The Last Hour of Gann (97 page)

Roads, walls, scrap, sky. He couldn’t even see the mountains from here because the window faced north. No, it was nothing but ruin as far as he could see, cut into slices by cross-streets, fallen poles, a canal, until the plains took it all away. Nothing.

And yet, when Scott had led his people onward, he had chosen to lead them out through this broken window.

Meoraq followed, his spines flat to his skull. The tracks quickly faded and were lost. He had to stop and search every alleyway, every open door and broken window, every small space a human might have squeezed through, but found no sign of them.

He ended at the canal, which was not a true canal after all, but some sort of stormway, collecting the rain as it ran off the roads and whisking it away through a tunnel. Stormways like these were used in modern cities to irrigate farmland or water cattle while reducing damage caused by seasonal floods. Perhaps the Ancients used them the same way. In any case, there were some machines alive to tend them, because the stormway had not filled in with the unavoidable detritus that even abandoned cities excreted in hard rains. There were some cracks in the wall, and the grate that had discouraged foolhardy children of the Ancients from exploring the tunnels had fallen, but otherwise, it seemed well-kept. The canal was quite wide and easily twice Meoraq’s height in depth, but there was only a little water in the bottom, standing clear on top of a thick layer of greenish-black sediment.

Clear enough for
Scott to want to fill his stolen flasks here? Meoraq hunkered down on the edge of the canal and thought about that, trying to be objective.

He couldn’t see it. The first person who got sick drinking this piss would end
Scott’s power over the rest of them.

Meoraq straightened up, scanning the ruins on the far side of the stormway, but he didn’t see anything and he saw no reason to keep looking. The slope of the canal’s sides were shallow enough that he’d ought to be able to simply walk across, but he hated to get his boots mucky and he could just imagine what that sediment smelled like when it was kicked up. Yes,
Scott had been here, but even he’d had the sense to move on.

Meor
aq turned away from the canal…and slowly turned back.

The storm grate lay in the bottom of the canal’s eastern end, staining the sludge around it rust-orange. The tunnel’s mouth yawned above it at roughly knee-height, tall enough for a machine to walk comfortably within if maintenance were called for. Or a man. Or many men, walking in a line.

His eyes shifted from the perfect black of the tunnel’s mouth to the sloping wall of the canal. The stormways were being maintained, but they weren’t scrubbed down often enough to prevent a thin veneer of scum from forming where water regularly flowed. A greenish-brown film skinned the lower half of both walls…but it had been scraped down on this side. Not cleanly, as a machine would do, but in clumsy stripes. Like skidding feet. Like boots, to be specific.

Meoraq walked along the edge of the stormway until he stood right above that scraped place. He hunkered down, peering into the tunnel as far as he could see. His arm could have reached further than his eyes, but his eyes reached far enough to show him all the scum-black tracks left by their human boots. All aimed inward.

“I am not going in there,” said Meoraq.

No one answered him.

“I say no. I say, in fact, fuck the fist of that very idea. I would not follow the Prophet himself into that hole and I for damned sure will not follow S’kot.”

Still no answer.

So. Decided, Meoraq stood and marched back up the narrow street, past the ruined building where Scott and his people had sheltered, and out into the broad travel lanes of this city. There he stopped and stood for some time, his head bent, meditating.

His prayers ended with a muttered curse. Then he raised his head and loudly said, “I require assistance.”

Three machines nosed out of their dens and crawled toward him. They all spoke, but only one of them was capable of making itself understood. “How may I direct you?” it croaked, opening its chest to display a glowing window where tiny images appeared in a neat row. “Error. Directory assistance not found. Error. Public communications channel not found. Error. Community calendar schedule not found. Error—”

“Come with me,” Meoraq said curtly. His meditations had left him with the strong conviction that mastery was more than the command of a moment’s need, but he knew he stood upon the very edge of breaking the Second Law. For now, Sheul was with him, but if he found
Scott in that tunnel, he was going to kill him there.

“How may I direct you
?” the bot asked, struggling along after him. It kept asking every few seconds all the way back to the stormway, where it tried to rattle out some complicated machine-reason why it couldn’t go any further. It made some equally obscure threats when Meoraq picked the fucking thing up and carried it with him to the bottom of the canal. His boots were swallowed at once in a shallow pool of stagnant slime, and it stank just as bad as he’d thought. Meoraq thumped the bot down in the mouth of the tunnel and stepped up onto the storm grate, doing his best to scrape his boots off.

“There has been an incident,” the machine observed, probing on
e of its feelers into the scum that covered the tunnel’s floor. “Maintenance has been notified. Error error. Channel not found. Error. No response, no arrival. How may I direct you?”

Meoraq aimed its glowing chest into the tunnel, where it shone every bit as br
ight as one of Scott’s human lamps. He could see now fifty paces, maybe more, but there was still nothing to see apart from their tracks. He listened. Deep in the darkness, water dripped onto wet stone. There were no breaths but his, no footsteps, no life. The smell was that of cold, moldering stone and black water—the very breath of Gann.

He was not going in there. It was madness to do even this much. And
Scott was hardly the sort of man who would strike off boldly down an unlit, unmapped, unmaintained tunnel. That took more than just idiocy. That took a certain degree of idiotic courage as well.

“S’kot!” Meoraq called.

“How may I direct you? Error. Directory assistance—”

“What is this place?” Meoraq asked.

“Error. Directory assistance not found. Updates requested. Error error. Channel not—”

“Stop. These tunnels…
Where do they lead?”

“Welcome to Citymap! Please wait. Error. Signal not found. Updates requested—”

“Stop! Enough. Let me think.”

So. Meoraq’s sense of direction was, like his sense of time, fairly well-tuned after a lifetime of travel. Although the tunnels might turn any number of ways after boring off into the blackness, right here, the stormway ran west to east. It could be fairly assumed that the tunnels stretched as far as the city, and if so, they might go on forever. The cities of the Ancients were the very flesh of this world in their age. A man could dig down anywhere and find their relics.

Did Scott really think he could travel through to Gedai in this tunnel, crossing not over the mountains, but under them? Or had he only intended to explore them a short way and lost himself? The human lamps were neither infinite nor infallible. They might well be just ahead, just outside of hearing, camped in blackness, waiting for rescue.

“You’
d better be here,” Meoraq muttered, climbing up onto the tunnel’s lip. His first handhold broke off in his hand. Not an encouraging omen. And not the only missing handhold, he saw. Who could possibly pull a piece of the tunnel out and keep going?

“S’kot!” he shouted, and the tunnel shouted it onward for him.

“How may I—”

“Just follow me.” Meoraq started walking, his gaze shifting between the bot-lit black of the seemingly endless tunnel ahead of him and their tracks on the floor. He thought of rain while he walked—the rain that sent Amber crawling in to share his tent, the rain that had not quite fallen enough to spill into this tunnel and wash these tracks away. The rain could be fickle.

The sound of water dripping grew closer. The bot’s light caught the surface of a wide puddle ahead, casting water-shine over the walls and ceiling. Thinking of rain, Meoraq walked right through it.

His boots squelched down into what might as well have been a puddle of black oil and went wildly out from under him. Meoraq’s right hand flew out to anchor himself to the wall (his left slapped down over his groin in a futile effort to relieve some of the strain of having his legs skid out in opposite directions), but there was nothing to grip and he dropped smack on his ass in the same stuff. He felt the shock all the way up his spine. And then he felt the icy sludge seeping into his breeches.

“Why am I doing this?” he muttered.

“I’m sorry. Please rephrase your question.”

“Can you not shut up for one fucking minute?!”

“Would you like to contact an usher support technician? Error error. Channel not found. I’m sorry I could not assist you today.” The light glowing from the machine’s chest snapped off. “Goodbye.”

Meoraq clapped both hands to his face, then threw back his head and howled, “I require assistance!”

Light obediently bloomed. “How may I—”

“Just stand there and stay quiet!”

“Standing by.”

“Great Sheul, O my Father, I thank You for every pain I am alive to feel,” he spat, pulling himself out of the muck with a wet sucking sound that would have been hilarious under circumstances that did not include him. He got up carefully, straddling the puddle in an awkward crouch, and ventured deeper, feeling his way along the wall. “Humans, come! Give cry if you hear—”

He slipped again, just one boot this time, which had the effect of throwing him hard against the tunnel wall. He hit snout-first, which was bad enough, and then the wall collapsed, pitching him painfully through the rotten stone and into a series of equally rotten pipes. They burst, spraying out stormwater like needles in his eyes
and breaking away even more of the crumbling wall. The flow quickly slackened, but the wall kept falling, opening a wider and wider gap below and above him until pieces of the tunnel’s ceiling were breaking off.

Meoraq scrambled back, his limbs skidding wildly through that damned puddle until he finally thrashed free of it. The bot pivoted to watch him go, lighting his graceless retreat until a crunch and a shower of sparks threw him into darkness. Meoraq bolted back up t
he tunnel, smashing from one wall to the other until he leapt out into open air.

He landed hard, skidded what felt like half a span, then hit a crack under the sediment and went right over on his belly in the bottom of the canal. Cold sludge sluiced up over his snout and poured itself in under his clothes, swallowing him in stink.

He lay there, dazed. He didn’t think he’d ever been dazed before. He could feel his brain still careening through its own black tunnel, seeking some gripping place, and what it eventually hooked onto was, ‘Salkith must feel like this all the time.’

He laughed, spewing bubbles up through the watery muck
, then pushed himself out of it. Behind him, the tunnel was quiet. The mouth stayed open, round and innocent, silently asking if he’d like to try again.

Meoraq gained his feet, wiping compulsively at the end of his snout even though he knew he was only rubbing the taste deeper into his
scent-cavities. He took a breath, coughed it out, took another, and decided he was all right. Bruised, reeking, and without a damned thing to show for it, but all right.             

He started to pray his thanks, stopped to climb out of the stormway, finished his prayer, and headed back to Amber.

She hadn’t put his tent together—it was still too early for that, in spite of the eons he’d spent in the tunnel—but she had lit a fire and was heating something in the stewing pouch while she waited for him. He had plenty of time to watch her watch his approach. Her face was as good as a mirror, but he didn’t need it. He couldn’t possibly look worse than he smelled.

“What the hell happened to you?” she asked
as soon as he was close enough.

There were many things he could have told her, things she deserved to know
, but he couldn’t think how to do it.

“I fell down,
” he said. That was true enough.

“That’s tea,” she warned, watching him reach for the stewing pouch.

“As far as I care, human, it is now oddly-scented bathwater.” He splashed a little over his face, rinsed his mouth, then began to undress.

She pulled his pack over and found his soap, started to hold it out and then drew it back when he put out his hand
. “Am I supposed to…? You want me to help?”

He laughed curtly. To have Amber bathe him again had been pressed into his imagination, his fan
tasies, ever since that night…but now, with this stink in his scales, he could not be less aroused. Sheul heard and answered every prayer. Ha.

“Yes,” he said, raising his arms.

She obeyed, wetting the bar and rubbing it between her hands before she gave it to him. While he attempted to clean his mouth, nose, and especially his scent-cavities, she moved behind him and started scrubbing at his back.