“Me neither.”
The man had given Taelin to one of the other Veydens, leaving one hand for the sack of lights and the other for his spear. It was bizarre. This man in fine clothes, carrying a spear through the tunnel.
They passed beneath occasional grates that sluiced in streetlight and sound. Caliph heard trees shush-shushing. Then the narrow slits to the upper world disappeared and he felt himself sucked into another sagging archway.
Finally, after tramping some way, the man’s oily light burst out over an uncertain precipice. The man held the netting high, revealing a dam of sorts that dropped off on the left into churlish reeking darkness. The air here was stirred by a never-ending gray waterfall, which poured from higher up on the right, over a series of smaller flumes that stepped through a vast angled tunnel. Caliph smelled minerals here and thought of Bablemum’s infamous mines. Maybe this was part of them, carrying out the dregs and sediment from what had once been constant digging.
The man was crossing the dam, dragging the light with him. Caliph let Baufent go first, watching over her not only from the darkness that quickly converged behind them but from the possibility of a fall.
Their path was furnished by a questionable catwalk that straddled a narrow viaduct. The viaduct was in turn supported by a series of pillars through which jetted the great cataract from the mines. Unlike the textured metal of the Bulotecus, the floor panels of this catwalk were poorly designed. Though they were grilled and therefore porous, they were also smooth and extremely slippery. Caliph kept a ready hand in the event Baufent lost her footing.
Unintentionally, he tasted the mist before clamping his lips shut.
The man with the lights used his single word again in an effort to coax Baufent along.
“I’m coming, you oversized toad!” She said.
“Take your time,” said Caliph. “They’ll wait.”
“Of course they’ll wait! Do you think I’m a damned fool?” Her voice was angry but her arms shook a bit at the slender and overly rusted rail.
“Take my hand.”
“So you can drag me down too?”
“Take it.”
Baufent snapped her fingers around Caliph’s wrist. She looked at him meaningfully and said, “All right, hero. Get me out of here.”
Caliph pivoted around her and took the lead. He adjusted her grip, reciprocating her wrist-lock, then, slowly, he began guiding her toward the Veydens.
They reached the end with only one close call and stepped from the catwalk back onto solid stone.
“Thank you,” said Baufent.
“Wouldn’t have to thank me if I hadn’t dragged you fourteen hundred miles,” said Caliph. He turned his hands upside down and pushed at the cushion of air between him and the Veydens, ushering them impatiently to get on with this ridiculous and dangerous excursion.
They did, guiding him through a pointed archway into a nondescript and sloppy cellar that echoed with some dolorous mechanism laboring far above.
A series of low, flat steps offered access to a strangely domestic-looking but dingy hallway. The floor had been tiled in tasteless ocher and lavender squares—many of which were broken or missing. The glass spheres in the net illuminated a rusted iron door.
Caliph felt the fumes of the waterfall pull past him and thought he could now interpret the sound as a chugging ventilation fan, though its location remained a mystery.
The Veyden guide rattled at the door. He did not seem to have a key or any other means of opening it but there was a chain attached to a strip of rusted metal that he could have slid within a frame. A peep slot, Caliph realized. It was the chain that the man had rattled.
Instantly, beyond the portal a faint sound of frenzied movement reverberated softly. More the ghost of sound than real sound, the clamor splashed and roiled only a moment before settling into ominous silence. For several long moments Caliph listened to the distant splish of the falls and the ghostly sound of glugging pipes. He waited for the peep slot to slide back, for someone to demand a password.
The Veydens waited too, frightened looks on their faces. Why were they frightened? Caliph had a bad feeling about whatever was going to happen. He didn’t have a weapon. Baufent would be useless in a fight. And the three Veydens would make short work of him.
The peep slot did not slide back. It never slid back.
Rather, a harsh squeak followed by a rusted clank bounced through the tiled hall. On the other side of the door Caliph heard a metal bolt retract and the portal creaked open. A tantalizing fissure peered into the darkness. An audible gasp rose out of the black, as though lungs full of liquefied sickness had breathed too deeply.
Then the door swung wide and Caliph nearly screamed.
CHAPTER
49
What Caliph had taken for negative space beyond the door, was in fact a hunched but enormous bulwark-like body, draped in inky cloth.
The Veydens seemed to melt before it, trembling.
When this daemon-shape spoke, a kind of “Hlnugh’dugh!” sound, the solid metal door vibrated. Caliph could assign no recognizable language to the voice and considered that it might have been a feral croak.
Whatever was underneath the shimmering blackness was only vaguely man-shaped. Caliph had the impression that the longer he looked, the less man-like it became, as if in that first glance his mind had tried to bend what his eyes took in.
It reached out, which elicited a yelp from Baufent, because this thing belonged in a wax museum of static nightmares, not here, not shifting and sentient, not groaning in the dark.
When its hand or paw extended to the edge of the door, Caliph felt his sanity slip. The paw rose from what was not precisely an arm, anchored to a hump of evil muscle. It was the only part of the actual entity exposed beyond the cloth and when it took hold of the scabrous door frame it made the metal groan.
The room beyond the door was sunken so that Caliph realized he was viewing the monster only from the waist up. As it leaned hunchback, gripping the door frame, Caliph got the impression of a giant crone peering through her window at him. Its enormous pink hand, pale as pork fat, held the casement with the wrong number of fingers, each only two knuckles long.
Caliph could feel hidden eyes examining him while the huge filthy brown talons flexed and gouged the metal as if it had been clay.
He had nothing to focus on besides the paw. Black silk in a black sewer swung in the black doorway so that only this thing, this paw, a gift of raw fish, glistened in the Veyden’s light.
The hand’s corpulence was so swollen that it looked as if touching it might cause it to tear open. Caliph decided he was not looking at skin but at raw exposed tissue—that was alive with wriggling, threshing forms. He realized that they were not parasitic worms but pulsing veins, squirming as if the creature’s circulatory system had a mind of its own.
When he heard the dreadful inhuman voice again—slurred inarticulate, and soft, semi-consonants melting into one another, he felt the blood leave his head. What kept him conscious was the shrieking sound of the paw coming away from the door frame, swinging back down into the pure black folds, disappearing and taking great hunks of metal with it.
The claw’s absence made room for the Veyden to use the doorway but Caliph’s guide was rooted in place. If the Veydens had betrayed him, they seemed just as terrified as he was. Caliph assumed that this strange reality was based on facts he had no access to. He wasn’t trying to piece it together. He was looking for escape.
Back in the direction of the dam there was no light, just the distant roar of water. Baufent was still staring through the doorway, lips parted, cheeks trembling.