‘Tunnels!’ she hissed. ‘I hate tunnels. Pits, caves. Dark-always dark-rooms. Where is he leading us? We’ve passed countless ramps leading to higher levels-what is the fool looking for?’
Rautos had no answers, so he said nothing.
Behind Breath, Sheb and Nappet were bickering. Those two would come to blows soon; they were too much alike. Both vicious, both fundamentally amoral, both born betrayers. Rautos wished they would kill each other-they would not be missed.
‘Ah!’ cried Taxilian. ‘Found it!’
Rautos moved up to the man’s side. They stood at the threshold of a vast eight-walled chamber. A narrow ledge encircled it level with the passage they had just traversed. The actual floor was lost in darkness below. Taxilian edged out to the right, lifting his lantern.
The monstrous mechanism filling the centre of the expanse towered past level after level-only a few with balconies to match the one they were on-until it vanished high overhead. It seemed to be constructed entirely of metal, gleaming like brass and the purest iron, eight cylinders each the size of a city tower. Spigots jutted out from bolted collars that fastened the segments every second level, and attached to these were black, pliant ropes of some sort that reached out like the strands of an abandoned spider’s web, converging on huge boxes of metal affixed to the walls. Peering downward, Rautos could just make out a change in the configuration of the towers, as if each one sat upon a beehive dome.
His gaze caught and held upon one piece of metal, bent so perfectly between two fittings, and he frowned as if silts had been brushed from some deeply submerged memory. He groped towards it, fighting back a whimper, and then the blinding clouds returned, and he was swept away once more. He reeled and would have fallen from the ledge had not Breath roughly pulled him back.
‘Idiot! Do you want to kill yourself?’
He shook his head. ‘Sorry. Thank you.’
‘Don’t bother. I acted on instinct. If I’d thought about it, I probably would have let you go. You’re nothing to me, fat old man. Nothing. No one is, not here, not one of you.’
She had raised her voice to make certain everyone else heard her last words.
Sheb snorted. ‘Bitch needs a lesson or two, I think.’
Breath spun to face him. ‘Hungry for a curse, are you? What part of your body do you want to rot off first? Maybe I’ll do the choosing-’
‘Set your magic on me, woman, and I will throttle you.’
She laughed, turned away. ‘Play with Asane if you have the need.’
Rautos, after a few deep, calming breaths, set out after Taxilian, who had begun walking round the ledge, eyes fixed on the edifice.
‘It’s an engine,’ he said when Rautos drew close.
‘A what? As in a mill? But I see nothing like gears or-’
‘Like that, yes. You can hide gears and levers inside, in housings to keep them clean of grit and whatnot. Even more relevantly, you can seal things and make use of alternating pressures, and so move things from one place to another. It’s a common practice in alchemy, especially if one conjures such pressures using heat and cold. I once saw a sorcerous invention that could draw the ether out of a glass jar, thus quenching the lit candle within it. A pump bound in wards was used to draw out the life force that exists in the air.’ He waved one hand at the towers. ‘Heat, cold-I think these are vast pressure chambers of some sort.’
‘For what purpose?’
Taxilian looked at him with glittering eyes. ‘That’s what I mean to find out.’
There were no ladders or bridges across to the towers. Taxilian led him back to the entranceway. ‘We’re going up now,’ he said.
‘We need food,’ said Last, his expression worried, frightened. ‘We could get lost in here-’
‘Stop whimpering,’ growled Nappet. ‘I could walk us out of here in no time.’
‘None of you,’ cut in Asane, startling everyone, ‘wants to talk about what we found in the first room. That’s what you’re all running from. Those-those monsters-they were all slaughtered.’ She glared at them, diffident, and rushed on. ‘What killed them could still be here! We don’t know anything about any of this-’
‘Those monsters didn’t die in battle,’ said Sheb. ‘That was a ritual killing we saw. Sacrifices, that’s what they were.’
‘Maybe they had no choice.’
Sheb snorted. ‘I can’t think of many beasts choosing to be sacrificed. Of course they had no choice. This place is abandoned-you can feel it. Smell it in the stale air.’