Chapter 141 - 139 — Beneath the Canal II
Five and a half metres ahead of us and slightly to the left, low, at about the height of my knee.
Alive.
That is the first signature that Ability has given me on this floor that is not one of my own party, and it arrived in my head the way they always do, as a place and a direction, and the direction was toward us.
"It is here," I said. "Five and a half, left, low, coming."
"How do you know that."
"Because it is alive and the Wardens are not."
---
Sokolov brought the light up and found it.
It came out of the second opening on the left, and it came out of it the way a hand comes out of a sleeve.
A thing much wider than that hole got out of it without appearing to change shape.
Then it stood on the floor of the passage in front of us.
---
It is about two metres from the head to the base of the tail, and almost none of that is height.
The body is long and low and thick through the middle and carried close to the ground, and the legs come off it at the corners, wide apart, so that the whole animal is about as broad as it is tall.
The hide is grey. Not the grey of the ash. A flatter, drier grey, thick and loose across the shoulders and gathered into folds where the limbs join, and it does not shine at all in the light.
---
The head is wide and flat and it comes out of the body without much of a neck.
The eyes are small and set well back and they did not close or narrow when Sokolov’s light went across them, which told me something I did not like about how much it uses them.
And the front feet.
Three claws on each, long, curved down and back, and the middle one is longer than the other two.
They are not for holding anything. They are for moving stone and soil out of the way and they have been doing it for a long time, because the outer two are worn flat along the undersides and the middle one is not.
---
I put my light on the floor beside it and the marks in the dust in front of it matched the marks on the lip outside.
Three points. Drag between them. Deeper at the toe.
And no panel came up.
Nothing. Not a name, not a level, not one line.
Every single thing I have met since the day I awakened has arrived with a line over it and this one did not, and I have no idea what that means.
---
It did not come at us.
It came four paces further into the open and stopped, and then it put its head down and turned it about fifteen degrees to the left, and held it there.
"It is not looking at us," Hana said, very quietly.
"It is listening."
"It is doing something with the floor." She had not moved anything except her mouth. "Watch the front feet."
Both front feet were flat. Not planted for a spring. Spread, with the claws out sideways and the pads down.
---
I could kill it.
I want that written down before the rest of this, because the rest of this was me deciding not to, and I would rather be honest about the order those two things came in.
It is two metres of animal in a corridor with no shell on it and I have four seconds of fire and a level fourteen body, and I have killed a great deal worse than that this afternoon.
And then I looked at the ceiling.
---
That passage is dressed stone with a flat soffit and it has eleven metres of canal wall and then a city on top of it.
There are three cracks running across it between here and the far end that I can see from where I am standing, and one of them has a piece of the soffit hanging about four centimetres proud.
Aten in here is heat and light in a stone tube. Talaria in here is about six metres before a wall.
"If I fight it here," I said, "the fight moves. And everything the fight moves into is holding up a canal."
"Yes," Sokolov said.
---
"And that is not the reason," Hana said.
"Go on."
"The reason is that it took it eleven seconds to cross seventy metres of open channel earlier today. Anton looked at the stride."
She still had not moved. "Whatever you do to it, it gets to decide how long that takes, and it is louder in here than you are, and I do not know what else is in those twelve holes."
"You think there are more."
"I think a thing that has worn a bed into a floor did not do it alone for forty years and I am not going to find out at a range of five metres."
---
"Then what."
Sokolov had already turned his light off the animal and onto the left wall.
"There."
Behind the pipes on the left, at floor level, there is a second opening. Not a broken gutter.
A proper arched mouth about a metre and a quarter high, with a dressed jamb, and it goes off at a shallow angle away from the main run.
"That is a branch," he said. "The main run drains the canal floor. That one drains something else and it will come up somewhere on the Inner City side, because everything down here does."
"You do not know that it connects."
"No." He looked at me. "I know that it is going the right way, that it has a cut jamb, and that it is one metre twenty-five, which is a height that thing cannot stand up in."
---
That is the whole of it and it is the best argument anybody made in that passage.
It is two metres long and it is built low and wide, and that is an advantage in a run it can move along and a problem in a hole it has to fold into.
"It can still get in there."
"It can get in there. It cannot turn round in there and it cannot come at us sideways." Sokolov put the light on the jamb. "And neither can we, which is why I am telling you now and not in forty metres."
---
"Hana."
"Yes."
"You have been in one of these before and I have not."
"Not this one." She finally moved, one pace back, slowly. "But yes. Go low and go slow and do not put a foot down hard."
"And if it comes, nobody runs. A thing built like that is faster over four metres than any of us, and running is the only thing that makes it certain."
"And if it comes anyway."
"Then you do whatever you are going to do and Anton and I are behind you, and afterward we are all still standing in a tunnel under a canal."
---
We went for the branch.
Twelve metres of main run to get to it, past the animal, with it standing four metres off the line and doing that thing with its head.
Sokolov went first because he is the widest of us and because he wanted to know whether the jamb would take him. Hana second. Me last, facing the wrong way, walking backward with my hands up and my eyes on it.
It turned its head to follow us and it did not follow us.
The front feet stayed flat on the floor the entire time.
---
Sokolov got in. Hana got in.
I had one boot on the jamb and one still in the main run.
And then the flagstone I was standing on moved.
---
It was one of the covers over the gutter and it had been sitting on a broken bearing for years and it had been waiting for somebody my weight.
The near end went down about four centimetres and the far end came up, and the whole slab rang on the stone underneath like a lid dropped on a pot, and then it rang again off both walls and went down the pipes.
I heard it go down the pipes. Four of them, in sequence, away into the dark.
---
The animal came off the floor like a door slamming.
There is no stage to it. The head came up and the whole body arrived at speed, and the noise it made was not a roar and it was not a scream.
It was a very fast clicking, three or four a second, coming out of the flat of that skull.
Four metres.
---
"Anton, the floor."
I did not need to say it.
He had two anchors on that slab before I finished, one into the bearing and one across the opening to the far lip, and the movement went out of it under my boot and the ringing stopped.
Which was the wrong thing to fix and the only thing he could have fixed, because the sound had already gone.
Three metres.
---
I did not go into the branch.
Sokolov and Hana were both in there and that hole is a metre twenty-five and the only thing in the world worse than a corridor is a corridor with two people behind me in a hole.
So I went the other way.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
Twelve metres up the main run, back the way we came, past it on the right along the wall with about forty centimetres to spare, and the arrest went into my ankle and up through a hip that had already done this three times today.
It turned in its own length.
---
That was the part I got wrong.
I had watched it come out of a hole it should not have fitted through and I had still built the next four seconds on the idea that two metres of animal needs room to change direction.
It planted the outside front foot, put those three claws into a dressed stone floor hard enough to leave them there, and came round on it.
A Warg commits. This does not commit to anything.
So I gave it something better than me.