Time passed in the dark cavern, and the nun did not return. Sharp found early on that he was hungry in a way that he had never been in the mirrors. Lack of hunger or thirst, or any need for food or water seemed to be a feature of the looking-glass dimension, but now that he was back in the “normal” world (or at least under it) he was finding himself prey to those bodily needs once more.
He had slipped hard ship’s biscuits into his pockets, and two small slabs of pemmican that the thief Dee had either not found or not troubled himself to steal. He ate as sparingly as he could from these as he worked, but the real problem was water.
He worked by candlelight, sifting through the bone pile, initially clearing a space around the mirror that he had propped face to the cavern wall. The skeletons and other detritus were four or five deep, but he found the stone floor beneath, and began to create order out of chaos. Initially he had intended to lay the bodies out separately, but it quickly became clear that the skeletons were in such an advanced stage of decay that working out which tibia went with whose ribs or skull and so forth was not going to be possible. So he found himself following the ancient custom of those who tend to the disposal of the long dead in ossuaries the world over, which is that he stacked the bones by type and shape, rather than by individual ownership. A pile of skulls grew next to leg bones stacked like cordwood, while all the diminishing sizes of bones were arranged in graded heaps around the edge of the cavern as he cleared space for them. Among the bones, he found the remains of more powder kegs, broken into their constituent barrel staves, which he duly stacked alongside the newly neat bone piles. After a while, he ceased to find the handling of remains unpleasant or charged with any kind of grim association and in the absence of anything else to busy himself with, he found himself taking pride in the painstaking action of clearing and sorting.
When he got to the centre of the floor, or the bottom of the cone, as he thought of it, he discovered both the answer to something that had been worrying him, and also the solution to his growing problem with dehydration: he had been wondering how, if the void had filled with enough water to leave tidemarks in the past, it was now dry. He moved a pair of skeletons twisted together in the folds of an oilskin cape that had resisted rotting, and found a narrow gash in the stone floor. It was about four feet long and maybe eight inches wide at the most, tapered at both ends in a slightly kinked peapod shape. And when he reached down into it, his hand found water, moving gently past from left to right. It was an underground stream, and the water, when he cupped it greedily to his parched mouth was cold and clean, with a flat mineral taste that was not unpleasant at all. This then was the drain that had emptied the void in the past, and now it was a welcome source of drinking water for his future. The channel was about arm-deep as far as he could tell, since he could touch the bottom if he stretched. When he did so, he found a shoe that had fallen in and wedged itself in a narrow groove, and he retrieved it and added it to the relevant pile.
Of course he found much else in the charnel heap. There were many more candles, which were very welcome. There were boots, shoes and belts which he mounded against the wall. There were fragments of unrotted cloth, and some garments that remained more or less intact. These he laid out on the ground and used as a mattress for the times when he extinguished the candles and went to sleep. There were horse-pistols and swords rusted to uselessness, and there was a surprisingly large number of coins which had fallen through the bone pile to the floor as the pockets they had once been in had rotted away to nothing.
And of course there were rings. Of all the things he sorted into piles, it was the rings that touched him most, rings that were all variants of the one he wore, gold rings set with mottled bloodstones on which were incised lions and unicorns, rampant. There were also wedding rings, and he took care to keep them all safely, tied into a handkerchief. He maintained a close tally on the number of them, adding to it every time he found another. He knew that precisely eighty-five souls had gone into the mirrors on the occasion of the Disaster, since the ominous number had often been mentioned by The Smith and Cook when discussing the tragedy which had brought The Oversight to its current desperate state. And yet, by the time he had cleared the bone jumble and stacked every bone, he had only gathered eighty-four rings. He re-counted them several times, and then went back to the piles of small bones and checked them again to make sure there was not an overlooked finger bone encircled by the missing signet. When that failed, he went through the piles of bigger bones. And when that too failed he gave up and extinguished the candle and tried to go to sleep.
He tried to think of other things. He stared into the darkness and thought of Sara Falk, of where she might be, of whether there was any possibility that the nun might find her. Thinking of the nun made him think of the man whose name she had told him, the man he must kill for her if she did miraculously make good on her part of the bargain and reunite him with Sara Falk. Thinking of the man, and her claim that he had been responsible for all the dead men and women in this cavern led him back to the number of them, and the number drew him relentlessly to the fact he was one ring shy of eighty-five, and then sleep was impossible and he relit the candle and walked to the pile of skulls.
He felt foolish doing it, but he methodically took each skull and shook it, like a child rattling a piggy bank, just in case the missing ring had tumbled into someone’s brain-pan in the muddle of broken skeletons, and was hidden there. He heard no tell-tale clatter of metal on bone however, and restacked the skulls. As he did so he found he was automatically counting them, and that was when he found out there was one skull missing too.
He picked up the candle, flared it to maximum brightness and slowly prowled round his newly ordered circumference to see if he had put it on the wrong pile.
He had not. There was no doubt. He was missing a skull too. And there was nowhere it could be hiding. Just ordered piles of human components, accessories and the barrel staves. He squatted and looked around thoughtfully.
Five minutes later found him counting tibias. He totalled them, divided by two, and confirmed that there were the right number of bodies but the wrong number of heads.
He sat on the floor to consider this dilemma, chewing a small portion of his dwindling pemmican as he did so. The dried beef made him thirsty, and so he went to the runnel in the centre of the floor.
He did not drink from it when he got there. Instead he stood and stared down at it. It was, he realised, the only place the skull might be hiding.
He retrieved the candle and lay on the floor. Then he stuck the candle under water and peered into the flowing water.
The candle did not go out. Instead it flickered in the current as a normal flame might waver in a draught of air.
“Brighter,” he said.
The flame grew in intensity and lit the walls of the subterranean channel. He checked one end as far as he could see, his face mashed to the stone as he strained to look back along the course of the rivulet. Then, seeing nothing, he switched round and peered carefully down the other way. He did not see the skull, but instead saw the ends of two bones, a radius and an ulna, still wrapped in a fragment of sleeve. He reached in and grasped them, and tugged. They were wedged in a wrinkle in the stone channel and did not come easy.
He pulled harder and then harder again, until he realised something was locking them in place. He pushed the candle back underwater and managed to squint down the channel and see that what was wedging them was the missing skull. He tried to reach it, but his arm was not long enough, his fingertips brushing the curve of bone but unable to get any purchase. He gripped the arm bones and pulled with more strength, twisting and levering them as much as he could until something cracked and the skull came loose from the cranny it was wedged in and was swept permanently out of reach by the flow, as the bones broke free and came out of the water so suddenly that he fell backwards. He stared at his catch, a whole skeletal forearm and the bones of the attached hand, balled up in the twisted remnants of the sleeve end. And among them was the unmistakeable gold band of the last missing ring.
He was so surprised and strangely pleased by this small victory that he laughed in delight, his merriment ringing round the dome above him.
Below him, unseen under the cavern floor, the skull he had dislodged bounced and bobbled in its own merry way, tumbling blindly along the imperceptibly narrowing curves of the channel, like a ball carried by the current. And then it stopped, wedged again, now wholly unreachable and this time corked like a bung, blocking the subterranean stream at a tapering choke point. The pressure of the current held it in place.
And dammed behind the sudden obstruction, the stream backed up, bubbling and gurgling up out of the slit in the floor, stopping Sharp’s laughter in an instant.
He stared at the thin puddle emerging from the hole and spreading in a dark stain across the floor.
Once he had worked out the implications of what he was seeing, he did not waste a moment. He looked up at the distant roof, the tide marks and the piles he had spent so much time organising.
The cavern was going to fill with water. It had done so before. Sometimes it clearly did not fill all the way to the top. So this was not necessarily fatal. But it was deadly serious, because although he could swim, he could not do so indefinitely. He needed something to hold on to, something that floated.
All he had were the barrel staves and the wooden frame of the mirror. He worked fast. Using the belts he’d reclaimed, and twisting rags into ropes, he lashed together the curved wooden slats, using the mirror as a base to tie them too. He ended up with an ungainly rectangular pallet, not big enough to call a raft, maybe four foot by three foot and eighteen inches in depth. It wasn’t something to sit on, but it would do, he hoped, to cling to if the water kept rising.
He had taken the precaution of collecting his pile of candles and jamming them about his person, wedged into boot-tops, pockets and waistcoat. By the time he’d done this and built his diminutive liferaft, the water was as high as his calves. He thought perhaps it was slowing, but as he sat on the long end of the propped up raft, he realised it had only slowed because the walls of the pear-shaped cone were widening and the increased volume was having a consequent effect on the apparent rate of rise in the water level.
And worse than that, he realised, the water was very cold. He was quite as likely to succumb to exposure as drown.
He wished he hadn’t laughed so merrily all those long minutes ago. Somehow the dark water rising around him felt like a punishment for that immoderate moment of optimism.
If Sharp had believed in gods (which he didn’t, gods being much more mundane and imaginary things than the arcane realities he dealt with on a regular basis) he might have thought they were punishing him for his one unguarded flash of hubris.
He extinguished the candle and composed himself to wait and see if the water would stop.
There was a quiet and deceptively gentle burbling as the now unseen water kept welling out of the cut in the floor. The only other sound in the perfect darkness was a single word.
“Sara.”
Which was either an apology or perhaps as close to a prayer as a man without a god could get.