If we didn't rescue Yasmin and the others before the wights found their objective, I knew we'd all be in big trouble. No one went to all this bother for something innocuous.
Soon, we were approaching the next intersection of a radial arm with the Spider's central ring. As before, a furniture-filled lounge occupied the area where the arm connected with the body; but in the center of the room was a spiral wrought-iron staircase leading down to a lower level. The iron was bare and unpainted, yet I couldn't see the slightest fleck of rust – either these steps were scoured daily by a platoon of wights with sandpaper, or there was some kind of magic at work, maintaining this place in pristine condition. I put my money on the magic: the whole Glass Spider was in good upkeep, but it had an air of antiquity about it, as if it had endured for eons, impervious to decay.
Miriam gestured that we should go down the stairs. Wheezle stopped her and sent two wights ahead to see if the way was clear. They came back smiling their pointy grins and hissing in a relaxed fashion that suggested no one was lurking in ambush. We formed up our company again, wights at the head and rear, more wights tightly surrounding Miriam; then we began our descent.
As we climbed downward, my ears picked up a rumbling in the distance. It took me a few seconds to identify the sound; but then I remembered a tour I had taken of The Lady's Chime, that huge clock tower just down the street from Sigil's Hall of Speakers. The upper floors of the tower had echoed with the clicking of gears, the whirr of flywheels, and the ratcheting of counterweights pulling time forward. The rumble I heard now had the same sort of mechanical edge to it – a giant clockworks muttering to itself. We must be approaching the machinery that allowed the Glass Spider to move.
A long arcing corridor led us away from the stairs, and soon the air filled with the smell of metaclass="underline" bare metal, oiled metal, hot metal. The corridor was lit by glass globes suspended from the ceiling; each globe burned bright and white from some inner fire. Their light revealed that Hezekiah had linked his arm with Miriam's as soon as we reached this lower floor. Clearly, he didn't want to risk her running away while he'd been appointed to watch her.
The mechanical rumble grew louder as we continued forward. Ahead lay an open doorway, and beyond that was a room full of metal machinery: I recognized gears, chain-belts, cables, and other simple trappings, but the great bulk of equipment was beyond my comprehension. How could one understand a bank of square crystals glowing with hieroglyphs of light, or huge metal drums that occasionally hissed steam through red-hot stopcocks? What was the purpose of a dozen metal pistons pounding in and out of smoking cylinders, or a gold stalactite mounted above a copper stalagmite with squirts of lightning leaping between their points? All I knew was that the air burned and reeked with oil, like the vestibule of some fiery hell.
Wheezle stopped us once more and turned a questioning gaze toward Miriam. «It's always like this,» the woman shrugged. «You're a gnome – you should know about machines.»
«I specialize in death, not devices,» Wheezle replied. «Are we close to where this Rivi would be?»
«Her quarters are in this machine room,» Miriam said. «She likes it here.»
«How can she sleep with all this noise?»
«She says it just takes discipline. Rivi is hot blazing barmy about discipline.»
«Why doesn't that surprise me?» I muttered. But Wheezle was already leading us forward.
A machine room full of moving parts is no place to go when your nerves are on edge. Gears clank; you whirl, expecting an attack. Steam erupts from a release valve; it leaves cloudy films on nearby surfaces, looking like ghosts out the corner of your eye. Pistons bang and conveyor belts flap; so much motion, so many nooks for enemies to hide. Every second, there was something new to jump at.
«There's a control room over in the corner,» Miriam said above the clatter of machinery. «That's where Rivi spends most of her time.»
«Then you stay here with Hezekiah,» I told her. «Wheezle and I will see if Rivi's home.»
«Whack her the second you see her,» Miriam advised. «She'll addle your chops if you don't.»
«No loyalty toward your former boss?» I asked.
«None,» Miriam replied. «If you don't put Rivi down, she'll turn my brains to cheese for helping you.»
«We shall try to avoid that eventuality,» Wheezle said. Kowtowing briefly to those who were staying behind, he gathered a selection of wights and gestured for me to take the lead.
The control room in the corner had thick concrete walls without a single window. An odd design – if you were a worker controlling the machinery, wouldn't it be nice to see what the equipment was doing? On the other hand, perhaps the room was not a command post where you calmly watched gauges so much as a bunker to take cover when you pushed the wrong button.
The door to the control room was closed. I took one side of it, Wheezle took the other, and the wights stood directly back from the opening, ready to charge in as soon as I turned the knob. Holding up his fingers, Wheezle counted off Three, Two, One. Flick, I threw open the door, and with a clatter of toe-claws across cement, the wights leapt forward. I jumped in right behind them, my rapier drawn and ready to impale anyone who could paint obscenities over other people's brains.
There was nobody home.
Undoubtedly, however, someone did live in this room. In the back corner was a small cot, its crisp sheets tucked and folded with a precision that would satisfy the most fastidious member of the Harmonium. Around the walls, wooden tables held neat stacks of paper, numerous books alphabetized by title, and a few scrolls hung on pine dowels. The whole place had an air of obsessive organization.
I turned my back on it. «Rivi's not here.»
«True,» Wheezle nodded. «But her library is. It could teach us a great deal about her intentions.»
«It would take days to read all this, and that's assuming it's written in a language we understand. Let's keep moving.»
«Surely we can spare a minute to glance at a page or two,» Wheezle said.
I waved my arm at the collection. «Which page?»
«The oldest.» He shuffled to the closest table and peered at the stacks – paper, parchment, vellum, papyrus. «The oldest,» he went on, «is most likely to tell of the beginning of things. Obscure secrets. Forgotten wisdom.» He moved to another table. «I have studied a number of ancient languages and am quite fluent in… ah, this looks interesting.»
Standing on tiptoe, he pushed away a stack of papers to reveal something underneath: a clay tablet, covered with scratchy marks like the footprints of a mouse. At some point in the past, the tablet had broken into three flat pieces; later on, Rivi or someone else had reassembled the pieces like parts of a puzzle, imbedding them in newer clay to hold them together. I had to admit, it certainly looked like the oldest document in the room.
«Can you read it?» I asked.
«I have seen the script before,» Wheezle replied. «The language is called Urqlish – extremely old. Some say it predates the eldest gods. No one knows how to pronounce its words, but my mentors taught me how to decipher such writings. The Urqs, whoever they were, left massive volumes of text to posterity. Much of it deals with incomprehensible facets of their culture, but this… this is something different.»
«What does it say?»
«Let me see. The Words of Savant… I can't make out the savant's name, but it doesn't matter. The Words of Savant whoever to his liege lord: Know, O Queen…»