He thought about it further. Over and over, he thought about it, but he did nothing.
Where are you, Che? He had been so sure that he would find her, but he was a prisoner, and she was not here beside him. She was dead, perhaps. Or she was free.
If he had known what the Worm would do to his mind, he would never have come down here. With his Aptitude intact he felt that the world was his to face and to master. But here . . . crammed into his tiny space, throat and nostrils choked with the sweat and excrement and fear of all those doomed souls, all his Aptitude could give him was a way to die.
And he knew, horribly, that if he took one step forwards, even that would be gone from him. He would have nothing.
His thumb found the cord, hooked into the metal ring there, tensioned it. He had linked the triggers to all the grenades: the simple mechanical exercise had been almost calming. Just one solid pull.
It was safe to say, he reckoned, that this was not what he had been looking for in coming down here. But, in all honesty, after Drephos died he had become unmoored in the world. Che had been the only landmark left for him to steer by, but what a treacherous course that had proved to be. She had never been any good for him.
He looked up, eyes wide against the darkness, and spotted the light. It was merely a faint, pallid luminescence, but it was light. A few of the slaves appeared to have seen it too – he could make out the odd face turned upwards, the dim radiance touching them fleetingly. The rest seemed blind to it, as though it did not exist for them.
But then he remembered Drephos – who had possessed eyes like a Moth’s – telling him how his vision had adjusted to darkness, leaching the colours from things, but sharpening the shapes, seeing the world in greys by some medium that owed nothing to light itself – the dark-adapted eye saw no light or radiance, torches and lanterns did not betray their owners to it.
Someone up there had a light, and Totho knew that it could not be any of his captors.
He lurched forwards, feeling doors slam shut in his mind, but in that moment not caring, shouldering his way into the human morass, fighting through it as though it were quicksand, shoving and kneeing and striking his way through the whimpering, unresisting throng.
‘Here!’ he shouted. ‘I’m here!’ as though the glow was for him, as though it could possibly be for him.
He saw a man there, crouching almost upside down at the mouth of the shaft, held there by the Art of both feet and one hand, with a kind of lantern held out into space – little more than some burning embers in a metal cage.
Some of the other slaves around him were staring mutely, although many were just ignoring everything, eyes empty as wells, denying what they heard and anything they might see.
‘Tell me you’re Totho,’ the lamp-bearer said. He was an odd sort of man, of no kinden Totho could immediately identify.
‘Yes,’ he answered.
‘Cheerwell Maker sent me.’ The stranger peered down, studying the dense mass of bodies below.
‘Get me out.’
‘I . . .’ The man glanced up the shaft. ‘I’m not sure that I can. Up above the city’s crawling with them. They’d see you the moment you got out of here. I need to think. Now I’ve found you, I need to think.’
‘They come here,’ Totho said. ‘The creatures that rule here, they come and take people. I’ve not been here long and I’ve seen more than a dozen go already. They just climb down and seize on victims at random.’ There was a moaning starting up, amongst the slaves, as though even speaking those words might incur the next visitation. ‘They can climb well – even on the ceiling. They get everywhere. How much thinking time do you need?’
‘I really don’t know if I can get you out. I’m sorry,’ the lamp-bearer admitted. ‘I promised Cheerwell I’d try, though.’
‘Can you come down here?’ Totho heard his own voice shaking. The dreadful sound the other slaves were making was swelling in a wordless, inhuman chorus of fear, of people who had been robbed of everything, their hope last of all. ‘I need . . . I need . . . Please, there is something I need to tell you, to show you. If it comes to the worst. Please.’
The stranger ducked his head back, and for a moment Totho thought he would just go, abandoning all attempt at a rescue. Then he was back, and his Art seemed to be almost as strong as the bodies of the Worm, because he crouched flat against the ceiling, creeping in jerky, awkward motions, following as Totho pushed and cuffed his way back towards his corner, hunting for it with the inner senses of his mind that told him when he was reaching that tiny pocket where the world again made sense. Where he could explain.
He looked up, and started away from the man’s upside-down face. The dirge of the slaves was rising into a full wail, and they were pushing and fighting not to be directly beneath the shaft.
‘The Worm’s heard that racket,’ the lamp-bearer guessed. He made no move to put the light out. Apparently he had come to the same conclusion as Totho about the limits of the Worm’s sight.
‘Or they were just coming anyway,’ Totho replied. ‘To do . . . to take us . . . wherever they do.’
‘Oh, I know where they’re taking their captives,’ the stranger hissed. ‘The Worm and its warriors, they don’t care. They don’t have any use for live prisoners. Up above, there are some scarred old men, though, some filthy, cowardly creatures who live in the Worm’s shadow. And the Worm is their god, and they give it offerings because they hope it will spare them. But it won’t. And neither will I.’ The quiet venom in his words was startling.
Now Totho saw the shadows as the Worm’s creatures crept out, clinging to the sheer stone and staring downwards, here at the behest of the stranger’s ‘scarred old men’, apparently. Sacrificed to a god, though? Is he serious? What does he mean?
‘Stranger,’ he hissed.
‘Esmail,’ the man told him.
‘Esmail, then. You’re Apt?’
The man looked at him, baffled. ‘No. Not that it matters. If I were anywhere else you’d call me a magician, perhaps, but that means nothing here. I’m living on pure skill and self-mutilation.’ This close, Totho could hear a quaver in the man’s words that matched his own hollow fear.
‘There’s something . . .’ He was watching the warriors of the Worm pick their way overhead. Every so often one would strike down, snagging a slave, and then half a dozen would converge to draw the struggling, shrieking individual up between them, whilst the rest of the host remained silent now, not wanting to draw attention, not wanting to be the next chosen. ‘If they come for me . . . there’s something I need you to do. An Apt thing.’
‘Well, that makes two reasons why I can’t do it,’ Esmail hissed.
Totho told him anyway. He explained it as simply as possible. He said nothing about mechanical principles or about the chemistry of the efficient little explosives. He focused on the simple physical action required. It’s as simple as pulling on a string.