Reclamation(60)
Jay was rummaging around in the cargo boxes. The noise stopped and he came forward to hook a pair of powered lanterns to the sledge’s awning, one on either side of Cor’s head. He looked at her, but neither one of them said anything.
The lanterns made a clear puddle of light to show her which way to drive the oxen, but did nothing to draw the teeth of the wind that had turned vicious in the darkness. She tried to read the mottled clouds. No breaks in the sky meant rain all too soon. Just enough light touched the Wall ahead to show her the jag and split that marked the entrance of the thread canyon where the shelter waited.
She halted the sledge and, even though she could feel Jay’s impatience like a weight on her shoulders, she unhitched the oxen. If the gods knew what was going on or how long it would take to clear it up, they weren’t talking. She slapped the oxen alternately with her hand and her stick until they ambled away. Somebody’d find them and take them in. Left tied up to a tree, they might just freeze before sunup. The Realm held no warmth at all after dark. No one was sure why. Cor had a theory, but she kept it to herself. Theorizing wasn’t part of her job.
Jay had both lanterns in his fists and handed her one. He’d stowed the gun out of sight. The numbing horror of watching him fire so calmly on the crowd was beginning to thaw, but she still couldn’t make herself speak. She motioned for him to go ahead of her.
He grunted something she didn’t try to hear and started up the crevice in the wall that held their little, domed base.
The cold had gotten its teeth well and truly into her bones, as they said, by the time Jay opened the shelter’s door and they stepped, blinking, into the light and warmth. Lu was nowhere to be seen.
“He must be downstairs,” said Jay.
He said it very casually, but that casualness vanished as soon as they peeled back the hatch that covered the tunnel entrance.
Once the silicate had been discovered, she and Jay had paid half a dozen Bondless to take them around to all the exposed patches they could find near Narroways. They’d carried on for only a week before they’d found the hatch.
It had taken Lu three times as long to pry the thing open. At the bottom of the well, a corridor ran straight into the canyon Wall, smooth-sided with an arching roof and level floor and no lighting fixtures at all. The surface of the walls seemed to shift and flow wherever their lights touched them.
About twenty yards past the entrance, the tunnel under the wall turned into another shaft. The platform that covered half the tunnel mouth and was obviously supposed to be used to navigate it was even more stubborn than the hatchway had been. Since they had used the ladder they were issued to get down the first shaft, they had been forced to commission something the people of the Realm actually excelled at. A native-made rope ladder dangled down into the darkness.
Ladders and rope bridges were a part of her daily life now, but it had taken Cor a long time to get used to climbing the thing. It swayed and wriggled under her hands as she descended. Although it was really only ten meters or so to the next level, it always felt like a hundred. She breathed a sigh of relief as the tunnel’s lip came within reach of her toes and she could stand on her own and pry her fingers off the braided rungs. She waved up to Jay’s silhouette so he could start down.
Light shone softly from down the end of the tunnel, too much light for it to be just Lu’s lanterns. Eerie shadows shifted on the wall, even though the light burned steadily. Voices echoed unintelligibly off the walls, but someone was crying.
“Lu?” Cor hurried forward.
“Here.” Distance and echoes made the word ring around her ears.
The light grew and enveloped her as she reached the threshold of the room they’d dubbed “Chamber One.” The curved walls were all made of the same strangely shifting stuff as the tunnel. The frames of the furniture, chairs presumably, were thick with dust from rotted padding. In the sockets on tables set flush to the wall waited fifteen of the gleaming white stones, which the People called arlas.
The really unnerving thing was the tanks. After who knew how many thousands of years, there was still liquid in them and in the liquid, there were shapes of things. Whether they were grown things or manufactured, Cor couldn’t have said, but they moved sometimes, sluggishly and without purpose, waiting for commands she didn’t know how to give. She couldn’t help looking at them now, and was relieved to see that the liquid turned smoky in this new, bright light, and she still couldn’t tell what was in there.
Lu stood over the two Notouch waving his hands helplessly, like a father who didn’t know how to comfort a crying child. Trail had her head cradled in her hands and was weeping—long, shuddering sobs that shook her whole body. Cups had her arms around her and crooned to her softly.