I stood with Naemians, eighty of them, maybe the last in the whole world. Those who had families left to hold now hugged them close. Fear thickened voices of those trying to comfort others, hush or muffle sobbing children. There, the shelter where they’d lived for nearly four months was burning, throwing sparks into the night. The sight took some of their eyes off me but I could still hear their murmurs: ‘It is him . . . had darker hair . . . had more hair . . . they done to him?’

Garth closed the gate of the district and we were moving again. Our six-guard escort kept us close, a bleak procession of the damned which drew more eyes from nearby dwellings; silhouettes in yellow squares of open doors and window-ways. ‘Borderlanders.. . taken by the guard . . . arrested . . .’

Ahead was the Ilovish Harem-house; from there the streets climbed. Past the water-tower of the Citizen District, we crossed the space among the fronts of wealthy houses and on through narrower roads. Above the roofs, the Inner Wall rose in its half-circle that elevated the citadel gardens. Step into the gardens. Here the street-lanterns were fewer; a relief. A crisp wind out of the desert brushed my neck, snaked up my crown and down bare forearms where Zeek’s sleeves didn’t reach.

Nymph-like as before, Javairea shaped out of the shadows at a well. Hair bound, mouth covered. ‘Have the Naemians hold back,’ she murmured to me and the sheriff. ‘One Shieldman walks the garden edge.’

Garth jogged back; gave a signal. I looked up to find the breaks in the hedge-growths I knew were there, but first Javairea grabbed my shoulder and pulled me close against the well. I heard the shuffle of eighty homeless, frightened people as the guards ushered them back under the eaves of lower buildings. At least no children were crying. ‘They’ll not be seen from the wall,’ said Garth as soon as he came back. ‘But we can’t linger. Can’t know who’s watching.’

Javairea’s answering nod was firm. ‘Wait for the Shieldman to pass that break in the hedge,’ she pointed up. ‘Then have them move swiftly ahead, there will be just enough time. Florian, with me.’

Not daring any upward glances, I tailed the nymph as she led me on and through an undercutting arch. We came to the door of a house set low, the topmost tiles of its slanted roof pressed to the bulwark of the garden steps. Windows were boarded but the bar had been raised from the front door, its lock removed. I saw a small light inside. ‘What is this place?’ I whispered.

‘Abandoned workshop, and home,’ she said, ‘of the former Chief Engineer.’

‘Meck?’

‘Yes, Meck.’ We stepped inside. ‘Never been used since his time but remains property of the Guild.’ From a table crowded round with shadows of machines, she took the lantern and passed it to me. ‘Your entrance is here. Find it, Florian. I will get them through the door.’

I gaped. ‘You don’t know where exactly?’

‘The mathematician was sure you would.’ She was calm—way too calm—as she hurried back to the open door, stood, watched and waited. I heard a cat meow outside, then my people moving, feet whispering closer.

I cast the weak light on the room. Old-fashioned, oversized machines filled up the dusty interior, floor to ceiling, through the rafters. They’d known each other, Meck and Azal, all those decades ago. Of course they had. And worked together too. How else had Meck come to own a piece of his famous Theorem? Somehow Azal knew ancient secrets, even then, about the city. But what use were riddles now?

Back at the door, Garth spoke urgently: ‘That’s almost all of them through and clear but we’ve been seen by other eyes.’

‘Eyes from where?’ hissed Javairea.

‘Lower square.’

I heard her curse. ‘It’ll be a follower who tailed me from Ilovish.’

My people started moving in, while I searched the far side of the room. I’d only seen half of his riddle. Azal hadn’t simply meant for me to meet Javairea here, at the foot of the garden steps; he’d wanted me to step inside those gardens.

All the clutter had taken on the same red rust of the decades, but I crept and squeezed between contraptions until I reached the southeast wall: the wall that surely backed the gardens. Workshop crowding fast behind me, I slid my hand behind the cupboard there and splinters spiked my fingers. Not from the cupboard but the planks set in the wall.

Front door now shut, my peoples’ agitated murmurs were close and unnerving. Jerome was perched on a wheel-shaped thing that could have been a Pull’s rotator if they’d had them back then. Javairea had unpinned the cloth from her mouth. The guards pushed back the cupboard; behind, a barricaded door. ‘Storage chute,’ Javairea said.

I sucked a splinter out. ‘That’s it then. It’s down there, under—inside—the gardens.’

We found old levers to use as crowbars and soon enough the planks were stripped. As Garth’s men broke the door down then, I only hoped the thick stone walls absorbed the banging. Dust blew up through lantern beams and I walked forward through the haze. A narrow passage. But a passage that sloped down.

Meck’s handiwork was here as well: a stub-like lever at the wall. I pulled it down: at a grating sound, a line of short timber brackets jutted out of the chute’s slant. They formed a sequence of steps, delving down into the dark.

‘After you, ekhin Flint,’ said Garth. It wasn’t courtesy; just good sense. So I widened the lantern-shutters. Every bracket moaned or grunted and the slant was steep. The Inner Wall would be above us, then the mass of earth and stone that made up the landfill of the gardens. My people followed, murmurs softer, children frightened in the dark.

Some distance down the chute got wider; wooden brackets replaced by crumbled sandstone steps. A bulky object was ahead: a battered, bashed-in clepsydra, on its back, facing the chute as if it waited there for help. Behind, around it, another mass of broken things choked up the way.

Garth called a halt to clear the blockade. Which wasn’t easy: all the stuff Meck had thrown down here old and ungainly; tangled, hooked and snared by parts of other things. Lathes and presses, cylinder drills, boards and panels full of keys and slotted holes, broken quadrants, astrolabes and waterwheels. Rusty screw-pipes. And other things I might have spotted in his papers but never really understood, like great ampullae sprouting tubes, a plated thing shaped like a tortoise and the segments of what looked like an enormous telescope. Six men were only just enough to manage moving it all aside – a task that would have been a challenge for most Deepworkers. I hovered near them with the light. It took a while before a narrow, barely stable gap was open. I led the way on through the junk while they steadied sides from toppling in.

Past the jumble I walked out onto a reflective metal floor that made a sonorous percussion as the others followed. My light caught sconces on the walls of a round chamber. Those walls were greenstone. Garth struck a match. The torch-heads fizzed reluctantly but took the flame. Their firelight waxed over the Naemians who now pressed close around the middle, which made their eighty look far fewer. What they surrounded was what grabbed my full attention: a weird conglomerate of stones. Under my feet were the threading grooves.

‘You expected this?’ said Javairea, suddenly beside me.

‘No. Makes sense though,’ I said. There were no passages from here; none that I could see.

‘All this time . . .’ she marvelled, ‘always the legends told that Esha, the first Chieftain of the Vedish who ruled here, was he who bade them farewell.’

‘When they left,’ I said, ‘and followed the river.’

‘Into the desert.’

Into it. But I’d known that. What I hadn’t known—no one had, I supposed—was that they’d put them here too. These, then, had been their last. The last doorway; the one they’d left through themselves.

‘GRAB HIM!’ Garth yelled.

We spun around as the guards dashed. I barely glimpsed the hooded head inside the junk-passage we’d made, then it was gone, a large machine keeling behind it. As Garth set hands to the machine to lift it clear, I said, ‘Leave it, we don’t have time.’

‘Don’t you realise who that was, he’ll be back with Shieldmen, boy! You said all this was to evade the bastards!’

‘We don’t have time,’ I said again. Sure of that part if anything.

‘You’re only six,’ Javairea said. ‘They’ve at least twenty to spare.’

‘So then—what now?’ the sheriff pressed, bewildered eyes across my people.

I looked away to hide the fact that I didn’t know yet. Javairea suggested, ‘Keep a lookout on the chute,’ and then asked me, ‘How long need you?’

Those Naemian faces blinked through half-light. Fighting fear of just how hugely I could be about to fail them all, I pushed some calm down through my body. ‘Just a minute.’

Thoughts racing through all that I knew or thought I knew, I strode towards the Builders’ Stones. Wary, my people stepped aside for me without my saying a thing, keeping their distance. Except Jerome who followed me.

Calvallagh’s sister stones had done so well to keep their ancient secret, but ever since I’d seen them, and, through the Sight those at that ruin, I’d known them all for entrances.

But how?

I climbed the largest one; from there stepped to the circle in the middle. From it a smaller circle struck up like a short pillar. My people watched me, looking cold, though it wasn’t all that cold in here. Jerome stood right beside me now, silent and waiting, as I looked across the ancient sculpted shapes: that segment standing proud against the far half of the floor, the five limbs stemming from the other half; three long, two short. I plunged my hand into Zeek’s pocket and looked again at Azal’s message. I eyed that ink-smudge on the emblem. And it sparked.

The Mooncircle. The stones were in that exact shape!

‘Hey, there’s a hole’—from Jerome.

When I turned around, he was hopping on his tiptoes to see over the topmost stone. I did the same and he was right: there was a hole, perfectly round, hollowed into the plinth. But my thrill died instantly. Fine, a hole, but far too narrow to fit a grown man or woman.

‘We have to make a move soon,’ I heard Garth mutter darkly.

‘Ekhit . . .’ Javairea said across the quiet. ‘You have to give us something.’ And there again was Dewar’s face among the others staring at me. And Miss Nindry’s, and her son’s.

My mind went back to the river chamber. Again I saw those stone grotesques – the horrid, swine-snouted little men with great big eyes and great big hands – and, in that moment, knew the truth. Whoever they’d really been, wherever they’d come from and gone to, the Builders of Antissa had been smaller than me. True maybe, they’d said goodbye to a trusted Chieftain from this place. But if that hole was the way they’d gone, then it was looking more and more likely that they’d not wanted to be followed. Not by humans. Not by us. I squashed Azal’s message in my hand.

Dewar and some others looked alarmed suddenly. ‘Not now, boy!’ shouted the butcher like a bristling father and I thought he was yelling at me. But then I looked to see Jerome’s legs slip from view, into the hole. I scrambled up and tried to lunge an arm in after him, but couldn’t, only batted ribbed stone sides.

‘Should’a known he’d go and do that,’ blustered Dewar, shouldering forward, up, and then – quite tall enough – thrusting his big butcher arm deep in the hole. ‘Jerome!’

‘Shit!’ I cursed. Then, hopping to reach, ‘Jerms, you hear us?’

No answer. I heard the worry ripple out across the chamber. A little girl whined, ‘Where’d he go?’

‘Kid’s so damn fast,’ Dewar grumbled.

‘Smaller than me too, I won’t fit,’ I said.

He ejected a serious lung of air. ‘Lad, what are we doing here?’ Not a growl but an honest question, man to man.

Time to tell them: chasing legends, dreams and visions. One more time, I hopped and called Jerome’s name knowing even as I did how it was making everyone more nervous, that little girl twice as frightened. Remembering too, if it even mattered, that moment crawling through the Hub wall: Rusper and Loquar going silent without any explanation. Such a dense silence. Like a wall.

Not meant to follow . . .

Suddenly the edge of the plinth knocked my chin, hard, as a jolt buckled my knees. Dewar grabbed the plinth as he jolted too. Looking back, I saw that everyone had felt it: that lurch from right under us.

‘Get back from it,’ Dewar warned, protective.

‘Jerome’s in there!’ I shouted back. The little girl started to cry, but I kept my eyes on the Stones. They were vibrating. Then the middle circle turned and I leapt clear.

Naemians were backing away. Javairea called something too, but the gyrating of stone and metal was too loud. And then the stone limbs of the structure – rays of the Mooncircle’s sun – were separating from the floor. The central section was rotating.

I shouted, ‘Everyone together!’

‘You heard the Flints’ boy—stand together!’ Dewar roared. I only realised his hand was firmly on my shoulder when the floor gave a second chug, which slammed my people to the metal. Immediately Javairea was among them, hands on arms, shoulders and backs and never once glancing at me.

Chug: a shape appeared on the right side of the chamber where metal floor met perimeter. Another chug, and another. There were three now; three squares like tiles. Through all the noise, somehow, Javairea rallied guards back from their lookout to the floor where they were helping calm my people.

Garth yelled, ‘What is this?’

Javairea answered, shouting, ‘That which your city’s built on.’ Did I catch a half-smile there?

I nearly smiled too as the Mooncircle’s three longest rays lifted. Defying everything I knew or thought I knew of engineering, stone unfolded. My people recoiled, looking back to watch the lengths of stone, impossibly connected stone, reform to span the chamber’s width. Then with some huge magnetic force, the end-points slapped flush to the tiles. Another jolt sucked us all down. The noise of grinding was immense and, with a crash that caused a few of Meck’s machines to topple out onto the floor, the whole floor sagged.

Some clutched the rays as distance widened. Javairea and the guards pulled them away. Floor parting, sinking, from the Stones, only the Mooncircle’s shape was left suspended over us.

Lantern becoming our only light, Javairea tried to brace herself against the deepening central pillar; it grazed her palm as the floor kept sinking down around it like some massive counting tile. Then she looked back at me, half-smiling in amazement again.

And there above us, pressing through the junk blockade, was Jharis’ face. He threw some angry shout at us, but the constant grinding drowned it out. More Shieldmen clustered behind him, those at his side considering the leap, one almost losing his balance and falling right over the edge. But we were too far down already and our descent was getting faster. Their dumbstruck faces in the circle of greenstone shrank overhead.

Gazing up, Javairea shook her head. ‘He won’t give up. If he can find a way to follow, then he will.’

She was right. I could see the way already: the walls around us ribbed with footholds just like the gills of the pipes. Even now Shieldmen were starting to climb down.

Our floor sank faster, the chamber’s circle further and further above us. I guessed at distance on some reflex . . . eighty feet, a hundred . . . faster. There was nothing to hold onto but each other. Where was Jerome?

Hundred and fifty . . . two hundred.

It was so strange, the sensation I felt growing, and the deeper the floor took us, the stronger it got. Two-hundred-and-sixty, I guessed, but wasn’t really guessing. Not anymore. With every second I felt my knowledge of the depth becoming surer; knew the distance we’d descended—three-hundred-and-forty-one feet and counting, almost deeper than the Hub-floor. Something was coming back to me, but not the way it was before. This wasn’t Seeing, it was feeling, and I knew where we were going.

Just as I knew, from a sudden twinge I felt at five-hundred-and-seventy-six, we had to: ‘Get back from the sides!’

They all drew inward as the rushing walls around us disappeared. The little girl who had been crying was pulled into Javairea’s arms. Black space billowed out, our lantern helpless against it. But I felt what was out there. Like a dream I could remember only one slippery corner of, it moved in me, whole but resisting thoughts.

The floor slowed down. Exactly six-hundred-and-ten feet from where we’d started, its metal docked to another huge magnetic clap. Then big silence.

Below Antissa’s hill by a hundred feet, it was impossible to see the Shieldmen climbing down those walls. They’d never reach us, it was too far. Granite, dunite, sandstone, earth, so much of it. That weight above us was a knowing I couldn’t explain.

‘We’re in your hands,’ Garth said to me.

I raised the lantern. Whatever it was, this certainty, I did my best to push it all into my voice—‘Follow my light. Quickly, together’—and led the way, sliding off the platform onto an upward-sloping floor. Then almost shrieked as Jerome appeared. He’d stepped right out of the central pillar. ‘How’d you do that?’

Dreamy with pride, ‘Dunno,’ he shrugged.

There wasn’t time. No matter what controls were in there, he had done it; activated the floor. Maybe his entering it alone was what had got it moving.

‘Come on,’ I said and pulled him up. The others followed. The greenstone slope was veined with thin, brown tubes I knew. The lantern didn’t light enough for us to see, but by the rate of the slope’s curve I knew we climbed along the inside of a huge globe-shaped hollow. I could picture it as, on all-fours, I scaled the way ahead and up.

But as the last of us, a guard, stepped off the platform, the silence broke. To the sound of releasing magnets and re-engaging gears, the metal floor lifted again. I turned against the slope, shining my light over the climbers, and watched it rise. So it would seal us in down here, cutting them off.

It was a short moment of hope. I reached the place where the perimeter, if it was a hollow globe, would have been impossible to climb. There was an opening and I started ushering my people through it, trusting completely it was where we had to go. Only to hear Garth call: ‘It’s coming down again . . .’

‘Faster,’ I pressed. ‘Through here, keep close behind the one in front of you. Group together on the other side.’ One by one they crawled inside, through the unknown, while I listened. I didn’t understand: why had the floor changed direction?

I went last and once inside could move ahead at a stooping scurry. I hoped that no one was too frightened; they couldn’t see where they were going, but at least the way was straight. Dead straight for fifty-seven yards. Overtaking Dewar at the exit, I jogged across an atrium of brown tubes.

The group was moving faster now; right behind me as I made my way—I don’t know how I knew—south over greenstone. That ancient masonry opened up, becoming two more square channels in two spiralling slopes. I stopped just long enough to hold the lantern high for any stragglers, but knew I had to keep up front. Garth and his men wouldn’t let them stray.

The brown tubes ran the spiral path; a path so steep that one could almost crouch and slide, yet no one slipped. The air was cool. As we kept going, spiralling down, our light looped weirdly on the walls surrounding us. We heard the echoing clap of magnets back in the globe chamber, then the hard shouts of the Shieldmen in that darkness. I heard the fright ripple behind me, but we could only keep moving.

The spiral levelled so gradually I almost didn’t notice, becoming shallow block-like steps and changing course by subtle spates of obtuse angles. In an even wider path, we met the twin of the downward spiral, and going on the blocks were broader, smoother too than any polished stone I’d seen. Were ours the first human feet ever to walk here?

The passage split and rounded north and delved on further; shallow blocks extending off, stretching away under my beams, between the tubes. The tubes seemed lifelike now; sometimes a spidery double-thread, sometimes a webwork that covered the greenstone like a creeper. Valve-wheels sparkled into view but I’d expected them. Not yet.

We heard the anger in the shouts behind us. Almost alarming, the passage brought the sound so clearly to us, although again something in the walls consumed the echo.

Our passage and its twin came head to head, then burrowed further. The block-steps were just as long as they were wide, so that my light wouldn’t reach their far edges at first.

‘Passages in the walls,’ panted Javairea, beside me now. But I’d seen them: amongst the tubes, circular holes.

‘Not passages, dead-ends,’ I told her. She didn’t ask how I knew but my visions alone had showed me hundreds, thousands: hives of egg-shaped cells in bedrock. Homes, perhaps, to the Builders long ago. Was this path of blocks we travelled once as good as a city street?

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That path now levelled to reach a landing and I stopped. The thrum of bootfalls joined the shouting from above, and as my people and the guards caught up with us and gathered round, I caught Garth’s eye. ‘Can’t stand them off, hope you know that,’ he warned me, voice brittle. I didn’t answer; just held my lantern to the doors I knew were there. Triglycerate flashed over a valve-wheel. This one stood upright in the centre of the landing while, behind, two greenstone rectangles were set into the wall. Two doors; left shut, right open.

‘In there, quickly!’ I pressed. As my people rushed in between us, Javairea looked a question at me. ‘It’ll take us deeper,’ I said. ‘As long as we keep on heading down, we will be safe.’ I shone the light on the wall behind her, where a twisting arm branched from the stone. ‘We can seal it off, I think.’

‘Are there no other routes down?’ she said, deathly serious.

‘These will be faster,’ I assured her. And myself.

Last Naemians hurried past and pressed into the space. Javairea followed, braids flailing. Then the six guards ducked in too, just as Jharis’ tenor blasted through the darkness we had come from. I couldn’t see them but, of course, they could see us. Neither their boots over the stone nor freeing blades made an echo. Still, my people cried out. I shoved among them, then along the inner wall of the hollow square, my lantern scraping on the stone. I found the panel, pushed it in, saw it give way at my hand’s pressure, then yield to some other force that pulled it deep into the wall.

The floor pulsed twice as magnet-holds released the sides. Stone rubbed on stone, a sound much deeper than that floor’s, and the square dropped from the entrance.

‘Whatever happens,’ I said to Javairea, then looked at Garth, ‘move down, not up.’ Javairea’s eyes widened at me, then her face cleared and she nodded as I gave her the lantern. ‘Keep them safe.’

I darted to vault the rising threshold and tumble back out on the landing. When I stood and grasped the twisted arm, it clunked. A tiny shower of gravel fell over the doorway as the stone descended from above, cutting me off from the lantern-light and sinking heads of my people. As it fell, its twin rectangle on the left began to rise. I saw Javairea grab Jerome, pulling him back, and they were gone. To the gritting of greenstone teeth, one way was sealed. One opened.

I stood in the dark. The shouts were close. Then I stepped up to the valve-wheel and turned it. The cool metal yielded. Under the floor, long-held pressure belched and water took its course. Light darted up from the wheel’s base, and down, and out, each sprawling metal channel filling, waking up. The glowing tendrils stemmed and wove across the landing, to the walls, over block-steps, bathing the stone in golden light.

Gold gleamed on the silver helmets with blue tassels; basked their bewildered faces. Jharis was the first to scrap his awe, his angry eyes panning the tubes. Pointing his sword at me just like he had at Con: ‘All die but one.’

It was surreal. As I ran, the lines of irrigated aqualumium streaked and darted ahead like yellow ribbons in the moulding of the greenstone. They looked alive, so full of purpose, even knowing the effect was simply metal meeting water. The way unfurled before their light and as I trusted it completely, the boots and baying of the Shieldmen noised behind.

Branches appeared, lit by more gold, but now my passage wasn’t level. It was sloping without steps. Don’t stop.

The downturn just kept getting steeper every yard I sprinted on—to what? I didn’t know, but—did I?

Don’t stop, trust.

Past sights were flickering in my head . . . circles, circles . . . and the greenstone, smoothly, surely steepened for the fall.

Men tripped and tumbled behind me, cursing, grabbing sides.

Don’t stop, trust—jump?

Jharis lunged and skated down on his greaves, sword batting stone. I ducked on haunches, halfway skidding, and at the point where the stone turned sheer, kicked out to launch.

Arms flailing—flailing for circles!

Every muscle I could move closed round the solid thing out there. I slammed hard, breath forced out, and swayed. Two blue capes flapped into the void, shrieks swallowed up by the greenstone’s vacuum.

With his sword Jharis barred the breadth of the sloped passage, half-crouched as close as he dared to the drop. His Shieldmen backed up and away.

I’d missed the circles – two small platforms – and was clinging to the cable of black polymer below them. The coursing water laced the tubes around the void I dangled in, then hit right-angles in the circuit and shot down.

With throbbing hands I climbed the cable.

‘Run forever if you wish,’ Jharis was saying. ‘We’ll find your people. She needs but one. You, with your notions, may delve as deep as pleases you.’

I reached the lower of the circles, mounted it and then its twin. ‘Luck to you, Lieutenant,’ I said, and squeezed the vice-and-clamp control I found there. For a second I was weightless.

Then I fell away from Jharis just like Fallstone from the sky.

It was too fast. I tried to crouch to keep my balance with one grip fixed round the vice that kept the twin circles in free-fall, but the rush was powerful. It filled my nostrils and my eyes, the cable’s whizzing was a scream. Below I saw the end of the golden run as it overtook the water’s current through the downward-delving tubes. That weird awareness of the depth flashed through my brain—six-hundred, six-and-fifty.

The circles barely made a rattle.

Seven-fifty feet, eight-hundred. Gaining balance, I worked my hands into the clamp-grips of the vice and eased in tighter. Nine-hundred. Above, and faintly, gold light followed. Slowly, tighter.

No—too tight. The clamp now screeched, scoring the polymer, and I lurched, slowing too hard. Over a thousand feet below the fortress hill, inside my mind, a rising floor started expanding. So I grabbed the vice, pulled up and clamps closed dead. Which sent me careening with a crash that broke the circles, dashed me clear. My arm hit stone, then—

It had already been dark. Hadn’t it?

Dark or not, I could see.

And feel, too, that I was moving without moving. I heard the overtones of stone.

There was a thing in my hand.

Four holes in greenstone were around me, circling me in orbit. Above them, symbols.

And a someone. A phantom, head to toe in white. That wasn’t possible, I knew. That ghost was part of the Disc. My Disc was gone. The thing I held couldn’t be that.

I kept on moving, slowly moving, without moving. The white-clad figure passed out of sight and then came round a second time as I returned. Cowl drawn back now, I saw the face. Young, honest, kind and browned by sun. ‘Con?’ I said.

His wooden fish. That was the thing in my hand. That Naemian treasure, surviving just as he and I had survived, at least as far as the borderlands. We’d gone to get it that night, from the farmhouse in the hills. It was only because of that . . .

Again, without moving, I rounded.

Con still there when I came back. So very still, but I’d never seen his eyes so clear.

‘I’m sorry Con,’ I said, but all he did was smile and turn and head off through the dark of one of the four holes in greenstone.

He wasn’t here anymore. The grind of stone was louder though, along with twinges of sharp pain behind my head. I was moving. I flexed my fingers. No wooden fish.

Gold blazed in front of my eyes. I’d hit my head coming down, but though I felt too dizzy to stand, I forced myself. If that gold light—I nearly tripped over a crumpled Shieldman—if it had just caught me up again and woken me up, then I couldn’t have been out more than a minute, maybe two.

The wheel I stood on was alight – a golden spiral – and being turned on its axis by four huge vertical cogwheels; rotating titans. Between the cogwheels were those holes. Four ways from here. Above each way, engraved in greenstone, was a symbol: Builder-script, just like the symbols on the Transcripts, Calvallagh’s Stones and Xiqopix board. About as much good to me right now as Naemian coins.

>«<< ><<« <<«> <«><

Although the last one did look . . . almost like . . .

Trust.

I looped my legs over the wheel’s rim as it rotated. My bare feet scraped along the floor until I neared one of the wheels and then I dropped. Stumbled and rolled. Got up and ran straight for the hole under that symbol.

The one like a fish.

A single tube shot through the floor to light this branch, the cold-slick rush inside it all I could hear over the slap-slap of my feet. I couldn’t remember losing my sandals or how many pairs that was now.

Two Shieldmen dead.

Two of how many? No voices reached me, but then the greenstone played with sounds. I only knew I had to move, and keep on moving, don’t turn back. A mile and more under Antissa and all I had now was this slipping, sliding imprint of awareness – somehow turned inside-out and even harder to grasp. I couldn’t see it, just sense it. Feel and trust.

The tunnel widened and went square—I might have seen this in the Sight or in my dreams—and then the way was coiling down, a kind of helix without steps, just more greenstone, smooth, lit up gold. There were more burrowed cell-like pockets in its walls. Homes? Could have been.

Could be again.

How far down had my people got? The Builders’ realm was a miracle, it always had been, but—safe? Not for us. Not for our kind. They’d been so . . . different. I hoped Javairea wasn’t scared. I hoped Jerome hadn’t run off. Were those vibrations I could feel now through the stone?

The helix levelled and joined a bridge over more dark. Big dark, I sensed. The aqualumium circuit seemed to end here. Its termini framed two sealed outlets, one to each side of the bridge. Awareness grew and shrank, taunting. The space below was gigantic, a ranging cavernous domain shaped in my mind only by textures of the greenstone and raw granite. Complex levels. Tunnel systems in the hundreds, hive-like honeycombs of thousands upon thousands of those cells. Spiral bridges, arcing pillars, constructs that made no sense at all. And machines. So many more ancient machines were waiting down there in the dark, like scores of gold and silver secrets cloaked in smoke.

The door was there. I’d never seen it in Sight-visions, not this one, but I knew it wasn’t far below me—twinned by the Spectres, that huge round portal that, though sealed, led out into the greater network. And the river, descending through the aquifer, ever deeper into the earth.

At a judder from the bridge, I spun to see one of the outlet panels falling. The other one was falling too. Behind it, gold light shone on helmets.

Fix, six, eight, I counted. Jharis’ shadowed face glared fury. ‘Take him now.’

I fled the other way and leapt the falling panel into darkness. Darkness roaring with the rush of tonnes of water.

They’d lost them, though—they’d lost my people!

Again it flitted, teasing . . . pillars, columns . . . some towering height . . . and circles . . . up . . . The air was chill. I tasted iron.

Eight Shieldmen, swords drawn, crossed the bridge towards the darkness I was in, and now five more jogged into view inside the lit-up branch behind them. ‘Let’s have an end to this, then, child,’ Jharis blared to compete with the torrential water-pressure.

I stepped back, deeper through the dark. Circles. My heel scraped a ledge’s lip behind me.

‘All out of tunnels, little engineer?’ Jharis sneered.

But he was wrong; there would be ways, I only needed to see! Why was it dark here? There was so much water surging! Columns . . . no, they weren’t columns. I was inside a column, yes. Pillars . . . round sides, huge iron . . . four.

‘They’re most impressive, that I’ll grant you.’ As the Lieutenant sheathed his sword, his men fanned out around him; a dozen blocking the threshold. Not masking his wonder, he gazed off into the blackness. Above the roar, ‘A momentous discovery. Almost a shame you won’t—’

‘I see him sir,’ a Shieldmen shouted.

Jharis: ‘Take him!’

Two of his number made to move just as a clap—clear through the roar—pushed Jharis’ chin out at a jut. He dropped and fell and crumpled forward on his knees among his men; a bloody hole black in his neck below the cusp of his helmet.

His party swung to brandish swords at the swathed figures on the bridge. I saw Mondric lower a fusil that wisped a tendril of chrozite gas.

‘Pox-mouthed bastard,’ he said.

Guards were behind him, at least twenty running forward, and with them were soldiers! Scimitars!

I darted back, right to the edge, and tried to focus on the drop. By the stronger light I saw the greenstone edge was curved and there, some yards off to my right, the arcing shape of another bridge. I shot towards it, reached it, saw the cables anchored to its sides, mounted and crossed it, quick but careful. A spindly outline of the framework at the centre became clear as new light entered from behind.

A second entrance opened. More Shieldmen poured across that ledge.

I threw myself against the tubes, monkeyed between them and climbed in.

Lit by mere licks of green and gold, the four colossal pillars loomed out of the walls. The flickers also marked the edge of the wide hole, the four stone bridges reaching in, speckling of iron-alloy anchors, links and binders in the webs, the shape of tubes those lines suspended . . .

Just there a Methan soldier flailed and kicked a Shieldman off the ledge.

I found and gripped the icy metal of the plug-bar; twisted, pushed. A small jolt shook me at the knees as segments de-magnetised.

Along the left side of the ledge, Mondric bashed a Shieldman back and down with a deft blow to the chest, while guards and Methans rallied with him.

I grabbed the switch-bar, pulled it down and felt it clunk through three degrees. No wait, not three, not all the way! I pushed it up again by two. Yes?

Felt right. Now what—think! I knew this! Pressure!

I clutched the gauge-wheel handles, left and right, and chugged them in towards my body. Felt vibrations stir the tank.

The fight was two crowds on the ledges; no more Methans charging in and no more crossbows from behind. I heard a throaty roar from Mondric.

Gold light grew below me. So did the thrum on every side. Come on, come on . . . !

I spotted Mondric stagger out of the melee, hand at his throat, pulled by a soldier.

A golden band flared into life on the controls. I shoved the gauges open wider and the light spread through the tubes surrounding me.

‘Tools!’ Mondric bellowed. I ignored him. I’d come back.

All the time brighter and brighter, the sphere rose on the central line, but it rose slowly as retracting lines expanded. It seemed to stretch, the gold light galvanising arms and under-tubes, which put new glamour on the pillars. Through its glare, I saw the Shieldmen throw down swords, subdued by guards and soldiers, and watch—awestruck—as I rose above the ledges and the void. ‘Tools! Florian!’ yelled Mondric, waving wildly as he sank onto his haunches; other hand pressed to the bleeding from his neck.

I would come back.

Now I took hold. I twisted both arrestor-levers; heard the crisp snap-flip of anchor-claws rotating. Pushed them down, which sucked the clawed blades through the arms. Some fifty feet above the docking cross, already speeding up, I shoved the gauges to full pressure. The sphere shot up between the pillars; guards, soldiers, Shieldmen shrinking fast.

This wasn’t some old relic, tarnished, buried in the desert. This Deeping Sphere was perfect, as if new; no scale of rust over its tubes, no broken parts. Workings were slick and as an orb of glowing gold it basked the pillars as it passed them. Even those pillars, which weren’t pillars, had a sheen on them down here that I’d not seen. The golden band of the machine’s light slipped over gauge-wheels on their iron, their surging din joined by the hiss inside my frame. Sphere at full pressure . . . keep it there . . . this speed was good. A thousand feet . . .

Around my flight the walls drew back, exposing the pillars for what they were. The greenstone gave way to crude rock in lumps and ledges in the shadows. Nine hundred feet.

The fat face smiled as, above the hiss, Hetch squealed— ‘Wherever are we going, Naemian?’

I batted out and slapped him in the jowls. They gave a wobble as he flinched but then he laughed and shot a hand into the frame and swiped for me.

No, not a hand—a metal claw swept past my face.

I’d been so focused on the controls that I’d not seen him board the sphere; he must’ve clung on to an arm. Still in that new blue-and-white uniform that somehow belted in his belly, the dwarf was hanging from the frame’s outer tubes just like the Rath under the Spectres. His bare bald head was basked in gold and the black currants of his eyes shone with the same. The striking hand, or what was there instead of one, was a hook of forge-blackened metal. They’d somehow fused it to the stump!

That grotesque grin wider than ever as we passed eight hundred feet and climbed, I kept my hold on the gauge-wheel handles while moving back to put the core-unit between us. Another laugh. He looped his hook on a lateral ring and swung his body in with me.

No.

I yanked the gauges fully back, which slammed the sphere to a violent halt and threw him down. He fell below the core but caught himself by the hook. Hanging off an under-tube, he gazed back up as the frame rattled, only slightly, on its line. Before it could drop, I twisted the release-plug and re-engaged the seize transmission. Felt segments lock.

‘Gentle, Naemian,’ he giggled. ‘Mustn’t be doing any damage to the Builders’ handicraft.’ He seemed blithely unaware of the long dark plummet below him.

I’d cut all pressure and fixed us here. ‘There’s no point, Hetch, you’ll never find them,’ I shouted down as the sphere dimmed. ‘And if you kill me, then you won’t have a Naemian.’

‘Aha—quite right.’ His real hand snatched the under-tube. ‘You’re my prize.’ More limber than I knew him, he hoisted himself back inside the sphere. In the fading light, a dagger glinted; his grin fell. ‘Still, prize or no, you’ll bleed some juice.’

The sphere went dark and so did everything else except the square on the controls: it showed the mainstay tank was full. I twisted, punched in the release-plug and we dropped hard again. Then seized it back, jarring my knees. Over the surrounding surge, I heard him make a grunt but couldn’t tell how far he’d fallen. Just get off the erg-damned—!

Ice-cold, it hooked me at the ankle. Going down, I tried to grab what I could reach.

Left gauge-wheel handle clunked full-circle and reopened. Hiss came back.

I kicked my free leg; in the dark, felt my heel squish the pudding face. No grunt at that, just a swift tug that pulled me in by my hooked leg and sent me backwards. And I knew, for a split-second, that I could be the long fall before I hit the under-tubes.

Fresh gold light blossomed just in time. Hetch barrelled forward as I freed my ankle, dagger plunging for my chest. I grabbed the knife-arm with both hands but when I felt his strength and realised his full weight wasn’t in it, I knew I couldn’t overpower him. He beamed wide.

I remembered the last time I’d been in his clutches. I felt the sphere rising again, too slow, just one gauge open. All three needed to be open and I needed him off! He wasn’t going to kill me and in his grin I saw the way he taunted, feigning a push towards my heart. But in the same moment I realised, he made a deft turn with his wrist, pulled his arm out of my hold and drew a gash over my right fingers.

I cried out but, as I did, drew Eflan’s knife and drove it hard into his side. It felt like stabbing so much cake, but he yelled high, the yell becoming a merry laugh.

I found my footing on the tubes and launched back up onto the core, kicking back as I mounted it but missing him this time. The hand-hook scored the mainstay tank, which missed me too.

Fast as I could, I opened both other gauges and the light and speed increased. There were the pillars again and the rough-hewn walls. Speed mounting, Hetch struggled with his balance but I doubted it had much to do with the hole I’d put in him. Badly as I wanted to now—much as it could help save Antissa from its fate—I couldn’t kill him, not this monster.

As we soared, just a bubble of light on an upward road, I held out Eflan’s knife at him. My hand was painted in blood. ‘Just stay back, Hetch. Stay where you are,’ I growled. ‘You’ll get your blood and everything else you want as soon as we get up there.’

‘Down-down-down, up-up-up!’ he cackled. ‘As if you’d even know the difference.’

Seven-hundred feet. I kept my other hand on the release-plug, ready to slam-stop again.

‘Had you only left this Naemian business in those borderlands, you’d have made something of yourself in this city, as I’ve done. And just in time for the greatness of empire. Instead you and your engineer will die in yesterday’s dust.’

Six-hundred. ‘Shut up!’

His glinting currants took a glance above the sphere-frame, up into the big blackness that matched what was below. He graced my blade, then my face, with another smile. Some blood was trickling from his midriff.

I dared a rapid glance up too, but knew he didn’t need me to. He wasn’t scared of Eflan’s knife; he was having fun and he could have me in a second. Could the sphere go any faster?

And had I just seen something up there?

Where were the landings, docking crosses? We’d not passed any of them . . . only the pillars’ valves and girders.

Five-hundred feet . . . I looked up again.

What was that up there? It looked like . . . . circles? Bright gold circles, turning, turning . . . I knew this—yes, I’d seen it.

Four hundred!

Hetch’s hook nearly grazed my nose and he was up on the core. I jabbed my knuckles in his side where I’d stabbed him and in the moment it gave me, leapt to his shoulders, quickly hauling my body onto the upper tubes. As I hoisted myself between them and climbed the top of the frame, he bounded after me. I rammed a foot down on his head. More wild laughter.

Three hundred. Docking cross approaching. Steadying balance on the upper tubes, careful not to touch the central line the sphere was climbing on so fast, I saw the silhouettes of more bridges against the gold circles above.

I moved my feet to dodge the swipes of hook and dagger from below. Then, dagger clamped between black teeth, Hetch hooked himself again for purchase, grabbed my shin and surged upward. That dragged me halfway down again but I struck out with Eflan’s knife to put a slice along his face.

The docking cross was getting closer. So were the turning golden circles.

Two hundred feet and closing fast. I’d nearly made it.

Hetch snatched my throat and pinned me down right at the line—which whizzed an inch from my left ear. Insanely grinning, he raised the hook-hand and hacked my shoulder. The crunch of flesh and sinew tearing filled me with fury, not with pain. Even the fury wasn’t enough.

But then I saw it – his bandaged thumb. It cost me Eflan’s knife to do it but I let it go to grab the thumb and squeeze it hard. He yelped with unexpected pain and I got both hands under him. I pushed and, screaming, threw him clear.

He toppled—‘Whee-hee!’—off the sphere.

Clank!

And again he caught himself, this time the hook looping a sphere-arm. He slid its length down to the elbow where the hinge stopped him from sliding off the end.

He swayed. His blood-splashed face looked back and up at me—‘Aha!’ We passed a hundred feet to surface. Somehow the sphere was slowing down and when I glanced to the central line I made out polymer threads laced through its metal, their friction counteracting pressure before those bridges.

At the docking cross the sphere suddenly stopped. Directly above, a ball of brass – though of course it wasn’t – froze our ascent, though still at maximum pressure the sphere was hissing and gleaming. From the ball two vertical stems dropped to reach inside. Activators. While above, no more than fifty feet above, clearer now than ever and probably clear as it ever would be, was the Gate.

Easily a hundred feet across, concentric rings of aqualumium, pulsing gold as if alive, wheeled and turned through one another, encircling a nexus where the sphere’s line seemed to end. How many times had I seen this shape in dreams and visions? I hadn’t known what I was seeing and didn’t now. Metal couldn’t do that, could it? Impossible, more beautiful than any of my visions, I knew that no engineer, none of us, would ever understand.

What I understood was enough.

Barely aware of the pain in my shoulder, I swung myself back down inside and manned the core. Hetch was reaching for a cable. We didn’t need those, not here; but soon we would. So, might as well. I gripped and heaved the two arrestor-levers up, splaying the arm-blades.

Seven of eight, anyway. The eighth blade seized inside the grip of Hetch’s hook, which jammed it there. I’d never seen quite that much white in his little eyes. He gave up reaching for the cable. Dropping his dagger, he latched his hand around the hook and pulled and rattled, squirming and cringing at, I guessed, the unhealed join of bone and tissue in his arm.

Through the Arterials’ surge I called out—‘Steel yourself, Hetch’—and pulled the activators down. The stems shot up into the ball, which somehow shrank into the line.

The sphere launched up at full speed.

For a second I saw the Gate’s gold circles iris from the nexus, then the white torrents exploded wide to fill up the ceiling.

A wall of water fell towards me.