Cage of Souls, page 36
There was a precious sliver of time between the sluggish appearance of the sun and the city’s awakening. In that span we watched the light creep into every corner of the waking city, brightening from that deep chemical red to something like old, scratched gold. By then Sergei was already feeling the scorch of it and Arves was worrying about his longevity. We retreated to the protective dark and went our own ways to bed, and slept out the hours that the surface lived its life in, until the sun dropped from the sky once again.
30
Alarums and Excursions
“War,” said Sergei, “is just capitalism by other means.”
It was during the war between the Meat Packers and the Alchemical Brethren that I made my one and only descent into the depths. It may surprise you to discover that there were wars below, but even the Temple failed sometimes. In this case, the Packers had begun to move in on the pharmaceutical territory that the Brethren traditionally held. The deal I had witnessed between the Packers and the Friendly Society had been part of an overall plan to expand Packer operations into an entirely new market.
The Alchemical Brethren were distressed at this unwanted competition, and they and the Packers spent a few months trying to come to some peaceable arrangement whereby they could prosper side by side. While the leaders were talking, the men at the cutting edge were getting more and more restless: shipments of chemicals went missing, refinery equipment was sabotaged, fires were set. Then one of the Brethren’s couriers was murdered and the obvious suspects were the Packers. Negotiations at the Temple went downhill sharply and war was officially declared. What this meant was that the Temple acknowledged that there was no more room to talk, and gave both factions permission to kill each other.
From that point onwards there was a careful and civilised outbreak of hostilities. The Packers and the Brethren called in favours, hired mercenaries and drew the battle lines, and then proceeded to murder each other with a free hand. It was in broad daylight, frequently in the midst of crowds and everyday business. There would be the flash of knives or the snap of a crossbow string, and a death. When I arose there would often be a body in the waking tunnels. The one rule the Temple held to – in return for giving the two sides leave to be at each others’ throats – was that those not involved in the conflict must be immune. Any innocents slain or injured, any neutral property damaged, and there would be heavy duties to pay. So it was that, for everyone bar the combatants, the war was something of a spectator sport.
There were other effects, of course. The supply of chemicals dried up, and there was something of a famine where recreational drugs, medical supplies and organ repairs were concerned. Some of the lesser factions stepped up production to fill the gap but many did not dare, lest they be dragged into the war. Factions that specialised in generalised procuring, such as the Friendlies, did very well for themselves. The Fishermen also had a time of plenty: the unplumbed depths were always a good source of merchandise.
How I became involved with them was simply this: Giulia told me one day that I was going on one of their trips into the dark.
“Nothing could persuade me,” I replied.
“Your boss will persuade you. He’s the persuasive sort, when it comes to having things done for him.”
I went to Greygori, hailing him out from his laboratory where he had been hunched around some dreadful innovation.
“They may find something I need, Stefan. With the war, they go deeper,” he told me. His voice had a pronounced wheeze by then. His skin was chalk-white, and he wore the dark glasses at all times. His eyes beneath them were glossy black and round. “They tell me, Stefan, they’ve a good lead, an ancient place of medicine they wish to raid. You will go with them, Stefan. I will give you a list of things I can use. Bring back all you can, Stefan. They will let you. I am paying for the privilege.”
“But… the depths…” I quavered.
“The Fishermen will look after you.” He had been about to slope off back to the laboratory, but abruptly a sharp-fingered hand was on my shoulder. “Besides, Stefan, we must all make sacrifices in the name of science.”
I said nothing. It was not the talk of sacrifices that silenced me, but the fact that his arm had unfolded from within the robe to a length of four feet to grasp my shoulder. Neither of the two joints revealed was configured like an elbow.
It was odd: the further he got from human, the more he hung on names and other light trappings of society, as though some dying part of him was trying to anchor itself to the world it knew.
*
“Some freebooter from the Seekers staggered up half dead last week,” Giulia told me. “He was raving, but then Seekers always are. He didn’t find God this time, just got himself lost. Reckons he saw something while he was down there, though.”
“Something medical, Greygori said.”
She nodded. “There’s a whole complex down there that was built during one of the old wars,” she told me. “That’s what we think, anyway. We’ve not explored a fraction of it. This Seeker drew a decent map of where he thought he’d gone. There’s enough demand right now that we’ll chance it. We’ve got plenty of money up front for this one. Your boss isn’t the only backer.”
She had taken me to the converted storehouse that was the hub of their spelunking activities. Compared to the doomed venture into the desert, this occasion was a model of rough efficiency. Giulia was in command of the venture and doing most of the organising. Her second, whom I had yet to see, was holed up with some backers, who were briefing him with their own list of what to look for.
I had been kitted out as befitted a daring explorer of the chasms of the earth. My casual clothes had been exchanged for hard-wearing canvas with pads sewn in at the elbows and knees. I had a sleeveless jerkin of some artificial cloth that was reinforced with flat metal strips front and back. On my head was buckled a plastic skull-guard which would apparently save me from cave-ins, or at least allow the Fishermen to retrieve my brain for Greygori. I am sure that he would have found a use for it. I had rope and metal spikes, a little pick-hammer and a lamp. The dozen Fishermen around me wore similar garb with many variations. Most of them were armed, too. Crossbows were an Underworld favourite, the best made to order by the Waylun Armoury. I saw a number of Wayluns around me, large and small, single shot, double-string and repeaters. One tall and broad-shouldered character bore an almost man-sized monster across his back. I had been given a knife and Giulia also presented me with a metal tube some two feet long.
“It’s a one-shot,” she told me. “We make them ourselves. A single bolt, a spring, trigger and trigger guard here. Try not to use it.”
At that point, her second came down from the high offices of the Fishermen, taking the steps three at a time.
“He’s not a Fisherman,” I pointed out.
“Neither are you,” Giulia said. “Sergei’s good, though, and he was on the last sortie that went anywhere near our target area.”
Sergei, it turned out, was an explorer as well.
“Frontiers,” he told me when I asked. “All my life I push frontiers: space, time. In this backwards place everywhere is frontier. No-one steps out of doors for fear of the rain. I cannot search deserts, so I search depths. When I was with Morlocks I go off on my own, one, two weeks at a time, exploring. Back then I need to get away from you people sometimes.” He turned to Giulia. “You have maps?”
“And space for more,” she answered. “Carving another chunk out of the unknown.”
I was given a pack of food and tools just light enough for me to lift, which was half the size of those everyone else was sporting. Even Sergei’s insect-thin frame seemed, like an insect, to support more weight than was reasonable. My lighter load was more in recognition of Greygori’s funding than my inadequacies.
*
To the Fishermen, the spaces beneath Underworld were like little principalities, small foreign states stretching out towards Sergei’s frontier. Those closest to us were well-mapped, familiar to all, devoid of wonder.
On our way to new reaches of the depths I was allowed to see the myoculture caves, where vast mounds of fungus crawled and grew, tended by the busy Fermers like a scene out of some fungal hell.
There were other strange sights that everyone else took for granted. There was a great round ceremonial room with a firepit in the floor and strange, broken cables issuing from holes in the walls, coated with gold leaf when first found. There was a long hall with shelves and shelves of small plastic plates that nobody had ever found a use for. Arves had theorised that they were books, some way of storing knowledge. If so, the knowledge was forever entombed within them for none could retrieve it now.
We were a whole day scrambling and climbing through caverns and chambers already picked clean. The journey was difficult, and I slowed everybody up, not used to climbing down ropes, crawling on narrow ledges or scrambling up steeply-sloping shafts. I was continuously being helped out by the Fishermen, who seemed to regard me with affectionate contempt. At the head, Sergei stopped occasionally to confer with Giulia on the best route, and this alone gave me time to catch my breath.
We made camp around a metal sphere one of the Fishermen had. He opened it up and there was a glowing coil within that gave a little light but more heat. Even though we were on home ground, Sergei still insisted that a watch was set.
The next day we started descending into areas that mankind had never properly reclaimed. Although there was some traffic in explorers and grave-robbers through these ancient halls, there were other occupants yet that could take offence, and there were devices of the ancients that still had power to harm. “Many of the Diggers,” Giulia said, using a Fisher term for those that had excavated these buried chambers, “guarded their property well, especially those who were at war. Don’t wander off and don’t touch anything.”
I had stuck to her heels even when we were secure. I was not about to strike out on my own now.
*
We came, shortly thereafter, to a gaping, jagged-edged wound in the earth some twenty feet across, giving onto who knew what abyssal depths. We were going down into it. Two of the Fishermen tied ropes together to make something they reckoned was long enough, and Giulia secured it to a metal ring in the wall that a previous expedition had installed.
“We used to keep a rope here permanently,” she said, reassuringly, “but something kept untying it.”
I watched anxiously as one man lowered a light down on the end of a long wire, hand over hand. At first it lit nothing but itself. Then I saw a jagged circle of stone, the floor of another level that had been holed by the same unimaginable collapse. This was at the very edge of the lamplight, thirty feet on all sides from our dangling rope. I asked Giulia what was there and she shrugged almost irritably.
“No-one knows. We can’t get over there from this descent, and nobody’s ever found another way up or down to it. One day I’ll find a way there. For now, it’s just a blank among my maps.”
The lowered light had illuminated some kind of floor down there, a good forty feet further down still. I saw columns, many of them fallen and broken, amidst rubble from the caved-in floors. It all looked far too distant to consider climbing down all that way. Then something scurried rapidly from one shadow to another and out of the light altogether, or perhaps it was the light’s own movement. A number of the Fishermen clutched their crossbows.
“What lives down there?” I whispered.
“Sometimes you find Vermin,” Giulia said, checking the mechanism of her own bow. “Seldom so deep, though. Mostly you should watch for cave spiders, Stabbers and Girricks.”
I gave her a look both frightened and enquiring. “So… these cave spiders… big?”
She asked me if I had been into the deserts. “Remember the scorpions? The cave spiders are like that: some you could fit in your pocket; the biggest I ever saw was maybe a little smaller in the body than Sergei. They’re a terror if you’re on your own but they don’t take on groups. The Stabbers are worse: less sense of self-preservation. The Diggers, one batch of them, put them together as guards. They’re kind of like mantids but half-alive and half-machine. No higher than your chest, but if they get their blades into you then you’re finished.”
“And these Girricks?”
She looked uneasy. “Not so dangerous, just… odd.”
“They talk,” Sergei filled in. “Lizards that talk.”
“They do not talk,” Giulia said firmly. “It’s just… the sounds they make can sound like they’re gabbling away in some language of their own. But they’re just big lizards and they don’t attack unless you get too close. They don’t talk, it’s all just lizard noises.”
“We’re ready,” one of the Fishermen called, which Giulia happily took as an end to the subject.
A man named Pelgraine volunteered to go first. Giulia attached a safety line to his belt, and he let himself down the rope using his knees and one hand. The other held a crossbow that he pointed out into the darkness, especially as he passed that broken, unknown level. He had to stop frequently to change arms. The climb was even longer than I had thought, and I began to wonder whether I would be able to make it. The Fishermen were toughened by previous expeditions into the unknown, from which only the strong returned. Even Sergei seemed to have within his skinny frame surprising reserves of strength. I was a soft academic who had never needed to fight for my life.
Pelgraine reached the bottom and there was a tense moment as he crouched with cocked crossbow, waiting for something to spring out into the light at him. There was nothing, though, and he waved a cautious hand up at us, a tiny insect all the way down there.
Giulia went next and roped herself to another Fisherman, who roped himself to me. I stood mute and trembling as a big man called Charno took next place, and so on down to Sergei who was bringing up the rear. By that point, Giulia was already partway down. She had a lever-worked repeating crossbow cradled in one arm in case of trouble from the air, and Pelgraine below was keeping an eye on the surrounding rubble. There was a tugging at my waist and I stood unwillingly at the very brink of the hole, looking down as Giulia and the Fisherman continued their slow descent.
“Go, Stefan,” Sergei told me, and I went. I took hold of the rope, tried to clench my knees about it, lowered myself with difficulty, hand over hand. I made such poor progress that those below were constantly having to stop and wait for more slack safety line, whilst Charno above kept up a constant grumbling. I looked neither at him, nor at the distant, broken ground, but stared only at my hands as they passed one below the other. Already there was a dull ache in my arms.
I was out in the abyss now. The rope swung and jerked with every climber’s movements, and if I let my eyes stray I could see the shattered edges of that forbidden and unfindable layer that had frustrated Giulia’s maps. My muscles were beginning to burn by then. I was finding it difficult to support my slight weight on my arms, with the pack dragging at my back. The grip of my knees kept slipping, and there was a rising peak of fear in me as I became more and more aware of the drop. It was as if, far from getting closer to the ground, every move of mine made the chasm that much greater and more fatal. I could still feel Giulia and the other man climbing down beneath me. There was no sound from Pelgraine to suggest we were nearing the ground, and I dared not look. I seemed to have been descending forever.
“Move, you runt!” Charno shouted down to me, and I realised I had been still for some time. With a whimper I managed to lower myself another arm’s span, and another. There was faint light below, and equally faint light above, but I was in a darkness peopled by all the flying monsters my imagination could come up with.
My hands slipped. It was the sweat really. One moment I was clinging to the rope, the next it was sliding through my hands, burning a neat line across both of my palms. I heard Charno swear above the racket of my own ragged breath. Then the pain registered, and I let go.
There was a moment of relief, almost, because I no longer had to continue that agonising descent.
Then I was falling into the void with a scream that cut off abruptly as the safety line snapped tight. Charno cried out in pain and alarm, but he kept to the rope, and I dangled like a spider’s victim. I have no idea how much time passed before I became aware of someone tugging at my sleeve. It was the man who had been below me. I had fallen to his level. He was trying to pull me in. I grasped at his hand, and he hooked a new safety line to my belt and freed Charno from my weight. In silence, we climbed down locked together, with him doing most of the work. It was still a fair way to the ground.
I collapsed as soon as my feet touched stone and took no further part in the proceedings until Charno got down, complaining that his climbing gloves had been ruined. The rubber pads of their palms were cut deep where the rope had sawn into them. I thought that he would probably want to take it out of my hide, but instead he sat down beside me and I realised his complaining was just covering for the fact that he had been scared out of his wits too. It had been a close thing for all of us. If he had been pulled from the rope then our combined weights might have plucked the entire expedition into the abyss in one go.
*
Pelgraine, who had a fringe of russet hair showing under his stolen Angel headset, took point as we started off into the great pillared space. The huge columns stretched in exacting rows as far as the light shone, with the impression of an infinite rank and file of them beyond that. They were hollow and, as we approached the closest, I saw that there was a kind of window in it, edged with daggers of splintered glass.
There was a corpse inside. It was the deadest body I had ever seen, skin withered and dried to a husk, face just taut leather stretched over the skull. The shrivelled eyes were shut, but the jaw was twisted open in an endless, soundless scream. It was pitched over onto its side, part out of the alcove obviously built to contain it. Whatever had broken the glass and hooked it out had also torn one arm away, or perhaps it had simply crumbled at the shoulder. The limb was on the ground beyond the window’s lip, practically at my feet.
