arterial-III. I tried to memorise its position before the scroll was put away.
I became a knight with two squires who prepared my armour for darkness. Loquar coaxed off my sandals; I’d need my toes for grip, he said. Meanwhile, Rusper used the strap of the scroll-tube to attach it firmly to my back, a bit too tight, but I said nothing. They had me sweep back my hair. In Loquar’s bundle was a small globe of glass that he had threaded with an undercopper stem and a triglycerate crystal. It had been fused to a cloth which, when tied around my forehead, set the globe facing front. Aside from the lenses of Rusper’s goggles, the only glass I’d ever seen had been in Sarah’s box of treasures: that vial of Naemian earth.
Forget that now.
‘Don’t come easy in ‘Tissa,’ Loquar grumbled as if peeling the thought right off my brain.
‘Not even for the Guild,’ Rusper added.
‘So mind yer way,’ Loquar warned me. He raised the hotting tongs towards my forehead.
‘Hold still,’ said Rusper.
I winced at the heat, heard the undercopper sizzle and blinked in the glare of greenish light.
Between more stern warnings not to break the glass if I wanted to live, I wheeled a leg over the pipe called II-b3 and bent down low to look in. The headlight played eerily in the curdled crevice, my nose twitching at the smell. I’d get used to it, I hoped. My hands, at least, were free.
Rusper was still talking: ‘I want to know about anything that might indicate deterioration. Not just Arte-III, anything at all. Not even the finest engineering lasts forever.’
I nodded understanding, then shimmied my body under the lip of iron framing the hole. It was a difficult squeeze and, once inside, immediately harder to move than I’d feared. I tried not to let it scare me, but knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Before I’d made it in three feet, my knees were scraped by the rough stone. But the pipe was dry, luckily. Holding to its gills, I could pull my weight along its topside with the help of my legs. It would be slow. And so I pulled, the headlight barely separating the darkness up ahead.
The pipe curled left, the crevice with it. The hiss inside the iron under my body was almost human. Except it never took a breath.
‘Still hear us, kid?’
‘Course he can hear us!’
The echo of their voices was wet.
‘I’m fine,’ I answered, pushing calm, wetly echoing too.
‘Flint, just be—’
Silence.
I froze. ‘Caliph Symphin?’
Not only had Rusper stopped short in mid-sentence; he’d stopped without echo. I said his name again, louder, and waited for him to answer. But he didn’t.
‘Loquar?’ I tried to steady my breathing and stave off the panic that slid in with the thoughts I couldn’t help but start to think. Would they have sealed me inside? Was this a trick? Why would they do that?
This had been my idea, I remembered. And no, there hadn’t been a bang of any iron slamming shut, although now even the seeping breath of the crevice had gone silent. It was as if the green wall had swallowed me up, sound and all, leaving me alone with my own breath and that soft hiss of running water.
Just stay calm. Whatever had happened back there at the opening, there was no way of crawling back now. Only forward. So I did that, all my muscles taut with extra care, and almost blind. The crevice curled right, the pipe’s hiss growing louder underneath my belly, and my elbows, knees and shins all sticky with blood before long.
What was I doing? Just two weeks ago, I’d been a child of the borderlands, running and playing in the river-plain. Now I was here, behind the high walls of a fortress city, and crawling through its pipeworks! Serving its lord! Had Erik and Sarah ever existed?
The scroll-tube snagged on stone, the crevice suddenly shrinking tight around me. I was about to get stuck, I could feel it, and at the instant terror I tugged too hard and scored my back on the ceiling. My stupid yelp sounded so strange, contained so tightly by the space, and when the tube did come free I lay forward on the pipe. I panted there, collecting my nerve and remembering what Rusper had said. The Guild has never sent children into the Hub, for good reason. I knew I’d have to be more careful from now on.
But then, a few yards further in, II-b3 made a different kind of turn. Instead of bending left or right, which I was getting good at, it elbowed down. The space around it just as close, if not closer.
He’d warned me.
I felt the panic surge again, now with the added dread of knowing that I couldn’t turn around. Would it be possible, even, to shimmy my way backwards if I had to?
Not if I did it. Did find a way to crawl down.
I pulled my way up to the elbow, the water’s hiss becoming urgent and aggressive at the curve right where the current hit the change and veered and fell who-knew-how-far. I stretched and twisted through the curdled stomach walls of the crevice and, gripping bolts, let my light peek over the slope.
The pipe went vertical from here and dropped a distance I could stand in. The line then straightened and went on.
Also the crevice, at the bottom, looked slightly wider where it turned: wide enough, I thought, to crouch and re-adjust my position. Or my direction, if need be.
Going down, I first made sure to splay my hands against the stone of the far wall—if any wall in here was far—in such a way that I was balanced with my belly on the curve. Then it was slowly, slowly, slowly angle down until the drop between my hands and the straightened pipe when I slipped forward wouldn’t be too far to fall.
No sooner was I face-down and vertical than the panic rushed through me again and made me want to squirm back up. I tensed, off-balancing my grip, and dropped.
My hands slapped lateral iron. Under my weight, both my arms buckled but didn’t buckle all the way. My own bones, bending outward in collapse, slowed down my fall, wedging me in by my own joints, which sent relief gushing down—or up—the length of my body. It was only well after I’d wriggled myself down into the lower space, and realigned, that I could feel how it had carved the skin right off my elbows.
The farther on I crawled into the wall, the harder it became to tell what kind of distance that was or how many minutes it had taken. The air got colder. I sucked it in between my teeth, tasting a tang. At least my light showed that the crevice had widened a little up ahead; enough, at least, not to have to worry about getting wedged and stuck again. Through the glare, a lipless circle then appeared around the pipe. Air touched my ears. I dragged my body further on, more careful than ever not to crack the globe against protruding sides.
But then the sides simply weren’t there. My light fled out through open darkness, my body’s sounds lost in echoes. Surging water, moaning metal, things that plunged and gonged and gurgled. Yawning space. My fingers clawed into the gills. I breathed and waited out the thudding in my chest.
I was inside.
And straightaway, my light seemed pointless. Just ahead, a larger pipe passed over II-b3 ‒ left to right, darkness to darkness ‒ that was all. Of the Hub Chamber itself there were only sounds of moving water and its echoes, and echoes of its echoes. Behind me, the ancient green wall dropped from my heels into pure blackness. I felt my breakfast move inside me; that blackness seemed to lick and suck my soles.
There were no ladders, no steps, no terraces. As far as I could see, no way of getting through the space but by the pipelines themselves. So much for the legendary Builders. How many of them might have fallen to their deaths here? I shuddered, thinking about their bones strewn on the floor, and then again at just how far away from me that floor could be.
Reaching behind, I worked the scroll out and spread it under my headlight. The Hub was easily as huge as Meck had made it look on parchment—I could hear it. Dauntingly huge. And yes, the pipe up ahead was II-a7, meaning I’d come out in the right place: Circuit Zone Two.
Alright. Breathe.
At least, III-a1 wasn’t too far.
I slid the scroll back into place, balled up my guts, hugged II-b3 with arms and legs, and edged out slowly.
Extremely slowly.
When, after something like ten minutes, I got as far as II-a7, I carefully climbed on top of it and just sat still there for a while. Volumes of water rushed inside, the surge vibrating at my legs. To test the hugeness all around me, or just really to bolster my courage, I drew a deep breath and shouted out the first thing in my mind.
It was a swear.
Maybe it echoed, maybe it didn’t. It was impossible to tell. The hissing and surging of invisible currents to every side owned all the echoes in this place.
I started off then, to the right.
The curving pipe followed the green wall, my light touching nothing else at all.
Yards farther on, I ducked to shimmy under the belly of a lateral, then went more slowly towards what I knew was coming up not far ahead.
Knowing it was coming didn’t prepare me.
Arterial-III. It entered my sphere of light like the back of an enormous, peeling pig. I couldn’t move for a few moments. Then, on nervous joints, I dared to tilt my neck back and look up its rusted hide of girders. Fifteen feet wide, at least, full height a secret of the dark. I heard its hiss, though strangely faint, then leaned back slightly with my light. The monster seemed to mimic me, leaning back into the gloom that it had come from, and I shuddered. I’d never felt as small as this; alone under a fortress with the giants in the dark.
Checking again to be sure of my way, I continued to crawl along the line. II-a7 ran under some criss-crossing laterals, large and small, and I spotted their valve-wheels as I passed. Then, from the other side, Arte-III reared up again and displayed its own row of gills.
Like a ladder.
I touched the gills, lightly, almost nervous of somehow waking the beast, but they were dry and deep enough for both my fingers and my toes. I was now so keenly aware of what a single slip would mean that it took me several minutes to manoeuvre my body into a position that felt right for the step; another few minutes after that before I was ready to do it.
I sent a shaking leg down.
And then another.
The gills allowed for good grip, I soon found, but even with that there was no way I could afford to move faster. One wrong foot, I knew, and my bones would be the next down on that distant, ancient floor.
It was a long, long way down; fifty feet, I guessed—fifty of those shaking downward steps—when Zone Three’s laterals came into view. There was III-a1 below me. I gently stepped down on its valve-wheel, took hold for balance and eased myself into place with my back against the giant.
The water that moved through this pipe wasn’t strong. When I set my hands to the wheel’s outer bar and tested it, I half-expected it to stick. But it didn’t. The vibrations were firm, and the wheel turned. III-a1 was open.
Which left III-b7 still to test.
Another check of the chart first. Though on the same zone—just parallel, in fact—getting to that one would be risky. As if any of this wasn’t! The only pipe that led to it from here was thin, about a yard off.
So I took my time, measured the distance and crossed with a wide step. Immediately I dropped, landing hard, wrapping my legs around the line and knocking the globe. Its clang went on for what seemed like a hundred miles of metal and for the first time I wondered if this wasn’t, as Rusper had possibly said, a bad idea. Then again, I’d come this far already, and so far my only hurts were scrapes to knees and elbows.
At the first lateral to undercut my way from there, I changed pipes. Then I went on, following the curve of the green wall. Another arterial – II – passed through my light. Unlike its sister, the sound of its surge was enormous. Pressure, I thought. He’d been right about pressure.
It could have been an hour in the dark, or even two, when I reached the clustered pipes around Arte-I. Struggling to make sense of how they curled and converged, I clambered over the laterals until they pressed closer together, closing the gaps between them. By the time I found III-b7, the second of Rusper’s suspects, I was able to stand, and then walk to where it stemmed into three. Like a mushroom the valve-wheel seemed to sprout just before the vertical downturn. I balanced my way towards it and took hold, instantly feeling the current coursing through the metal. Open.
I sat and slumped against the wheel over my clammy forearms. My clothes were damp, too. I shivered. He’d been wrong on both counts.
But even as I thought about it, staring out at that dense gloom, I realised that I was looking at something that shouldn’t be there. I narrowed my eyes against the glare of my headlight, but it was too much for me to make anything out properly. So I wriggled the light off my head and held the globe out by its cloth.
Cables?
Still not enough light to really tell. Carefully, I mounted the valve-wheel and leaned forward on my knees. Yes they were cables, a kind of web of cables, surrounding what looked like a cluster of lines. And not pipes like the others; more like thin, vertical tubes. Whatever they were, they weren’t on the chart; right now I was looking directly into the centre of the Hub, which I had studied all morning. This wasn’t marked.
But there was something else. Something behind the tubes and cables . . . I reached out further. A bridge? A stone bridge!
The cloth slipped.
I swiped and missed and lost my balance. Dropped to the wheel.
Heart thudding lead into my veins, I clung on tightly with my body. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ This time I did hear my echo and felt the huge pipes judge me too. Zone by zone, I watched the light shrink away into the depths, calling the hall of iron arteries obscenely into being on its way, almost hitting some lines. Slamming my eyes shut, I fought to turn the gauge on my fear and push calm back through my nerves.
But when I opened them again, the dot was there. Still there, unmoving. As if the globe hadn’t smashed, but simply . . . stopped. I stared at it, my heartbeat slowing, but the dot stayed right where it was. How?
How didn’t matter. I had no choice now but to climb down to the bottom and get it back, or in the dark I’d never get out of this place.
Blind, I felt my way back to Arte-I. Touched its face. Patted a path and found its gills. Holding on tightly, I hoisted myself up against its side, though my feet slid about before finding their place. Another panic. It was a long journey to the bottom of the Hub, and soon measuring the time became an impossible thing. Counting the gills meant less and less. Twice I glanced down between my feet just to be sure the dot was at least a little bit bigger than the last time, almost ready to believe the Hub was infinite now. If there was no light in a place, maybe it could go on forever . . . ? By the time I could see the gills in front of my face again, my count had overshot three hundred.
Down here the gills were wet, however, so I slowed down before dismounting. On a thin lateral feeder, I braced myself between another of the verticals, just as thin, and Arte-I. Shadows closed off everything above me, and although the light had taken on the green tinge of the wall, lit by triglycerate, it was too weak to read the chart. This was Zone Six: apart from the ongoing surge of the four central arterials, it was completely shut off—as it should be. Pipes were still.
All of that was half-noticed, though. For a few eerie moments, it seemed that my headlight hovered in space. Reflections played on the pipes. And then I realised that the globe wasn’t hovering, but floating on the surface of a lake, beaming down through clear water into the narrowing zones. Through those zones, spindly verticals reached down like skeletal legs to disappear into the murk all the murkier somehow for being underwater. The globe’s glow was dimming. The undercopper stems that powered the crystal had cooled, which meant there wasn’t much time left.
A lateral led me to the northeast side of the water, curling around a fat Arte-II girder.
From there I balanced to Arte-III. The globe floated close enough just there, the cloth that floated beside and underneath it giving it the look of a luminous jellyfish. I lay on my belly and started stroking the water towards me. It was icy!
Something was wrong. No way could this be the city’s water-source. Below, I could see, all four arterial channels turned inward with the green wall and plunged down deeper, deeper, deeper. Rusper had told me, anyway, that the source—the “aquifer”—was three miles down.
Water shouldn’t be here, I decided. Not on Zone Six.
The globe drifted towards my fingers on the current I’d made, fading as it came. I stroked more quickly, not liking how it made me feel to look down through the surface of the water. Each time I did, I felt the fear that something old, deformed and curdled by its rust and stygian algae would swim up and grab me by my arm.
And then I saw it. A dark eye.
I froze and stared back for a moment, then made a grab for the globe and plunged it down into the water. The weak light waxed over jagged edges—it was a hole. Though hardly bigger than my hand, it was as if a chunk of Arte-III’s metal had been ripped out of its side. A thrill rolled through my body. This was it: the reason for the system’s drop in pressure. Even now, if I looked carefully, I could make out the quivering of water rushing from the fissure. How long had it been like that? Long enough, obviously, to fill Zone Six, but how long was that? How fast was the water level rising? How long would it take before it flooded the Hub? I was no engineer, but it didn’t take one to know that the channel had to be sealed. At least until the real engineers could do something about it, I figured, as I pulled my arm out of the water.
Tying the dripping cloth back around my head, I looked up. So much darkness, but at least this time it was a darkness I’d been in. Hands to the gills, I started climbing.
The first sub-gauge was on Zone Five—two levers—and the surging current fought me back as I forced them flush against the girder, narrowing the floodgates. Zone Three had the second; I forced it too. And then climbed higher, faster now. The light was sputtering inside the globe, and total blackness closing in. Another sub-gauge on Zone Two: under my hand the stream was thinning.
Disgruntled bellows of the pipeworks rising with me as I climbed, I pressed for the top of the Hub Chamber. There, my light flickered just enough to show a broad, vaulted ceiling that put another shudder through me. Some feet shy of a colossal iron girder, affixed with bolts wider than my face, was the Mains Wheel.
Anchoring my fingers and toes into the gills as best I could, I gripped and heaved.
A juddering groan was what came first. Then everything the channel still had power to raise raged back at me. Vicious, outraged, the wheel spun against my strength but I held tight and kept on pushing. At least as long as I could bear before the force of the valve plucked me clear. I grabbed the wheel, swung down and jolted.
The Hub shook all around me.
Arterial-III trembled and roared. Then gurgled, shivered and went still.
----------------------------------------
Rusper drummed his nails on a feeder and bristled as if he might eat me alive. ‘A leak.’
I nodded, for the third time.
‘Desert take it!’
Crouched on the bricks, I used the headcloth to dab my knees and sliced elbows, smarting at the grit that had got into the cuts. They weren’t as bad as all that.
I looked at the misty globe. The triglycerate had died on my return through the green wall, though after its time in the cold water I’d been lucky it had lasted even that long. Had I really just done that: sealed one of the central piping channels of the city of Antissa? Whatever I’d done, I’d reported everything in full detail to Rusper. He was intrigued, instantly, about the stone bridge and tubes and cables that I’d seen, but after my mention of the hole in Arte-III, didn’t care.
‘That settles it.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll have to halt the Deepworks. The risk’s too great, digging this blind to what’s in there.’ As he grimaced, I knew he wasn’t really speaking to me. ‘. . . have to redirect the aqueducts. As of now the entire North District will be drawing up the dregs of its reservoirs. It’s midday.’
I thought about my people. ‘So I’ll go in again.’
‘Don’t be stupid. Won’t have you dropping to your death in that tomb!’
‘But I already went.’
‘No.’ He looked at me and read my face. ‘You did well, Flint. Sealed the arterial, stopped the flood, balanced pressure for the moment. It needed done.’
I swelled a little. ‘So how will you fix it?’
‘By opening the Chamber,’ he said. ‘We can admire the Builders until the ergs drown this fortress in sand, but our trust in their legacies must be tempered. It’s time. Antissa’s needs have now changed.’ A white strand of hair fell loose over his eyes. He was silent for a while, gazing ahead at the green wall as if making mental calculations already, before I dared to interrupt.
‘Where’s Loquar?’
‘Dismissed.’
For the day, I thought he meant, but I was wrong. The next morning, even though this time I’d pushed the bed well out of its range, that pipe didn’t open to splash me awake. It didn’t open again.