The one blessing was there wasn’t any door on the top, just a circular hole in the crust of the bauble. You’d have mistaken it for a deep-shadowed crater, except there weren’t any craters anywhere else on that bony rock. But even up close, it didn’t look like anything special. You had to be almost right over it to see that it was a shaft, going right down – and there didn’t seem to be any bottom to the thing.
The shaft measured a hundred spans side to side, near as mattered. We already knew that from the notebooks, and we’d come prepared. With our suits on, we got the equipment unshipped from the launch and laid it on the ground near the edge of the shaft. The main part of it – most of the bulk – was a hinged frame that folded out into a kind of triangle, so that you could push the sharp end of it out over the hole. The other ends of the frame were counterweighted using fuel from the launch, as well as being secured to the ground with pitons.
At the sharp end was an electrical winch, and a reel holding one and a half leagues of line. The line was hooked onto the bucket, which was actually a flimsy-looking platform with openwork sides, large enough for four of us to squeeze on plus a little room for loot. One of the sides could be dropped down to form a short connecting bridge, if we happened to be lined up with a doorway in the shaft.
‘We’ll set it here and reel down,’ Trusko said, standing on the lip of the hole with his hands on his hips. ‘Once we’ve identified the orientation of the doors in the shaft, we can reel back up and move the frame accordingly.’
‘Do you have a robot eye you can send down ahead of us?’ Prozor asked.
‘Machines don’t take well to baubles, Proz,’ Trusko replied, as if he was the old hand at this lark. ‘They can’t be relied upon, any more than you can rely on squawk or power augmentation. No, we’ll do it the slow and reliable way – one step at a time. It’s served me well in the past and it’ll serve me well now.’
‘Yes,’ I muttered, as if Gathing were inside me, stuffing snidey thoughts into my mouth. ‘Why change a winning formula?’
By the time we were ready to lower the bucket, we were down to twenty-three hours. Prozor would have laughed at me, but I swore I could feel a premonitory tingle in the vacuum around the bauble, as if it had already started to thicken up, curdling over with the perplexing energies that would eventually mesh together and form an impenetrable surface.
Or maybe she wouldn’t have laughed.
The bucket went down slowly. A league isn’t any kind of distance in a tram or a train, but vertically, it’s a different story. The line wasn’t one piece of line, either. It was twenty different bits of yardage, joined together with spit and prayers. They’d put the strongest sections at the top, where they’d be taking the most strain. The weakest, most frayed lengths were just above the bucket, where we could dwell on ’em and consider the drop under us were they to snap.
I’ll spare you the worry of that. They didn’t snap, and we didn’t drop.
But it still took us an iron eternity to get down to the level in the shaft where there started to be doors branching off, leading into horizontal tunnels and sub-shafts and chambers of imagined loot.
‘Perhaps this’ll do us,’ Trusko said, as we ended up lined up with one of the doors. ‘Get us through this, Strambli, and we can be up and on our way . . .’
Strambli had brought a metal case full of equipment, crammed wih cutters, cables, picks, listening devices and little electrical boxes with magnetic pads. She was already opening it up, ready to have a crack at the door.
‘I’m not sure, Captain,’ I said. ‘The whispers I got through the skull were pretty clear. Everything at this level’s been cleaned out centuries ago. If it’s going to take Strambli time to get through the door, then I think we should go deeper and make the best of her time.’
‘We’re hardly in a rush, Fura.’
‘I know that, Captain, but ain’t there always an element of uncertainty, even when the auguries are solid? I’m just saying, if we know the good loot’s deeper, maybe we should get at that first, and then see what’s left over behind these other doors.’
‘Watch your step, Prozor,’ Strambli said. ‘Fura’s got her eye on your job, by the sounds of things.’
‘She can try.’ But after a silence, Prozor said: ‘What she says ain’t anything you need a Bauble Reader to tell you, Captain.’
‘Then you agree with her?’ Trusko asked.
‘I ain’t sayin’ that, exactly . . . just that we ought to start deep and work our way back up.’
‘Hmph,’ Trusko grunted. ‘Well, it seems we’ve been overruled, Strambli. Our two most junior recruits think they know better than the senior hands, when it comes to cracking a bauble.’
‘They might have a point,’ Strambli said, sealing up the case. ‘We didn’t go to all that trouble to find a league and half of line for nothing, did we?’
If ever there was a cove that sounded less enthusiastic about doing something, I hadn’t met them. But I bet Trusko would have whistled a different tune if he knew who was sitting out there in space, waiting to pounce on his ship.
I thought about telling him there and then. It would be news to him, certainly. And to Strambli.
But also news to Prozor.
I didn’t think any of them needed to know right away.
21
The winch took us down one and a quarter leagues, about a third of the way into the rock. It was much deeper than we’d gone at Brabazul’s Ruin but there was still the same size of swallower pulling at us, and by the time we reached the level of the Ghostie stuff we were all feeling twice our normal weight. Everything was harder. Just standing up in the bucket took effort, and my suit pressed down on my limbs like there was another one of me standing on its shoulders. I felt every sharp edge inside it, every bad join or rough seal, and I knew I’d have a nice set of bruises to remember the day by, no matter what else it brought. Bruises would be the least of it, though. We were all double our normal weight, and so was Strambli’s equipment, and the bucket we were standing on. All of that extra load was going up through the same lengths of yardage we’d begun with, and none of those threads had got any stronger since we started out. We might have come as deep as we meant to go, but the shaft carried on down below us, and our torches could only poke a little light into that plungey horror.
When Prozor told us how Githlow died, I’d struggled to wrap my head around the idea of someone panicking as badly as Sheveril had; panicking so badly that they tipped the bucket and sent the two of them falling. But it made peachy sense to me now. This was a shivery place, and I couldn’t wait to be somewhere else. I knew that the swallower was just a little knot of matter, squashed so tight that even its own light couldn’t break free of it, and I knew it didn’t have a mind or a will or anything you could think of as an appetite. But I still couldn’t shake the idea that at the bottom of the shaft, in the middle of this little rock, there was something that wanted to drag us down, and all it had to do was tug a little harder.
Luck’s a rum old thing. I’d have said it was against Trusko from the moment he left Mazarile. I’d have said it was against me from the moment I sneaked into Madame Granity’s. But when that winch brought us down to the level of the Ghostie stuff, we couldn’t have been more nicely lined up with the door if we’d planned it. We hadn’t, though. Trusko had just set the frame in place and chanced his arm, and for once the stars hadn’t sniggered at him.
‘This is the limit,’ he said, as the bucket creaked under our shoes. ‘We go no deeper. Every span puts more load on that yardage, and we’ll need some strength in reserve for the loot. Strambli: get to work.’
She folded down the connecting bridge and set her case on the end of it, opening it and spreading out her gear like a surgeon preparing for battle.
I glanced at Prozor. We were all on the same squawk channel now, so there was no way to have a private chinwag. But I’d been acco
unting things in my head. It had taken us nearly four hours to get this deep. We were down to our last nineteen – and that included the time we’d need to get into the launch and up and clear of the bauble.
My good hand sweated into my gauntlet. My tin one clenched against the suit’s stiff finger joints.
Strambli was taking her sweet chaffing time with the door.
She spent an hour not even trying to open it, just sniffing around it, getting a feel for the mechanisms and possible countermeasures. She’d fix on her little listening devices, tap this bit, tap that bit, move something a hair, repeat the exercise, go back to her notes, make mousy sounds to herself, like someone trying to sort out an anagram.
‘Difficulties?’ Trusko asked, after we’d all been thinking the same thought.
‘Just don’t want to rush into anything, is all,’ Strambli said. ‘Be silly to, wouldn’t it, after the time we’ve taken to get here? I think I can see the way through, but I want to be sure.’
‘Take as long as you need. We’ve still plenty of time in hand.’
Every now and then Trusko got on the squawk back to the Queenie. The signal wasn’t good, us being all the way down that hole, and nothing works well in a bauble anyway. But each time I was glad when Drozna came on and said there wasn’t anything unusual going on, no shadowy returns on the sweeper, no dark tattered sails showing up against the leftovers of creation.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t out there.
Just that she was biding her time.
Strambli had been at it for three hours, the door no more open than it had been at the start, when something snapped in Prozor. ‘Mind if I say somethin’?’ she asked, in the tone of someone who’s going to say it anyway, no matter what anyone minds. ‘I ain’t any kind of Opener – wouldn’t pretend to it if I wasn’t. That’s your business, and I respect that. But I’ve crewed with plenty of Openers in my time and I’ve been in a few baubles with ’em, and I s’pose some of it rubbed off on me.’
Strambli carried on with her probes and boxes for longer than was comfortable. She was sliding a metal disc around on the periphery of the door, the disc connected back to her helmet while she drummed on other parts of the door with her fingers. Sometimes through the grilled-over window of her faceplate I could see her squinting hard with the concentration, only making those two eyes of hers look more mismatched.
‘What I’m saying, is . . .’ Prozor started.
‘What you’re saying is, you think you know better than the Queenie’s regular Opener. That’s what it is, isn’t it?’
By now even Trusko was getting impatient with Strambli’s leisurely concept of progress.
‘Perhaps if Prozor has something to contribute . . .’
I had something to contribute, too. We had sixteen hours left before the surface bottled us in like pickled specimens. The way Strambli was going about it, we’d need all sixteen to crack this one door.
‘Get it off your chest then,’ Strambli said.
‘The locking mechanism’s standard enough,’ Prozor said. ‘You can crack that easily, with the right shunts and magnetics. You figured that out fast, I know. What’s throwin’ you is that the anti-tamper circuit’s cross-wired compared to most of the doors you’ll have run into or read about in books. So your inductance coils are playin’ off the wrong polarity to begin with. Flip ’em; reverse that diagram in your head, and you’ll be in and through in no time. And watch for a mercury trip on the secondary latch.’
‘There’s no mercury trip.’
‘What if you assume there is, and then I’ll apologise later when you prove me wrong?’
Strambli said something under her breath, but with Trusko breathing down her neck, now wasn’t the time to get into a squabble with Prozor. Huffing out her disapproval, she rearranged her equipment and got us through the door inside ten minutes.
One by one we crossed the connecting bridge, until we were standing on the firm ground of the bauble, with the bucket waiting to take us back up again. Those two gees were beginning to grind me down. I could see why Trusko had thought better of roping in Drozna, who weighed twice as much as the rest of us to start with.
The door had gone sideways into a wall. Facing us, leading horizontally away from the main shaft, was a smooth, circular tunnel. We had to stoop just to walk down it, the tops of our helmets scraping on the ceiling if we weren’t careful.
We went down that tunnel in single file, torches pushing light ahead of us, and it was another thirty or forty minutes before we reached the start of the vaults. They branched off in both directions, like ribs off a backbone. Some of them were sealed off behind doors, while others were open, inviting us to step through. Except nothing about that place felt like it was giving off any kind of invitation. There was a cold, crawly feeling at the back of my neck.
‘Someone was here,’ Trusko said, studying the sealed doors and comparing them against the open ones. ‘An Opener party. They even left some of their tools, Strambli.’ He kicked aside a coil of electrical cable, ending in the snakelike head of an inductance pad. ‘Openers wouldn’t normally leave a place without sealing up all the doors they got through, would they?’
‘Not unless they were in a hurry to leave,’ Prozor said.
‘Well, it’s good that we’re not,’ Trusko answered. ‘But I don’t mind admitting: the sooner we’ve said goodbye to this place, the better.’
‘There are gold boxes in here,’ I said, stepping through into one of the vaults, and trying to make my statement come out all casual, as if I had no idea of what I’d found. ‘Lots of ’em. Chests and boxes and sculptures. Nasty-looking, too. You want to take a squint, Captain?’
The four of us assembled in the room. It had a flat floor and an arcing ceiling that came down to form the walls, so that the cross-section was semicircular. It was about sixty spans long. We had come through one end wall and there was a door in the opposite one, looking through into a similar chamber, and perhaps another one beyond it.
I’d formed a mental image of this place while listening to Prozor’s story, but none of it had prepared me for actually being here. The boxes were everywhere, laid out singly or stacked up in piles, or up on their ends, resting against the walls. Most of them were about the size of a coffin, and they were all done over in elaborate gold carvings. At first glance, the way the boxes glinted and gleamed back at us, you could almost think they were pretty, like big versions of the boxes a rich person might have for jewellery or keepsakes. The carving was ornate and as far as I could tell none of it was the same from box to box.
But the one thing it wasn’t was pretty.
The boxes were covered in skulls, and ribs, and spines and pelvises, and jawbones and sockets, and knuckles, and none of these things were joined up to the others in any way nature intended. There were skulls with fingers coming out of their eyes, and ribs with skulls locked in them, and jaws coming out of pelvises, and that wasn’t the worst of it. The gold was worked up into meat, muscle, tendon, skin, brain, blood vessels, eyeballs, lungs, tongue, windpipe, guts, and all this gore and gristle looked like it was about to peel off the bones like cooked meat and form up into boxes of its own, just so it wasn’t missing out.
I swallowed. I didn’t think I was the only one.
‘They’re just boxes,’ Trusko said after a while.
‘But I don’t want to be in the same room as ’em,’ Strambli said, in a low, quiet voice, all the indignation gone out of her, and the worst part was that she’d just put into words exactly what I’d been feeling.
‘At least we’ve found something,’ I heard myself say. ‘The rumours said there was loot, didn’t they? Now we know it’s something big. No one’d go to the trouble of those boxes for a few bits of lookstone or catchcloth.’
‘Maybe,’ Prozor said, ‘it would help if we opened one of ’em?’
Prozor went over to one
of the horizontal boxes, and we followed her. Each step that I took closer to that box felt harder than the last, as if the ground was steepening, or the box was putting out a magnetic force that pushed against our suits. But I didn’t think it was anything that would have shown up on Strambli’s instruments. This was something getting into our brains, plucking the lowest, deepest strings of fear.
Prozor knelt by the box. The top was hinged along one side, with a handle made out of golden bone. She lifted it open. Everything was silent about that vault, because there was no lungstuff. But my imagination filled in a slow, forbidding creak as the hinges worked.
Prozor leaned in to aim her lamp into the box. Trusko and Strambli bent down to see what was there.
‘Huh,’ Strambli said. ‘After all that. After the door, and all this fancy carving . . .’
‘Empty,’ Trusko said.
He moved to the next box, lying beside the one Prozor had opened, and tugged on its lid.
‘What’s inside?’ Strambli asked.
‘Nothing. As empty as the first.’ Trusko left the box open and went to one of those which was stored on its end, leaning against the inward curve of the wall. He opened the lid like it was a door, and that box was empty as well.
‘It’s a bust,’ Strambli said, and then repeated it twice, the hope draining from her voice. ‘It’s a bust. It’s a bust. We came all this way and it’s been for nothing.’ She moved to one of the piles of boxes and opened the one on top. ‘All of ’em. I’m sure of it. There’s a reason those doors weren’t sealed up – it’s been picked clean.’
‘They’re not empty,’ Prozor said, and to begin with her way of saying it was so matter-of-fact Trusko and Strambli didn’t seem to notice. She had to repeat herself, louder this time. ‘They’re not empty. You’re just not looking at what’s inside ’em the right way.’
‘There’s a wrong way?’ Strambli asked, with an edge of desperation in her voice.
‘You’re looking directly. But that’s not how it works. Got to look askance, out of the corners of your eyes. Like you aren’t meanin’ to peek at all. Then you can start to see it.’