Caliph never saw the zeppelin hangars of Malgôr firsthand—at least not that day. He heard about them instead from Vhortghast on his way down a crepuscular spiral staircase deep inside the northwest zeppelin tower. Humming overhead metholinate lights illuminated patches of rust and slippery stone.
“Watch your step,” warned Vhortghast.
They passed through several well-manned checkpoints before the staircase dumped them into a small dingy tiled foyer with the number six painted in red, barely visible through layers of grime.
They stepped out into a half tube that tunneled north and south. Over one hundred fifty feet wide and seventy-five floor to ceiling, the black-green tunnel burrowed out of sight in both directions, obscured slightly by steam and questionable vapors that drifted aimlessly over the floor. The space was lit by sustained magnesium lights suspended far overhead.
Cones of intense white revealed patches of crud-caked block work, walls befouled in a way that suggested black frosting dripping down the sides of a moldy cake. Echoing reverberations and random mechanical clicking filled the quiet vault with ominous background noise.
Vhortghast pulled a breaker switch. It snapped down with a faint sizzle. From the south, a pinpoint of yellow light flared up in the curtain of blackness and a clattering racket chugged slowly toward them. The yellow light drew closer every moment, seeming to gain momentum until its awkward truth was revealed.
It passed through a harsh white pool thrown across the tracks, taking the shape of a strange mechanized engine with a small front cabin and an enormous swollen canister lying behind it. Like a queen termite it rolled into view. The light on its nose revealed it was number six in some unknown series of stations or contraptions or both. Below its bolted numeral, a heavy framework of ornate wheels, six on each side, connected it to the tunnel’s rails.
Behind the front cabin, which was choked with levers and rods, eight additional wheels supported the long iron canister whose paint bubbled with corrosion. Small chemiostatic lights glowed limey and pale in the dark.
The vehicle seized suddenly, squeaking on the rails, disturbing the low waft of steam across the floor. A sour smell filled the air.
Vhortghast motioned Caliph in and threw several indistinguishable rods.
The grotesque contraption lurched, plunging forward into the dark.
“We’re under Thief Town now,” mentioned Vhortghast. “Headed toward the docks.”
Caliph had said nothing during their entire time down the staircase. He didn’t know what to say. Finally he tried, “I take it these aren’t the normal subway tunnels?”
Vhortghast’s reaction couldn’t be seen in the dark.
“No. There are the sewers. Then there are the streetcar tunnels. And then there are these. No one knows about these except myself, the dissolved Council, the men who work in them and now you.”
“What about the Blue General?”
“Clueless.”
“Where in Emolus’ name are we going?” The canister-bearing engine was hissing along at a clip faster than a galloping horse. The magnesium lights passed by overhead. Stripes of light and dark flashing. They made Caliph’s head throb.
Soon they passed another alcove with the number five stenciled in red paint.
“Have you ever wondered where a city of two million people gets all its food?” Vhortghast’s question brought an irrational hysteria to Caliph’s mind. “I mean the Duchy of Stonehold isn’t exactly huge yet we’ve got Vale Briar with close to three hundred thousand. Tentinil with another hundred thousand. Miskatoll is what? About four hundred thousand? And then Mort
rm weighs in at sixty-two thousand. In the shadow of Kjnardag that’s a lot of people to feed off a landscape too cold to grow decent crops. And those are just the capital cities. Add the smaller towns and villages from Gadramere to Tairgreen and this is a damned densely populated country with some rocky fields and a deep dark sea that’s been heavily fished for half a thousand years. If we didn’t supplement what our hard-working cotters produce, and what our sleepless fishermen bring in, we’d have hardly enough to feed ourselves—maybe not enough at all—let alone any caviar or isinglass to export.”
Caliph’s mind tried to guess at whatever Vhortghast was teasing him with, searching for some logical alternative to the spymaster’s compelling evidence for starvation.
He’s going to tell me we’re all eating rats and fungus, thought Caliph.
They passed another empty darkened station with the number two painted on dingy tiles. It flashed in the magnesium lights and disappeared unsettlingly, swallowed up by surroundings unimaginably contaminated and unclean. Not the place to be discussing creative food sources.
Vhortghast threw one of the engine levers and the grease dripping machine began to slow.
“All I’m saying is that we have to eat.”
Up ahead a brightly lit station with a squad of armed Nanemen in full battle gear lit by pink and blue gas lamps waited unpropitiously. The engine drifted to a crawl and the Naneman soldiers saluted the High King as Caliph stepped onto the platform.
The guards parted as Vhortghast guided Caliph up several steps to an open bay and into a wide hallway lit indiscriminately along its black esophagus with candles and torches and gas lamps and forgotten lanterns.
They passed a wooden chair with a crusted and gruesome jacket hung from its back. Together with a gory hook laid at its feet, the chair composed a sort of mile marker on the interminable walk.
Several metal doors evolved from the gloom but Zane Vhortghast pressed on. Caliph felt only too happy to bypass them. They had small barred windows and offered only darkness beyond.
At the end of the hallway, Zane bid Caliph wait at a pair of double doors similar to the ones they had passed but devoid of peep slots.
He approached a wooden cabinet mounted on the wall under a flickering lamp. Upon opening it he dragged a pair of strange objects out into the light. One he handed to Caliph.
“You may want this,” he said without explanation.
It was a leather mask with glass eyes and a strange canister that hung like a proboscis over the mouth and nose. It fit snugly by means of adjustable straps that netted over the back of the head.
Caliph took it limply with a growing sense of unease. Vhortghast turned the handle on the doors and a dull echoing thud sounded as some metal pinion retracted. The doors swung in.
Caliph stepped forward, hesitantly, eyes adjusting to the gloom. At first he could see nothing. Then the stench hit him in the face like a blacksmith’s hammer.
The vile, overpowering fume of concentrated piss and sewage choked him as if a bottle of pure ammonia had splashed across his face. Caliph fumbled mindlessly for his gas mask, trying to pull it on before he convulsed.
Vhortghast helped him unsympathetically, tightening the straps that hung off the back of Caliph’s head like drooping antennae.
For a moment Caliph concentrated on breathing. He closed his eyes and rested his palms on his knees, sucking odorless air into the close leather funnel around his mouth. After a moment he felt better and stood up.
The room seemed to sway before him. But it was not an illusion brought on by nausea. The room did in fact sway, or rather the contents of the room swayed.
Caliph could see men in headgear similar to his own moving between row upon row of large caliginous shapes. They carried rods and wore seemingly one-piece uniforms and high top boots with cleats. Occasionally they reached out and touched one of the hanging shapes with their rods and the shapes jolted mindlessly in response, swaying on creaking chains.
Caliph felt his gorge rise. A network of pipes along the ceiling knitted in perfect symmetry over the prodigious objects hung beneath them, elbows of black ribbed metal turning down at every cross section, thrusting into the top of huge breathing bulbs of meat.