Chapter XXXII
XXXII
WE DESCEND AS THE DOOR FOLDS CLOSED BEHIND US, the woman and child leading. I find myself stooping, despite not technically needing to. Tighter than most of the tunnels we’ve been using, I can’t move more than a step or two to the left or right without hitting my head against the sloping roof.
“Where are we going?” I ask the question to the stranger’s back as we reach the bottom, taking careful note of our direction.
“To meet Netiqret.” The response is calm but brooks no follow-up.
We walk for minutes, taking several turns and moving into a section I haven’t been through yet. My mental map remains accurate, though, and my time at the Catenan Academy did nothing if not improve my memory for mazes. We will be able to get back out, with or without our current guide.
“These tunnels are a lot lower than the others.” Ahmose scowls and jerks away as his shaven head grazes the roof.
It’s small, but ahead, the woman twitches. Vek. A barely noticeable hesitation, but it’s clearly in response to Ahmose’s mutter. She knows we’ve had previous access to the tunnel network now.
“They were not made for the likes of us,” she says eventually.
Before I can ask what she means, we turn a corner and she brings us to a halt. The girl moves to the side of the tunnel, running her hands over the smooth black surface. To my surprise, a series of previously invisible glyphs abruptly glow there.
“What do you think?” I’ve dropped back slightly, murmur the words to Ahmose as our guide moves the child aside with a light touch to the shoulder, crouches, and starts pressing the symbols.
Ahmose’s gaze flashes nervously to the young girl. “I think she’s a Westerner.”
“Why?”
“Sometimes you can just tell.”
The woman finishes inputting her sequence and the dark stone slides away with a low grinding, revealing not more illuminated triangular tunnel but instead a grey stone passageway, clean-cut but unpolished, barely four foot high and not quite as wide.
“Through here.” The woman lets the girl go first, then follows her on hands and knees. “Quickly,” she snaps back brusquely as Ahmose and I look at each other. “The entrance will close in a few seconds.”
We follow, me bringing up the rear and barely getting inside before the obsidian grinds shut again. It’s not as utterly dark as it first appeared in here, I’m relieved to find; there’s some distant source of light up ahead, allowing Ahmose’s crawling in front of me to resolve in faint silhouette.
I take some steadying breaths as we clamber our way forward, the stone rough beneath my palms. Caeror’s maps never showed anything like this. On the one hand, that’s a concern; I’m going to have to take even more careful note of every turn we take from here on out.
On the other, it means Netiqret knows more about the city than I do. Which is exactly what I need.
After a minute there’s a rushing sound, faint at first but growing steadily louder.
An enclosed, thundering echo. I’m just about to call questioningly over it when the increasing light around us gives way to a massive cavern, lit entirely in the same green as Neter-khertet.
Far to our right is the source of the overwhelming noise: a constant torrent of water, crashing from the enveloping darkness above into a fast-flowing river perhaps a hundred feet wide that slides past us before, farther to our left, another deluge from the void above violently feeds it.
I peer in both directions. There are at least three other waterfalls that I can see.
“Each of you hold one of these. Do not lose it. I do not have more.” The woman is pressing something into my hand.
There’s a flush of energy, and when I look down I discover a scarab amulet sitting in my palm, near enough identical to the two still bound around my arm and hidden by my clothing.
I close my fist around it tightly, covering my surprise and hoping she doesn’t notice Ahmose’s pointed look at me as he sees what he’s been given.
“Stay as far away from the water as you can. Move quickly.” Our guide barks it over the roar, then sets off before either Ahmose or I can react further.
The grey, scarred stone underfoot becomes treacherously slippery as we edge closer to the nearest of the pillars of water, the constant fine mist from its exploding against the river highlighted in green, and suddenly thick and damp against my exposed skin as we hug the wall and begin moving through it.
With increasing intensity, it’s accompanied by a stinging sensation. I wipe my face anxiously, but the moisture is replaced within seconds. My lungs burn as I inhale it, and I cough.
“Ka-sheut,” curses Ahmose in a rasp behind me, having much the same reaction. “What is this?”
“Just keep moving,” the woman calls from ahead of us, a slight rasp to her voice. “It is only temporary.”
With little choice we press on, soon making it past the edge of the haze.
We navigate two more clouds, coughing and rasping, the cavern’s length stretching on, before finally the river begins to shrink, smaller culverts angling off the main flow and leeching its water into dark holes in the wall.
Thin, ungainly bridges allow us to cross these side-streams, though we do so with plenty of caution.
Even the woman guiding us seems not to trust the ancient-looking, cracked grey stone beneath our feet.
As we cross another and round a bend in the cavern, Ahmose suddenly slows ahead of me.
“Ka take us,” he murmurs. “Who could make such a thing?”
I follow his gaze. Slow as well. “The better question is, who could destroy it?” I mutter.
Up ahead, the cavern finally ends, but not in a wall like the ones around us.
Instead the way is clogged by rubble and wreckage, great boulders surrounding the rusting remains of some kind of massive construction.
Steel thicker than a man’s body juts twisted and crumpled from the stone, snaking upward into the concealing gloom.
Only its base remains clear, several more holes sucking the remaining water greedily into their darkness.
Our guide hasn’t paused, is apparently unfazed by the sight as she angles us toward the debris that, I realise, will allow us to clamber across to the other side of the flow. I push Ahmose gently back into motion. Heart quickening.
It’s been hard to tell for certain but if my mental map is right, we’ve been following the path of the Infernis above.
This might be a way to the east.
I examine the ruins of the massive device as we draw closer.
Hints of huge cogs in amongst it all, though everything is so damaged and corroded it’s hard to tell.
It reminds me a little of the sketches I’ve seen of some of the great machines the Hierarchy built with Will, the ones used in mining and other areas I’ve had no cause to see in person.
We studied them at the Academy. Emissa once noted one of them appeared to be a giant middle finger, constantly raising from and retracting into a clenched hand.
Praeceptor Nequias was furious for the rest of the class when none of us—not even Iro—could restrain our smirks whenever he referred us to the diagram.
The sight, the memory, brings a twinge. Is the version of me in Res relaxing somewhere with Emissa, right now?
Laughing with Callidus and Eidhin? Or did he somehow manage to win the Iudicium and find a peaceful escape to the embassy in Jatiere?
Caeror’s words ring true again and again as I navigate this place, this world.
Once, I would have given anything to be free of the Hierarchy.
But things can always be worse.
I take a deep, acidic breath and square my shoulders, following the woman and child as they begin the somewhat precarious journey across the rubble. I may not like where I have ended up, but without me, there will be no better life—here or in Res—if I don’t succeed.
“What is this place?” My curiosity finally overcoming the woman’s very obvious lack of desire to talk to us. “Are we beneath the Infernis?”
“Yes.”
I examine the rushing torrents we’re making our way over, and then the streams of water plummeting from the darkness in the distance.
“So this is some sort of overflow.” I’ve seen the water level of the Infernis rise and fall constantly in the valley outside the city, but above us, in Duat, it never seems to change.
I picture the massive waterfall on the northern exterior of the black pyramid, where the river spouts from Duat and almost immediately drops a hundred feet.
“It funnels the excess down here, then connects again outside the city?” The relative elevations would make sense.
She gives me a shrewd look. “I am told some of this water feeds the wells. Other than that, I wouldn’t know.”
I reexamine the channels disappearing beneath our feet. There are only a few wells in Neter-khertet, though I know from Ahmose that they are far more common in the east. Clean water, available to all for washing or drinking. But the Westerners don’t need it for the latter. “How is it made safe?”
Our guide either doesn’t hear or, more likely, ignores me. And probably doesn’t know the answer either way. I let it drop.
Soon enough we’re across the main flow, then choking our way back through two more green-tinged clouds before the woman finally opens a relatively small gate made of obsidian bars, gesturing us through.
Inside is dim, lit only by the shimmering green from the rushing water outside.
I peer into the gloom, straining to see anything beyond Ahmose’s silhouette and austere grey walls.
Behind us, there’s a booming sound.
I spin. Curse. Dive. Too late. The stately stranger and child stand on the other side of the barred gate, and I know even before I slam into it and try yanking it open that it’s locked.