Episode 268 · The Shelf

— They followed us, Soles said.

It was true. He heard how little it helped.

Varren did not answer. He looked at the rope around Bram’s waist, at the coil on Maxim’s shoulder, at Tesa, who had already moved half a step toward the man on his knees.

— Don’t, Varren said to her. He came down on his own.

— He’s counting, Tesa said.

— He came down at one o’clock. I didn’t send him back.

The surveyor’s palm lay flat beside the slit, in the heat, as if he were keeping something warm. Above him a shelf of rock jutted from the wall over the pillar, its edge rough with old chisel marks. His lips moved. Ten. Nine.

Through the rock on their left the knot-calls went on, closer now. Soles knew the voice calling them. Corvin. The last time they had gone down together, Corvin had come up the rope alone and told the men at the top that the others were right behind him.

Krista went to the foot of the stair, where the wall was thinnest to the sound, and laid her ear against the stone.

— How many? Soles asked.

— Six. Seven. They’re carrying something between two of them.

Behind them, in the channel, water splashed. A light swung across the grating.

Maxim turned with the rope already up in both fists. Halloran came through first, soaked to the knees, his apron gone. Zora came after him. Noct came last and passed through the grating without touching its sides.

— Zora brought him to the mill, Halloran said. He was breathing hard. Then the trucks came back. Six of them, going through the mill with lamps. I couldn’t sit on the hatch against six.

— The rope? Bram asked.

— Tied off. It’ll hold. I don’t know who’ll be holding the other end.

Zora had stopped just inside the grating. She looked past all of them to Varren, then down at the pale blade in his hand.

— Varren, she said. Put it away.

He did not.

— You told me to decide when, he said.

Soles took a step toward the table, slowly, his hands where Varren could see them.

— There are men behind that wall, he said. Whatever you came here to do, do it with us.

— With you. Varren tilted his head at the rock. And with them. They have a paper with my name on it, Soles. Yours is on it too. Under mine. The man who found me and let me go.

Noct looked around the chamber, at the pillar, at the slit, at the faces. He stood in the middle of the floor, well away from every wall.

— Fight an ancient horror for a couple of pints, he said to nobody. Should have asked for more pints.

Through the rock, the knot-calls stopped.

In the quiet, Soles heard Krista breathe in.

A man’s voice came through the wall, flat and clear, used to being obeyed.

— Charge is set. Clear the face.

Krista pushed off the stone.

— They’re going to—

— Down! Soles shouted.

The floor came up through his knees and threw him sideways. The slit opened like an eye. Heat came out of it in one long breath, and light behind the heat, white and moving, and every flashlight in the chamber went dim against it.

Above the pillar, the shelf cracked along its length.

The surveyor did not look up.

— One, he said.

The shelf came down.

It struck the floor beside the pillar with a sound Soles felt in his teeth, and the surveyor’s voice stopped as if someone had closed a door on it. Dust rolled out from the fall in a gray wall. Soles lost the pillar, lost the table, lost his own hand in front of his face.

Somewhere a flashlight hit stone and went out. Smoke came after the dust, bitter, from the far side of the rock, where the charge had gone off.

The air was moving. It went past him toward the slit, steady and warm, pulling the dust with it in long threads. He could feel it in his clothes. Wanting him to sit.

He did not sit. He got one boot under him, then the other, and counted his people the only way he could.

— Tesa!

— Here!

Her voice came from beyond the fallen stone, close and furious.

— He’s under it. He’s alive. I’ve got his hand.

Another voice beside hers, deep and shaken. Halloran.

— It’s on his legs. If it rolls, it rolls onto his chest. Don’t you touch that rock—

— Maxim!

— Grating. Maxim was coughing. I’ve got Bram. Bram’s got the rope. Zora’s—

A woman’s voice, farther along the channel, calling Noct’s name. No answer came. Noct had been standing in the middle of the floor. Soles could not remember which side of the fall the middle had been.

— Krista!

Nothing.

Soles took a breath of dust and heat and called again. The slit pulled at the sound and took half of it.

— Krista!

He turned his good ear toward the dark and waited. When her voice came, it came from higher than he expected, and thin.

— Stairs. I’m on the stairs. I can’t see the bottom.

He let out the breath. Two steps from him the dust was thinning, drawn toward the light in long gray ribbons. The fallen shelf lay across the floor between him and the others like a wall somebody had built in a hurry. On this side there was only the pillar, the slit and the heat.

The slit was wider. Not much. A hand’s width. He could see it was wider, and he knew whose force had done it, and none of the men behind the rock would believe him when he told them. The air no longer only pulled. Every few breaths it pushed back, warm, as if something on the other side had noticed the door was open.

Across it, Varren got to his feet.

There was dust in his hair and a cut over one eyebrow, bleeding into the corner of his eye. He did not wipe it. The pale blade was still in his hand. In the light from the slit it looked almost white.

Behind the fallen shelf Tesa was swearing steadily at somebody. Maxim was calling Zora’s name now, and Zora was still calling Noct’s. Above them all, on the stairs, Krista said something Soles could not make out.

Varren listened to all of it. He looked at the wall of stone, at the dust, at the dark where every one of those voices was coming from.

Then he looked at Soles.

— Now nobody’s watching, he said.

He began to walk around the pillar. Not toward Soles. To his right, along the edge of the light, to the side where Soles would not hear him coming.