Suited (37 page)

“Their touch stretches far.”

Their touch. I knew who he meant. Who else, surely, but the puppet men?

“Where are we?” I had truly lost track, I couldn’t even say if we were climbing, descending, or simply marching forward.

“Underground again.” Strange, it didn’t feel like it. “Beneath the river. And the bridge.”

That made me shiver. “The Keeper’s Tear Bridge?” Impossible. The centre of the city was older than its effluents and rills. It had been built with few pions, from actual cut stone, not concrete created, shaped and smoothed. Before Grandeur had stripped me of my pion sight the city centre had seemed empty, sparse, unlit by the complex tangle of bonds and particles that made up the rest of Movoc-under-Keeper. So it could not generate enough debris to create doors like this, to surround and menace us.

My surprise must have somehow shown. “What you see around you,” the Keeper said, expression twisted with disgust. “These abominations, this is their influence. Their torture, their experiments. Each part of me they tear away, bend beyond recognition and keep for themselves, and it becomes such a door. And they do not tire of their work.”

“But under the river?” It still did not seem possible, rusting evidence aside. “There is nothing beneath the bridge but water. I don’t understand.”

“There are many ancient, long lost parts of your city. Some of the oldest were built deep beneath the ground, even below the river itself. The Halves that built them thought it the safest place for their equipment, to reduce the risk of contamination in your world. But these places were abandoned as the Halves changed, and lost their abilities and their memories. Their purpose. Some places collapsed, others were rendered inaccessible, and any records of them have faded. They can only be reached by the dark paths now.”

“Halves built them?” I paused, fought for clarity. “But, wait, you’re saying the puppet men also use these dark paths?”

“I have come to believe so.” The Keeper hesitated. “I have followed them. Or tried to. But they turned the paths against me and I was trapped. Held where you found me, in that room.” He was labouring to make sense of it all, I could hear confusion and hurt in his voice, and once again he was the Keeper I knew, the broken and tragic guardian. The strength Lad’s life had bought him was fragile. “Surrounded by doors. Do you remember?”

The first laboratory we had infiltrated. Of course I remembered. And, I supposed, that explained the horror he could not express, and his absence for days beforehand. “But that’s…” I struggled to understand. “If the puppet men can walk the dark paths then, what are they?” Were they suit and debris, like they had made me? I thought of their seamed skin, the darkness in smiles that did not fit on their faces.

“They are…” he rubbed his white face with a free hand. For a moment I could see the debris behind his cheeks, as though he had flushed grey. His voice hitched, breathy, as though he had to fight simply to push out the words. “Half, but not like the Halves. They belong, they are part of this place, of me.”

“Part of you?” I whispered, horrified and utterly confused. “I don’t understand. How is that possible?”

“I…” another struggle “It isn’t… They should not be, they are wrong, Tanyana. Wrong!” He was shouting now, eyes roaming the doors, hand so tight where he held me. “But they are here.” He drew a deep breath, calmed himself. “And I must deal with them. That is why I was made. To hold close the doors. And they are opening them. So I must stop them.”

He stared down at me, and halted. On the surface, he looked calm again, steady. But I could feel the storm raging within him, the strong pulse of debris beneath his skin. And there was more to it than that. His whole dark world seemed to quaver, in time to that pulse, a thudding that reverberated in my head and had nothing to do with the unsteady doors. The Keeper was debris, the doors were debris, this whole dark world I was walking through so lightly was debris. All of it was weak, all of it struggling and broken. “And you must help me. Are you ready?”

I jerked back from him. “Ready? Are we here?” I looked around. Doors, only doors, everywhere doors. No puppet men, no debris monsters, no Kichlan.

“We are.” He did not sound pleased. “I have to let you go. You will need to be in the light world, to help him.”

“On my own?”

“I will be here. Listen for me. We will do this together.”

I nodded, tense.

“Be wary. They know we are here.” And the Keeper released my hand.

The doors withdrew. They did not disappear entirely – after all I was still sheathed in my suit – but they lost some of their solidity, and shapes from the light world began to appear. I could make out a tunnel, the rippling of water, and caught a strange scent: ancient stone, mould and musty air, combined with something heady, something artificial, like the flow of pions to a malfunctioning lamp. If I was not coated in my suit it would have lifted the hairs along my arms. As it was, my entire body started tingling.

“Go,” the Keeper whispered. “I am with you.” And he graced me with a rueful, self-deprecating smile. “For all the good that will do.”

I drew my suit back in.

We had indeed arrived in a tunnel. Nearly lightless, with only the slow spinning of my suit and a faint light shining from beneath a far door giving me anything to see by. Stonework arched above me. Water trickled down through it in several thin but steady streams. How long before the stone finally wore away, and the river above us rushed in to claim this place?

A strange pattern in crystal covered one of the walls beside me, reflecting the beam from my suit. I approached it carefully, and ran my fingers across a large, flat facet. Cold, wet, and made dim by a gathering of mould. I rubbed at the crystal with the end of my sleeve, revealing flecks of gold inside it. Just like the stones we had found in the underground street – the ones Zecholas had exclaimed over; the ones the Unbound had used to build Lad’s temporary tomb.

“What is this stuff? What did it do?”

The Keeper hesitated.
It…It’s too old now. Doesn’t work. Didn’t really work that well in the first place anyway. Once you’ve come one way, it’s hard to travel back. It changes you
.

“Travel back? Keeper, what do you mean? I don’t understand.”

Tanyana, we have to focus. Please. For me, for Kichlan. Keep going
.

I swallowed my questions, and crept across slippery stones. The door on the far side of the room was wooden, and did not belong here. After so many countless years it should have rotted away in this closed, wet place. It should be little more than hinges and a rusted old handle. But the wood was fresh, the handle smooth, and it opened without a sound.

I wondered, briefly, why the puppet men had bothered to mount a door here. And then how they had got it here in the first place and who had installed it.

But then I stepped through, and all such thoughts fell away.

Any resemblance to an ancient city disappeared on the other side. I found myself on a landing. A cavern stretched out below me, and I could not shake the feeling that this was just like the basement where Lad had died, only of a far greater size.

Do you see
?

See? Two lights were drilled into the wall either side of the doorway. Not pion powered, not even gas. Not a candle-flame either, more like starlight collected and bottled, small but heinously bright, bobbing behind crystalline fittings. Their shine scattered across the landing, only touching the great space below. I caught hints of glass, of metal, reflecting in the darkness.

“I can’t see anything.” I tried to peer further, but couldn’t make out any details. “What is in there?”

I do not know. All I can see are doors. So many doors
.

That could not be a good thing.

Go deeper
.

The energy I had felt in the underwater archway was stronger here. It lifted the hairs along my arms and the back of my neck. When I touched the metal railing around the landing a bright blue spark sizzled between us, strong enough to make me snatch my hand back. I rubbed the spot on my palm where it had bitten me, the skin quickly reddening.

A truly bizarre set of stairs led down into the cavern. They spiralled tight and uneven around a central axis patterned with garish tiles. Small glass chambers hung from each step, rattling as their internal light flickered on with my footsteps, as though awakened by my presence. When my feet touched the cavern floor a thin line of these chambers lit up, threading a winding trail off into impossible distance.

The room might be underneath the Tear Bridge, but it was so wide and long I was certain it stretched further than the banks of the river and deep into the centre of the city itself. It was crowded with strangely set-up devices, all shimmering their suit metal in the reflection of the lights.

“What is this?”

No answer. I imagined the Keeper did not have one.

I left the stairs, and wound my way through hulking machines. No seamed smiles appeared suddenly to stop me; no whispering mist dogged my feet. The Keeper had said the puppet men knew we were here. So either they did not fear me – which was entirely likely – or they were giving me the space to investigate their underground maze. Both were disconcerting thoughts.

I passed an enormous globe. Easily three times the height of a man, sections of the outer shell were missing so I could see all the way to the centre. There were several smaller globes inside, and circles, and semi-circles all crowding close to the outer shell. The middle was hollow. The energy that buzzed through the room intensified as I approached it. Though the machine was still, it vibrated, humming softly. I peered inside and noticed gears between each of the circles, and tracks of worn metal that told me the whole thing must move, the countless complex layers rubbing against each other as they spun. What was supposed to be at the centre? What did they spin around?

I see a door
, the Keeper murmured by my ear.
Circular, glass instead of wood or metal. It is cracking, slowly, surely, in round patterns like a spider web. I hate it, Tanyana. So warped out of shape, so broken and fragile. But I can still feel its pain
.

I kept moving. The path was broad enough for three people to walk shoulder-to-shoulder, guiding me in a wide circle. More of the great, stripped-down globes lined the way. I realised with a jolt that there were nine of them and in the middle, a metallic bed.

I ran to it. So familiar, I had myself been strapped to one while needles fed the suit into my bones. But there were no arching fingers here, no threads of wire. Nothing but a roughly star-shaped slab, with leather straps at each point, open now and limp.

“It’s a nine point circle.” But what did that even mean? Could these globe-things act as circle points? What energy did they charge when they spun? And for what purpose? I glanced around at them, so silent and still, yet vibrating with the memory of power. How long ago had they last been used?

And who had been strapped down here, their circle’s unwilling centre?

“Are there doors in each of these things?” I hissed, desperate to know, desperate to understand. “And what about here?” I patted the table, winced as another spark travelled along my arm. “Is it a door?”

The Keeper was silent for a long moment – too long – before he whispered,
We need to keep going
.

“But–”

It hurts here. Please Tanyana. Please
.

I dismissed my anxiety, and nodded. Did I really want to understand what the puppet men were doing down here? And to whom?

The room stretched on. I realised, as we walked, that the lights behind us turned themselves off as the ones before us flickered on. The only constant source remained that first, thin path; the one we followed. So the globes and their freakish nine point circle fell into darkness, as a small forest of glass tubes started sparkling.

The tubes protruded from the ground, as thick as my thigh but only as tall as my hip. I noted more gold-flecked crystals embedded in the floor of solid, chiselled stone. I threaded my way through the tubes, the path tight. While the strange lights reflected in their glass and started them sparkling like a field of stars, there was a darkness within the cylinders. I crouched. A thick webbing of debris planes filled the pipes, shards of darkness taut between clear sides.

That wasn’t all. Blue light – something between the blaze of my suit and shocks this place had given me – snaked its way along the outside of the glass. I didn’t dare touch it. It sparked between each tube and brushed against me with a prickling warmth.

Hurts
.

“They are doing something to the debris, aren’t they?” I stood, and glanced around me. So many tubes. “Is this how they create their monsters? Is this how they twisted you?”

I do not know. I remember needles and silver and light, such cruel light. But there are so many pieces within me. You, Tanyana, are within me. I cannot tell you how each part was made. They are too many, and they all tumble into one
.

“I could break them, set the debris free.” I said this even though I feared to touch the tubes. “Give it all back to you.”

That is not why we are here. And I do not know what good it will do. Continue on, and save him
.