‘Your mate Akkad’s a nasty bastard, to think up something like this,’ he muttered.
‘Weren’t him,’ said Silo. ‘Was me.’
‘You what?’
Silo looked over his shoulder. ‘My idea,’ he said. ‘Din’t have much tolerance back then for them that didn’t subscribe to the cause.’
Frey sucked his breath in over his teeth. ‘What’s the Murthian word for “irony”?’ he asked.
‘Ain’t one,’ Silo replied. ‘ ’Sides, I’m here ’cause I put myself here. Man’s just a great big sum of the choices he made on ts he="he way, and what he did with what Mother gave him. Ain’t no irony to it, or otherwise.’
‘Mother?’ Frey asked. The word jarred; it seemed excessively formal, coming from Silo. Scuffers used ‘mama’ and ‘papa.’
Silo’s dark eyes glittered in the torchlight. Then he turned away, and didn’t say anything else.
Frey watched as Silo made his way around the edge of the chamber, thrusting his torch into various gaps and fissures.
‘What are you looking for?’ he asked, when it became apparent they weren’t moving.
‘Breeze. Ain’t none.’
‘Then that way’s good as any,’ he said, pointing at the largest exit he could see.
Silo grunted, made another mark, and headed into the fissure he’d indicated. Frey followed. It was narrow enough to pass through if they hunched their shoulders. After a dozen metres it was blocked by a fall of rubble. Silo lifted his torch and said ‘Reckon we can climb up.’ So they did.
The upward shaft was even narrower than the fissure, and more uneven. Frey had to squeeze his way through gaps that were barely big enough for his hips. His cutlass scratched the rock and caught on corners as he struggled after Silo.
He was beginning to sweat again, and this time it wasn’t the heat. The smoke of the torches was thickening the air and making him cough. The sour taste of suppressed panic gathered in his mouth. He had visions of all that weight of stone coming down on him. Damn, he didn’t want to go out that way.
He needed to talk, to take his mind from the oppressive gravity of his surroundings. Silo had made it pretty clear that he wasn’t interested in talking about ‘Mother,’ but the way he said it made Frey think she was something more than a parent. He made a rare intuitive leap.
‘You a religious man, Silo?’ he asked.
‘Show me a Murthian that ain’t,’ came the reply from up ahead.
‘Mother?’
Silo stopped and looked back down the shaft they were climbing. ‘Don’t, Cap’n,’ he said. ‘You ain’t gonna understand.’
But Frey wouldn’t be deterred. He’d suddenly developed a keen interest in anything that stopped him thinking about where he was. ‘Just saying,’ he continued. ‘If you got any prayers up your sleeve, we could use ’em right now.’
‘Don’t work that way,’ said Silo, who had resumed his clumsy ascent. ‘She ain’t into interventions. She bring a man into the world, and she watch ’n’ weep at his troubles, but every one o’ her children gotta make their own way. Just like a real mama.’
‘Not like mine,’ said Frey. ‘Bitch dumped me on the doorstep of an orphanage.’
‘You reckon that’s why you spent the rest of your life tryin’ to get attention from women?’ Silo asked.
‘Probably,’ Frey admitted. ‘Couldn’t give a flying cowshit about the reasons, to tell you the truth. Shagging’s fun.’
Silo gave a deep chuckle and shook his head. ‘You some sort o’ feller, Cap’n. Don’t think I never met anyone like you.’
Frey grinned. Absurdly, in the midst of all this, he was enjoying himself, albeit in a slightly hysterical kind of way. He’d learned more about Silo in the last nine minutes than he had in the previous nine years. He felt closer to his engineer than he ever had before, and that wasn’t only because he was practically crawling up the man’s arse.
The shaft opened out halfway up the wall of a new chamber. Frey heard running water as Silo passed him back the torch and climbed down. He made his way to the edge of the opening, handed down both torches, and climbed down after.
The flames beat back the dark, and showed them part of a low-ceilinged cavern, with the far side still lost in shadow. Before them was black water, slapping and sloshing through a winding channel. That small, restless noise was loud in the silence.
‘The water’s gotta go somewhere, right?’ Frey suggested. Desperate hope ignited inside him at the idea.
‘Yuh,’ said Silo. ‘But water’s where they gather. They eat fish when they can’t get nothin’ bigger.’
‘How long you think the light’s gonna last, Silo?’ Frey asked, waving his torch about to illustrate his point.
A distant cry echoed through the cavern, a sound somewhere between a croak and a shriek. Both of them turned to look in the same direction: the way the water was flowing.
‘Still think it’s a good idea, Cap’n?’
‘I’m not dying in the dark, Silo,’ he said, and it was only as he said it that he realised how absolutely, utterly serious he was about that. ‘I’d rather meet whatever made that sound than wander till our torches go out.’
It wasn’t bravado. Hearing that shriek, an unmistakably inhuman noise, nhuheighhad made the danger he’d been ignoring seem suddenly present and real. But he still feared the lonely, empty dark more than any violent end. Dying unnoticed and unseen, lost and helpless: that was the worst thing he could imagine.
Silo gave an approving grunt. They followed the water along its course, with Silo making occasional marks, until it disappeared into a cleft in the cavern wall. Frey kept a nervous eye on the shadows at the edge of the torchlight as Silo climbed into the water. It came up to his thighs. Frey did the same, and found that the water was surprisingly warm.
They waded into the cleft. Frey was careful to ensure his pistols stayed dry as he went. His cutlass blade stuck into the water, tugging at him like a wayward rudder, but that wasn’t much of a concern. It was a daemonically thralled blade that moved of its own accord and was capable of deflecting bullets. Given all that, he assumed it was rustproof too.
‘What do you reckon happens when you die, Silo?’ he said quietly.
‘You really think this is the time, Cap’n?’
‘Well, since I’m likely to find out pretty soon, yes.’
Silo looked over his shoulder, saw that Frey meant it, and forged on through the water. ‘Me, I’ll go back to Mother ’n’ get born again,’ he said. ‘Back in the pens, most likely. But the stuff I learned this time round, it’ll all be down there, hidden off in the back o’ my mind. And I’ll be better next time.’
‘You’re not scared of dying?’
‘Nuh,’ he said. ‘Ain’t keen on losing my liberty, though. S’pose I won’t remember. But I reckon I’ll remember the sense of it, and I’ll want to have it again.’
Frey thought about that. ‘What about me?’ he asked.
‘You ain’t Murthian. You’re screwed.’
Frey rolled his eyes. ‘Yeah, that sounds about right. Members only.’
‘Ain’t too late to convert to the Awakeners,’ said Silo. Frey saw a flash of white teeth as Silo turned his head, and realised he was smiling. ‘Mebbe the Allsoul will take care o’ you.’
A joke? From Silo? Frey wondered if he’d already died. But it was such an unexpected thing that he couldn’t help smiling along.
‘Crake would kill me faster than these ghalls would,’ he said.
‘He’d have to find you first,’ Silo pointed out.
Frey looked at his hand. Once, he’d worn a silver ring. A ring that was daemonically connected to a compass, which always pointed towards it. Crake had fashioned it to keep track of his wayward captain when he disappeared on a three-day drunk. He might have used it to find Frey now, but Frey had given it to Trinica.
‘I knew that woman would be the death of me,’ he murmured, because a bit of black humour was the only way he could deal with the thought of her right now.