The Cache, James Brogden [ebook e reader TXT] 📗

‘Can you hide me?’

He shook his head. ‘Domitia and I have an understanding, but I am of no hall and so my influence is limited. I will not detain you, but that is the most I can offer.’

‘Thanks for nothing.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’ll have my tech back.’ When he hesitated, she waved her knife. ‘Let’s you and I have an understanding too, then – a quarter of whatever I find, or else I see how much damage I can do to your funny little tubes before the arbiters get me.’

He laughed, and it sounded like stones rattling in a bucket. ‘Half. I will input the cache’s coordinates so that the Seal directs you to it.’

‘Done.’

He made his adjustments to the device’s sliding switches, muttering in his arcane machine language, and returned it to her. She saw now that rather than a medallion it was a compass, suspended in a gimbal of rings that allowed it to rotate in three dimensions.

‘It will now point to the cache at all times,’ he said, then added with a dark amusement that she did not like, ‘though it will not guide you through whatever is in the way.’

As the servo-skull’s shrilling grew louder, Lyse fled.

Down, then. Except that if Master Cracius was to be believed, down had once been along. The idea of being able to walk in a straight line for more than a dozen yards without obstacle was simultaneously fascinating and so alien that it threatened to overwhelm Lyse’s imagination, so she pushed it aside and concentrated on finding a way down to the last cache. If she could find it without being killed by crawlers, and then open it, and if there was anything left, there might be something that she could use to barter with Domitia for her freedom. It was a ladder of ‘mights’, any rung of which might slip from under her footing and send her plummeting to her death.

There was only one zip line that travelled so far down, laid years ago by some foolhardy or desperate scavenger who had never returned to tell of what they had found, and she prayed to Saint Geller that it was still there. With only hearsay and tall stories to guide her it was difficult, but her consolation was that her pursuers didn’t even have that, and would be moving much slower than herself. She kept her biolux low, and trusted to her instincts.

Despite telling her imagination to keep its mouth shut, she couldn’t help examining her surroundings as she passed, looking for evidence to support Cracius’ absurd tales. It might explain why nothing seemed designed properly for people: doorways were sometimes so low that you had to crouch to get through, and all over the Spike there were vertical rows of sigils on the walls, but since she couldn’t read she had no way of telling whether or not they were the right way up.

She found it in the end – a wide-mouthed shaft as derelict as any other, with a pair of metal tracks running down one wall. She cocked her head to one side and experimented with seeing that wall as a floor, and the tracks being used to transport something to and fro. It was impossible. The zip line was there, bolted to the wall, and she wondered how far down it went, who had set it there and what they had seen. Had they fallen under the claws of crawlers or looked on the djinn fires with their own eyes, or even reached the very bottom of the Spike itself? Until Cracius had shown her the ghost of the Spira Tenebris she had never thought of the Spike as having a bottom; it had always seemed to just go on, down and down forever. If it had a bottom, then what was on the other side? The Outside? It hurt her head to think this way.

There was a good chance that this was all nothing but his idea of a joke, sending her to certain death on a quest for something that had never existed in the first place. But what choice did she have?

‘Damn you, Cracius,’ she muttered, then clipped onto the line and lowered herself over the edge.

She could feel a faint vibration thrumming up the line, as if it were descending through levels where massive furnaces roared in the darkness. She took it slowly, not trusting the old anchor points to be secure, and paused often to listen, sniff the air, and feel the vibrations in the metal walls. There were no blockages, thank Saint Geller, and no sign of any crawlers. She knew they were there, of course. They were probably watching her right at this moment, and had just decided not to show themselves. Not for the first time she wished she had brought a decent weapon. Her small size and sneakiness were always going to be her best assets, but it would be nice to have something larger than her little utility knife to wield. She made a small detour along a side tunnel off the shaft and found a length of piping that felt comfortingly heftable, shoved it through the back straps of her harness and resumed her descent.

Gradually Lyse became aware of a current of warm air bathing her from below that she didn’t like the feel of at all. It might be coming from the djinn fires, in which case it was poisonous and to be avoided at all costs, so she left the shaft and took to a transverse passage. The Seal only gave her the crudest directional guidance, and so she was constantly forced to backtrack and find ways around blockages, jammed doors and abysses that yawned unexpectedly at her feet. Eventually, however, she reached a place where its compass began oscillating as if confused, and she knew that she must be close. Lyse found herself before a wide,