Chapter 32: The Cistern Chamber

They reached the third hold-point on the fifth day, and it was the chamber with the cistern in it, and Khrr was not there.

Sacha had not let himself expect otherwise.

The eight had gone in fifteen days ahead of the column and had come out the far side; there was no reason for any of them to be sitting in a shelter halfway back.

He had known that for five days and had still, every time the column entered a new chamber, done the thing he could not stop doing, which was read the air first for a scent that was not there.

What was there was the cistern, exactly where Khrr's measurement had put it, exactly the dimensions Khrr had made a scout memorise for no reason anyone could have defended at the time.

Sacha stood over it for a moment before anything else.

Somebody had cut this.

Not scraped, not found — cut, a smoothed hollow with a lip on the low side to hold what collected, in a chamber that no rat and no beetle and no bred soldier of any faction in this sector could physically have reached.

Roaches had dug this.

Roaches with tools, or with time, or with enough of both to make a permanent thing in a place they had expected to keep living in.

He filed the ache of that and went to work, because there were sixty-one people behind him and the seep would not start itself.

What was also there was a message.

Not from Khrr.

Laid in the same grammar, in Khrr's hand, on the chamber's east wall where a column coming from the west could not miss it — which meant Khrr had written it on the way out, fifteen days ago, and had written it for a colony that at that point had no plans to be here.

If you are reading this you have moved everyone. That means the building went early or something worse. I did not know which so I have written for both.

Sacha stood in front of it.

Water in the cistern from a seep on the north face, it fills slow, four days for enough. Start it before you rest.

The passage east from this chamber narrows at forty lengths and does not open again for a long time. Send the smallest first and do not send the nursery until the smallest returns.

If I am not at the far end when you arrive, do not wait. The ground east is wet and there is food and the Mother's markers are close. Go north along the wet ground, not east. East is the corridor.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from NovelPhoenix; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

There is one more thing and I do not have the grammar for it so I will use the wrong marks.

And then, in the shorthand they had built in the first week, three glyphs that in three months of use had only ever meant return to the reporting crawl, laid three times in a row.

Thresh read it over his shoulder — or did whatever a beetle with one antenna does that is functionally reading over a shoulder — and said nothing for a while.

It wrote you instructions for a situation it did not believe would happen, it observed eventually.

Yes.

Fifteen days ago. On the way out. While carrying its own mission. Something in the sending Sacha could not place. My god never once left a message for anyone.

Sacha did not answer that, because the honest answer was that Khrr had not learned this from him either.

He had never written an instruction for a contingency he did not expect.

He had built perimeters, run drills, doubled watches — all of it for threats he could name.

Khrr had spent fifteen minutes in the dark writing directions for a disaster it had no reason to think was coming, on the off-chance that somebody it could not warn might one day need them.

Where did you learn that, he thought, at a lieutenant eight days east of him, into a channel that had never worked and never would.

He started the cistern seep before anything else, exactly as instructed, and then went and sat with the last three glyphs for longer than he could operationally justify.

Return to the reporting crawl.

There was no reporting crawl. There had not been one since the column cleared the fracture mouth; it was under a building that might not exist any more. Khrr had known that when it wrote them — that was the entire premise of the message.

Which meant the glyphs were not an instruction.

They were the only two words Khrr possessed that had ever been used exclusively between the two of them, deployed three times because repetition was the only emphasis the grammar allowed, in a message otherwise composed entirely of practical directions for keeping sixty-one people alive.

Sacha sat in a chamber a dead civilisation had dug a cistern in, with a colony sleeping around him and no ground under his name, and understood that he had just been told something in a language neither of them had built for it.

He marked the same three glyphs on the wall beneath Khrr's, which was operationally pointless, since the column was heading east and would never pass this way again.

He did it anyway.

The column rested four days in the cistern chamber while the seep filled, which was the longest any of them had been still since the fracture mouth, and Sacha used the time badly at first and then better.

Badly: he spent the first day going over Khrr's directions for errors, found none, and went over them again.

Better: on the second day he began, for the first time since the crawlspace, to actually look at the chamber he was sitting in.

Sixty-one roaches slept in a room built by roaches.

There were tool-marks on the cistern lip.

There was a smoothed track worn into the floor between the seep and the hollow, deep enough to represent seasons of the same journey made by the same small feet.

And there was nothing here that had died.

No shells.

No remains.

No sign of a fight, a collapse, a flood, a starvation.

Whatever had ended the people who cut this cistern, they had not ended here.

They had gone somewhere.

Sacha worked at that for the rest of the fourth day, in a room that had been somebody's home, and added it to a list that was getting long, under a heading he had not previously needed:

things that happened to roaches in these gaps, before me.