“Come on. Let’s get out of here.” Rennie pushed the little room’s door open violently. The clatter it made striking the panel next to it vanished into the darkness. “There’s nothing here.”
Daenek nodded and started back the way they had come into the factory. As he walked with his head bent in thought, it was some moments before he noticed that Rennie was no longer right next to him. He turned and saw her several meters behind, bending down to look at something on the factory’s floor, the yellow light from her candle forming a sphere around her.
Maybe she found a coin somebody dropped, he thought. Then this won’t have been a total waste. Waiting for her to come along, he looked idly around himself, holding his own candle in front of him.
He was a little distance from one of the looms that stretched up into the heights of the factory. A tangle of fibers spilled down its complex surface, like a frozen waterfall. He stepped closer to examine it.
The threads dangled into a little pile at the foot of the loom.
Daenek lifted them with his hand and held his candle close. The stuff was some kind of synthetic fiber, slick and milkily translucent against his palm. A drop of candle wax fell onto the threads and they burst into flame.
Quickly, he jerked his hand away but the stuff, with a billowing, cloying smoke, melted and clung to the sleeve of his jacket. He fell backwards, pulling more of the filaments from the face of the loom and into the fire spreading across the front of his jacket like a stain. The heat flickered upwards at his throat and chin. Frantically, he slapped at the flames with his hands.
Behind him, he heard Rennie’s footsteps running towards him. He caught only a glimpse of her face before she grabbed him by the shoulders and rolled him over onto his chest. She grasped the unburnt ends of the stuff and pulled it away, the flames billowing as it spun across the floor, end over end away from them.
In a few seconds the last bits still clinging to Daenek’s jacket were smothered against the floor. The rest had gone out as well, consuming itself into a little tangle of ashes. A nauseating smell of burnt chemicals permeated the air. “You all right?” said Rennie.
Daenek rolled onto his back and lifted himself up onto his elbows. “Yeah,” he said. He couldn’t see her face, as both candles had gone out and been lost in the scurry. “Just singed here and there, is all.”
She helped him to his feet and pushed him in front of her towards the factory’s door. Once outside, he leaned against the metal wall and coughed.
“I guess that makes us even,” he said. The taste of the smoke was still in his mouth. “Remember the time with the shaft? Underneath the caravan?”
In the moonlight her face was visible, settling into an expression of annoyance. “I should care about being even,” she grated. “Just protecting my investment, is all.”
On the way back to the caravan she showed him what she had found on the floor of the factory. A rusty metal washer, that she flung into the bushes at the side of the roadway.
When they had climbed back aboard, Daenek stood for a few minutes at the guardrail, gazing back towards the village and the hills beyond it. A few of the other mertzers could be seen in the moonlight, straggling back towards the caravan, their revelry finished. But Daenek’s attention was elsewhere, on the unseen figures somewhere in the dark, the ones who had abandoned the village, their homes. Pioneers of the abyss, he thought. The phrase was solid and chilling in him as a block of ice. Falling ahead of us. To where we all might be, someday.
He turned away from the rail and headed slowly for the hatchway.
Chapter XIV
The returning was something that he had been secretly dreading and yet waiting for, since the moment he had first realized that it would inevitably come. And now, as all things did, it had come with the passage of time.
The village of the stone-cutters had changed. The entropic process was accelerating. Daenek stood at the edge of the marketplace and watched the slowly milling crowd, jostling against each other as they moved from stall to stall. But now the trays of vegetables and other things seemed to be sinking towards the ground, bending and warped by the same gravity that tugged at the dilapidated houses and buildings. Soon the soil would have reclaimed everything. From behind him came the harsh mechanical noises of the quarried stone being hoisted aboard the caravan.
A few curious faces glanced at him. Daenek knew they saw only a mertzer, in the usual leather jacket and cap, and with a face that meant nothing to any of them. “Come on,” he said to Rennie, standing beside him. “Let’s see if they still have their inn open.”
They pushed through the crowded market and located the low-ceilinged building on the other side. The interior was dim and faintly steamy, filled with the quarry-workers converting their wages into beer.
More faces, sullen with alcohol, glanced at Daenek and Rennie as they entered, then turned back to stare into the depths of their glasses.
Rennie leaned against the serving counter and slid a couple of small coins onto it. She made motions of lifting an imaginary glass, then held up two fingers. The innkeeper set out two glasses filled with a dark liquid. Daenek sipped his and found it warm and sour.
He listened to the voices around them, of the quarriers standing on either side or clustered around the wooden tables. It had been a long time since he had heard their language, his own first language. It was still clear and lucid in his mind, a fact that none of the villagers seemed to suspect.
“Look at ’em,” someone muttered. Other voices, thick and slurring, joined in. “Damn mertzers . . . think they’re so great . . . what do they know about anything? Just hop on their big bloody machines ’n’ ride away . . . that’s all . . .”
Daenek sipped again at the beer. The chorus of stone-cutters murmured at his back like ocean waves breaking in the distance.
Beside him, Rennie looked bored, jingling corns in her pocket.
The voices caught his attention again.
“. . . machines . . . we used to have machines . . . just slice the damn rock right up . . . now we just get a few crummy blocks out by hand . . . sweat . . . look at those damn mertzers . . . things have changed . . . bad priests . . . subthane gone, and that new governor from the Capitol . . .”
He knew what they were talking about. He had seen the development in several of the areas through which the caravan had passed. The old subthanes had grown too old or incompetent to handle the affairs of their regions any longer, and so had been removed and governors sent out from the Capitol to take their places. They were rarely seen, evidently preferring their own company to that of the people they ruled.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Rennie. She pushed her half-full glass away and stood up.
“You go on back,” said Daenek. “There’s something else I want to do.”
She shrugged and headed for the door of the inn.
The voices of the stone-cutters had sunk into whispers.
Daenek drew a line with his finger through a puddle of spilled beer, then stood up and turned around. One of the faces at the nearest table looked into his for a few seconds, then shifted back to his glass. Daenek recognized the man as the leader of the subthane’s militia that had hunted him down. The man was no longer wearing an immaculate black uniform, but rather the grey, dust-permeated clothes of a quarry-worker. His was also the drunkest face at the table, pale and dissolute. Daenek strode towards the door, wondering if he should feel somehow satisfied at what he saw.