Episode 77 · The Third Drain

On the third day he slept through the daylight in an abandoned yard, on a wooden bench under a vine gone wild. The Hunters came only at night. Or only at night could he feel them.

When he woke, the sun was low, and he had put his jacket under his head the way he had never put it before: with the sleeves tied, so no one could take it from him without waking him.

He did not remember doing it. His hands had done it.

The marks on his right wrist had darkened while he slept. He worked his fingers before touching the knot.

He looked at the knot for a long time. A good knot, tight, with a free end he could undo with one tug. No one had taught him. Or someone had, long ago, in a winter camp near some ruins.

He undid the knot. He tied it again, by himself, with his eyes open, so he would know it was his now. His hands learned it a second time, more slowly. The third time it was his alone.

That evening he wrote: here.

Krista replied: Maxim called from the road. Lucky isn’t eating. Mina’s eating for both of them. Maxim says you’re not allowed to die, because he doesn’t know what to do with two dogs.

Soles read it three times and, for the first time in three days, laughed. It hurt his ribs. He didn’t care.

At the far end of the yard, the old stone wall facing the street grew heavier.

Then another, the wall on the right.

And a third, the one at the back, the one the bench was leaning against.

Soles stood up slowly. Three. Until then there had been one, that followed him, lost him and found him again. Now there were three, and they were no longer trying anything. They were waiting.

Surrounded.

The word came with a weariness Soles recognized from the winter camp. It named what he could already feel. It did not find him a way out.

The only side without a wall was the one facing the riverbed: a slope of earth, a fallen wire fence, the reeds. And beyond the reeds, down below, far off, the water still coming out murky from the garden’s broken bank.

Soles understood that they were no longer following him. They were herding him.

He slid down the slope on his backside, the backpack clutched to his chest, through the soft earth and the wire of the fallen fence. The reeds received him with a long rustle, and behind him the three walls stayed heavy, full, motionless. They did not follow him. They knew where he was going.

The riverbed was almost empty at that hour. On the bank, the garden’s temporary fence, the investigator’s tape tied between two stakes, a forgotten wheelbarrow with its wheel in the air. Water was still coming out of the two uncovered arches, more slowly now, gray, smelling of old earth. The blocks stood where Kale had left them, stone backs lined up end to end along the bank. Above them, on the terrace, the post at the end, the one Piter had measured from.

Soles looked at it and felt it fill.

It was not a wall. It was a stone post, as thick as a man, and the weight in it settled exactly as it had settled in the pillar under the bridge: from the inside, leaning, facing him. Then the second weight, in the terrace wall. The third stayed behind, somewhere in the slope he had come down, in the earth itself. Soles had not known they could be in the earth too.

Forward.

Soles looked toward the blocks. Whatever Leonatus meant, he would have to find a way through them himself.

Soles walked past the first two without a glance. Those had been measured; they were on the map. He stopped at the third and moved two paces to the left, to the angle Piter had found between the reeds. He crouched beside the block and laid a hand on the cold stone.

The stripe was there. Dark, low, as long as an arm, between the edge of the block and the bank. Maybe the shadow of a crack, he had thought then. He had told the investigator only that he couldn’t tell him yet.

Now he could. Not with his eyes. With something else.

The block was resting on something. Not on the bank, the way the other two rested, with all their weight let down onto the earth, but on a curve. Soles felt it through the stone. The block did not press on the curve. It sat on it carefully, its weight spread, like a hand laid on a shoulder to steady it, not to break it. Someone had lowered it there with care. Someone had seen, or had been told, where to stop it.

Soles did not take the thought further. There was no time.

The weight inside the terrace post shifted. Soles felt it come down, slowly, along the post, toward the base. Toward the earth. And from the earth it could go anywhere.

He dropped onto his stomach in the mud and slid under the edge of the block.

The space was tighter than it had looked from the terrace. His injured rib struck the stone and the light went white in his eyes. He pushed the backpack ahead, then pulled himself after it, his knees in the water and his cheek pressed against the underside of the block, which smelled of silt and iron.

The dark stripe widened. It was not a crack. It was the mouth of an arch, half blocked with sand and gravel brought by the flood, through which a thin thread of water flowed.

Beyond it, warm air.

He felt it on his face, with a smell he had smelled once before, under the garden, on the night of the footbridge. Old stone and something sweetish, like an apple forgotten in a drawer. Soles pushed through the mouth of the arch on his elbows, water running under his clothes, and dropped into a drain in which he could kneel.

He switched on Kale’s flashlight.

The drain ran forward on a gentle slope, toward the heart of the hill. The walls were old brick, then, after a few meters, dressed stone: large blocks fitted without mortar, so tightly that a pocketknife blade would not have gone between them. Soles knew them. He had touched them once before, under another arch.

Behind him, at the mouth of the arch, the earth grew heavy.

He went forward on his knees, then stooping, then, when the ceiling rose, upright. The drain climbed now, leaving the water behind. Under his soles the stone was dry and warm, like a hearth where the fire was put out an hour ago. Soles held the trembling flashlight with both hands.

The tunnel ended in a chamber.