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“ARE WE THERE YET?” Padg had a special whiny voice he put on.
Dun clenched his teeth.
“Will you two stop bickering? We’re nearly... over the Grey... Duchy,” said Nev. “Also... you could... give me a... paw... hauling this... cable!”
Dun leapt to help, partly out of guilt, partly to be away from the grizzly bickering with Padg. He was in a properly grouchy mood since the whole discussion about faith and beliefs. It wasn’t even that Dun was a non-believer. He had too much to believe in, if anything—his lovely burrow family, including Padg, his friendship with Myrch, making massive progress towards creating a lasting peace in the Dark. It was just he’d felt too much, been too far, lost so many that it seemed all the pieces of the inside of him responsible for wonder or belief had been scooped out of him. Some good manual labour was a relief.
“Shreds, this is heavy!” said Padg.
“Err, yeah?” said Nev.
“Shall we all pull it?” said Dun.
“No wait a few clicks, I think it’s snagged on that last bend we went round. If we just pull and pull, we might rip the outer sheath. I’d hate to scuff it up after having gotten this far.”
It was a long way through twisting, cool air ducts to get them to where they needed to go. The plan was to draw the best map possible of the distance to the Grey Duchy from the Sanctuary, and then guess the route on the way. The overhead air-ducts had never been mapped, since they had always worked flawlessly. The map had been scribed by Dun, as near to scale as they could manage while performing a makeshift pacing survey of distances without raising suspicion. The Dome was a perfect echo-chamber for gossip, and Grey Duchy spies would be unnecessary to rumble them since word of anything new travelled fast. Having the map scratched out on the floor of the Sanctuary seemed the best bet as the Grey Duchy rarely visited. From that plan, they calculated a best guess distance for the route and made a ball of twine knotted at fifty-stride intervals to run out where they thought they should end up. Dun and Padg held the end of the cable, while Nev scuttled back the way they’d come to trace where the snag was.
The breeze slowed to a stop in the vents.
“Gods, that’s a relief,” said Padg. “I thought my whiskers were gonna snap off there.”
“Just like old times eh?”
“Yeah, just with creakier joints.”
Dun thought he heard murmuring from somewhere farther on, but thought it might be his ears ringing from the constant noise from the fan.
There was swearing from down the duct. Then rustling, more swearing and the pad of feet as Nev headed back towards them, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.” Padg groaned quietly. Nev didn’t wait for a reply. “The good news is I’ve unstuck the cable. The bad news—” Nev presented Dun and Padg with an end each of the snapped cord they’d been using to judge distance.
“Can’t we just tie it back together?” asked Dun.
“Yeah, if I could find the other end!” Nev snarked back. “It must have been under pressure for ages, it must have twanged off strides and strides.”
“Better not chase back in the wrong direction now we’re here,” said Padg.
“How do we know how far we are now?” Dun asked.
“It was only really a guess anyways,” said Nev. “The most important thing is to find the other bloody end of this cable we’re attaching to.”
“It’s about four-hundred strides ahead of you on the left”, said OneLove’s voice in Dun’s head.
Dun walked, straight into Padg.
Padg laughed, turned round and gripped Dun by the shoulders, “Receiving transmissions are we?”
“Uh, sorry yeah,” Dun had been receiving foretellings for eons before all the Folk properly knew what they were—messages from a handful of transmitters in the Dark that were now thankfully all the property of the loose collective running things. Monitoring all of it was OneLove, who was now connected to their own transmitter. In the war, things had been different. Now mostly people called the foretellings transmissions, but they still called the rare folk that could receive the messages shamans.
“What did The Vat have to say for himself?” Nev asked.
Dun relayed the instructions.
“Does he know how far we are out over the Grey Duchy here?”
“No, he says it’s hard to tell now they’ve built all those new atriums out front.”
“You know,” said Padg, “I preferred it when I was a Tinkrala, in awe of the all-knowing God-like being. Being employed by the slightly-knowing-being is so much more stressful.”
Dun snorted out a laugh.
“If he said something rude, I don’t want to know,” said Padg.
“So, we’re kind of on our own,” said Nev.
“Yup,” said Dun.
They gave a collective sigh, then turned to the walls and floor of the duct, searching for any kind of pipe work, cables or conduits that might help them in their search. No one spoke as they searched, sliding hands gently across surfaces and transferring weight from one foot to another without causing twisting to the floor of the ductwork. Ducts being notoriously noisy to the careless. Slowly, silently they edged forward.
Dun held each breath and released it into the quietest moment. How the technical world of wiring and ducts worked was a mystery to Dun, though he had a lot of experience mapping it, cartographer had been his first job in life. It had stuck with him. The Folk being tribal by nature, few people had explored as much of the Dark as he had. The map that his father had bequeathed him, with its then bewildering scribbles, now had ten different volumes, and was copied by scribes to circulate to all the tribes. The idea of a world map being collective property was met with mystery by many traders and the very trading-oriented River-folk, but OneLove insisted on the idea of the Mapa-Mundi as he’d called it, being everyone’s, so everyone’s it was. There was a master version verified local maps could be added to and a thriving Cartographers guild where maps were collected, scribed, checked. The nerd in Dun loved the hell out of the whole idea and the romantic in him knew that his father, wherever he lay, would have been proud of what had been built on those early scratches from so long ago.
“There’s something here,” said Padg.
“Where?” said Nev.
“Roof box. Use your air sense. Cables coming from it. This what we want?”
“I don’t know let me get to it,” Nev ran across to where Padg stood in the centre of the duct.
BANGBANGBANGBANG
The noise and vibrations were sharp and under their feet.
BANGBANGBANG
“We can hear you up there! Come out little beetles, or we’ll need to fumigate you!”
“Shreds!” said Dun.
“Now what?” said Padg.
“Further in, let Nev work.”
“Sure?” said Nev.
“Let’s go!” said Padg and they ran farther in over the Grey Duchy temple, their feet thudding with each footfall and twanging with each lift. Beneath them, they could hear the guards being directed to follow them.
“It’s working,” said Dun, from behind Padg’s back, “keep running.”
“Can’t. Junction. Left or right?”
“Right.”
They took the right junction and thundered on. There were shouts underneath them, someone barking orders, then hissed whispers. They stopped short. There were no voices anymore, but some odd metallic scraping noises beneath them. They tiptoed down the duct. Dun felt a jerk under his feet. Then another. Then the whole world tilted on its axis and their floor was suddenly a very steep slope and they slid, down over every rivet and edge and into a wide chamber and quickly after to its floor, which they met with a bang. Dun’s teeth smashed together, catching his tongue. Padg fell six strides away from him with a loud ”oof!”
“Ah visitors,” said a mellifluous voice above them. The room was big, but Dun was too dazed to use his Air-sense yet. He heard more folk approach on either side, guards presumably.
Someone got close enough to sniff him and Padg, “This one again. And the one from the Bureau.”
“The Bureau doesn’t exist anymore,” said Dun.
“Shaddap you!” The guard from Dun’s other side whacked him with the end of a weapon. It hit him across his temple, sending him sprawling.
The voice of their commander, leader, whatever she was, would have been comforting if the people in her command weren’t clearly keen on beating them up with little objection from her, “So what shall we do with you? We did say we weren’t open to guests, don’t you Bureau folks take no for an answer?”
“The Bureau—,” Dun shied away from the pole he felt swing in out of the corner of his Air-sense.
“Tie these troublemakers up,” the commander said. “I have the perfect punishment for nosy bureau brats. Let’s have them find what they came for! Then if they survive, we’ll interrogate them.”
The guards tying them seemed genuinely shocked that whatever they were in for would be used as punishment. That didn’t bode well, it didn’t bode well at all.
