I wandered, my feet tripping over the babil, looking for a strand of stonework with steps in it or on it so that I could go higher, my vision getting dark at the edges, my legs feeling bouncy and strange and something howling in my ears that might have been the wind and might not.
I don't know how long it was before I found the spyer, fallen amongst the babil, dead, crumpled, head shattered, skin dried, white bones poking through his kneepads. I remember looking up and thinking he must have falling from the open-work ceiling, and I saw his mask and the cylinder on his back but I just wandered off again, feeling like I was walking along this tunnel because that was all I could see and it seemed like hours later while I was still searching for another stairway or at least a door or something that I thought, Hey, maybe I could use the spyer's gear! and I started to turn round and almost tripped over him because I'd wandered in a circle.
There was old brown blood dried on the face mask but it fell away like dark dandruff when I knocked it. The oxygen in the tank was cold and it felt like it was freezing my lungs but my headache started to go and I wasn't looking down a tunnel all the time no more.
I finished the water in his canteen, took his jacket, hat and torch and left the poor bugger lying there.
The stairs were in a really obvious place, just along from the top of the pillar I'd climbed.
The lammergeiers' roost was on the next level. I got there at dusk and collapsed in a nest of dry babil and huge scratchy feathers. The din waked me and I started investigating, ending up looking down the big shaft.
I hear the crunching noise.
I swing the torch round aiming the beam down the tunnel; the warm breeze coming up the deep black shaft tugs at my jacket. The torch beam just disappears into the dark, swallowed up.
Something crunches again, then there's a noise of something coming whistling towards me.
I don't have time to duck and I don't see what hits me, but it bashes into my chest and knocks me backwards, the breath going Hoof!, out of my lungs. I feel myself start to go over the edge of the shaft and grab with one hand as the lip of stone skates under my bum. My hand misses.
I fall into the black throat of the shaft.
The roar of air builds up around me, tearing the mask off my face.
After a few seconds I get my breath back and I start screaming.
TRANSLATION — EIGHT — 4
I get tired of screaming. Even more I get tired of getting bashed on the head with the mask what has come off my face; it's still attached to the air tank on my back and it's slipped round behind my neck and is going thump thump thump on the back of my bonce.
I feel behind me and tear it away.
My ears are going pop pop pop. The air is blasting round me so hard there's hardly any point in me screaming anyway. It's almost totally dark; I've got a sort of gray sensation of the walls rushing past around me, and if I twist round I can look up and see a vague impression of a tiny patch of dark gray on the blackness.
Downwards, there's just blackness.
I try to crypt but I can't; don't know if it's because I'm moving too fast or because the shaft is shielded or because I'm too terrified to concentrate properly. I start screaming again, then stop, gulping for breath.
I'd have shat my pants by now but it's been so long since I ate that I can't.
The air is cold and I'm shivering but it's not freezing. I settle into a sort of floppy X-shape after a while, like I've seen skydivers do; I drift towards one wall, then manoeuvre myself away again. I have to keep swallowing to keep my ears from bursting. I try to think how far up I was and how long it's going to take me to fall to the bottom, if it's the bottom that's going to break my fall. I realise that there might be something between me and the bottom and I could hit at any moment and I start screaming again.
I stop after a while. Tears get whipped off my face but it's not me crying it's just the fierceness of the wind tearing at my eyes.
I've never died before. I don't know what it's like. I've heard from other people and I've been in the minds of bags what have died and got their impressions but they say it's different for everybody and I don't know what it'll be like for me and I was hoping not to find out for a while yet thanks very much but there we go.
I start wondering if they'll resuscitate me at all. Oh fuck; what if I'm in such big trouble they'll just lose my identity from the crypt? What if they catch my dying thoughts and then just interrogate me, or don't bother saving me at all?
I feel like I'm going to be sick.
The roaring around me goes on forever. My eyes are dry and sore. My ears hurt too.
Oh fuck I don't want to die.
I can't believe how long this is taking. I feel like I'm in crypt-time. It occurs to me maybe I am, maybe I crypted without knowing about it. But I can't be. I'm obviously not. I'm here, falling down this shaft, dammit. I try crypting again.
It works. I'm on the second basement level, practically at sea level.
How much further down can this bleeding shaft go?
/I port across into the crypt; at least I can avoid the moment of impact. My implants will pull me back when I die, so there won't be two of me, but at least… wait a bleeding minute.
According to the local hardware I'm still on the same level. The crypt thinks I'm stationary. What's going on here?
I double check, treble check, quadruple check. Yep; the cryptosphere thinks I've stopped.
I give a sort of mental gulp, then port back across to my body.
/The air is still screaming up round me. It's still totally black but with the thermal bit of my vision I can still make out the walls to either side. Sure enough, they do look a bit different; no impression of them hurtling past no more. I stare down.
I don't see nothing but blackness but now I think about it the sound is different somehow; even more of a roar.
Then suddenly there's lights everywhere, blinding me.
I close my eyes. I think; blimey, I never felt a thing. That's me dead and this is the long tunnel with the light at the end what everybody gets to see and I must have hit the bottom and not even felt it.
Except the roaring's still there and the wind is still pushing into my face. I open my eyes again.
I'm staring straight down at a sort of a hexagonal grid of wires or metal or something, and beyond the grid, a few metres further down, there's all these big propeller things, 7 of them, all whirling away and roaring and sending the air screaming up past me.
I look to the side.
There's a door in the wall level with me and a couple of big black mean looking birds with scaly necks perched there, looking at me, beady-eyed, their feathers ruffling in the draft.
I can't think what else to do. So I wave to them.
That was how we used to reach our home, one of the birds tells me.
I'm walking along a broad brightly lit tunnel. The two lammergeiers are keeping pace with me by sort of half-hovering in the air one on either side of me, their wings going whuf whuf, whuf whuf. I didn't even know they could do this.
I'm walking kind of funny because I think I did crap my pants just a little, but they don't seem to notice, or they're too polite.
You mean you got blasted up there by those fans? I say, surreptitiously pulling at the seat of my pants.
Correct, says the bird (having to shout above the noise of its wings going whuf whuf).
So why'd you leave? I shout. And who was that up there who pushed me down?