Chapter 130: Cart Ruts

The other side of the ring was cold, and it was wet, and it went down.

Theo came off the last board of the ramp onto a stone causeway four feet wide with black water on both sides of it, and the sound of the stockyard cut off behind him the way a door cuts off a room.

He stood there for a while and let his ears do the work.

Somewhere a long way off, one drip, and then eleven seconds, and then the same drip again.

’...It’s a cistern.’

He put the Genesis Eyes on the dark and let them run.

The place opened up in his head like a drawing.

A vault, brick, arched, going away from him in bays under a ceiling he could not have touched with a spear, and the water lay across the whole floor of it flat and unbroken and absolutely still. Pillars came up out of it in rows. Stone stairs went down into it at intervals and did not come back out.

And down the middle of the causeway, worn into the brick, two cart ruts.

’They come in here with the handcarts and they keep going.’

The mask was already hot. The beak channelled his breath back up into his own eyes and the inside of it had gone damp in about ninety seconds, and Theo pushed it up onto his forehead and breathed properly and felt immediately better about everything.

’Right. Nobody in here but me.’

The first one came up under the causeway about two hundred yards in.

It came out of the water on his left without any noise at all, six feet of pale rope-muscled body and a mouth that opened in four directions, and it was on the stone and coming before Theo had finished turning round.

He killed it with one cut.

Then he stood there with the water settling and looked at what he had done.

’...Huh.’

Raindrop had come out of the belt wet. It had been wet since the causeway, because everything in this building was wet, and the blue patterns were lit up the whole length of the blade and had been the entire time without him noticing.

[Rain Cutter — active]

’It’s been on since I walked in. I had to open my own hand in the Cinderfall to get that, and in here it’s just on, because the room is wet.’

He laughed inside a wooden mask on his forehead in a flooded vault under a stockyard.

’I like this Dungeon!’

For the next hour he had the best time he had had since the lake house.

The things in the water came at him in ones and twos and he let every single one of them get close before he did anything about it, because he wanted to see them work.

They hunted by the water. That was the thing he worked out at the fourth one. They did not have eyes, and they did not seem to care about noise, and what they came for was the push a body makes when it moves through water, so a man standing on a causeway was a shape, and a man standing on a causeway holding absolutely still was a pillar.

Theo tested that eleven times and it was true eleven times.

Then he tested the other thing.

He put a rope of shadow into the water twenty feet off the causeway and moved it, slow and heavy, the way a leg moves.

Three of them went for it at once.

’IT WORKS! And it costs almost nothing, because I’m not holding anything up, I’m just stirring!’

He killed all three from behind while they were busy with a piece of dark that was not there.

[Shadow Sword — Mythic] 10.45% → 11.08%

[Genesis Eyes — A] 5.99% → 6.40%

[Attendant’s Hands — A] 0.01% → 0.09%

’Nine hundredths! That thing’s been at nought point nought one since the day I got it and it has MOVED—’

The ranks were wrong.

He noticed it properly at about the fifteenth, standing in shin-deep water at the bottom of a flight of stairs with a body floating face down beside his boot.

[Target: Cistern Drowner]

[Realm: Enhanced — Rank I]

Theo read that twice.

’This is a Tier C.’

The Cinderfall had been a Tier C, and the Cinderfall had run Mundane wolves all the way down to the third level. Enhanced had been the Dire and the Warden, and that was the whole of it.

’And this is the fifteenth one I’ve stepped on.’

He crouched down in the water and turned the body over with the flat of the blade.

Then he cut it open, because he had spent four days butchering monsters with a woman who knew how and had watched every cut she made.

It took him a while to find. It was not where a heart goes and it was not where a stomach goes. It was low in the body cavity, wrapped in something that had grown round it the way bark grows round a nail, and when he got it out and washed it in the water it was a smoky stone the size of a walnut with a slow light going round inside it.

He knew exactly what it was. He had one the size of his fist in the Coffer.

[Warden Core — fragment]

[Origin: not this Dungeon]

[Note: this creature is carrying a foreign core]

Theo stayed crouched in the water for a long moment with a dead thing’s core in his palm.

’They’re not storing them, and they’re not selling them. They’re putting them INSIDE things.’

He opened the next nine.

Seven of them had one. Two had two. One of the two had a piece so big that the body had gone crooked around it, and that one had been the hardest of the nine to kill, and Theo sat back on the steps with eleven stones lined up on the brick beside him and did the sum out loud in his head the way he did a bill.

’Four thousand four hundred and eleven cores.’

If it took one to move a thing up a Rank, and that was a guess and he knew it was a guess, then somebody had been standing in that stockyard for years.

’Turning a C-tier into something the board still calls a C-tier.’

He looked down the vault, at the rows of pillars going away into water that his eyes could see perfectly well and nobody else’s could.

’...And the Hall doesn’t have this gate on the register at all.’

He put the eleven stones in the Coffer, because they were worth a great deal of money and because he was, whatever else was happening, still the man who took the inventory.

The cart ruts kept going.

That was the part that would not leave him alone. He had been following them for two hours without meaning to, and they ran the length of the causeway and down the third flight of stairs and along a second causeway under the water where he could see them through four feet of black, two lines worn into brick by wheels.

A handcart holds what a man can push.

Four thousand four hundred and eleven trips, one at a time, down a ramp and along a causeway and down a flight of stairs into a flooded vault, for years.

’Who gets up in the morning and does that?’

Then the Shadow Fragment moved on its own.

He was not wearing it.

That was what stopped his heart for a second and a half, because the Fragment had been sitting in his coat as a fragment since the Cinderfall, and it had never once done anything without being called.

It pulled.

It came up out of the coat as smoke and it did not go over his shoulders, it went out in front of him, low over the water, and it hung there straining in the direction the ruts were going like a dog on a short lead.

[Fragment Resonance]

[A fragment of the same origin has been detected]

[Distance: closing]

Theo stood in a flooded vault with his own armour trying to leave him.

’...That’s the one line on that item I’ve never been able to do anything with.’

Reacts strongly to nearby fragments of the same origin.

He let it pull, and it went, and he had to walk fast to keep up with his own coat.

It took him down two more flights and along a bay where the water came up over his belt, and then the brick stopped and the causeway ran out onto a lip of stone and the whole vault opened.

Theo stopped on the lip and looked.

The water went away from him in every direction, flat and black and absolutely still, out to walls he could see and a ceiling he could not, and in the middle of it, four hundred feet out, something came up out of the surface that was not a pillar.

The cart ruts went straight to it.

They went off the lip, and down, and on across the floor of the thing under four feet of water, two clean lines all the way out, and the Shadow Fragment hung in the air off his shoulder and shook.

Theo pulled the crow mask down over his face.

’Right. That’s where four and a half thousand cores went.’