“Definitely the Fourth?” Ferbin said. He leaned up on one elbow — something twinged in his right shoulder, and he grimaced — to look over the side of the bed he was lying on, peering down through the hazy surface Holse was standing on. It all looked rather alarming.
“Definitely the Fourth, sir. Not that I had opportunity to count as it were, but that is most certainly what its denizens term it.”
Ferbin looked at the dried meat held in Holse’s hand. He nodded at it. “I say, d’you think I might have some of that?”
“I’ll get you a fresh piece, shall I, sir? They said you were all right to eat like normal when you wanted to.”
“No, no; that bit will do,” Ferbin said, still staring at the meat and feeling his mouth fill with saliva.
“As you wish, sir,” Holse handed Ferbin the meat. He crammed it into his mouth. It tasted salty and slightly fishy and very good.
“How did we come to be here, Holse?” he said through mouthfuls. “And who would be these ‘they’?”
“Well now, sir,” Holse said.
Ferbin had been badly wounded by a carbine bullet as they stumbled into the cylinder that had revealed itself on the Oct’s access tower. A lucky shot, Holse told him. Firing in near darkness from a beating air-beast at a running target, even the greatest marksman would need his fair share of good fortune for a month all gathered together at once to secure a hit.
The two of them had fallen into the interior of the cylinder, which then just sat there, door still open, for what had seemed like an eternity to Holse. He had cradled the already unconscious Ferbin in his arms, slowly becoming covered in blood, screaming at whoever or whatever to close the door or sink the effing tube thing back down into the tower, but nothing had happened until some of the men who had attacked them actually landed on the surface outside, then the cylinder did finally lower itself back into the tower. He’d yelled and hollered for help for Ferbin, because he was sure that the prince was dying. Meanwhile he had the impression that the round room they were in was continuing to sink deeper inside the access tower.
The room came to a stop, the doorway they’d fallen through had slid into being again and a machine the shape of a large Oct had scuttled in towards them. It took Ferbin’s limp body off him and quickly turned him this way and that, finding the hole in his back and the larger exit wound in his chest, sealing both with some sort of squirty stuff and cradling his head with a sort of hand thing. Pincers on that hand had seemed to slide into Ferbin’s neck and lower skull, but Ferbin had been too far gone to react and Holse had just assumed and hoped that this was somehow all part of the ministering or doctoring or whatever was going on.
A floating platform appeared and took them along a broad hallway with whole sets and sequences of most impressive doors — each easily the equal in size of the main gates to the palace in Pourl — which variously slid, rolled, rose and fell to allow them through. Holse had guessed that they were entering the base of the D’neng-oal Tower itself.
The final chamber was a big sphere with an added floor, and this had sealed itself tight and started moving; possibly up — it was hard to say. The place had felt damp and the floor had patches of water on it.
The Oct doctor machine continued to work on Ferbin, who had at least stopped bleeding. A screen lowered itself from the ceiling and addressed Holse, who spent the next hour or so trying to explain what had happened, who they both were and why one of them was almost dead. From Ferbin’s jacket he had fished out the envelopes Seltis the Head Scholar had given them. They were covered in blood and one of them looked like it had been nicked by the carbine bullet on its way out of Ferbin’s chest. Holse had waved these at the screen, hoping their effectiveness was not impaired by blood or having a hole in one corner. He felt he was almost starting to get the hang of how to talk to an Oct when some clunking and gentle bouncing around told him they had arrived somewhere else. The door swung open again and a small group of real, proper Oct had looked in through a wall as transparent as the best glass but wobbly as a flag on a windy day.
Holse had forgotten the name of the Towermaster. Seltis had said the name when he’d given them the travel documents but Holse had been too busy trying to think what they were going to do next to pay attention. He waved the travel documents again. Then the name just popped into his head.
“Aiaik!” he exclaimed. It sounded like a cry of pain or surprise, he thought, and he wondered what he and Ferbin must look like to these clever, strange-looking aliens.
Whether the Towermaster’s name had any real effect was debatable, but the two of them — Ferbin carried by the limbs of the Oct doctor machine — found themselves, still on their little floating platform, riding along various water-filled corridors inside a bubble of air. The Oct who’d been looking in at them through the wobbly glass accompanied them, swimming alongside. They entered a large chamber of great complexity; the Oct doctor machine cut the clothes from Ferbin, a sort of jacket was wrapped round his chest, a transparent mask connected to long tubes was placed over his face, other tubes fastened to his head where the doctor’s pincers had entered and then he was placed in a large tank.
One of the Oct had tried to explain what was going on, though Holse hadn’t understood much.
Holse had been told Ferbin would take time to repair. Still sitting on the platform that had borne them earlier, he’d been shown through the watery environment to a nearby room from which all the water drained away while fresh air took its place. The Oct he’d been talking to had stayed with him, its body covered in a sort of barely visible suit of moisture. Another set of dry rooms had opened up which seemed to have been designed for human habitation.
The Oct had said he could live here for the few days Ferbin would take to repair, then left him alone.
He’d walked over to the set of round, man-high windows and looked out over the land of the Sarl as he’d never seen it before, from nearly fourteen hundred kilometres above the surface, through the vacuum which existed above the atmosphere that covered the land like a warm blanket.
“What a sight, sir.” Holse appeared lost for a moment, then shook his head.
“And how came we to be here, on the Fourth?” Ferbin asked.
“The Oct only control the D’neng-oal Tower up to this level, as far as I can understand the matter, sir. They seemed reluctant to admit this, as though it was the cause for some embarrassment, which it may well indeed be.”
“Oh,” Ferbin said. He hadn’t known that the Conducer peoples ever controlled only part of a Tower; he’d just assumed it was all or nothing, from Core to Surface.
“And on account of the fact that beyond the Ninth one is in the realm of the Oversquare, transference from one Tower to another is not possible.”
“Over… what?”
“This has all been explained to me by the Oct I was talking to on the screen while being bled upon by your good self, and subsequently and at some length in my quarters near your place of treatment, sir.”