16
The dog turned out to be much better suited to falling than to climbing. It was, however, very good at pushing, and managed to bully its way through the top half of the rubble mound, flattening it considerably and spreading broken stone for a dozen yards along the tunnel.
After that it continued to lead the way, sniffing periodically and taking the downward option almost every time a choice was offered. The stars became very few and far between, small islands of illumination amid the relentless dark of tunnels that burrowed among the mountain’s roots. Sometimes it wasn’t possible to see the next point of light before the one behind winked out of existence. On these occasions Quell gathered his courage and put his faith in the dog’s guidance.
Whereas the population had been sparse around the chamber where Valak lived, here it seemed wholly absent. Level, well-shaped corridors had been replaced by wandering, hand-hewn tunnels. Once they found an abandoned pick, an iron head set in a haft made from board material. Later on, a wheeled iron cart, badly rusted. Quell picked up one of the small black rocks scattered around it. Unlike the dark stone from which the tunnels had been hewn, this was utterly black—so black it stained his hand. And lighter than a rock should be. He squeezed it and managed to crack it in two.
“Coal,” he told the dog. The stone that the worms in the ice fed on and that Thurin had ignited to melt the passage to the surface. A path to freedom that he hadn’t been able to use. Quell shook his head at the memory of leaving Thurin behind. The man had deserved better. Still, Quell hadn’t liked the way he looked at Yaz, so perhaps the gods had chosen wisely.
They encountered more coal as the dog plodded deeper. Crushed pieces littered the floor of every tunnel. Many chambers seemed to have been hewn only in pursuit of the stuff. Here and there black seams ran through walls, hard to see against the darkness of the natural stone. Quell assumed these had been too meagre to bother mining.
On several occasions they heard the distant sounds of picks striking rock. Once, a rumbling sound rising up a steep decline announced something approaching. Quell hurried back to a narrow cleft in the wall they had passed some twenty yards earlier. The dog, which would not have been able to fit in even if so inclined, simply bowed its head and folded its legs in. By the time whoever was coming arrived Quell imagined that the dog would have turned itself back into the iron cube he had first seen in Valak’s chamber.
Quell heard voices and the tunnel grew lighter. He wedged himself in tight and hid his face.
“What’s this?” A man’s voice. “You three, put it on the cart.”
“But the coal . . .”
“I don’t care about the coal. Tip it out! What I care about is how something like this got here. Who left it? Where did it come from?”
A few moments later, Quell heard grunts of effort, followed by: “It’s too heavy, acolyte, we can’t lift it.”
“Useless! All of you try.”
More grunting and huffing.
“Put your backs into it! Any slacking and I’ll send you all to Mother Jeccis for correction.”
This seemed to motivate them and for long moments the only sounds were of straining and heaving.
“It’s too heavy!”
The acolyte let out a hissing sigh. “Gexxan, run ahead, tell Hessix what we’ve found. Jorrik, stay here and guard it. The rest of you carry on with me.”
It turned out that with two of their number missing the remaining miners were unable to shift their load of coal any better than they could lift the cube. The acolyte, who Quell reckoned should have gone ahead himself if he wasn’t involved in dragging the coal cart, being unable to recall the messenger, recalled the guard to service, and with a great deal of effort they got the load moving up the slope.
Before long Quell and the dog were left once more in almost total darkness with just the twinkle of a distant star to guide them onward. The dog unfolded itself and plodded towards the light. It seemed more certain now, picking up the pace fractionally and sniffing less often.
Twice more they heard the sounds of picks and shovels close at hand, and then the dog turned sharply from a major passageway into a much narrower tunnel that led more steeply down. Underfoot the ground lay thick with coal dust and the crash of picks came echoing up. The air grew dusty too and through it shone the light of half a dozen small stars hung amid iron struts positioned to support the roof.
Quell followed the dog forward, trying not to breathe too deeply. Their arrival went unnoticed by the collection of blackened figures swinging their picks against the coalface. Quell thought he could probably shout a greeting and still they wouldn’t hear him over the din. The dog increased its pace, almost bounding now, sending one strut flying and knocking another askew as it charged towards the nearest of the miners, a figure as black as the coal he hewed at.
The man turned mid-swing, went down on one knee and set his hands to either side of the dog’s blunt head, bowing his own forehead to touch its snout. Nearby, one of two gerants stopped his work and turned to stare in amazement. The flesh around his eyes was paler than the general coal black of his skin, creating a curious, almost comical contrast.
Quell advanced with caution, eyeing up the fallen strut as a possible weapon.
“Quell!” the gerant cried.
“Kao? Is that you, Kao?”
Kao came across as the other miners began to turn from their labours. He threw a huge arm around Quell’s shoulders. “It’s good to see someone clean! And you’re walking! Have you come to join our shift?” He looked back towards the dog. “And what in all the hells is that thing?”
“Heavy maintenance.” The man by the dog looked up and Quell realized it was Erris. “It’s a part of the city, semiautonomous.”
“What’s he saying?” Quell hissed to Kao.
The boy shrugged, looking surprised to find himself cast in the role of expert.
“But what is it?” Kao asked again, more loudly.
Erris grinned. Even his teeth had been blackened by the coal dust. “A helper. These days they mainly wait for instructions and conserve their function. But they still get messages from the city.” He stood, patted the dog’s head, and came across to where Quell stood with Kao. The rest of the miners watched, astonished. “This one smelled me on you.” Erris pointed to Quell’s side. Through the slashed hides a dark strip of his skin could still be seen around the edges of the scar where the knife wound had been. “That woke it up. Then it went searching.”
“Why does the city care about you?” Kao asked.
“The city thinks?” Quell blinked. “No, forget that.” He raised a hand to forestall any answer. “Why are you still here? Where’s Yaz?”
“The priests told us to stay,” Kao answered as if that explained everything. Quell supposed that to a large extent it did. Kao had been raised to respect the priests’ judgments, just as he had. “It’s dirty work.” Kao frowned, then brightened, slapping his belly. “But they feed us well! And where would we go?” Mutters of agreement rose from the other miners at this last question. The priests’ word extended across the ice. No clan would take them in if the Black Rock declared them outside the law.
“I was asking him.” Quell pointed at Erris. “He doesn’t care what the priests say. He doesn’t have a clan.”
Erris looked slowly down, and when Quell followed his example he raised one shackled ankle, rattling the chain that joined it to the others.
Quell shook his head. “Chains can’t hold you.”
Erris quirked his mouth. He stepped on the chain and lifted the other foot until one of the links surrendered with a bright retort. “Well, this one can’t. That’s true.”
“Why then?” Quell demanded.
Erris met his gaze. “Because I don’t understand this place like you do. These priests are not my holy men. I’ve no clan, as you say. If I go hunting for Yaz they will try to stop me and that will go badly for them or for me. I’m not sure Yaz would thank me for arriving at her door with a long string of corpses dotting my path from here to there, even if I was prepared to murder my way to her. So I thought I would give her the credit she deserves and let her fix this problem herself.” He turned and went back for his pick. “You might have noticed, she’s very capable.” He swung and buried the pick up to the shaft in the coalface. “I was beginning to think that she might have had long enough, though . . . And much as I love hacking one kind of black rock out of another . . .”
“Also there’s the Watcher,” Kao said.
“And he is?” Quell asked, not sure he really wanted to know.
“Worse than the hunters,” Kao said. Others among the miners nodded at this.
Quell nodded, heart sinking. “I had been wondering why, if the regulator made the hunters, there were none of them here . . .”
Erris yanked his pick free, bringing down several men’s weight in coal with a black dust cloud billowing before it. “Because the void star augments all the stars around it, and as you move further away it becomes harder to build things like the hunters. But here, deep under the mountain, we’re actually not very far from the undercity. In fact I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the tunnels don’t connect with it somewhere.”
“So . . .” Quell tried to recapture the momentum of the earlier conversation. “It’s time to leave and find Yaz. Right?”
“Right.” Erris and Kao answered together. The rest exchanged glances.
“So how do we leave without this Watcher seeing us?” Quell asked.
“It’s too late for that,” rumbled the other gerant miner. “Those are its eyes.” He waved a dirty hand towards the ceiling.
“What are?” Quell stared at the rocks and shadows but the starlight showed him nothing.
“The stars,” answered the gerant. “These ones. The ones in the tunnel. All the stars.”
“The trick,” said Erris, moving past them up towards the main passage, “is to get up higher. Before long it’ll get too far from the void star and won’t be able to follow us.”
“Before how long?” Quell asked, setting off after him, the dog now following at his heels.
“Well, that depends on the size of the star used to construct it and on the skill with which it was put together.”
Quell glanced back past Kao and the dog at the black line of miners. “You’re not coming?”
“They’re scared of the Watcher.” Kao spoke into the answering silence as the miners shook their heads.
“Gods in the Ice be with you,” said one woman, her clan unknowable beneath the coal dust.
Quell paused and met her gaze. “What’s this Watcher like?”
Kao snorted. “None of them have even seen it.”
“Watchful,” the woman replied. “And only those who try to run get to see the Watcher.”
Quell shook his head. He had seen all manner of horrors since he had followed Yaz into the Pit of the Missing. One more was not going to stop him reaching her side. And then . . . well, then they would see where they stood.
They joined the larger tunnel and Erris led to the left, as confident and sure as if he’d been riding the prow of his own boat on the Hot Sea, harpoon in hand, rather than filthy after gods knew how long labouring for the priesthood in a dirty hole.
“You know the way to Yaz?” Quell asked.
“I know the way to the places I’ve been,” Erris said. “Starting at the start might be good. Or do you know where she is and how to get there?”
“So you never forget anything?” Quell found himself unaccountably cross. “Your perfect memory is going to lead us out of this maze?”
Erris paused and frowned, considering the question as if it were offered in good faith rather than out of childish temper.
“It’s complicated. Memory is the scaffold on which we assemble ourselves. We are the lens through which we see the past, the collective weight of what and how we choose to remember. Eidetic memory would make each of us merely the product of events, no different from the sum of their parts. And so I have my own, fallible, mutable, biased memory, just like everyone else. But alongside that I have access to a perfect record of all my experience. But I have to consult that as I would a book. It does not intrude on who I am.”
“He knows too many words,” muttered Kao at Quell’s shoulder.
For his part Quell made no reply, just followed on, burdened by an unaccustomed shame. This seemingly perfect man that Yaz regarded so highly brought out the worst in him—made him un-Quell-like. It hurt Quell to fall so short of the person he expected himself to be. At the next junction he followed Erris’s lead and remained silent.
While the only description forthcoming from the miners had not been detailed, it was at least accurate. The Watcher proved very watchful. Erris, Quell, Kao, and the dog had travelled barely three hundred yards from the coalface, making just two turns, before the unmistakable sound of iron claws on stone reached out of the darkness ahead to knot their stomachs in fear.
The tunnel stretched before them, punctuated by pinpricks of light, diminishing into the distance. One by one they began to vanish, silently winking out of sight. And the scrape, scrape, scrape of claws grew ever closer.
“We could be in trouble here,” Erris said.
“The dog could help?” Quell suggested. He saw Kao’s doubting glance. “You’d be surprised!”
“The heavy-maintenance units are durable and good at moving loads but they weren’t designed to fight,” Erris said. “I’m not sure they would even understand the concept.”
The sounds of iron on stone drew closer, accompanied now by the clanking of chains.
Kao began to back away. “We need some light it can’t put out.”
Quell thought they would need considerably more than that. In the battle amid the city ruins he had seen Pome’s hunter swinging three gerants around on a chain without apparent effort. And that had not been a particularly large hunter.
“Stay,” Erris said. “The only lights here are stars. Running won’t help.”
As he spoke the closest but one star faded in its cage then died, and the stars behind them also went out, leaving them isolated on an island of light. In response Erris spoke what seemed to Quell to be a short string of nonsense words. In the next moment the star hanging above Quell’s head shaded rapidly into darkness too, but a heartbeat later the dog’s eyes blazed white, a truer colour than any flame.
Revealed standing just yards before them was the Watcher, a thing of metal and magic but as different from the hunters as a dagger-fish is from a man, though both are made of flesh and blood. It stooped as though it had been made without thought for the heights of the tunnels in which it served, taller than any man, its head a featureless ovoid of burnished steel about which a dozen and more lightless stars orbited. Unlike the hunters, its design had symmetry and each part seemed bound to the next by the mysteries of mechanics rather than just the overriding compulsion of the heart-star. In the hunters their star demanded that a collection of unassociated pieces work together: they were in truth little more than animated scrap. The Watcher was better formed. It had something approximating a man’s form: a metal torso hung about with rusting chains, long spindly arms with overlarge ball joints, and hands that were little more than three yard-long fingers, each ending in a spike.
“Run!” Kao’s shout gave voice to the demands of both Quell’s head and his heart.
The Watcher’s floating eyes lit all at once, more than a dozen blazing stars. Erris moved fast but the Watcher was faster, backhanding him into a wall as he lunged forward to get close enough to swing with his pick. The dog charged but the Watcher merely stepped over it. Using a foot that was unsettlingly like its hands, the Watcher kicked backwards, scooping the dog up and accelerating it so that it went rolling off, head over tail, into the darkness, white eyes pinwheeling.
In the next heartbeat the Watcher snatched up Kao in one long-fingered hand and Quell in the other, lifting both from the ground. All Quell’s Ictha strength applied to one of the talon-like fingers found no give in it.
“I surrender!” Kao shouted. “Take us back!”
The Watcher trapped Erris beneath one foot, stamping him to the ground. It lifted Kao towards the dome of its head, the stars encompassing him in their orbit, painting his terror in first one shade then the next. Quell was scared too, but Kao was still just a child, despite his size.
While two fingers trapped Kao in a circle of steel, arms bound to his sides, the third raised a needle-pointed tip to sit beneath Kao’s chin.
“No, please!” Kao leaned back, craning his neck to avoid the spike.
“Let him go! Take him back!” Quell roared the words, ready to say anything rather than to see—
The Watcher drove the finger up and the bloody point emerged from the top of Kao’s skull.
Erris struggled down below, yelling furious noes. Quell, though, went limp. The fight had been lost. They would all die now. Kao’s death had defeated him where threat or challenge could not.
Erris’s roaring seemed to swell in volume as the Watcher lifted a sharp finger from the trio binding Quell’s chest and steered it towards his neck. Quell stared ahead, refusing to notice the danger. He wouldn’t die begging.
The roar grew louder still, a wind rose, rushing around them although they were deep under the rock and ice. Quell imagined that this must be how the Gods in the Sky took a soul when it left the body—a great wind carrying you off to infinity. And then, for one brief moment, he saw the wall of white water rushing towards him and knew that the Gods in the Sea had come for him too. He had no time to give thanks before the water crashed into them and everything, even the Watcher, was swept away.