“Is there any more on the Sarcophagus?” Oramen asked.
Broft — a bald, trim, upright figure in neatly pressed dungarees with a conspicuously displayed pocket pen — shook his head. “Not really on any of them sir, as I understand it.”
The adit sloped downwards into the bowels of some long-fallen building, following a passage that had silted up when the city had first been buried. A string of flickering electric bulbs did their best to light their way, though a couple of the foreman’s men carried meshed lanterns as well. This was as much for the fore-warning the lanterns gave — sometimes — of noxious gases as for the light they cast, though that too was welcome. The air about their little party had turned from chilly to mild as they’d descended.
Oramen and foreman Broft led the way, flanked by the two men bearing lanterns. Droffo and a small gaggle of workers, some on their way to their labours, came behind, tailed by Vollird and Baerth — Oramen could hear Vollird’s muffled coughing now and again. The passage was smooth save for knee-high ribs running across the floor every fifteen steps or so. These had once been part of the passage walls; the building had fallen on its back and they were walking down what had once been a vertical shaft. Stout wooden boards had been placed across these ribs to provide a level path, one corner of it given over to cables and pipes.
“This one is the deepest, having fallen from the plaza level, sir,” Broft said. “We are investigating all such anomalous structures out of stratigraphic orderliness, for once paying little heed to the integrity and place-in-sequence of all discovered objects. Mr Poatas is normally very strict on his integrity of objects, but not here.” They were nearing the pit where the artifact had been discovered. The walls here ran with dampness and the air felt warm. Water gurgled beneath the boards at their feet. Pumps sounded ahead; companions to those they’d passed at the entrance to the adit. To Oramen the machines were like the men at either end of a two-man saw, passing it to and fro, cutting into some great trunk.
“Many are the theories, as you might imagine, prince sir, regarding the objects, especially the large central one. My own thoughts…”
Oramen was only half listening. He was thinking about how he’d felt when the caude had dropped away beneath him as they’d left the clifftop. He had been terrified. First he had thought that he had forgotten how to fly, then that the creature wasn’t properly awake — hearty breakfast or not — or ill; caude took ailments as men did, and there was enough sickness around the Settlement. He had even wondered, just for an instant, if the beast might have been drugged.
Was he being preposterous? He didn’t know. Ever since the conversation with Fanthile the day that Tove had been murdered and he had shot the two assassins, he’d been thinking. Of course there were people who wanted him dead; he was a prince, the Prince Regent; future leader of the people who had conquered these people. And his death, of course, would suit some. Tyl Loesp, even. Who would gain most from his death? Fanthile had asked. He still could not believe tyl Loesp wanted him dead; he had been too sure and absolute a friend of his father’s for far too long, but a man of such power was surrounded by others who might act on his behalf, thinking that they did what he might wish but could not request.
Even those awful few moments in the courtyard of the inn, when Tove had died, had been poisoned for him. Thinking about it, the fight had started very easily, and Tove had pulled him out of it and sobered up very quickly. (Well, drunken fights did start over nothing, and the prospect of violence could sober a man up in a heartbeat.) But then Tove had tried to send him out of that door first, and seemed surprised, even alarmed when Oramen had pushed him out. (Of course he’d want his friend to get to safety before he did; he thought the danger was all behind them, back in the bar.) And then, his words: “Not me,” or something very like that.
Why that? Why exactly those words, with the implication — perhaps — that the assault itself had been expected but it should have happened to whoever was with him, not Tove himself? (He had just had a knife rammed into his guts and ripped up towards his heart; was he to be suspicioned because he failed to scream, Fie, murder! or, O, sire, thou dost kill me! like some mummer in a play?)
And Dr Gillews, seemingly by his own hand.
But why Gillews? And if Gillews…
He shook his head — foreman Broft glanced at him and he had to grin back encouragingly for a moment before resuming his thoughts. No, that was taking supposition too far.
However it worked out, he was sure that, this morning, he should have tested the caude. It had been foolish not to. Admitting his flying might be a little rusty would have been no great disgrace. Next time he would do the sensible thing, even if it meant running the risk of embarrassing himself.
They came out on to a platform above the pit, looking down from halfway up the curved wall into the focus of all the attention: a night-black cube ten metres to a side lying tipped in a moat of dirty-looking water at the bottom of a great shored chamber at least thirty metres in diameter. The cube seemed to swallow light. It was surrounded by scaffolding and clambering people, many using what looked like pieces of mining equipment. Blue and orange flashes lit the scene and hissing, clattering steam hammers sounded as various methods were attempted to gain entry into the cube — if it could be entered — or at least to try to chip pieces off. In all the noise and hubbub, though, it was the object itself that always drew the eye back to it. Some of the labourers they’d accompanied filed on to a hoist attached to the main platform and waited to be lowered into the pit.
“Still resisting!” Broft said, shaking his head. He leaned on the makeshift railing. A pump fell silent and Oramen heard cursing. As though in sympathy, the light nearest them, on the wall of the chamber to the side of the adit, flickered and went out. “Can’t get into these things,” Broft said, turning and tutting at the extinguished light. He looked at one of the lantern men and nodded at the lamp. The fellow went to inspect it. “Though the object might be judged worth lifting out,” Broft continued, “the brethren would have left it here to rot — or not rot, probably, as it hasn’t already — but, however, under our new and may I say much more enlightened rules, sir, we might offer the object to a third party, which is to say… What?”
The lantern man had muttered something into Broft’s ear. He made a tsking noise and went to look at the dead light.
It was relatively quiet in the chamber for a moment. The squeaking noises of the pulleys lowering the first group of workers towards the pit floor was the loudest sound. Even Vollird seemed to have stopped coughing.
Oramen hadn’t heard the knight’s cough for a little while now. Without warning, he felt an odd chill.
“Well,” he heard Broft say, “it looks like a blasting wire, but how can it be a blasting wire when there’s not any blasting today? That’s just ridiculous.”
Oramen turned to see the foreman tugging at a wire strung with some of the other wires looped along the wall between the light fixtures. The wire led down the wall to disappear behind the planking at their feet. In the other direction, it disappeared into the tunnel they’d just walked down. Vollird and Baerth weren’t on the platform.
He felt suddenly sweaty and cold at once. But no, he was being silly, absurd. To react as he suddenly wanted to react would be to make himself look fearful and stupid in front of these men. A prince had to behave with decorum, calmness, bravery…
But then; what was he thinking of? Was he mad? What had he decided, only a few minutes earlier?
Have the bravery to risk looking foolish…