The Sunset Warrior - 01 (16 page)

They hunkered down by the purring side of a Machine, aware of its warmth, and Ronin unfolded the crude map the Magic Man had drawn for him. G’fand ate several mouthfuls of food while Ronin studied the piece of fabric.

The trouble was that the map had been drawn assuming that they had come to the ninety-ninth Level via the designated Lift, the one that had failed. Although he knew in which direction they had gone on the seventy-first Level, he had only a rough idea of the distance they had travelled before coming upon the second Lift. The map covered very little of the geography of the ninety-ninth Level. He would have to estimate the difference in their position, a dangerous but necessary action.

G’fand, still chewing, wiped a greasy hand across his mouth and rubbed it on his breeches. He swallowed. ‘Do you know where we have to go?’

Ronin pointed away from the group of gesticulating Neers. ‘This way. No noise.’

They slipped from Machine to Machine, the bulky shapes looming out of the haze to offer transitory shelter. He took them on a zigzag course out across the floor of the gallery.

Rapidly the walls receded from their view, and G’fand, glancing up, fancied they were adrift in an ephemeral, forbidding world. He felt an odd discomfort without the security of walls about him.

They had covered almost a kilometre and had begun to sweat profusely in the damp heat, when Ronin brought them to a halt. In the shadow of a squat Machine they stood very still and listened to the voices just ahead of them.

‘This is leading nowhere.’

‘Don’t I know it! We’ve been here for over a Spell. Are you certain you checked the generator in Block Twelve?’

‘Checked and rechecked. If there is any connection it is beyond me.’

‘Beyond all of us, I am afraid.’

There came the sounds of metal against metal, a light scraping, and then a sigh.

‘I don’t know. What if we tried the second Level with
all
the power on?’

‘Um, it might work at that. Just make sure—’

The conversation receded as they crept away. Following their short detour around the Neers, they resumed their oblique course across the gallery.

The huge circular Machine stood at the end of a broad area, wider than most of the spaces between the hulking shapes. They dared not approach it directly for fear of being detected either by Neers or by daggam.

They moved cautiously along a narrow aisle parallel to the one leading to the Machine. The heat increased and they had to will themselves not to pant. They were obliged to stop twice to let Security patrols pass them on perpendicular but intersecting routes. Each time Ronin waited long minutes after they had passed before proceeding. Once they almost ran into the back of a daggam who stepped out into their aisle, and they shrank back into the shadows, waiting breathlessly until he moved away.

Crouching low, they made their way, skirting the Machine, until, having seen it from all sides, Ronin judged the way to be clear. Once more he consulted the map, to be certain that they approached it from the right direction. They moved towards it.

It cast its own long shadow, the promise of a haven, a towering structure of incomprehensible function, wider at the bottom than the top, all sharp angles and crenulations. Lights flashed along its summit, smoky in the haze. It seemed to be vibrationless.

They paused in the meagre shadow of a small Machine, about to make the final approach. Ronin held them there. It did not feel right. They sweated.

Three daggam converged on the Machine that was their goal. Their conversation dissipated on the active air. Presently, they split up, went out of his sight. Still he waited.

A black cloud bloomed to their left, the way they had come. A crash filled the air and they felt the floor tremble slightly beneath them. They heard the sound of running feet. They ventured a look. The cloud had ballooned out, staining the haze. Lemon flame licked below it.

‘What happened?’ G’fand whispered.

Ronin smiled thinly. ‘I believe the two Neers we passed knew less about that Machine than they thought.’ He saw daggam running towards the fire, and touched G’fand.

They dashed across the open area and into the shadow of the towering Machine marked on the Magic Man’s map. Ronin put a palm flat against the metal side. It was still. Perhaps it was the structure’s quiescence that had led Korabb to begin her clandestine exploration. They moved along the side.

It did not look like an entrance but then it did not look like much of anything save a wall of metal. There was a wheel to turn, it was that simple. Ronin turned it withershins as far as it would go. A disc approximately a metre and a half wide was now raised from the surface of the Machine. They grasped the right edge of the ellipse and pulled. An opening yawned before them.

Without hesitation Ronin stepped in; G’fand followed. As soon as they were across the threshold, the oval closed of its own accord.

They were in impenetrable blackness.

A vertiginous sense of space, echoing minutely. Silence, almost. A damp rich smell. Far away, a sound: persistent but so very distant that it was indefinable: a kind of seething.

G’fand fumbled out his tinder box, and lit a torch he produced from his belt.

An oval tunnel danced before them, black with age. Underfoot the floor sloped gently downward. They went down into the dark and presently they began to feel a chill breeze on their faces and G’fand was obliged to protect the now-whipping flame from extinguishing. Beads of moisture clung to the walls and fairly soon they encountered cones of what appeared to be ice growing down out of the ceiling. Some were mottled grey but others contained streaks of orange and light green, magenta and deep blue. They became more numerous until Ronin and G’fand had the discomforting sensation of being turned upside down, as if they were walking on the ceiling instead of on the floor.

At first they had paused every so often to listen behind them until Ronin was satisfied that they had not been observed entering the portal and that there was no pursuit. After more than half a Spell, the tunnel commenced to slant more sharply downward and they had to be more careful of their footing. The walls grew slimy and different in texture and Ronin had G’fand bring the light closer to the side. Masses of a grey-blue lichen completely covered the walls, glinting oddly in the light.

Ronin told G’fand to gut the flame. At once they were engulfed in an eerie bluish glow. ‘The lichen is phosphorescent,’ G’fand exclaimed. ‘I have seen the like in some of the food-growing vats. It’s thrown away.’ They found that they had to get used to the new light. Light colours—G’fand’s shirt, for instance, where the fabric showed through the grime and dried sweat—jumped out disconcertingly; other dark colours vanished altogether unless one was very close to them.

The low seething sound that had been with them since they first entered the tunnel grew more distinct although they were still at a loss to define it.

They paused once to eat and rest, pulling at the tough pressed food from the bands, backs against the cushiony walls, legs stretched out before them. They talked of inconsequential matters, deliberately avoiding certain topics that were all too much on their minds.

They resumed the march and presently the sound increased in volume with such a rush that they felt as if they had opened an unseen door. It washed over them, reverberating down the tunnel, and they perceived a slight change in the light.

Just ahead they found a gigantic aperture in the wall to their right. There was a glow beyond; coloured lights swam. A promontory beckoned to them.

They looked out into a cavern so vast that it seemed to have no end. Streaks of pastel light drew themselves upon the air, and by their uncertain illumination Ronin and G’fand were able to make out the enormous arch of the waterfall thundering out from a rock face, cascading down in a froth of turbid silvery spray into the bed of a snaking river glinting far far below. The echoing boom of the kinetic water reflected back at them like a physical presence enfolding them. They stood transfixed at the sight.

G’fand said something but Ronin could not hear him for the noise. He leaned closer and repeated, ‘I never knew such a thing still existed. I had read—it is something out of legend!’

Ronin turned to him. ‘Time to go,’ he yelled over the roar.

Apparently the glowing lichen needed a great deal of moisture in order to survive, for as they left the waterfall behind them, they noticed that the breeze was now less damp. With that the light became dim and they began to encounter patches of bare wall with increasing frequency until G’fand was forced to relight the torch.

Ronin had estimated that they had descended over a kilometre—although they had actually walked many times that—when he spied something ahead. A lighter patch of darkness. Cautiously but with an increasing sense of anticipation, they approached it. And at last they found themselves standing at the end of the tunnel.

Before them a wide ramp led down to a broad avenue that seemed to be roughly the centre of a dizzying jumble of buildings extending away on all sides, vanishing in the thick air. The structures were bewildering in their construction, each one a complex of styles and shapes apparently mortared together at random. Large windows crowded upon small ones, balconies cut into rooftops of abutting buildings, what they took to be doorways hung suspended five and six storeys above street level.

G’fand gaped. And for an instant Ronin experienced a vertigo so intense that he almost fell. He blinked. And breathed slowly and deeply, exhaling more than he inhaled to empty his system and replenish it.

Beside him, G’fand whispered in an awed voice, ‘It is. It must be. The City of Ten Thousand Paths.’ Ronin looked at his transfigured face. ‘The city of our forefathers, where everything was possible. Ronin, I could have been anything I desired here. They knew—so much, so much.’ He shook his head and gripped Ronin’s arm. ‘You do not know what this means! It is like a dream—all that I wished for and had no hope of obtaining. It is all here!’

Ronin smiled briefly. ‘Do you remember when we were young they used to frighten us when we were mischievous with tales of the City of Ten Thousand Paths?’

G’fand could not tear his eyes away from the cityscape. ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘They tried to scare me, but I paid them little heed. As a child I was afraid of nothing.’

‘And now?’

His breath quickened. His voice was a whisper. ‘And now—now I am frightened of a great many things.’

The sweet smell of ancient decay was in the air, and the soft dry tickle at the back of the throat caused by aeons of fine dust floating like gravid spores, cloying, as if they had entered a garden filled with dying flowers.

And they went down the broad ramp into a dense and appalling silence. The creak of their leather, the soft slap of their boots against the rough metal, seemed to be swallowed whole in that vast bowl of quietude.

They tried to use the central avenue but found that, inexplicably, no doorways or windows were to be found on the sides of the buildings facing them. So they were obliged, perforce, to choose at random one of the narrow, twisting streets of which there were a bewildering profusion.

Numerous balconies of all sizes sculpted with decorative cementwork hung above their heads and very little light filtered through the maze of architecture. Yet it was enough to see satisfactorily without the aid of the torch.

And the city was not without an aura, promising a mysteriousness like the aroma of an exotic spice sniffed from far away: powerful, elusive.

The streets were cobbled in stone, slightly rounded down the centre so that it was higher than the sides. They shone dully in the diffused light. There was no sign of refuse or decay out here although sections of the cobbles appeared to be so dark that it seemed as if dirt had been ground into them for centuries until it was now part of the stone.

They heard it at the same time, their heads lifted, questing. It had sounded like the tail end of a growl. They stopped and listened but the silence had closed down upon them again so that even the sounds of their breathing seemed muffled and peculiar to them. They drew their swords, glint of light on polished metal.

Ronin pointed with the tip of his blade to a small wooden door set in a two-storey building just behind them. G’fand nodded. They moved carefully along the cobbles, aware that they were not used to the surface. G’fand flattened himself against the wall of the building just beyond the door as Ronin inched it open with the toe of his boot and stood back.

The interior was dark. They heard no sound. Ronin made a sign and G’fand nodded again and they went swiftly and silently through the doorway. Ronin immediately stepped to one side so that his body would not be silhouetted by the light from outside. He turned, and shoved G’fand to the side, into the shadows.

The room appeared to be much larger than he had anticipated because it was very deep. He could make out wooden beams set at intervals along the low ceiling and the deep shadows of heavy furniture. Nothing moved.

Then there came a low cough from a corner and now they could make out two red pinpoints, low, glowing, remote. Outside, the golden light filtered down and the silence hung like a thick winter’s shroud. The pinpoints moved and there was another cough, louder, more menacing. The red eyes stared unblinkingly at him, black pupils at their centres very small. They advanced on him. Outside, the silence was a protection against danger, the light spilling like thick honey assuring safe passage. It was part of another world, as remote and unattainable as the Salamander’s atrium.

Ronin crouched, turned sideways, gripped his sword with both hands, muscles along his arms and thighs tensing as he heard the soft scraping.

The eyes, half a metre above the floor, were not human, of that he was certain. He moved slowly to the left, attempting to coax the thing into the light from the open doorway, but it kept steadfastly to the darkness. The scraping came again. Ronin was now almost shoulder to shoulder with G’fand.

The thing moved towards them and below the baleful gaze of the eyes a very dim glow of long yellow teeth appeared and then winked out. A soft clicking. The cough came again, and Ronin advanced to meet the shape, moving into the deeper shadows.