Pilgrimage v1.0, page 11
“But that path looks like it circles back, maybe toward the north flank,” Liza objected.
“Lord above,” said Brann, “then that one.”
The sounds of pursuit grew behind them and without even time to catch their breath they ran again. The path they had chosen turned gradually Frontward. It was straight and easy. Brann thought perhaps the cry of the folk was diminishing. Had they given up?
Halsam, who was a few paces in front, called back breathlessly, “It’s getting narrower, I think. The walls are coming together.”
They were in a sort of canyon between near vertical walls of stone, as if somehow the rubble near the verge of this gallery had been compacted into a stone barrier. This was the only path now, the only breach. They were not really running anymore, stumbling instead on the uneven floor. Brann could hardly hear the cry of the folk behind; the sound of his own blood moving, the sounds of his breath, drowned it. A single moon lamp was lit in the ceiling, which was dark otherwise, so that only a faint light from far behind and to the flanks came.
“I see the verge,” Halsam called. “It’s not far now.” Somehow he still had the strength to sprint and he moved out ahead of the others around a curve of the wall. Brann lost sight of him in the darkness. Then Liza fell. Her legs, sore from the beating she had taken, gave out and she tripped over loose rock. Brann ran full into her from behind. Their legs tangled and they went down together. The baying of their pursuers became terrific. Liza was spent. Brann got back to his knees and pulled at her, saying, “Get up, they’re close. We have to get up,” and Liza just clung to him and shook her head.
The baying stopped.
A stench rolled over them as of things dead a thousand years. Brann pulled away from Liza and turned. There stood the Driver. His face was a rictus, past speech. The Driver’s tongue worked in his mouth. Blood, a black line in the moon lamp’s small light, ran down from his left temple. His left eye was swollen and half closed. There was a brightness in his right hand. He extended the arm and Brann saw that the brightness was a knife—Brann’s had dropped during the struggle in the camp.
The Driver’s mouth worked and out of it came a single, half-coherent “Nnnnnnnnggggggg!” Liza hitched backward, dragging herself through the dust. Brann slid backward also, his eyes never leaving the sharp edge of that knife. In the blue darkness behind the Driver, Brann saw eyes, the only evidence that the Driver’s folk waited beyond. The little Driver paced at his teacher’s feet Slowly, in hideous ballet, Brann and Liza crabbed backward around the bend in the wall. And just as implacably the Driver followed them, his knife-point weaving before Brann’s face. Space opened in the pathway behind them and Brann heard Liza say, “Halsam! Where .…7*
“It’s sealed,” Halsam said. “The gate is shut.”
Brann heard motion behind, Liza standing. He couldn’t take his eyes off the blade that moved inches from his face. He stared at the Driver. And a change came over the Driver’s face. His eyes widened. The motion of the knife stopped. He seemed to stop breathing and tendons stood out in his neck. The mouth worked, beyond any noise now, and the knife dropped, forgotten, at Brann’s feet The Driver was looking past Brann now as if Brann had vanished. Brann craned his head around to see Halsam standing, half turned, next to the walled-over gateway to the gallery. On Halsam’s chest the jewel burned with a bright scarlet light that grew steadily more intense.
Firmly, the Driver’s eyes were fixed on the burning jewel, and in his throat a terrible, piteous moaning began.
Chapter Five
The Stairs
It was the jewel the Driver wanted as if it were his soul. Somehow in the generations that the jewel and the Driver were one, the jewel had lost the separate identities of function and device. It had lost even the clear delineation between Driver and ornament In this generation, Driver and jewel were inseparable. Yet now they had separated and Brann saw the consequence of it in the faces of the dumb folk. They came into the glow cast by the jewel. Women and men of the folk pressed into the space at the end of the pathway until they were a solid mass. The air seemed a tangible thing, their stink a physical force that battered Brann until he felt disoriented.
The jewel’s light was great now. In it the Driver’s skin shone with the slickness of sweat and he shook as if spastic. His naked skin twitched. His eyes rolled. His voice rose to a warble and his arm, as if controlled by a poor puppeteer, jerked out over Brann’s head to reach for the jewel on Hal-sam’s chest Brann found his knife.
“Stick him, Brann,” Liza said.
“Stick him,” Halsam echoed.
Brann brought up the knife. He was dizzy in the hot air and he found he couldn’t focus on the gyrating body of the Driver. The little Driver mimicked his father’s moves. His tongue lolled carefully. He mewed and spat and pawed at dirt trying to share some of his father’s rage over the loss of the jewel, matching the larger creature’s frenzy. The Driver stepped on the little Driver’s foot. The little Driver howled, turned and stepped on the foot of one of the dumb folk. And the dumb folk began stepping on each other’s feet, woofing, snorting, thoroughly distracted.
“Stick him now, Brann!” Halsam said.
Brann tried to answer. Halsam moved and the Driver’s voice caught as though he were choking. Halsam reached down for Brann’s arm, pulling it to get at the knife. In that movement something shifted inside the jewel and a crystalline ringing began inside it. The Driver screamed and leapt simultaneously. Brann felt the rough horn of the Driver’s feet trample him. He saw Halsam and the Driver grapple. He felt Liza pulling at him, and perhaps she said, “Help him, Brann,” and the light was doused as Halsam and the Driver came together.
“You!” Halsam was screaming. “You!” And Brann, finding his feet, stood in the darkness.
“He’s killing Halsam,” Liza said. The dumb folk noticed the fight and left off their foot-stepping game. They pressed and shifted closer so that no open space remained. Hands touched Brann. Liza flailed at the hands which felt her. In the red light issuing from between them, Halsam and the Driver were shown locked together, grappling. In that light Brann saw the Driver’s strength, and he wondered at Hal-sam’s and how his friend could hold his own in the struggle. Brann reached out to help and felt hands of the dumb folk come between so that he could only watch. The Driver’s strength was telling. His fingers found new purchases, working closer to Halsam’s throat. The little Driver strangled Liza’s knee. She kicked him. Brann flailed with his knife. He felt it bite into flesh and he knew he was hurting some of the folk but they made no cry of pain. Steadily he was pulled farther from Halsam’s fight. Liza was next to him.
“The Driver’s killing him,” she said.
“I know,” Brann answered, and he shoved helplessly against the mass of flesh and groping hands.
Then a different note came from the jewel, a sudden high trilling as if a bird were captive inside. A distant muffled rumble came, the grinding of ancient machinery. Brann felt the vibration through the concrete of the floor. The grinding grew. The hands of the folk stopped and woofs of uncertainty sounded. Brann saw Halsam and the Driver pressed hard against the stone of the passage’s end, pinned there by the pressure of the folk. The driver’s hands had found Halsam’s throat. Halsam pulled at them. The grinding went on and the mass of the stone wall began to break with a cracking report.
Liza pointed at it and cried, “There’s a light; the wall is coming open.”
Through the new-riven opening in the stone mass a swath of yellow light spilled out With the shriek of an engine long unoiled, a metal door pulled away from the imprisoning masonry and slid sideways. Beyond was the lighted landing of a stairwell, and into that opening the pressure carried Brann and Liza and the front rank of the folk. Broken masonry collapsed in dust. In it Halsam was buried, and the Driver, too, senseless from the blow of a falling brick.
Lights sprang on above and the folk shrank from them, pulling back into the blue darkness of the passageway. Brann found they were on an open metal grating that served as one landing in a spiral staircase that went up as far as he could see. Cold air blew down, and the irregular bride walls dripped.
“Get Halsam,” Liza said to Brann. “Help me.”
The folk still watched, keeping well back from the landing. Brann moved over next to Lisa and together they pulled Halsam out of the loose dirt and rubble that had fallen from the opened door. Once again Brann thought that he might kill the Driver, and looked about for his knife.
“You have to kill him this time,” Halsam said, and he kicked at the Driver who lay unconscious in the dirt “My knife is lost” Brann said. Remarkably he was relieved that the knife was missing. He remembered the dead giant in the Post House and tried to imagine himself stabbing the Driver that way. There had been a time a few moments ago when it would have been possible. Not now.
The chimney of the stairway dropped away into extreme darkness. The walls of it were like the irregular brick interior of an oven. Brann had never seen a chimney or any such thing for comparison.
‘I’ll kill him,” Halsam blurted. He cast about for a stone large enough to bash the Driver. The Driver was coming to.
The glow of the jewel had entirely faded. The magic of the scene was gone.
“We have to go up,” Liza said. She pointed along the helix of the stairway. Its open risers were rusty and it wound up through a stairwell that seemed bored into the substance of the city. “We have to go up, don’t we, Brann? That was the message on the wall of the Post House.”
The masonry was rotten; it broke in Halsam’s hands. Tears of fury ran down his cheeks as he beat with the stone at the Driver. Brann took Halsam by the arm.
“Hals,” he said, “if you don’t come away soon, they’ll all be after us again. You can’t kill him; there’s no way and no time.”
“I hate him,” Halsam said. “You saw what he was going to do to me.”
“Leave him, Hals,” Liza told him.
Together she and Brann pulled Halsam away and they began to climb the clockwise spiral of the stairs.
“Where did all this come from?” Liza wondered. “I never heard of any secret stairways in the city.”
“You never heard of giants before,” said Halsam, “or of ugly stupid folk, either, that stink so awful.” He squinted into the light that came from lamps set into the walls of the stairwell, looking down several turns toward where they had left the Driver and his folk. “Did you see the little one, making believe he was his papa, throwing stones at me and squeaking? Maybe if the Driver really is dead, the little one will just keep following. I bet the runty little thing would just keep coming.”
“I wonder how far up this goes,” Liza said.
“I can’t know,” Brann answered, “except that the air is cold like from the closed elevator shafts craning from way up on the city roof.”
“That’s far,” Liza said. “I hope there’s a way out before then.”
Brann looked into the tightening spiral of stairs that twisted away above as far as they could see. Stone much harder than that which had broken below plugged what was probably an opening into the next tier. They stopped to probe at it and Halsam touched and worried the jewel, but whatever had worked to open the door below didn’t function here. They climbed on.
“I bet the bastard Driver keeps following us,” Halsam said. “I bet he keeps following us forever. He wants this back.” He pressed his hand over the jewel which was dark and sparkled only in the irregular lamps of the stairwell.
“We have to get high up away from him,” Liza answered, “clear away from all of them.”
Halsam shook his head. “No, one time soon we’re going to have to take him on. He’ll keep trying until we do.”
They looked back down the stairs again. Perhaps something clanked down there, and they speeded their pace.
Who had made the stairway? Brann couldn’t shake the wonder of that. He had no doubt that it went on down to the Foundations, into the darkness below where they climbed. The brick of the walls was yellow and slick. In places where the brick had peeled away, Brann could see the gouge marks of some machine (of the Structors? he wondered) in the concrete of the city. The well went up like a corkscrew so that he could see no more than a few turns upward. If Liza was right, then there was no way out before the roof. They passed the plug filling the entrance to yet another tier. The shadows from the openwork risers cut the space into a network that shifted on their skins like a floating spider’s web. The risers themselves were of iron, treated somehow so that there was little rust. Dirt encrusted them, mixed from dust and condensation.
The three moved up the leftward spiral, Halsam first, then Liza and Brann. They had climbed perhaps three tiers and Brann’s legs pained him already. “The steps are so high,” he said. “It hurts to keep stepping up them.”
“Yeah,” Liza agreed. “It’s as if they were made for bigger people.”
“They were made for the giants,” Halsam said.
“Do you suppose giants like the one we saw made them?” Liza asked.
Halsam shrugged. “Who would want a secret stairway?”
“Huten would,” Brann said.
“A story for babies,” Halsam scoffed.
“Well,” said Liza, “Huten is supposed to have tunnels like these.”
There is a tale of Huten and his keys. It is told to frighten truculent children.
“Do you hear the keys ringing in the tier, jangling in the night? Huten comes for a child. Huten has his own ways about the city, paths he only walks, passages he knows. He has hair down over his face on his chin and cheeks, and teeth so big they are like yellow blocks of stone.”
Children would vanish. It happened to Lars a, a schoolmate of Brann’s. She, brown hair, brown eyes, a pudgy ten-year* old, vanished. She had walked past the derelict plats of the inner wall north of the marketplat Elders whispered, “Huten!”
A troop of Gads was arrested by the officers, interrogated. The Romking grinned, gaptoothed, yellow, as was said of Huten.
“NT,” he said in his funny Frontward speech, “n’any Gad would steal a child o’folk. How d’you take us? T’be thieves. NT!”
An old Gad woman, face as dark as a monkler’s, eyes like one, too, small and never still, had whispered to him in Tzingaro.
“Tsa!” he whispered back.
She made motions about her face, pointed to the Rom-king’s mustache, which was only black hair cut from his head and fixed on his lip, waxed and drooping, a strange, fierce ornament.
“Potko!” he grunted. He shook his head violently.
“W'the keys took her,” the Romking explained. “The good-woman says, w’the keys come ringing, took’er.”
“Stupidity,” the Schoolmaster said. “Huten is an old tale. She’s taken it herself to wander from here. She’ll turn up or not. It was foul play or not, but not Huten.”
In Brann and Halsam’s hiding hole above the conduits, they had listened for the keening in the pipe and fancied footsteps going away.
“Is Huten real?” Brann asked Ebar.
“Perhaps,” she said. “We have evidences. A noise does come sometimes at night, the ringing. Have you heard it?”
“You said it was air moving in the old pipes and water maybe.” In Ebar’s green room sunlights fought with the light outside fading; shadows moved two ways.
“Huten,” she said, “not the fabled monster, do you understand, boy? Not some inhuman thing. But you know there are things we have lost We have lost this. There are ways through the city we do not know and folk who use them and these folk are hairy of face and chin and they are tall. I’ve heard some of the Post Folk speak so. Other tales, too.” She would say no more.
“Post Folk speak to you?” Ten-year-old Brann was awed. Ebar talked with Post Folk!
“Much is missing,” Ebar said. “Perhaps this was once known.”
“But Hutens?” protested Brann. “Do you mean there are lots of them?”
“Where is Larsa, your friend?”
In later years Brann would say Huten to Grandmother Ebar.
’Trash and fool stuff,” she would say. But dim bells sometimes rang at night and perhaps there were footsteps through solid walls.
It was Halsam who heard it first Far below was a humming sound like voices blended into the motion of feet He rose on his elbow and looked over the sleeping forms of Brann and Liza. The light in the stairwell was exactly the same as before. It was entirely independent of the sunlamps on the tiers. He sat up, feeling the ache in his muscles from his exertion and from the continual damp.
He shook Liza. “Do you feel it?” he asked. “I think the Driver is coming again.”
She squirmed out of the blankets. “No, do you mean it? They couldn’t be coming.”
Brann woke. “I hear something, too,” he said. He massaged his legs.
“They’re coming,” Halsam said. “I knew they would.”
The three scrambled to pack their belongings.
“How far are they?” Brann asked. “What do you think?”
“Maybe they’re just starting,” Halsam answered.
“No,” said Brann, “they could be close. The air is blowing down from above and it might be carrying the sound away.”
“Won’t this stop?” Liza asked. “Will they just keep following us? We’ve climbed seven tiers. Will they just keep following us until we get to the city roof?”
“I can hear them singing now,” Halsam said. “Let’s go.”
“I’m hungry,” Liza protested. “We have no water left” She probed at the mortar which plugged the gateway. “We surely can get out here.”
The plug was scored with the marks of others who had tried. Brann pointed to this. “We don’t have time for it Liza. Come along.”
He handed her her satchel and they turned to the stairs again. The steps passed beneath them, each one pulling at hamstrings and calves over the wide risers. Breath came harder until the words of encouragement they called to each other dissolved into a steady panting without voice. They passed two more landings and finally stopped, exhausted, at the third. Here even the signs of a doorway into the tier were obliterated and the stairwell rose smoothly.
