Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

Inch by strained inch I slid down the shaft. My legs shook with the effort and I felt sure I must be leaving a trail of skin and blood on the Builder stone: my shirt couldn’t have lasted long against the friction.

Sufficient daylight reached down to let me know when the shaft ran out of wall, and soon enough I found that whilst the soles of my boots still gripped the stonework, my heels had nothing to rest on. When a decision is inevitable you may as well take it as quick as possible so that you still have something left to deal with whatever consequences may arise. I dropped, doing my best to swing my feet below me. The effort proved a partial success and ended with bruised heels, banged-up knees, elbows slammed to the ground, and finally the side of my head fetching up against the floor. An inch or so of dust covering the stone floor served to lessen the impact, saving me from a cracked skull and leaving me conscious, choking, and with a river of blood flowing from my nose. I levered myself up so I could sit cradling my knees, and set my back to the nearest wall.

‘Ow.’ The complaint came out nasally.

Pain led my fingers to a piece of the lantern glass embedded in my thigh. I pulled it out and held the wound closed until the blood stopped pulsing around my fingertips. In time I found the lantern wick, set it into the oil flask, and with steel and flint and more fumbling than necessary I set a flame to it. The tunnel led off to front and back, circular in cross-section and looking suspiciously like a sewer. The end of my rope dangled three yards above my outstretched hand and getting back into the shaft would require gymnastics I thought beyond me even without wounds or fever.

On the assumption that water had once flowed along the tunnel I made my best guess at which direction it might have taken and started to walk ‘upstream’. When you’re in a dark place, and your light is going to run out before too long, you get on with things. It’s a wonder to me how few people apply that same logic to their lives.

Three times new tunnels joined mine and on each occasion I studied my choices through the Builders’ view-ring, which shed some light on the matter, a red blinking light that demanded I turn right twice and then follow straight on. At two of the turns traces of rust hinted that metal grilles once blocked the way. A great sage once said there are few problems that won’t go away if you ignore them long enough. Fortunately these obstacles had been pre-ignored for a thousand years.

Toward its end the pipe rose at a steep angle and brought me into a circular room, empty in the main but littered with fragments of plasteek. Brittle with age, they made a satisfying crunch underfoot. Some of the pieces could have been the arms of chairs, small wheels, others lay bonded to the remains of metal cabinets. A corridor led off and I followed it, shadows dancing all around. The place had no odour to it, as if even that staleness which haunts abandoned rooms had given up and left.

A long corridor led me past many doorways all open and dark, decorated with the fragments of the doors that had guarded them. In the ceiling flat strips of whitish glass punctuated the walk and at one point, as I passed below, two of them tried to flicker to life like the glow-bulbs in the Tall Castle.

I’ve wandered the ruins of forts where generations lived, seen the march of empty centuries across the old stone, wearing away the sharpness that defined lives. In those places, at every turn, those lost inhabitants are remembered. The scuffmark where a door closed decade after decade, steps sagging with wear, the deep-scored name where a child set his stamp upon a windowsill. You can read such ruins, however tumbled, almost see the soldiers at the walls, stable-boys leading horses out to exercise. But in the dry corridors of this Builders’ den, untouched by rain or wind, undisturbed, I saw nothing but puzzles and sorrow. I might be the first man to walk here in a thousand years. A thousand more might pass before the next. In such a place silence and dust wait whilst men’s lives slip past. Without the flicker of my flame to count the moments hours could race by, years escape, and I might crawl away ancient and unwise.

The corridor ended in a large hall with many doors, these seemingly of wood but untouched by age.

Silence.

In the times that I have reached after the dead to pull back what is needed to make them rise, it seemed I reached into such a place as this. When I drew Row back into his corpse it was into dry lands that I followed him despite his dying in the mud of the Cantanlona bogs. I thought for a moment of William, of my little brother falling into such a place after they broke him. When I lay as dead after Father’s knife touched my heart I imagined an angel came for me and I refused her. I hoped that years before that day she had descended to the dry lands to make those same offers to William. And that he had not refused.

My head snapped up, jerking me from my half-doze.