The Satrap’s tower: I was back. Through the glow of lamps around the bed, something was flailing. The frame rocked side-to-side, its curtains swaying, while physicians in purple gowns crowded around it, pelted with pillows. A foot struck one of the bedposts and split the wood. Hands forced it down. A purple-gown dropped a spoonful of powder into a cup and brought it to the bedside, but another stroke from the foot sent it flying. Somehow the spoon found its way into the hand of the patient, and from there into the purple-gown’s eye.

I fled to the stairs. Hearing a whisper.

The citadel. A door was standing half-open and, through the open gap, I saw two men standing in a room. Dressed in the blue robe and tallith of the First Circle was Vizier Vesh. He spoke in a passion, waving his hands, while Captain Mondric heard him out; arms folded, nodding sagely.

The whisper called me from the room.

There, coiled in a chair so large it made even the tall man look short, was High Commander Plamen; without his headdress and his mantle, plainly clothed. A small iron coal-fire near his feet outlined the shape of Tazen, who dozed there stretched across a rug.

I saw the courtyard, as though I sat between the stone gryphon’s wings. In some dark corner, the dwarf crouched and stroked the horrid little sandrat that he called Heironymus. A fly swooped close to Hetch’s cowl and he snatched it out of the air, feeding it directly between the fangs of the rodent.

Men and women, hands and servants, dragged weary feet toward their homes, watched by the guards who stood on duty. Lights shone above the flagstones, from little dwellings in the courtyard wall; above those lights, the high estates.

Following the whisper, I flew up there.

Through the first set of curtains the caliphs of Verunia and Laudassa were dining late. Arif spoke down into his plate while Omran stuffed his mouth with persimmon fruit.

Through the next, the viziers Dranz and Ramed were drinking out of huge cups of wine. Both drunk and bored, they teased and mocked one of their servants from the table.

Through the third was Vizier Basra, lying asleep beside his wife.

My way went blurry. Whisper, faint.

Then there was Rusper at the window of his quarters. Sweat stuck his nightshirt to his chest, hair hung over his eyes, and his lips were moving—but I couldn’t hear. With a stagger, he turned his back to the stars and faced the lamplight. It flickered near his pallet and put a sheen on smooth black skin. A bare-breasted woman lay in his blankets, listening. Braids hung loose about her shoulders and her throat was enclosed in a thin band of green gems. Harem-senah.

As Rusper pressed palms to his temples, the woman’s lips moved too, and she rose. Rusper looked up, towards her, his face contorted as if searching but unable to find her. Stepping away from the window, he stumbled and, falling, didn’t try to stand up.

She was young, but her movements seemed older. She crossed the room on naked feet while Rusper stayed kneeling on the floor, eyes closed, lips murmuring something. When she had shuttered the window, she came to kneel and put her arms around his shoulders like a veil. She spoke slow words into his ear. She touched his cheek, lifted his face. Then smiled and kissed his mouth to stop him saying more. The kiss, it seemed, took some of the anguish from his face, but he still trembled.

From her braids, she took something then. Some kind of green trinket or jewel. A dragonfly. Her nimble fingers twisted away its wings-and-head to reveal a capsule, and only when she raised it to her cheek did I see that she too had been crying. A tear ran down her rich, dark skin and slid into the capsule, before she reached for Rusper’s hand and placed the jewel into his palm.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

The whisper called me from their door.

Along the corridors, down stairs, through the long grey hall, and further down.

Into the Deep.

There were the smithies at their forges, working late into the night, melting metal.

There in the overseers’ rooms, Pintle and Gudgeon cut their pens, taking their coffee, while a girl swept the floor of the day’s dust. I knew that apprentice. Taflan. Sometimes we’d run our errands together.

There was the Chief Engineer’s workshop. Another boy lay sleeping on his arms at his workstation, one arm stretched forward of his head across the worktop. Blue light was shining through his fingers.

There was the Hub. From what was left of the cantilever bridges, the standing soldiers stared down at the water. Among ripped nets and swaying feeders, Arterial-III was just a shadow. I slipped in through an open lateral and followed the whisper on, and down.

But it was thinning. As it called me, on and down, and down, and down, I felt my waking self. I felt my power over the dream and just how easily I could rise. An open hand that holds a moth and can so easily kill it. Down, down and down . . .

. . . down to green stone and a green tunnel . . . I reached for my quilt . . . don’t lose the tunnel . . . quilt wasn’t there . . . don’t lose the tunnel . . . felt something firm under my hand. My jaw was numb on a hard surface . . . don’t lose the tunnel. But I wasn’t in a tunnel.

My eyelids parted. Just by enough to see my arm across the worktop. The torque was open, and three of my fingers lay resting over the mirror of the Disc. It glowed blue. And as I hazily tried to remember what it was I’d been doing before falling asleep, the sleep pulled me under again. My eyelids drooped . . . it’s not a dream, I was still there . . . still somewhere down there . . .

Close and perfectly square, the green tunnel flowed on ahead of my sight. I chased the whisper as it grew into a voice, not far ahead. Above, the ancient green stone sank even lower. Walls pressing tight. And soon the way became too low for any man or boy to pass it. Smaller it shrank until I could barely even crawl through anymore.

I didn’t have to. Here, I had no size, no body; I was the sight of my awareness, and if I moved at all, I floated.

But was there someone with a body up ahead, standing in the tunnel? Was it the ghost? It vanished then, voice fading with it.

Beyond the tunnel’s shrinking square, I moved through cells and cube-like chambers. They were like nothing I had seen; branched left and right and up and down without a way of reaching them . . . distorted walls and angled ledges, fathomless floors, levels and portals that just went on and on and on in all directions. Until the walls began to morph into machines of stone and metal.

A branch of tunnel sucked me in.

It took me down a long, long way into a hollow of the stone: a kind of bubble in the maze. Here, four stone bridges reached inward towards the core of the bubble. And in the core, a golden globe of rings and wheels hung in mid-air. A loop of blades and web of cables seemed to hold it, hanging there, while through its eye a skein of tubes ran up and down, leaving the bubble.

Even though the voice had now gone silent, I floated up through the bubble’s ceiling and let the tubes guide me higher. Up, up and up . . . between the bridges and the cables and the pillars . . . four massive pillars in the granite, also rising as I was. Or were they pillars? In their bodies, I knew movement.

Something was higher overhead, growing as I flew towards it, faster. Was it a wheel, a set of gears? Its liquid arcs almost converged around the tubes . . . a shape I knew . . . a shape I’d seen . . . a shape that turned—

And something poked me in the shoulder. I sat bolt-upright in the chair and broke the Sight. For several out-of-body moments I sat there blinking, half-awake, before I saw that Zeek was there. She stood right next to my workbench, wide-eyed and staring at my face. But then she always stared like that. She must have come to douse the lights.

I couldn’t focus on her now, or anything else in front of me. Those tunnels, chambers and machines: they were all real. They were real things, and all still vivid. It was the strangest thing to feel, but I could still see every part of that great maze that sprawled below as if a map of it had burned onto my brain. I’d known on sight that golden globe of rings and blades; that looping circle turning weirdly overhead—because I’d seen them both before. In Gaspar Meck’s diagrams.

I reached for pen and parchment. ‘Builders.’