Chapter 140 - 138 — Beneath the Canal I
**POV: Jace**
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We went down off the lip onto the slope and then down the slope onto the floor of the channel, and it took about four minutes and the whole of it was noisy.
That is the first thing about the bottom of a dry canal. There is nothing in it to absorb anything.
Eleven metres of dressed stone on either side and seventy metres between them, and every boot that comes down on that slope arrives back at you off the far wall about a fifth of a second later.
We stopped talking about two thirds of the way down without agreeing to.
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The deeper channel in the middle is about four metres across and a metre and a half down, and there is a lip on both sides of it where the slope ends.
There is no water in it and there has not been for a very long time. What is in the bottom of it is ash and grit and a long line of black silt that has dried and cracked into plates.
We went along the lip rather than through it, because Sokolov looked at the plates for about two seconds and said, "That will be soft underneath."
I put a boot on one to see and it went in past the ankle and came out with the sole hissing.
Not hot. Wet. Something in that silt is still wet after however long that sky has been orange, and it has no smell at all, which I liked considerably less than a smell.
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The tracks are on our side of the middle channel the whole way.
They come out of the east wall, cross the slope at an angle, go north along the foot of the west wall where we found them, and end nowhere I can see.
Three points at the front with a drag between them. Deeper at the toe. No heel.
Whatever made them came out of the passage we are about to go into, came across seventy metres of open channel in the direction of a gatehouse that had just started making noise, and then went away north.
It was not hunting on the way over. The stride is even the whole distance.
It came to look.
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The east passage is in the face of the wall about a metre above the slope, the same as ours, and there is a lip in front of it and the mouth is dark.
The tracks go in and out of it in both directions and there are a great many of them, overlaid, going back further than the fresh ones.
That is its road. It has been using that entrance for a long time.
"Right," Hana said. "Before we go in. What does everybody actually think."
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"I think we go in," I said. "Because the map has no second route and I have looked at the wall on both sides for three hundred metres and there is nothing to climb."
"Agreed. And?"
"And I am not walking in there expecting to talk my way past it."
"Nobody is asking you to." She was checking the straps on her own pack while she said it.
"I am asking whether you have a plan that is not hitting it, because there are three of us, and one of us has half his mana and one of us is going to be the person who carries whoever gets hurt."
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Sokolov said, "Light," and put his up into the mouth of it.
It goes straight for as far as that light reaches. Two and a half metres high, about two wide, dressed stone the same as the other one.
And down both walls, at about waist height, there are pipes.
Bronze. Four of them on the left and three on the right, running the length of the passage on brackets, each about the width of my thigh, green-black with age.
Underneath them the floor is not one floor. There is a gutter down the centre, and about every eight metres the flagstones over that gutter have gone, so that you are looking down into a second channel below the one you are standing in.
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We went in.
The first thing that changes is the sound of yourself, and it changes immediately. In that channel outside everything came back at you off a wall seventy metres away. In here it comes back off a wall you could touch.
The second thing is that the ash stops.
Twelve metres in there is none of it. The floor goes from grey to clean dressed stone, and after that every mark on that floor is a mark somebody or something made.
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There are a great many marks.
The first thing Sokolov’s light found was scoring on the bronze. Not scratches. Grooves, three at a time, running along the underside of the pipes on the left at about the height of my hip, in sets, for metres at a stretch.
"It goes along the wall," Hana said.
"Why."
"Because the middle of the floor has holes in it."
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The third open section had a broken gutter cover beside it and the break was not old.
The flagstone had been levered up from one end and dropped, and the edge of the hole it left was chipped in three places in an arc.
Sokolov put his light down it. There is a drainage run below, about a metre deep, going the same direction as the passage.
"It uses both," he said. "Up here when it wants to move. Down there when it does not want to be seen."
"That is a guess."
"That is a guess." He did not move the light. "Here is the part that is not. There are twelve of these openings between us and the far end and it can come out of any of them."
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We went another forty metres and I stopped because of a smell.
Not rot. Dry, and faintly sharp, like a cellar with an animal in it, and it got stronger toward the left wall and then stopped being stronger.
It has been lying there.
There is a shallow place where two pipes cross the wall behind a bracket, and the stone under it has been worn smooth in a hollow about the size of a man lying down.
There is dust in the hollow and the dust is disturbed.
"It sleeps there."
"It sleeps there and it has slept there for years," Hana said. "Look at the stone."
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"What does it eat," I said.
Nobody answered that.
There is nothing alive on this floor. That is in every document there is. There is nothing in this passage and there is nothing in that canal and there is nothing in eleven hundred replies about anything down here with a mouth.
And that hollow has been worn into dressed stone by a body, which takes an enormous number of nights.
"Do not," Hana said.
"I have not said anything."
"You have been about to for six seconds."
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Then Sokolov put his hand up and we all stopped, and I opened the thing I have not been able to use since I arrived.
> **[Ability Activated: Androphagos.]**
>
> **[Duration: 01:00.]**
Six metres came up around me the way it has come up around me for five weeks.
Hana. Sokolov.
And something else.