I squeezed the uncovered wound, trying to force the pus out of it. ‘Christ-on-a-bike!’ One of Makin’s oaths, that. I don’t know what a bike is but it sounds painful. The edges of my flesh looked an unhealthy pink, rimmed in black crusts. I couldn’t imagine the two halves ever knitting together again.
The Bad Dogs had plenty of rope at their camp and I’d taken a fair bit of it with me. Never go questing without a bit of rope, at least that’s how the stories have it. My three pieces knotted together reached about two thirds of the way down the hole. I tied a larger knot in one end and secured it under the stone lid rather than trust to my equine companions for anchorage. On my belt I tied the lantern I’d taken from the camp and a spare flask of oil. I squeezed flint, steel, and tinder into a pocket. Better not to carry a light for the descent or a fall might find me with broken legs and on fire.
A tired achiness made each action clumsy. I swallowed another bitter pill of Carrod Springs’ salts and took the rope in both hands. One more glance at the dusty hills, at the worn blue of the sky, and I started down.
Out of the sun I felt cold enough to shiver, though that may have owed more to fever than to the drop in temperature. I climbed down hand over hand, clutching at the rope with my knees. When my knees discovered they had nothing left to clutch, the top of the shaft, part occluded by the lid, offered a bright crescent of sky. A shudder took me, along with the sudden conviction that someone would slide the lid back and seal away the light.
Groaning with the effort, I lifted both feet to brace against the side of the shaft and pushed until my shoulders and upper back wedged against the opposite side. I had no great conviction that the pressure would keep me from falling if I let go the rope, but even less conviction that I could manage the climb back.
I let go.
Inch by strained inch I slid down the shaft. My legs shook with the effort and I felt sure I must be leaving a trail of skin and blood on the Builder stone: my shirt couldn’t have lasted long against the friction.
Sufficient daylight reached down to let me know when the shaft ran out of wall, and soon enough I found that whilst the soles of my boots still gripped the stonework, my heels had nothing to rest on. When a decision is inevitable you may as well take it as quick as possible so that you still have something left to deal with whatever consequences may arise. I dropped, doing my best to swing my feet below me. The effort proved a partial success and ended with bruised heels, banged-up knees, elbows slammed to the ground, and finally the side of my head fetching up against the floor. An inch or so of dust covering the stone floor served to lessen the impact, saving me from a cracked skull and leaving me conscious, choking, and with a river of blood flowing from my nose. I levered myself up so I could sit cradling my knees, and set my back to the nearest wall.
‘Ow.’ The complaint came out nasally.
Pain led my fingers to a piece of the lantern glass embedded in my thigh. I pulled it out and held the wound closed until the blood stopped pulsing around my fingertips. In time I found the lantern wick, set it into the oil flask, and with steel and flint and more fumbling than necessary I set a flame to it. The tunnel led off to front and back, circular in cross-section and looking suspiciously like a sewer. The end of my rope dangled three yards above my outstretched hand and getting back into the shaft would require gymnastics I thought beyond me even without wounds or fever.
On the assumption that water had once flowed along the tunnel I made my best guess at which direction it might have taken and started to walk ‘upstream’. When you’re in a dark place, and your light is going to run out before too long, you get on with things. It’s a wonder to me how few people apply that same logic to their lives.
Three times new tunnels joined mine and on each occasion I studied my choices through the Builders’ view-ring, which shed some light on the matter, a red blinking light that demanded I turn right twice and then follow straight on. At two of the turns traces of rust hinted that metal grilles once blocked the way. A great sage once said there are few problems that won’t go away if you ignore them long enough. Fortunately these obstacles had been pre-ignored for a thousand years.
Toward its end the pipe rose at a steep angle and brought me into a circular room, empty in the main but littered with fragments of plasteek. Brittle with age, they made a satisfying crunch underfoot. Some of the pieces could have been the arms of chairs, small wheels, others lay bonded to the remains of metal cabinets. A corridor led off and I followed it, shadows dancing all around. The place had no odour to it, as if even that staleness which haunts abandoned rooms had given up and left.
A long corridor led me past many doorways all open and dark, decorated with the fragments of the doors that had guarded them. In the ceiling flat strips of whitish glass punctuated the walk and at one point, as I passed below, two of them tried to flicker to life like the glow-bulbs in the Tall Castle.
I’ve wandered the ruins of forts where generations lived, seen the march of empty centuries across the old stone, wearing away the sharpness that defined lives. In those places, at every turn, those lost inhabitants are remembered. The scuffmark where a door closed decade after decade, steps sagging with wear, the deep-scored name where a child set his stamp upon a windowsill. You can read such ruins, however tumbled, almost see the soldiers at the walls, stable-boys leading horses out to exercise. But in the dry corridors of this Builders’ den, untouched by rain or wind, undisturbed, I saw nothing but puzzles and sorrow. I might be the first man to walk here in a thousand years. A thousand more might pass before the next. In such a place silence and dust wait whilst men’s lives slip past. Without the flicker of my flame to count the moments hours could race by, years escape, and I might crawl away ancient and unwise.
The corridor ended in a large hall with many doors, these seemingly of wood but untouched by age.
Silence.
In the times that I have reached after the dead to pull back what is needed to make them rise, it seemed I reached into such a place as this. When I drew Row back into his corpse it was into dry lands that I followed him despite his dying in the mud of the Cantanlona bogs. I thought for a moment of William, of my little brother falling into such a place after they broke him. When I lay as dead after Father’s knife touched my heart I imagined an angel came for me and I refused her. I hoped that years before that day she had descended to the dry lands to make those same offers to William. And that he had not refused.
My head snapped up, jerking me from my half-doze.
‘Enough of this!’ Delirium had started to reel me in. I shook it off and focused. I moved on, snorting at the thought of William and the angel. Even at seven he could probably have given her a harder time of it than I did at fourteen.
At the far end of the hall an archway led into a smaller lower hall. It caught my eye since the Builders weren’t given to arches. A dozen or more cubicles opened to either side of the lesser hall, like monks’ cells, each of them layered in dust, scattered with plasteek fragments and pieces of corroded metal. I picked up a sliver of metal. Lighter than expected, not iron, and not rusted but powdery with some white residue. Oxidation. The word floated up from Lundist’s instructions on alchemy.
The seventh cell on the left held a wonder. A man waited there, without motion, his back to me. And from the side of his head a spray of scarlet blood, fragments of bone tumbling through the air … all frozen in the moment. A picture, but not a picture. Something real and solid but standing outside time. Where each of the other cells had a ring of corrosion in the centre of the ceiling, this one had a collar of silver metal, bound in places with copper, and surrounding a white light. The man sat in his grey tunic directly below the light. Somehow, no illumination escaped into the hall – and yet I saw the light. He sat on a chair that looked too thin to support him, odd in its slim and flowing form, without decoration or device. Beside him, part of a bed. Not a broken piece or a component but a section as if cut out like biscuits from dough, ending at some unseen perimeter that surrounded it and the man both. Beyond this small circle at the cell’s centre, holding the man, the chair, and part of the bed, the remainder of the room lay in dusty ruin like all the rest.