It was growing light as she hung her pack on a line and swung it into the opening down the shaft, put the rope ladder she had stolen from an upper room at the museum over the spikes in the wall, and then crept over the coping and down. Only two steps down, Dismé decided that it would have been far easier and safer had the ladder hung slightly away from the wall instead of tight against it. As it was, she bruised her knuckles against the stones when she pushed her fingers around the side ropes, and each time she felt for the next step below, her foot was pushed off the rungs by the wall itself. There were fifteen rungs between the well coping and the bottom of the hole, each of them a struggle.
Once at the bottom, however, getting into the hole was easy enough, though the inside was deep in dried bat droppings. She flipped the ladder several times before dislodging it from the spikes, realizing as she did so that she would be unable to return that way. There had to be some other way out. Her continued existence rather depended on it.
She had expected the tunnel to slope downward, as it did in fact, and after the first fifty feet or so, signs of human travel became obvious. The path had been cleared, the footway was smooth, although there were still many bat-caverns leading off to either side. Light fell into this tunnel through crevices in the stones above it, and mirrors had been affixed to the walls to scatter whatever light sneaked through, though only bats and spiders had been here recently.
According to Dismé’s reckoning, the Great Maze was almost directly south of the well she had entered, and by referring to Ayward’s compass she reassured herself she was moving in that direction, though her elation gave way to a feeling of dismay when she passed the last of the mirrors. The lantern did well enough for emergency light at home, but it wasn’t well-suited for exploration. It had been easy to follow the little puddles of mirror-reflected light, and she had gone quite swiftly from one to the next. Now, however, she stood in a small globe of visibility and could go only where she carried it. She held the light high; a flight of bats went by, startling her. The lantern fell, rolled, and was gone down a deep crevice in the stone, leaving her in darkness.
She had a moment of total panic, crouching as though fearing a blow. Inside her a voice spoke, “There there, settle down.” She pulled herself inward, held out her hand and said, “Tamlar, I need light.” The flame bloomed on her palm, growing as she watched it, until it lit the way before her. Her hand outstretched, she continued downward and southward, making minor detours to either side. The bats were behind her; the dust lessened and she eventually was able to make out the trail itself, stone worn so smooth that it gleamed in the light, as did rock-edges of the walls that had been slicked and glossed by passing hands. The air, which had been full of motes near the surface, was clearer here, making it easier to see. She heard running water, and soon after, a few trickles came out of the wall at her left and ran along beside the path, the rivulet gaining in size as she went.
Dismé considered the water a good sign, since there had been a pool below the hole in the maze. Though the water made her hopeful, it was the appearance of light that relieved her anxiety. She blew out her flame and hurried toward the light ahead, stumbling, almost falling, coming out into a vaulted space with rays of sun filtering through a tangle of roots and twigs onto a still pool. The Chair stood beside it, set upright, its wheels bent, the carapace jagged and torn. It was empty and covered with mud.
Dismé ran to the Chair and fell to her knees beside it, uncertain whether to laugh or cry. If he had been freed from the chair…If he had been freed. She stood up, looked around, finding a level spot beside the pool where a blanket was spread, bearing the imprint of a body.
“So he did get out of the Chair,” Dismé cried.
“Which was appropriate,” growled a voice from the darkness.
She spun around, searching for the voice.
“If you want to talk with us,” the voice commanded, “sit down on the blanket, facing the water.”
After a doubtful moment, Dismé sat.
She heard someone approach from behind her and started to turn.
“No. Keep your eyes front. I’m going to blindfold you so you can’t see me. I don’t want my face known. I won’t hurt you, and we can talk, but only with the blindfold.”
Dismé said angrily, “Do it then! Tell me about Ayward!”
Dark cloth descended over her eyes and was knotted tight.
“Now,” said the voice from before them. “What do you want to know about your friend?” It was a youngish male voice, a medium baritone.
“You said he was alive when you found him. Is he still alive?” Dismé demanded.
A woman laughed, the sound coming from across the pool. “Though he was irritated about that fact, yes. He planned that the fall would kill him, which it would have if he hadn’t hit the water. It’s deeper than it looks. The Chair floated, of course, as it’s designed to do. Still, he broke one arm and several ribs, so he’s been taken away to be seen to.”
“Then I needn’t have come at all,” cried Dismé. “It was all a waste!”
“On several counts,” agreed the woman. “Why did you come?”
“I came because I heard his voice…”
“Then you must be Dismé,” the voice said, with another unamused laugh, like a snort. “Ayward said you’d show up. His faithful friend Dismé.”
“He couldn’t have known…”
“He did know. He said if you could find a way, you’d come. After he’d fallen, he saw you up there, against the moonlight.”
“You took him out of the Chair,” Dismé accused.
The man’s voice said, “Of course we did. And we gave him painkillers that’ll keep him unconscious for several days. He’s been strapped into that Chair so long that his muscles and tendons are in revolt. He hasn’t been able to straighten from that cramped position for years. Also, it’ll be a while before his chair-sores heal, and before he can eat solid food. There are people moving his limbs for him, turning him and massaging him. We’ll let him sleep until the worst of it is over.”
Dismé murmured, “I didn’t know you could take someone out of a Chair. With so much of their bodies missing, the Regime says only the Chairs keep them living.”
After a short silence, came another of those cheerless snorts, rather like a bull or horse. “Well, the Regime says a lot of things, nine-tenths of it lies and the other tenth wishful thinking. Ayward is entirely whole, though rather bent at the moment. He’ll recover.”
“But the chaired ones give their flesh to people who need it,” Dismé said, desperately trying to understand. “We don’t take parts from the dead, that’s what brought on the Happening, but we can take parts from the living! They took Arnole’s legs to give to someone else, someone who didn’t have the Disease, someone who needed them…”
“That’s what they tell you,” he said.
“But he couldn’t raise his head,” she cried. “They took tissue from his back…”
The person sounded exasperated. “Listen, woman! We’re the ones who build the Chairs and we’re the ones who put people into them. Unlike the Spared, we’re not torturers. It was after Ayward was installed in the Chair that the Regime put metal plates over his arm and jammed a hook into the muscles of his shoulders. Every time he tried to straighten up, it dug into his flesh!”
“Why?” She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“You needn’t understand. Enlightening you isn’t my job.”
Dismé cried, “If you were here, why did you let him suffer? I heard him from up there. He screamed out, asking someone to turn it off. He was in pain!”
The woman said, with more calm but no less annoyance, “We were here the day before, yes, but we’d left before Ayward…dropped in. There’s an alarm system, however, and we returned as quickly as possible. I quite agree that any time is too long for a person who’s suffering, but it wasn’t actually very long by other standards. He terrified himself with the idea the Regime might move
on him suddenly, and instead of doing what was logical, he took the sudden appearance of that hole as a portent.”
“At which point,” the male voice jeered, “he did a totally uncharacteristic thing! He acted!”
“You think all this is funny?” cried Dismé.
The female voice answered soothingly. “Pain isn’t funny, but it is humorous that the only decisive thing Ayward Gazane ever did was try to end it all.”
“It was panic,” said the male voice, dismissively. “The idea of losing brain tissue horrified him. And he may have feared his link with us would be discovered…”
“His link with you?” she demanded. “Ayward? What link?”
“The same one we had with Arnole. If Ayward had kept his wits and asked for help, we would have come for him before anything happened, just as we did with Arnole.”
Dismé put her face into her hands, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Arnole? You came for him? Where is he?”
The woman said, “A long way from here, I’m sure.”
“Alive! And he never let me know?”
“Well he couldn’t very well, could he? He said you were a chatterer, always busy telling anyone and everyone everything that occurred to you.”
“I never saw Ayward talk to anyone!” Dismé cried.
“You wouldn’t have known. We saw what he saw, heard what he heard, not that we bothered to listen or watch after the first few days. Ayward used nine-tenths of his waking time explaining himself and Rashel to himself. We grew weary of the monologue.”
Dismé shook her head in frustration. “I don’t understand.”
There was a muttering between the two voices. Dismé started to turn, but heavy hands on her shoulders kept her faced toward the water. “Tell her,” said the woman. “Arnole said to.”
“If she’ll be quiet and listen!”
Dismé shut her mouth. After a moment’s pause the voice went on: “As soon as Bastion was settled, people began moving over the border. So far as the Regime was concerned, that was desertion, so they sent armed teams out to wipe out the deserters, along with anyone who got in the way! They used to go thundering out of Bastion on killing sprees every spring before planting and every fall after harvest.”
“They always say there’s no one out there,” murmured Dismé. “Just demons and devils and monsters…”
“People,” said the voice in a disgusted tone. “Just people, like you, like me, some of them farmers, some of them runaways from Bastion, some of them people traveling in caravans from one city to another.”
“Cities?” Dismé breathed. “Out there?”
“Cities, yes. Some on the New West Coast. Some to the east. As far as the people outside are concerned, Bastion is a boil on the world’s rear end, and they stay well away from it. There’s another city in the mountains south of here, called Chasm, and it’s been there since before the Happening. We people who were being slaughtered asked Chasm for help, and Chasm provided some excellent weapons so we could target the leaders of the raiders. It doesn’t do any good to kill underlings, not with a Regime like Bastion. They just pop some tissue in a bottle and pretend the person is still there. We had to get the ones at the top, and we had to be sure there was nothing left of the bodies. No bodies, no bottles. No bottles, no being re-created by the Rebel Angels.
“Well, that went on for a few years, long enough to make leading war parties very unpopular. Meantime, we’d made a deal with Chasm. There’s no agricultural land where they are, and we’re happy to provide food in return for manufactured things. When we’d slaughtered enough of the Spared to make them more reasonable, we offered them a deal: we’d provide things they needed and couldn’t make for themselves, like machines, if they’d stop raiding us and taking our children.”
“Machines?” asked Dismé. “What machines?”
“Well now, that’s interesting. My grandfather was one of the negotiators. According to him, our side suggested things like medical equipment and power looms and farm equipment and glass-making machinery, but that wasn’t what Bastion wanted. They said comfort and contentment and health weren’t important, they weren’t life-ful things. They wanted punishment Chairs and batteries to run them and nutrient bottles for their bottle walls. Things to gain them credit when the world ends. Which they expect rather soon.”
“Life-ful,” said Dismé. “Yes. That’s what they call Chairs and bottles. Life-ful. And if you provide them, that must mean you’re demons.”
“That’s a Regime label. We’re people, just like you are, and this series of caverns is one of our routes to and from Apocanew. A team of us goes in every day or so, to the place they put their useless people and the dead. We put the heretics in Chairs for them, and we put tissue in bottles, and we sedate and transport the so-called useless people out of Bastion. Other teams do the same in other cities. That way we can keep an eye on all of Bastion, to be sure it’s living up to the agreement.”
“Heretics?” breathed Dismé. “They’re not heretics. They just have The Disease.”
“The only disease they have is the disease of doubt or of being in someone else’s way,” snarled the voice. “Which is heresy so far as the Regime is concerned. Recently they’ve been getting uppish again, so we’re going to have to settle them down.”
“Who do you mean when you say we?” demanded Dismé.
The woman chuckled. “We. Let’s see, if you include everyone who detests Bastion and all its works, it’s a rather large group. We’re allied with the rebels inside Bastion.”
“Rebels?” asked Dismé. “There are rebels?”
“There are, and I’m not going to tell you about them, and you wouldn’t remember if I did.”
“And Arnole was one of your people?”
“Since he first volunteered to be abducted by your salvagers fifty years ago. He kept us informed of what went on inside the Regime. We could see and hear everything he saw and heard.”
The woman interrupted. “He married a Bastion woman, an unfortunate marriage from our point of view, because she was already pregnant when he met her, and she had no sense to speak of. She was beautiful, however, and she was in danger of being bottled for illicit sexual relations—another thing the Regime is good at—and Arnole felt sorry for her. She was a lovely thing, a Comador girl who died when Ayward was quite young.”
“Arnole wasn’t Ayward’s father?”
“No. Though Ayward was never told that. When Ayward was thirty…I guess you were the one he was attracted to.”
“How did you know?”
“You’re not listening again! From Arnole, obviously. We saw everything that happened to him and around him. We know your whole life history, such as it is, better than you do.”
“I doubt that,” muttered Dismé, offended at his tone.
“Yes we do, including the fact that Ayward was attracted to you because you resembled his mother. And the fact that Rashel seduced Ayward and then told him she was pregnant. The Regime is fairly strict about such things, immorality being a symptom of The Disease. He chose to marry her instead. Later she told him she’d miscarried, and it was his fault, so to make it up to her he should help her get a job with the BHE.”
Dismé cried, “I didn’t know that!”
“Of course not,” the man said. “But we did, because Arnole was a snoop and a gossip and damned clever besides. He was never actually sentenced to a Chair; he had us make it for him because being in a Chair was good cover. We made sure the Chair was comfortable. He used to sleep in the Chair a lot in the daytime, and then at night, with his door locked, he could get out of the thing and move around on his own. He used to disguise himself and wander all over Apocanew, cutting a swath through the married ladies and finding out all kinds of interesting things. He probably has a dozen sons or daughters out in Bastion somewhere.”
“The Chair wasn’t real? And he never told me.”
“That Chair wasn’t. The next one would have been.”
; “But, didn’t the Regime know he’d never been sentenced? Wouldn’t their records have told them…”
“Records. Ha. The Regime keeps its records like it keeps its pacts. Why would anyone suspect someone in a Chair was there voluntarily, and if they can’t find the records, who cares. We could have removed him from Bastion before Ayward and Rashel were married, but he chose to stay.”
“Why would he stay?” Dismé demanded.
“Because he had been very fond of Ayward’s mother, sense or no sense, and he grew to be fond of Ayward, and then even fonder of you,” said the male voice. “He thought you were something special, though I can’t see why. You never followed his advice to get away from that damned family!”
Dismé felt her inner gates open, felt Roarer come out, didn’t even try to stop it. “He didn’t know Rashel!” she cried. “Not half so well as I did. If I had tried to go elsewhere in Bastion, she would have hunted me down and killed me, or worse. Even if I had left Bastion, she’d have found me or died in the attempt.”
There was a shocked silence among the echoes, then the female voice asked, “Why? Why would she hate you enough to…”
“I don’t know,” Dismé snarled. “Why did she hate my brother enough to kill him! Or my father enough to kill him also! If they had known, if I had known, we might have defeated her somehow. But we didn’t know why.”
“Do you know this to be true?” the male voice asked.
“I know they were in her way and nothing stands in her way. Not when she was a child. Not now! I don’t know how I know, but I do know!”
“But she hasn’t killed you,” objected the male voice. “She’s had plenty of opportunity.”
“I’ve played the role she gave me, and that kept me safe…relatively,” said Dismé tiredly. “I don’t expect you to believe me. It wasn’t something I could prove to Arnole. It wasn’t something you’d find out merely by seeing what he saw. She doesn’t show the world what she is.”