The Sunset Warrior - 01 (15 page)

Ronin paused, extending an arm, holding G’fand back. He peered ahead. They went forward slowly about six metres and stopped abruptly.

It looked as if a gigantic fist had smashed into the Corridor. Something apparently had exploded with tremendous force from the inner Well, tearing open the wall, crumbling the floor for a space of a metre and a half. They peered cautiously into the gaping hole. There appeared to be a fire burning below on what they took to be the next Level.

G’fand wiped at his forehead. ‘Frost!’ he whispered. ‘What is happening?’

Ronin said nothing. He looked across the face of the pit.

‘Perhaps we should see if we can help.’

‘These Levels appear to be deserted,’ Ronin said somewhat distractedly.

‘Still—’

‘Our problem is how to cross this pit. There is nothing we could do in any event.’

G’fand looked up out of the flickering light. ‘Why not retrace our steps and traverse the Corridor from the opposite direction?’

‘Too much time lost, and the Corridor might be in worse repair. We press onward here; there is no turning back.’

He stepped into the dark of the blown wall and, after a moment, called to G’fand. He had found a metal beam, set free of its foundations by the collapse. They set to work manoeuvring it through the gap in the wall and setting it down in the Corridor. Then they pushed it across the diameter of the pit, found that it was long enough to reach the floor on the other side. He stood on it, bounced slightly, testing it.

He went first. It was narrow, barely seven centimetres wide, but it was twisted very little, so that the surface was fairly smooth and even.

The pit blossomed before him, lurid orange light twisting in the darkness like a bloated serpent, alive and deadly, far, far below. Swinging in short arcs, light receding and approaching, forming patterns. And vertigo lapped at the edges of his vision, waves forming. After that he did not look into the depths, but concentrated on his booted feet as they inched along the beam. One step at a time. Centimetre by centimetre, arms outstretched for balance. And at last he was across.

He turned and beckoned to G’fand, who stepped up on the beam and moved out over the pit.

Ronin called to him: ‘Concentrate on your movement; feel your feet against the metal. That’s right, one at a time. Slowly now. Careful, feel your balance. There. Now.’

G’fand was almost halfway across when his back foot slipped as he put his weight on it and he lurched to one side, over the yawning pit. He fell. And reached up desperately, in reflex, one hand hitting the beam, the fingers finding purchase. He swung dizzyingly in short arcs, his other hand scrabbling to find the beam.

Ronin first thought of pushing himself out on his stomach to get to him, but he did not trust the beam to hold them both and there was no time to find out. ‘G’fand,’ he called, ‘let your legs hang, do not move them, you must stop the swing. All right, now reach up. No, to the left. Yes, more; now stretch.’

G’fand now gripped the beam with both hands, and hung like a vertical bar, arms stretched above him. He looked at Ronin. Hair was in his eyes and he shook his head in an attempt to free his vision, and his slippery hands skidded on the metal. He caught himself just in time.

‘Easy, easy,’ said Ronin. ‘Listen to me, G’fand, and do exactly as I tell you. Put one hand in front of the other. Look up, not down.’ The strain showed on the Scholar’s face. ‘Good. Now again. Think of only the next movement. One at a time. Good. Again.’ He spoke to him in a steady stream and in this way G’fand made his painful way across the remaining length of the beam, until, reaching out, Ronin was at last able to pull him up from the edge of the abyss. G’fand’s body shook and he turned away from Ronin and was violently sick.

And now dark smoke and choking fumes rose in thin swirling clouds from the Level below. And now the fitful glow appeared brighter through the gaping rent. And now they heard the muffled pounding of running feet, and under it a dry, crackling sound, abnormally distinct and clear on the close air.

Ronin, crouched along one slimy wall, dragged G’fand along the Corridor, well clear of the rubble surrounding the hole. He pulled him off the floor and said, gently, very close to his face, breathing the sour smell, ‘I am sorry but we must move on—at once.’

G’fand wiped his mouth and nodded. ‘Yes, yes,’ he whispered. ‘I am all right.’

They moved on as swiftly as they could.

Presently they encountered the first people either of them had seen on this Level. They were all dead. Bodies were strewn about the Corridor as if hurled through the air by some titanic force. They lay burned—some so badly that they could not make out their features—maimed and broken, amid viscous puddles of dark seeping blood.

G’fand stared wide-eyed. ‘By the Chill! What has happened here?’

Ronin said nothing, and they plunged on into the murk of the curving Corridor, away and away, over the stinking mounds of the bodies. No Bladesmen here, and Ronin knew that he had been right; they were far Downshaft, among the Workers.

He paused as a small indistinct shape fled from out of a doorway, running at full speed into him. He grabbed hold, almost losing his balance, and looked down to see a small girl struggling in his arms. He picked her up and looked closely at her, the first sign of life they had encountered on this Level. She had thin pinched features visible intermittently beneath long lank hair whipping about as she writhed against his grip. She was sobbing, and through her tears Ronin saw that her eyes held a measure of torment that startled him.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, but she would not or could not answer.

G’fand touched Ronin and pointed ahead. A figure had reeled out of the doorway from which the girl had run. A tall gaunt woman with short hair and a hungry mouth and dull eyes. She saw them.

She ran unsteadily towards them. She screamed, ‘What are you doing to her?’ She rushed down the Corridor at them. The child cringed and screamed as the woman reached out one long clawlike hand, dirty, the nails broken far down their length. The child clung to Ronin with a strange desperation. Then the woman took her.

She raised her right hand, brandishing a long curved blade, crusty with dried blood. ‘Animals! You’re not content with me, you take her too—’

‘She ran into—’ Ronin began, but the woman was not listening.

‘Taking her off to some dark room, were you? Get away!’ she screamed, and whirled, pulling the girl behind her back along the Corridor, disappearing through the doorway from which they both had emerged. Ronin still felt the clutch of the girl, felt from far away his lost sister’s arms around him.

He began to run, calling, ‘Come on!’ over his shoulder, and heard G’fand coming after him. Bursting through the doorway.

Dim and smoky. Rooms much smaller than Upshaft. Three rooms to a quarters, two or three families. The rooms were a shambles. Broken furniture, shards of pottery, ripped fabric, the floor slippery-sticky with an indistinguishable amalgam of liquids. Nothing moved here and they went on into the second.

Ronin saw an arm protruding from a pile of refuse. He drew his blade and uncovered the body. It was a Worker, thick chest and arms, squat. By his outstretched hand was a heavy lever, ripped from a Machine, obviously used as a club. He turned the body. The Worker’s chest was a pulpy mass and there was so much blood that they could not count the number of times he had been stabbed.

‘Frost!’ he muttered. ‘Have they all gone mad?’

G’fand turned his head away.

They moved into the last room. A lamp burned, hung from the ceiling, swaying slightly so that shadows moved and perspective was shattered.

The woman knelt on a bed at the rear wall. A washstand had been knocked over. The woman grasped the sobbing girl in one hand, and with the other arm, the hand still gripping the blade so hard that the knuckles were white, she held a limp figure to her. Her eyes were wide and staring blankly. A thin line of spittle drooled from a corner of her mouth. They paused just inside the doorway.

‘Fiends!’ she cried. ‘One more step an’ you’ll get what your friend out there got!’

G’fand stared at her and choked. ‘You did that?’

She laughed, a throaty, chilling sound, and her eyes rolled madly in their sockets. The girl struggled to get free. ‘Aye, that. Surprised, are ya, well so was he!’ Her eyes wavered and dropped for an instant to the head of the small figure she was cradling.

‘See,’ she wailed. ‘Look upon your work! Fiends’ work!’ And she turned the limp figure, and they saw a thin young boy, perhaps somewhat older than the girl, same dark pinched features. ‘See how you have defiled my son! See how you have taken his life!’ Her voice rose, and quickly she clutched the boy back to her. Strength seemed to flood into her then, and she drew herself up defiantly. ‘You’ll get no satisfaction here! Not this time!’

Too late Ronin realized that she had spied his drawn sword. Too late he divined her intent. She pulled the girl to her, the child’s eyes round and staring, a high keening coming from her open mouth, and as Ronin leapt she drew the long curving blade across the girl’s trembling throat. A gout of blood erupted and the keening became a thick gurgle, and she twisted the body behind her so that he fell atop her.

But the blade was now behind him, out of his line of vision. He dropped his sword to free his hands. He twisted to find the knife before it found him.

He was aware of her arm moving swiftly and then he felt her convulse violently under him, arched and stiffened. A smile came to her face at the same time the trickle of blood did. He looked down to see the knife plunged hilt deep into her side. He tried to withdraw it, but her fist, locked in a death grip, would not give up the hilt. A kind of relief suffused her face. Then he felt a spreading wetness, hot and sickening.

He backed off the bed on his knees. A sudden dizziness threatened to overwhelm him. Reflexively, he retrieved his sword. G’fand moved to the edge of the bed. ‘What—?’ But Ronin waved him wordlessly away. ‘Out!’ he managed to gasp.

‘But—’

‘Out!’ he bellowed. And they stumbled through the reeking rooms out into the Corridor, raced along its curving length.

They almost overran the familiar bulge of a Lift’s doors, and heaving them apart they pitched inside, closing the doors behind them.

In warm darkness they sat, panting, and listened to the soft silence as their pulses slowed and breathing returned to normal. It seemed like a long time.

Presently Ronin heard G’fand stir.

‘I have that trapped feeling again, as if the walls are closing in on me. The Freehold is dying, it’s all coming apart.’ He shifted. ‘How far Downshaft are we?’

Ronin stood and moved his fingers over the Lift’s control panel. He pressed a sphere and the doors opened, closed again. ‘According to the Lift, the seventy-first Level. Perhaps we can take it all the way to the ninety-fifth.’

‘Is that all you can think of,’ G’fand said accusingly, ‘after all we have witnessed. The Lower Levels are going—the Workers murdering one another—total madness!’

There was no response from Ronin. ‘By the Chill, you are like ice,’ G’fand said bitterly. ‘Nothing affects you! We have just seen things that have wrenched my stomach. What flows through your veins? Surely not blood!’

Ronin looked down at him, his colourless eyes barely discernible, and said, ‘You are free, as you always were, to return Upshaft, to attempt even to reach the surface.’

G’fand put his head down and would not meet Ronin’s gaze. Their harsh breathing was all that could be heard for a while.

When he was certain that G’fand would stay, he punched the sphere marked ‘ninety-five’. It glowed and they commenced to sink rapidly and smoothly Downshaft. G’fand stood up. The Lift hummed. Ronin drew his dagger. The Lift sighed to a halt. The doors opened soundlessly.

He had assumed that since no Lift they had been in went as far as the ninety-ninth Level, they would be obliged to take a Stairwell the rest of the way. He saw now that he had been mistaken.

There was no Corridor. They stood instead upon a metal-grillwork scaffold arcing away from them on either side until it was lost to view in the haze.

Space. Where the inner wall of the Corridor should have been was enormous space. Ronin had never seen so much open space. G’fand stared with his mouth partly open.

They moved slowly to the low metal railing that ran around the inner edge of the scaffolding. And looked down.

Immense geometric shapes, some simple, others extremely complex, all stupefying in size, studded the vast gallery below them. And now Ronin knew why the Lifts descended only as far as the ninety-fifth Level. They were peering down into an area four Levels high. Perhaps the sides of the gallery themselves were Machines. The life of the Freehold, he thought. Without these we die.

A deep humming filled the air, permeating it so that it seemed to flutter before their eyes. Soft blue haze hung in the air, trembling minutely. Light came from an unidentifiable source, lost somewhere above them. It was very warm, and a sharp, pungent smell, not at all disagreeable, floated on the air. Over the droning of the Machines they could just make out, now and then, the faint chatter of voices. Oddly, the sound heartened them.

They began to walk along the scaffold and at length they came upon a square opening cut into the outer edge abutting the sheer wall. Ronin looked down. A vertical ladder stretched away into the haze. It appeared clear. They descended, Ronin holding the dagger in his mouth, teeth locked on the hilt. As they went, they passed other scaffolds at regular intervals. They were deserted. He counted seven before they reached the floor of the gallery.

The thrumming was more insistent here, seeping up through the soles of their boots into their legs. The close air smelled of artificial heat and what Ronin knew to be lubricant. He had smelled it enough on Neers. The Machines rose all about them, a lush humid forest, strange and compelling. The light was dimmer, the blue haze thicker.

Off to their left, three Neers stood debating, their voices smeared by the background sounds. The air hung like sheets.