She prodded Leaf. ‘Come on. The sooner you get delivered, the sooner you get to work.’
‘Work?’ asked Leaf. ‘What work?’
‘You’ll find out,’ said Milka. ‘Hurry up.’
Leaf started walking. Every step felt strange; she had to consciously take smaller, less forceful movements in order to keep her balance. It wasn’t like being on the moon – at least she wasn’t moving like the Chinese astronauts who’d landed there a few years ago. She guessed it was about eighty-five per cent of what was normal on Earth. Enough to upset her balance, that was for sure.
The rough-hewn passage with its gaslights continued for several hundred yards, always curving gently to the left. Every now and then there were doors, sometimes on both sides. Very ordinary-looking wooden doors, all painted pale blue, with a wide variety of bronze knobs and handles that might or might not signify what lay behind them.
‘Slow down!’ Milka called out. ‘Take the stairs on the right.’
Leaf slowed down. There was an open archway up ahead, on the right. The number 42 was painted in white on the right of the arch – or rather, Leaf saw, the numeral was a mosaic made of small pieces of ivory or something similar. At the apex of the arch there was another white numeral, this time 2.
Through the arch was a landing that had the number 2 inlaid in the floor, again in small white stones or pieces of ivory. From the landing there was a broad stair that went up to the left and down to the right, the steps again carved straight out of the stone, this time faced with a smoother, pale stone with a bluish tint. The stairs were also lit by gas jets, smaller ones than before, which were shaped like crouching leopards and set into the wall rather than the ceiling.
‘Up!’ ordered Milka.
Leaf turned to the left and started up the steps. She climbed quite a long way before they came to another landing, which had the number 3 on it.
‘Three more to go,’ said Milka.
Even with the lower gravity, it was a long climb. Leaf counted three hundred steps between level three and level four and a similar number between four and five, though she lost count at one point, when her mind was distracted by worries, both for her family and for herself.
They met no one else on the way up and there was no one in evidence when they came out on level 6, or ‘Circle Six’ as Milka called it. The corridor they entered looked almost exactly like the one the sleepers had taken, way down below, though Leaf did note there was some minor variation in the colour and texture of the rock.
‘Now we walk around to segment eighteen,’ said Milka.
‘I hate this place,’ said Stupid. ‘I wish we were back in the House.’
‘Quiet!’ snapped Milka. ‘You never know who might hear you!’
‘I was just saying—’
‘Well, don’t. What did I do to get lumbered with you anyway, Feorin?’
Leaf was a bit disappointed to hear Feorin’s real name. It made it hard to keep thinking of him as Stupid.
‘I don’t know,’ he said now. ‘Did you accidentally press someone?’
‘No. I volunteered. Thought it would lead to promotion. Now be quiet. The sooner we drop off this child, the sooner we can have a cup of tea and put our feet up.’
‘Tea? Have you got some?’ asked Feorin. ‘Really?’
‘Yes. I got a chest from those rats last time we were back home. Hurry up.’
They walked considerably faster after the mention of tea, with Feorin leading the way. Judging from the numbers they came across every few hundred yards and from her brief look at the map, Leaf worked out that she was in a circular passage that was divided into chapters – or segments – like a clock. The passage ran along the outer rim of the circle and all the rooms and presumably lesser corridors ran from the rim in towards the centre, or at least until they hit whatever the big blue thing was on the map.
Leaf spent some of the time working out how big the circle was. If there were sixty segments and the distance between segments was about three hundred paces, and she knew her paces were about eighteen inches long, then the total circumference was 300 times 1.5 feet, or 450 feet or 150 yards, times 60, which was 9000 yards or about 5 miles. From that, using c=2πr she could calculate the diameter …
Leaf was so intent on working this out in her head that she didn’t realise that Feorin had suddenly stopped. She ran into his back and bounced off, losing her balance and landing on her bottom.
Leaf started to get up but instantly decided to stay where she was as Feorin threw his arms back, his trench coat flew off, and his eggshell-blue wings exploded out, the trailing feathers brushing across her face. At the same time, he drew a short sword or a long dagger from a sheath at his side, a dagger whose mirrored blade sent bright reflections leaping across the walls.