I found the strength to grip the lever and seal the torque. The blaze-portal closed and the lightning drew back, making me gasp from the sudden absence of pain.
Plamen’s wide eyes found me. As both the horses bucked and tossed he strode across the sandy crater and helped me up, to my surprise. Then grasped my jaw the way he’d done on our first meeting and looked hard into my face. Raising his eyes about the walls of the crater, said: ‘Well done.’
‘I don’t know what’s happening anymore,’ I confessed, nursing my wrist. A vague look, maybe acceptance, crossed his face while behind him Kobi’s chest heaved up and down in his panic. Who could blame him: without warning a ball of light had just moved him across an unknown space.
But Rath weren’t here.
The crater, wherever it was, wasn’t fully enclosed. On one side a jagged parting carved underneath an arch of the jet. Through it I saw the open sand. I’d already spotted the cave opening on the crater’s opposite side.
We led the horses towards it, carefully under the teeth of its ceiling. Inside, the sandy floor sloped down and made for difficult footwork but the coolness was a relief that I—for once—hadn’t realised I’d needed. Plamen held the lantern out and soon its green beams sharpened the edges of a hole in the cave floor. We crouched there, sand skating away from our feet and out of sight. Before he had a chance to say anything, I made my attempt. Nothing, as expected. No Sight. Not even a tickle on my skin.
‘Very well, we have our eyes.’ As Plamen stood from the edge, I did the same, only to have the lantern pushed into my hands. ‘Rope and hook, servant.’
Still shaken, Kobi went to the gelding’s saddlebags for our grappling hook and coil of rope. As I stood there, shaken myself, dumbly cradling the lantern’s box, Plamen tied a tight knot in its handle. That done, he took it back, returned to the hole’s mouth, found his footing on the edge, shouldered the rope and fed the light through the aperture. The dark oesophagus brightened, immediately narrowing below the crevasse lips so that the metal knocked and batted at the jet.
After ten feet we saw it stop, lean on a ledge and slip from view. Plamen let it slide some distance on before the rope went taut. He pulled it up.
Rope and lantern were shoved at me again as he stepped back from the hole and plucked at the fasteners of his garments. A chill started at my neck and dribbled slowly down my spine. He looked at Kobi. ‘Stay with the horses,’ he told him and I saw dread fill the boy. He would be left here alone. ‘Should the Rath pass the crater, take my horse and leave this place, make your return to the fortress. We will see to our own when we resurface.’
Kobi’s head bobbed; not a nod. He was trembling.
When we resurface? I tried to keep my nerves in check as the Commander unwound his headdress, then folded it ridiculously neatly and slipped it into his saddlebag. He took his crossbow from his back and hitched it onto the saddle. Removed his cape and robes then too. Adjusting his scabbard on his hip, he came back to the black hole and looked down.
I tried to keep my voice level: ‘Commander. We know it’s here, the river.’
‘So you say,’ he replied. ‘So you think. What you know for certain amounts to little. Are you prepared to wager Antissa’s safety on what you think you have seen? If that Disc is playing you false now, what value is your word that it has not done so before?’
Bitterly, I realised, he had a point. A point I pushed aside.
‘Rath will be down there,’ I said. ‘If the Disc can’t protect us, then. . .’
‘Welcome to the armed forces,’ he replied, glib. ‘You’ll find that there are still men and women who will die for their realm. You have seen it yourself. Like any such Vedan I’m prepared to do the same.’
I smarted at that and looked at the floor of the cave. Disdain radiated from him as he snatched the lantern and rope back from me. Were were really going to do this?
My heart lifted for a second as I saw him untying the handle’s knot, but when he caught my eye and most probably the look on my face, said, ‘Light stays with us, can’t climb without it. Rope’s for the hook as we descend.’
He stopped halfway through the knot. The grey pools of eyes were so still on my face, but a fresh focus was in them: ‘You do not like me, do you?’
I swallowed. ‘No.’
He nodded like a Guild foreman checking a routine manifest. ‘Then here is something of which you can be certain, boy: I like you no better. You who dares use this mission to elevate your own newfound worth.’
‘That’s not what I’m doing,’ I retorted, amazed that he could say that. ‘You were the one who wanted me on this mission.’
‘Don’t whinge to me, I never denied your uses. We both have parts to play in this and, if the river is below us, you’ve played yours well.’ He paused to tug twice at the knot. ‘Don’t question mine. If the river is not here then, by your own admission, it may be leagues from this place and our capital stands no more secure from the Rath than when you and your mystic disc first rolled in among Symphin’s tools.’
At the sting of his words, I stammered, ‘You . . . really won’t . . . go back till you see it?’
‘I must see it, boy, if I’m to break the enemy’s advantage. I must understand.’ He shook his head with that quiet amazement at whatever made me not good enough to him. ‘I expected more enthusiasm from you. Or was your family not slaughtered at Ratheine hands?’
‘Don’t!’ I snarled.
At his thin half-smile, I realised just how right he really was: I’d never liked him. He was cruel and he was proud and he didn’t care about my people. Never had, from the start. He only cared about his own.
But that was his way—the Vedish Way. And whatever he was to me, to Vorth he was a defender of a people. He did care for them at least. Hard as it was to imagine more than cold air inside his heart, there would be people Plamen loved. Those he wouldn’t let come to any harm. That, if anything, I could accept and maybe even respect.
‘I think we understand one another,’ he said, watching my face. ‘Servant, the hook.’
As he tied the claw of prongs to the other end of the rope, I took my swathes off and gave them to Kobi. Who watched me re-attach the holster to my waist, so full of fear that I couldn’t bring myself to look at his eyes. I loaded the fusil with a fresh charge of chrozite, a full round of schot. Then made my careful six-point check – pyrites, mainspring, spindle, torsion, breech and chamber – and secured the rest of my ammunition in its capsule on my belt. Eflan’s knife I took as well.
Hook set in place, Plamen collected the rope. ‘Quiet and careful,’ he said. Tested his footing.
‘I think I know that,’ I muttered.
Ignoring my tone, he told Kobi to listen at the edge of the hole for instructions; then looped the lantern’s handle over the hilt of his sword and leaned back on the rope. He started slowly scaling down.
I followed him, the jet stone jagged and hard enough for solid footholds between the whispering showers of sand we pulled over our heads. I glanced one more time at Kobi, part of me hoping he’d take the gelding and just go. But he wouldn’t. If he did that, and we did get back to Antissa alive, he’d only be met with a martial punishment for abandoning his post. A Ratheine spear, I imagined, might be a better way to die.
The narrow funnel was cold, and I could feel it getting colder with almost every foot we dropped.
When we reached the ledge, it formed a pocket where we could stop and stoop and hold the lantern out to see down further. The next ledge was some ten feet deeper down the hole. As we went, the walls shrank tight and snagged my shirt at every pause but I couldn’t move faster with Plamen’s body blocked the light.
Turning sheer, the drop then widened for thirty, forty more feet. Our progress slow.
Sand was heaped high on the second ledge. When Plamen cast out the rope from there, it unravelled without landing. He called up, and Kobi answered, telling him to drop the hook now. I hated the closeness of Plamen’s voice, trapped in this funnel with him, though a moment later the clang of iron took its place. Plamen pulled, very gently, so that it scraped along the stone, gathering rope-length in his hands.
But before the grappling hook could reach us, it snagged on something. He threw the extra yards of rope out, tugged to test the snagged claw’s grip, and then continued.
The length was just barely enough, our line finally ending after thirty more feet of the scale. Our light, which swayed from a clasp on Plamen’s belt, reached to a floor. An indefinite floor. I watched him abseil towards it and, moments later, release his grip, drop and crunch down firmly on his haunches. For me it was too far to drop like that, so as I left the dangling rope-end, he supported my fall and steadied my landing.
Sand from above sprinkled our hair.
The air was freezing! Less than hour ago I’d been burning and now my sinuses stung with cold and gooseflesh rippled on my arms and legs. Plamen’s arms, bare too, were cut and scratched from the jaggy jet-face. He raised the lantern to wash surrounding walls with green. ‘No passage,’ I said.
He hushed me, lighting up the jet at our feet while more sand hissed and trickled down from the crevice overhead.
Falling sand, I thought. But where’d it fallen to? Where’d it all gone?
Plamen moved forward, slightly down into the dip of the funnel floor. There was a deep pockmark there, in the centre.
Another hole.
Like a mouth, it seemed to inhale the freezing air, breathing in the sand cascading from the surface. Had I seen it? In a dream maybe I had: a sand-floor hissing and sagging through a mouth of black rock as if eaten by some deep-dwelling devil of the erg. Not quite the same, but close enough.
Sword and lantern went first. We watched them fall just a short way and land in freshly-drained sand a few feet under the gap. Plamen only just fit through its opening, wriggling his body between the teeth until he could slip through, grip and drop. When I peered down after him, he was crouching in the light. So I threw my sling-bag down to him and manoeuvred my legs into the hole. Then let go. Landing with a thump.
I knelt and patted myself down; sand soft and powdery here, as if sieved. It was a passage, but a passage choked up with sand all the way to the top. Too soft to stand in, it still pressed us too close to the jet ceiling for Plamen’s height and, in the closeness, the triglycerate greened our faces. ‘There must be other ways like this,’ I murmured to him. ‘The wind must fill them up, that’s why we never see them till the Rath—’
‘Shh!’
I tensed up, thinking he’d heard something. But it was silent in here; just the weird, low whistle of moving air through the stone above. He dropped my bag’s sling over my arm, took up his sword and started edging over sand. I followed.
Awkwardly, we scooped away at the blockade; not something I’d ever expected to be doing with the High Commander. It wasn’t easy work and while I wasn’t any stranger to how time could stretch in darkness, it still must have been almost an hour before we could crawl under that ceiling and down again the other side.
It got easier then, the trapped mass gradually receding to lie in the tunnel like a carpet. Underneath, the jet was gone and there it was: the deep greenstone of the Builders. Just as I’d seen it in my mind under Antissa and Shen Drumbar. Now for the first time with my own eyes.
Twitches filled the tunnel. Creatures with papery wings flitted past and around me, slapping my cheeks. I tried to duck from one as it flapped under my chin and dragged a long leg on my lip. ‘Cave crickets, harmless,’ said Plamen from ahead. Content as he seemed to ignore them, I did the same.
Our light glinted on the left and right walls. Just as in my visions and my dreams through the Sight, on either side of the tunnel thin tubes threaded through the stone at halfway height. I moved in closer to stroke the cool, smooth, red-brown metal while another flitting creature fell onto my shirt and began its climb towards my face. I resisted the urge to swat the thing but then the light swung in my eyes. Steel sliced unsheathing but I only saw the pinpricks of his eyes through the glare.
‘What?’ I said.
He didn’t answer. I felt the touch of the blade at my chest and the brief snag as it got under the legs of what was climbing and plucked it. It smacked the wall of the passage. Fists going tight at my sides, I watched a spider—coal-black with legs all longer than my fingers—skitter out of the light.
‘Those are not so harmless,’ warned Plamen before adding, ‘Be alert now. And let there be no more talking.’
I readied the fusil, did a re-check even though I didn’t need to. We moved on, side by side. The swarm of crickets was a nuisance, but as long as they were just crickets I could try and pretend that they weren’t there.
A shape emerged. Plamen was cautious, holding the light on a long arm and taking small steps towards it. But the black eyes that greeted us from the tunnel floor were those of a half-eaten gazelle. ‘Fresh,’ he said, nudging the head with his sword. Belly ripped, spilling guts that still glistened oily grey, maggots were only just arriving on the scene.
Other carcasses waited for us further down the tunnel: two more gazelle, a grey wildcat and at least a dozen yellow lizards scattered about the floor. All were freshly devoured, blood barely dry on the thinning sand.
Without offshoots at any point, the tunnel led perfectly straight and, though the compass-needle spun, we both began to suspect that it was taking us south. Not having anything by which to mark or measure distance, we could have walked more than a mile. Plamen guessed less.
I relived the night in the borderlands, just as I always, as voiced wafted out of darkness; those same croaks and snarls and gibbers I’d heard with Con in the foothills. But these weren’t the sounds of the kind of rabble that had overrun my home or staggered out of the wilderness at Calvallagh. Whatever made that kind of noise, I couldn’t guess at numbers.
Multitude.
Plamen half-blinded the windows of the lantern so that, by the slivers of light that peeped out under the shutters, we could see little more than each other. I measured my own voice against the din of raging Ratheine throats: ‘That’s thousands.’
‘At least five,’ said Plamen—here were the thousands—before setting a finger to his lips and nudging me behind his body. Single-file now we moved on, holding to the tunnel’s left-hand side. The darkness ahead was evil. One more time I tried to open the Sight but the Disc gave me nothing. It had become a dead weight.
The further we went, the more freezing the air got and the wetter the walls, glistening as if with their own icy sweat. The red-brown tubes continued running along both sides. At several junctures wheels appeared. Sub-gauges. But even when Plamen tried, he struggled to loosen their seals. Only one budged against my strength and nothing happened when it did. ‘They’re all part of a system,’ I said, wanting to smile but still too tense and cold and sickeningly aware of all those echoing voices. ‘Like Antissa’s pipeworks. All this is the Builders. We’re close.’
Like a rebuke, a louder guttural echo shot from ahead.
My body seized. ‘That was close too.’
Plamen’s grip tightened on his weapon. Unresponsive to what I’d said about the Builders’ engineering, he simply said, ‘We stay the course.’
Nothing had ever looked like a surer way to kill myself than walking on towards that noise, and yet I walked on behind him. The Ratheine echoes never stopped: sometimes a handful like some bats in a cave ceiling, sometimes hundreds all together like a waterfall or rock-slide. At other times it sounded like they scrapped or fought each other; then I’d almost think I could hear words among the gibbers. As we moved on between the cold, wet Builders’ walls, I kept the fusil in my hand, knowing that beyond our tiny light we were blind. Never sure how close they’d be, yet inching closer all the same. How long would it take them to tear us apart?
Plamen showed no signs of fear and now I wondered if that made him courageous or mad. Not once, I realised, had I ever seen a moment’s fear in this man’s eyes. And suddenly, as a breath of colder air touched the top of my lip, carrying clearer voices, I grabbed his jerkin—‘We should turn back.’
Like a tried parent, he glared. ‘Back?’
‘This is crazy!’ I hissed. ‘Can’t you hear that?’
‘As well as you. But they’re below.’
‘We don’t know that,’ I pleaded. ‘What happens if we die here? No one will even know where to look for our bodies!’
‘The Rath are below!’ he whisper-shouted, flinging my hand off from his side. ‘Listen.’ I did. ‘The echoes are funnelling up from levels further down than this. That sound isn’t coming from this level.’
‘How can you know that? You’ve never even—’
I cut my urgent whisper, glancing past him to the edge of our light. What was that?
Plamen followed my shift of focus before I said anything, his own eyes searching the gloom ahead. ‘What do you see?’
‘Another light,’ I said, pointing. There was.
‘Can’t be.’
Its glint repeated: a sheen through darkness, almost nothing. ‘There.’
‘Could be a turning,’ he said, ‘our light reflecting on those tubes along the walls.’
He dared to raise the lantern-shutters, widening the beams. When he moved on it was with caution but also enough steadiness to suggest he was more certain about the source of the echoes than I’d thought. I walked behind again and felt the chill turn bitter. The tunnel widened. Strong on my face, the echoes bickered on its breath.
The light-sheen bloomed. The darkness opened to a vaulted space of the greenstone and I saw that Plamen’s guess was right. It was reflection on those tubes, but these tubes weren’t attached to walls.
Here our passage became a stone bridge that lanced out across a chasm; empty but for the hellish updraught of voices. Three other bridges just like it lanced from the other sides. But what we were staring at was what we saw right in the middle. A structure like nothing I’d ever seen. Plamen took another step towards it. ‘What in . . . ?’
A sphere hovered at the eye of the four bridges; not a solid metal mass but a hollow framework of rings formed by those tubes. A collar of spokes splayed from the midpoint of the frame to suspend it from a web of cables. I counted eight suspending spokes, almost like arms, the farthest half of each becoming a kind of blade that gripped the cables with a claw. Inside was a core-unit of levers, gears and gauges. More tubes branched out, down, from that core, like the hiked-up legs of a startled spider. With cylindrical pistons for feet.
Tarnished but whole, the metal’s russet-brown shone weakly through an ancient scabrous skin of patina. It seemed to float there like a god – a fierce but sleeping god – though now I saw the single cluster of lines that ran down through its vertical axis.
Vivid images from dreams surged through my mind, followed instantly by the memory of that graphite-on-parchment diagram. I didn’t realise that I’d spoken until Plamen looked at me; half a glance, attention still mainly on the thing. He took a step back from the chasm. ‘A machine for what purpose?’ he said over the Ratheine echoes.
‘Deeping,’ I said. At the quizzical frown he gave me, I suddenly felt like a man. I’d known what the thing was the second our light had touched those rings. ‘It’s our way down, Commander. Up too, I think.’ I pointed to the darkness of the ceiling; he raised the lantern. That revealed the open mouth from which the sphere’s line descended. No doubt the way back to the surface. Then I stepped forward and looked down, between the cables, into the chasm: the way to our river.
‘How do you know this?’ said Plamen, voice hard and suspicious. ‘I have never seen such craft conceived by our guilds. Was it the Disc that showed it you?’
I met his eyes, wondering how much he deserved. He was not, after all, Rusper Symphin. So I just nodded. The Sight had showed me this machine. But I’d seen it somewhere else too, on parchments almost cast aside by the Guild. This was the machine of the Builders of Antissa that Meck had been trying to decipher in his diagrams. Somehow he’d known . . .
As if to reclaim some control of the situation, Plamen lowered the shutters of the lantern again and walked onto the bridge. Ignoring the wild echoes, I followed and stood behind him at the end where he crouched and put a hand towards a claw. As his finger stroked the metal there I heard the rasp of his nail. ‘It’s old,’ he said before peering distrustfully at and through the sphere’s rings. ‘Look at the rust, it’s thick on those guiderails. And you propose to descend in this machine?’
When he looked over his shoulder, I simply nodded again. ‘There’s no other way down.’
Of course there wasn’t; there wouldn’t be. And of course it was old—at least five hundred years. Yet suddenly, in the presence of the craft of the Builders, I felt safer than I had at any moment with the Commander’s sword at my side. We’d come this far. So I slid my fusil through its holster and overtook him on the bridge.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
‘What are you doing?’ he said.
‘Completing our mission.’
Only the sphere mattered now. But the only way to get into its frame was across the arms. As clearer echoes swept up, I put a foot out from the end of the bridge to test my weight on the claw. Rust crisped under my sandal but the claw’s grip on the cable was firm: if it gave at all, it was by an inch. I hopped forward onto the arm-blade before I was properly ready and hotfooted down the metal, over a hinge, to the frame. Rust scored my hands as I fell against the tubes and, above the echoes, Plamen scowled.
I swung myself into the sphere, crossed over the spider-legs and mounted the core; pulled myself up to the controls. A slew of levers, pedals, plugs and wheels surrounded me at waist level, protruding from its column – and from the vertical and lateral tubes that crossed ways. All were thickly rusted, the vice-like crest of the column a curdled mess. So was its counterpart below where another three under-tubes of steel-like alloy met the base, all speckled dirty-brown.
I looked out through the sphere’s rings, across its circle of arms, and felt a giddy rush of power—if only Rusper could see this! A blade was missing, I saw, and two had turned completely black, but what did it matter? I picked a dark flake from the tube over my head; caught Plamen’s eye. Shrugged: ‘Rust means water.’
He boarded. Struggling at first to find his balance on the blade as I had done – not only bigger than me, he carried the lantern – he too was able to quickstep along the arm and reach the frame. The lantern clanged against the tubes, the added weight of his body making the sphere quiver slightly and softly groan as if it muttered in its sleep. He climbed to meet me at the core, again lowering the light. ‘Not too low,’ I said, ‘I still need to see all this stuff.’
The core’s platform far too small for both of us to stand on, he stayed below it with his feet on the spider-legs and one hand on a lateral conduit. ‘And I suppose your Disc has told you how to initiate descent?’
Secretly I was wondering how to even begin, but his scoff had lacked its usual venom.
‘Maybe.’
Three wheels; they looked like gauges. A stop-plug with a sort of twisting rod attached. Some kind of gear-switch, positioned at an upward right-angle. At my feet, a pedal. Two levers, left and right, both pointing upward from the conduit that aligned laterally with the arms . . . I went for the left one, closed my hand around it. Cool and rough.
But no, the blades would still hold. They’d have to, wouldn’t they?
I looked at the three gauge-wheels again, then peered down over the edge to the base of the sphere. Three vertical conduits . . . three rising lines, fused to the frame.
Segmented lines.
I set my hand to the grip of a gauge-wheel and turned. It clunked a mere grudging quarter of its rotation and stopped. Nothing happened.
I clunked it back.
‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’
‘I only said that I’d seen it!’ I snapped back. Grabbing the rod of the stop-plug, I twisted, pulled, then pushed but still nothing happened. ‘That’s stuck too, everything’s stuck!’
Plamen reached in. He brushed my hand aside and twisted it himself, pulling sharply towards his chest.
The whole sphere lurched, crunching down about a foot so fast and stopping so hard he nearly slipped off the spider-legs. I clung to the core-unit as screeches ricocheted from the chasm. Then I glanced down at the lines—they shone more silvery now where hunks of brown had cracked off.
Contracting segments!
But the game was up. Below, the hands and feet were pattering up from darkness. That’s what our one-foot drop had cost us.
‘Get it moving,’ Plamen growled close at my ear.
I gaped at the controls, pulse rising—none of this was right!—then grabbed the right-hand lever, heaved and rattled hard. Twisted its handle, felt it resist. ‘The other one!’ I shouted at Plamen above the heightening chorus of hands and voices. ‘The handle, turn it—ahh, clockwise!’
He gripped and turned it; mine gave way to snaps of metal from the arms.
The claws flipped open, breaking rust.
‘Now pull!’ I yelled.
We pulled together, which smacked both levers flush against the conduit. The blades surrounding us released their hold on the cables, achingly drawn back through arms.
Frame jolting angrily again, the central vice grated and choked against the line.
Squeezing the grips, I saw it: one of the two rust-blackened blades was still stuck fast, tarred into place by rust and unable to retract. Old metal squealed—I felt the tension in my bones—and then it snapped.
A rush of air, a shout from Plamen and then black.
We hurtled down.
I kept my grip glued to the core, feeling my breath sucked out of me and my stomach left behind up there. Opening my eyes didn’t help me know how fast we were falling, only the shuddering of the frame, force of the air in my ears, my jelly legs, struggle to breathe—trapped on the inhale, I couldn’t breathe out! The lantern’s light—still with me!—touched nothing around our fall.
At least for a few seconds; then it touched the teeming mass. More docking crosses of bridges and cables swept into light, alive with movements and noise of countless Rath. Then gone again.
More rushing darkness.
Level by level, we bypassed more docking crosses, every one crawling with Rath, but much too fast for them to touch us.
Then we slammed. My knees gave way.
Voices flared all around us but those below were really close. In mid-darkness we’d hit more rust on the central line: fat metallic barnacles I could see by our light and knew couldn’t pass through the eye of the core. ‘We’ll have to widen the vice or we’ll never get lower,’ I said at the controls.
‘Can you?’ said Plamen, breathless.
‘I’m trying.’ I started at the sound of a croak—way too close!—then grabbed the right-angled switch at the top of the core-unit and yanked. It fought me. ‘Jammed too!’
‘Move,’ Plamen ordered and climbed beside me to add his strength. I cringed for the workings as the lever crackled back, the vice’s jaws starting to part.
He jolted down as we dropped, passing some rust, then slam-stopped again. The force of it sucked me down on the core and threw Plamen against the frame’s base, nearly losing the lantern.
White hands shot in, closed on his boot, pinned it to the metal. He wrested and kicked as a chalky mouth gnashed at his hip and I screamed. The claws found flesh and tore. Plamen seethed through nostrils.
A second flew from darkness and slapped onto the tubes, sending me darting round the core. Below, I could see now, the chasm had opened again, our stop leaving us right above the bridges of another docking cross. An easy jump for Rath.
More hands grabbed Plamen’s shoulders. His leg was pulled out of the sphere to the knee, while a fourth and fifth leapt to the frame. Albino spiders with black-glass eyes, their globular skulls bobbing, jaws gnashing, flecking spit. Knife in his hand, Plamen floundered forward from the pull on his leg and plunged it down, but the blade glanced off Ratheine teeth.
Rage fired my blood. I drew Eflan’s knife and was on those tubes before I’d thought about balance.
‘No! You get it moving!’ choked Plamen. The white embrace took his throat.
But there was no use in trying—the knots of rust were just too big and too far under the sphere.
Plamen hung on the white arm, the creature’s wrinkled face basked triglycerate green. I grabbed a lower tube and swung, one stark blue tattoo almost smiling like a target as I lunged. Bone crunched, flesh sucked at the knife’s steel; I could’ve retched. The inky mouth slacked, arm slipped, the body’s weight slid the head clear. Plamen tore free, drawing his sword and bounding back towards the core, pulling me with.
We manned the core now, back to back round the jammed central line. I heard my own giddy shout: ‘I got one! Killed one!’
‘One’s not enough!’
They were all over the frame, swinging and capering from its tubes and shaking them as if to break the sphere clean off the line that held it. Five, six, seven, more leaping up. None were armed—no thorny half-spears—and yet their own arms looked somehow larger, longer, as if stretched by the darkness. I sheathed the knife and pulled the fusil. Took aim and fired.
Clap—clap—clap: three shots that hit none of their vitals, but each blasted a body. The crazy thrill of killing them, of needing it, surged through me and I aimed the fourth shot badly. The schot-stone whistled past the head of my target. As it did the creature lunged between the tubes, clawed for my face. Plamen grabbed my other wrist and pulled me in with the force of a piston, my head to his chest. And as the Rath swung in—right into the sphere!—his sword slashed across its belly and sent it flapping through the tubes. Back to the black.
I fired on two more, blasted one and grazed the other at the shoulder. Three more leapt and met the frame, another two right behind me by the sound of the hands.
‘I’m nearly out!’ I shouted, hoping he knew what I meant.
He he spun around to face the core. Sword high, he wedged the tip of its blade into the vice. ‘Stand clear,’ he warned.
I backed out, straight into the grip of a Rath hand.
‘Not that clear!’
But I’d already pointed the fusil over my shoulder and felt its barrel find the mouth.
Trigger. Clap.
The hand left my arm as blood sprayed onto my neck.
Plamen clenched his jaw and forced his strength against the vice. A big chunk splintered, causing another sharp lurch of the sphere and slam again. The movement swung me while he arced his blade and struck a blow that burst the strangled vice in an explosion of rust.
Like gorge the line spewed up rust-knots, sphere plunging down with such a rush it cleared the Rath from its sides. Freed, we fell between the four stone bridges and I gasped at the swarm of white bodies over them. Then that docking cross was gone.
So was the vice.
We dropped like lead, the lines alone preventing the frame from spinning away like a tossed ball and hitting the walls of the chasm. I clung onto the core-grip, the plunge too fast for me to stand while, in Plamen’s lap, the lantern rattled. He winced and swallowed as blood pooled in the creases of his boot.
I watched for any rising bridges, swarming landings, with both my hands on the controls, ready to splay the blades and arrest the fall; even if halting from this speed broke all our bones. The seconds passed as darkness rushed, but no more landings passed us by. All the levels above us now, it seemed, we simply fell through nothing. Nothingness sucking us down.
I holstered the fusil as we fell, touched a finger to the torque. No answer there, my ghost as silent as before.
Faster and deeper we fell, no way of knowing how far. Five hundred feet or a thousand, five thousand? Moments meant nothing at all and, out of nowhere in the cold, I thought of Fallstone’s story—the broken city that had fallen from the sky long, long ago.
When the dark air opened up again, it felt as if the desert’s throat had yawned. Plamen held tighter, sucking breath between his teeth, clearly in pain. It got colder!
And I could see . . . see something. Far below us, thin threads of light, like glowing eels, squiggling one way. And rising.
Too fast!
By the time I knew to grip the core with my whole body, all I could do was jam my eyes shut and hope. The impact tore me from the bar, ending the rush of moving air with a jolt I thought would crack my teeth. It flung me, slamming my arms and ribs against the tubes. An icy blackness raged over my eyes, around my skin, while my ears filled up with a kind of roaring nothing. I flailed in it, hearing muffled moans of metal and my own distant yell. All senses gone except the tightening of my lungs.
I saw my hand around a tube of the sphere-frame, by light that pushed between my fingers. Golden light that now bloomed on all sides.
The sphere surged up. It couldn’t have been longer than five seconds but as the frame broke the surface we both gasped for air. I seized the nearest tube in both hands; glimpsed Plamen’s face for a moment as, with a battering splash, we sank again, pulled down by force. Ice cold and deafening. And again we came up, glowing brighter.
A word exploded in my mind – the whole frame glowing gold through rust. But despite the strength of the current, the core held the sphere to the central line, allowing the frame to rise and fall in position.
Plamen had vanished. As I found my bag’s sling, pulled it out and held it high, I tried to look down through the water. His body’s shadow crossed the glow of under-tubes and he came up seconds later with his sword, but no lantern. Not that it mattered. The triglycerate would have died at the moment of contact. Parts of me were numb already!
He hooked himself above the current on the opposite side and slid his sword into its scabbard. Flicking the moisture from hair and face, he scanned the sphere gleaming between us and met my eyes. As the water ran off them, the upper tubes were already dimming again to russet-brown, leaving only the submerged half fully alight. Of course—they’re hollow! Hollow enough, anyway, to keep the metal afloat. ‘It’s aqualumium!’ I shouted above the rush. ‘Water-metal!’
He nodded shortly and shouted back: ‘And water. A river!’
I looked around our cradle of light: across as much as I could see of the coursing water, then up into the endless black of what we’d come from. ‘How far down are we?’
‘A mile at least, probably more. We’ll have to swim if we’re to find the river’s outlet,’ he said. ‘It’s a strong current. Swim hard.’
With a wince at his leg, he hung off the outer tubes. It was impossible to tell the full depth of the moving water; even with that glow of aqualumium piercing the dark under my legs, below that glow was still more dark. For good measure I detached the chrozite capsule from my belt and gripped it in my teeth before looping the sling-bag around my chest.
Plamen launched into the current and I sloshed out behind him, dragging at the water with both arms and kicking fast. Though it was strong I could resist it so long as I kept moving.
I didn’t have to for long. Barely twenty feet out into the rush, Plamen stood with the water to his waist. He watched me find my own feet on what had become a level surface, though it still reached up to my shoulders when my sandals snagged the grooves of what felt like flagstones. He took my wrist to keep me steady.
Wading further away from the glow of the sphere, steps rose from the floor and brought the water to my knees. Plamen let me go and plashed ahead into the dark. I stopped, plucked the capsule from my mouth and then looked back.
The sphere was a floating golden basket on the black and, for a while, I just stood there, dripping water, shin-deep, racked by shivers. This was almost too much to take in all at once. The levels through which we’d passed to get down here were so like those of the Deep, but they were ancient. As if the city had somehow, without knowing, mimicked what had been built here. Rusper had barely believed me when I’d told him of my dream; that below the fortress itself the Builders had left a far greater domain. Now I’d have to tell him that the whole northern desert crawled with roads of the same greenstone.
My headcloth dribbled more water in my eyes so I pulled it off and squeezed it out.
‘There’s something here you should see,’ came Plamen’s voice above the coursing water.
I wrapped the damp rag back around my head, then dragged my shins through the shallow current. A second set of flagged steps brought me out onto a platform. Dry stone. There Plamen stood with his hand on a promontory of metal we now both knew at first sight. It was furnished with a gauge-wheel identical to those of the Antissan pipeworks. It was too dark to see his eyes, but I could tell from his laboured breath where his face was. I just said, ‘Turn it.’
There came the grate and squeal of threads—such ancient threads—and the grumble of inner workings. The stone beneath us started trembling as the gauge gave up its seal and water surged through channels untouched, I guessed, for five hundred years or longer. I almost gasped at what it did.
A clean gold light stabbed the heart of the wheel and splayed out to its circumference like an opening flower. That liquid light slid down the gauge’s promontory to the floor. Tubes glowed at our feet and ran the platform’s length and breadth, their glow meeting branching tubes as it travelled. These lit the bridge we were standing on, but I already knew what I’d see as the glow ran on and on from it, scaling those steps towards a landing. A circular landing. Plamen turned and watched the golden luminescence reach beyond and spread fan-like, around the enormous, brown-iron circle of that door. Door to the rest of the Roads.
Not even the Commander’s martial discipline could keep the awe out of his face. He shot me a glance of disbelief while the branches of light multiplied and spread to gild the wide walls all around us. The chamber was as I’d seen in my dream; just as the ghost had revealed.
There was only one difference. As the growing light shone on the rushing water, I could soon clearly make out the original boundaries, now some four feet underwater. Sparing the bridge, steps and high landing at the circular door, the river’s chamber was awash. The direction of the current was plain to see, flowing in through a greenstone arch, left of the bridge, half-submerged. Through another arch on its right, it flowed away.
‘You’ve seen all this?’ said Plamen.
‘Yes,’ I answered him. ‘But in my dream it wasn’t flooded. The river hadn’t broken those boundaries.’
Had the Disc lied, then? I half-expected Plamen to make the accusation himself, but he didn’t.
And then it hit me. If this river was connected to Antissa’s aquifer, then there’d probably been a backwash when we’d sealed Arterial-III. Causing a flood in this place. I tried to say as much to Plamen, but he only stared at the round door.
Then he narrowed his eyes at the little statues that flanked our bridge. I looked at them too, realising that they’d not been in the dream either. Three to a side, they were sculpted in the images of children. Gnarled, disfigured children like the ones inside that erg-drowned ruin. All had huge eyes, loped foreheads, noses flattened like pig snouts and hands much bigger than their heads. They should be funny but they weren’t; they made me shudder.
Another detail missing from my dream was the man who lay on the other side of the bridge, below its steps. We approached him slowly. His naked flesh was muddy grey without rupture, though it had started coming away from his bones in wads and lumps. One leg was hanging in the water, foot bobbing in the current as if alive. When I saw the drawn-back lips, blackened eye-sockets and fluids seeping out of the nostrils, I looked away. ‘Is it him?’
‘Kathris, yes,’ Plamen exhaled. He leaned over the steps to lift the chin of the vortan soldier. Dead for probably more than a fortnight, there were no eyelids to close. So the Commander touched the forehead with the palm of his hand, a strangely gentle gesture. Then stood back. ‘Strangled,’ he said. ‘The creature that took his garments from him would have wanted them intact, to pass the gates of the fortress.’
‘That creature was human, remember?’ I said.
‘Not to me.’
Swallowing disgust, I looked down at the corpse on the step. Thought of the phantom that had entered Antissa in his place and made short work of all those watchmen and guards on the northwest wall. Had it not been for Rusper and the fusil, it would have killed me too. It. We’d stripped that body down to bare skin, naked as Kathris lay now, only to find something neither Ratheine nor Vedish underneath. The remains had been human and yet, unlike any soldier, the body had been gaunt, flesh pocked all over with strange warts, and ashen grey. I remembered the hair, long and dark when unbound from the mask melted to its face.
And now I saw them in my mind. I’d dreamed them over and over again until the ghost had gone silent. The tall, lean men and women who stood on hilltops and deep in wooded vales; who looked out and spoke to hordes of listening Rath. Eyes of poisonous green, wild and billowing hair. That language like mud, spoken together, repeating words in a chant. The words were vague now in my memory, as if tattered by the wind, but that didn’t really matter. The dream, I knew, wasn’t the only place I’d heard them. I’d heard them that same day on the wall, from the lips of that phantom.
Nemae il veru . . . I felt my lips mouthing . . . deh gossa kerak. That was it.
‘That’s what?’ said Plamen.
‘Leaders.’ Thoughts turned to words without permission. Was I sure? ‘Human leaders. He was one. The last one maybe.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’ve seen the ones who led the Rath. There were more of them before. But the one who killed Kathris so he could get into the city was the last.’ I found his eyes, my certainty rising. ‘Don’t you see? The Rath got into the pipes through the river, from here, because leaders sent them from here.’
‘How can you make such a claim?’ he snarled back, clearly angered that I would dare to speak my “guesses” aloud. But I wasn’t making guesses. And this he had to know now. I couldn’t keep it secret anymore.
‘Someone is trying to tell me something, or remind me of something. It’s been happening since the Disc first gave me the Sight, back in Antissa. There’s a voice, a kind of ghost, that shows me things, visions, and talks to me like he knows me. I think it’s why the light protects me. Whatever’s in the Disc thinks it knows who I am. Except it’s wrong—I’m not who it thinks!’
‘And who might that be? Who is it this ghost has mistaken you for?’
I stared at him, thinking hard. Back in the crater outside the cave, the ghost had called me another name but now I couldn’t remember it. Couldn’t bring it back. It was like the word had been stolen right out of my mind.
Insult hardened Plamen’s face now, peril in the softness of his voice: ‘You were there when we stripped that body. You saw it. A withered thing. Rotten, diseased. You would have me believe it led the Ratheine hordes against the fortress? All because a ghost has told you so?’
‘It killed ten guards when it attacked the wall, you know that,’ I retorted and flung an arm out towards the body. ‘And Artabh Kathris! Whatever those people really were, they had some kind of power. Enough to control the Rath somehow.’
‘Control them?’
‘Yes. They . . . changed them.’
‘Ah. More magic.’
‘More like a . . . a curse.’
‘Enough!’ he shouted, shoving me aside. He limped across the stone at the foot of the steps.
I breathed out hotly, only now aware of the first screeches flowing down. ‘They’re coming,’ I said.
But he didn’t answer. Compass in hand, he faced the arch through which the water was being channelled out of the chamber. I knew the needle would be spinning but also knew that when it stopped it would point south. To Antissa.
Above, the echoes got louder. How many, I wondered?
When Plamen looked at me again, the anger had cleared and in its place sat a flat satisfaction. It was just as I’d told him and he’d found his river. Once again he glanced up at the big round door.
‘Sealed,’ I said before he asked. ‘More tunnels the other side, roads left by the Builders. Verunia. Antissa. Even Calvallagh maybe. They’re all connected through the Roads, it’s how the Rath keep on coming out of nowhere at us.’ At the sharpening scowls I looked towards the nothingness ceiling. ‘We have to leave now, Plamen.’
He snapped the compass shut and, for the first time probably ever, looked like he fully agreed with me. Knowing what I had to do already, I jogged back up the bridge’s steps, between the stone grotesques and down again the other side. Splashing out into the ankle-deep current, I didn’t wait. As soon as the floor dropped under me, I clapped the chrozite capsule in my teeth and swept out towards the sphere. Plamen swept out not far behind.
Distance widened between us, his leg worse than I’d thought. And yet he followed as if trusting. He couldn’t know, as I did, that even with the vice of the central line destroyed and gone, with these waterways now open the sphere had become an active machine. I swam hard, ignoring the screams from above, hauled myself up between the arms and back aboard.
The upper half of the aqualumium frame was still dimmed to its rusty brown, while the lower gleamed just like the chamber on all sides. Plamen swam towards me, yards away. I should have waited but I didn’t: closed my fist round the gauge-wheel’s bar and pushed.
Chugging forward, I felt the surge of that pressure—water pressing through hollow tubes, fed by the system we’d opened. The golden light climbed once again, filling the top of the frame.
And then the sphere began to sink.
No . . . no!
As Plamen shouted something at me, my panic threw me and the core was underwater before I could think how to stop it. The river lapped at my neck. The chrozite capsule popped out of my mouth and disappeared. I’d been so sure the frame would rise—why would it sink? The upper tubes closed over me. On instinct I grabbed them as they pushed me down, blazing bright gold in my eyes. Whatever Plamen was shouting, I couldn’t catch it. The voice inside my own head was louder than him anyway: retracting lines!
Gulping air, I ducked under.
Half-blinded by its glare, I swam down inside the sphere-frame as it kept sinking; there gripped the core and found the gauges, pushed at second and third. I felt the surge increase below. The sinking slowed and, when I shoved all three gauges one more degree, stopped altogether.
My lungs strained.
I wrapped my arms and legs round the core, sensing the force of the pressure taking over, growing strong enough to counteract the weight of the sphere’s metal. It started lifting, dividing water above it, faster, faster. I pressed my head down but my eyes were still open when – in a burst of golden light – it broke the surface.
Plamen swung from the tubes through the shower.
‘Hold on!’ I yelled as we launched out of the river, gleaming bright and gaining speed.