B00DW1DUQA EBOK (21 page)

‘I mean it. I’m going to talk to Master Owyn. You know what it’s about don’t you? You’re no fool. You’ve worked it out too, haven’t you?’

‘Finn, didn’t you listen? I’ve told you what happens. The mines. You won’t stand a chance down there.’

‘I don’t think the mines are on the other side of that door. How do you know if no-one ever comes back? I think there’s something else. And I’m going to find out what.’

‘Finn, you fool. Don’t do this!’ Faces were turned to watch them, now. A low hubbub of muttering spread around the room. Finn could see Graves grinning, as if this was all some scheme of his own invention. The older boy still wore a white bandage around his forehead and ears. Bellow and Croft sat next to him, not understanding what was happening but also grinning at the thought Finn was in trouble.

Tanner seized Finn suddenly and pulled him close to speak into his ear. ‘Finn, listen. I know a name. If you’re going to do this, try and find Lud. He’s your only hope.’

‘Lud?’

‘The leader of the wreckers.’

‘How do I find him?’

‘He’ll find you if he wants to. No-one knows who he really is.’

Tanner released him and returned to his valve just as Master Owyn strode up to them. ‘What are you doing, boy? You’re in enough trouble as it is.’

‘Master,’ said Finn, standing. ‘May I speak to you?’

‘Are you ill? Can you not work?’

‘I must speak to you.’

Master Owyn yanked him away from the table, pinned him to the wall and all-but shouted into his ear.

‘What is it, boy?’

‘It’s the valves, Master. I mean I’ve known for a long time. They don’t work. They can’t work. They’re all useless, aren’t they?’

Finn regretted his words instantly. They were, they should have been, unspeakable. He felt as if it was someone else saying them, someone he was simply listening to. But
he
had said them. They could not be unsaid. His heart thumped and thumped in his chest. He watched as Master Owyn stared at him, jowls bobbing, mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water, anger building to a sharp point in his pig’s eyes.

And Finn understood, in that moment, that Master Owyn was not a part of the conspiracy. That he was not going to congratulate Finn for his cleverness. That he actually believed the valves worked as he had explained to them on the first day. Master Owyn’s role was to cow the artificers with his bluster and brutality, keep them in line, keep them working. But he knew nothing. His ignorance, his piggish stupidity, was clear on his face. They called
him
master but he was no master. He was a slave too, controlled by those who really controlled Engn. The Inner Wheel. Master Owyn was as much a cog in the machine as Finn was, scarcely above him in the great scheme of things. Despite everything, Finn found himself feeling sorry for him.

‘I never would have thought it of you, Smithson,’ he said. ‘Bellow or Croft, perhaps, but not you.’ He spat out the words, his distaste clear. Finn had to stop himself laughing. What did it matter?

Croft is too stupid to work it out
, he wanted to say.
Bellow too
. But he managed to hold his silence. One of the Ironclads clanked up to him and placed a heavy gauntlet on his shoulder. He turned to look at the guard, seeing his darting eyes through the thin slit of his helmet.

Finn glanced around the room. Graves, Croft, Bellow, Tanner, Scowl, Sigh. He would never see any of them again. It was a wonderful, dizzying thought. He’d been happy here, in a way, but it was a prison.

So it was that, with a wide grin, the Ironclad urging him forward, Finn pushed open the postern door.

Finn strode through the postern door, refusing to look backwards. The door closed behind him with a gentle click. Thick, solid darkness consumed him. He stopped, waiting for his eyes to adjust. He would be able to see soon. But, after a minute, two minutes, he still could not. The darkness remained complete, except for faint lines of light around the edges of the door behind him. He experimented with closing and opening his eyes to see if there was a difference. Nothing. He thought about pounding on the postern door, asking to be let out again. No. He wouldn’t do that.

He felt around with his outstretched fingertips. A rough stone wall on either side of him, nothing ahead but cold, empty air. He stood in a passageway of some sort. His arms held out in case he walked into something solid, he began to shuffle forwards on the dusty floor, feeling for each step with an outstretched foot.

The passageway twisted left and right so he soon had no idea in which direction he walked. The air smelt muggy, as if he was being smothered by old blankets. The faintest humming noise sang from the stone walls around him but otherwise the only sounds were the tapping of his outstretched toe and the rush of breath in his own chest. Occasionally his fingers found one of the glass orbs set into the walls. If they were lights, he could find no way of switching them on.

As he crept along he thought about Tanner’s stories of the mines and the furnaces. He began to imagine that, at any moment, he would step onto nothing and plummet into a pit, tipped into the flames or onto the sharp rocks of some deep cavern. On three occasions he came across an iron grill in the floor. Welcome, cold air breathed up at him, clearing his head a little. He had no choice but to step onto them. Each rocked and boomed as he crossed, but remained solid. Once he thought he heard distant voices from down below, calls or screams. He told himself it was just his own mind inventing things.

He walked for a long time – hours it seemed – but found nothing. He must be going round in circles and would eventually find himself back at the postern gate. Only rough stone walls on either side of him, nothing ahead but cold, empty air.

Weary, he lowered himself to the floor, his back against the wall. He longed for water. His mouth was dry, his lips cracked and sore. Why hadn’t he smuggled food and drink out from breakfast? He could die of thirst and no-one would know. He thought about all the others who’d been sent through the door. Were they all still in here, fumbling about in the darkness, or else reduced to clumps of bones? He tried to still his breathing and listen for a sound, any sound. Nothing.

He thought about Tanner’s words, the name he’d whispered.
Lud
. Who was he? More importantly, where was he? Somehow, Finn had to find him. Or be found by him. Was that the plan? Had Connor deliberately arranged for Finn to sit next to Tanner so Tanner could pass on the name? Or did Lud already know about him? Perhaps it had even been Lud waving from the dome?

How could he know? How could he possibly know?

The questions whirled around in Finn’s head, each chased by a further question rather than an answer. After a while, he fell into a fitful slumber, his tired brain full of confused voices calling to him, telling him to come quickly.

Some time later he jerked awake, thinking someone had shouted his name. But he’d dreamed it; the darkness enfolding him was as still as ever. He couldn’t tell if he’d slept for moments or hours.

Heaving himself to his feet he trudged on. He began to walk with his eyes closed. His mind repeatedly drifted into brief dreams where he walked along a precarious mountain path, or else was back inside the moving engine trundling across the great grass plain. So it took him a few moments to understand what it meant when his foot clanged against something iron blocking his way.

It was another spiral staircase, this one leading both up and down. By feeling his way around the walls he discovered that the passageway ended here. He had to go one way or another on the staircase. Was he allowed to go up? Or should he just accept his fate and descend? Was this one of the tests? Or had he already failed? What would Lud want him to do? He debated for long moments, then stepped onto the staircase to wind his way upwards. He had nothing to lose.

The iron spiral boomed like a cracked bell with each footstep. It also swayed, as if it only lightly anchored to the walls. Finn climbed step by step, his mind full of visions of the staircase collapsing, of his own body crushed within tons of buckled metal. He scraped off flakes of rust from the handrail as he climbed. How old were these stairs? Who maintained them, repainted them?

He grew more anxious and more weary as he ascended. He could no longer allow himself to sleep for fear of tumbling all the way back to the ground. Instead, several times, he sat on one of the steps, head in his hands, and waited for his breathing to calm.

Once when he was young, and feverish with illness, he’d had nightmares of being on a staircase like this. But it was unending, with an infinite gulf of space all around him, and in his confused state, he lurched between being tiny and immense. He was himself, pinned there to the vast staircase, insignificant, and then he was the infinite void all around, seeing himself.

It was a little like that now. Dizziness wheeled inside his mind. He hadn’t eaten for a long time. Hours? Days? But he could only go on. He hauled himself back to his feet and continued the climb. He began to think he wasn’t moving; that the staircase wound downwards into the ground as he ascended, leaving him stationary. That he would ascend for ever until he dropped dead from exhaustion and rattled all the way down to the mines or the furnaces at the foot of the stairs.

The third time he stopped, looking up, he made out a lattice-work of light filtering through the treads of the steps above him. He was finally getting somewhere. He stood back up and hurried on before his strength failed.

The staircase finally delivered him onto a circular landing. An alcove in one wall revealed a small, round window, glassless, from which the light shone. Finn peered through and could just make out, far, far below, the naphtha lamps and the great table where the artificers assembled the valves. He could discern one of the masters – impossible to say which – creeping around the edge of the table down there.

If he had paper, he’d write a note and throw it down to those he’d left behind. If it didn’t catch fire on the lamps, he could tell Tanner and the others he was safe. That he hadn’t been cast into the furnace or condemned to the mines. But he wouldn’t want the message to reach Graves or one of the others. It was only their ignorance that prevented them coming up the stairs after him. And in any case, he had neither paper nor pen.

He wondered if he was near the high walkway. Pushing his cheek against the cold stone and peering upwards he could see he was only about half-way to the top. The underside of the high balcony running around the walls of the hall was still far above him. Still no way to get up there.

He turned. Opposite the alcove were three doors. The nearest was wooden, its ancient timbers lime-green with rot. Finn hesitated for a moment, then knocked on it. There was no reply. He could feel a keen draught blowing around its edges. He rapped again, hard enough to make his knuckles hurt then, when there was still no reply, he lifted the rusty iron catch of the door and pushed.

The rush of air took his breath away. He stood on a narrow shelf half-way up one of the towering walls. Three or four pigeons clattered away in alarm. The drop to the ground yawned open in front of him. He grasped hold of the door handle. The wind made his eyes water.

Machinery stretched away before him, off into the distant haze, the pipes and pistons and wheels of Engn. Down below him he could just see a corner of the Octagon, crossed by insect figures. He watched as four of them, Ironclads he thought, moved in a line over the flints. One stopped and Finn felt suddenly very exposed. It was too far to tell if the Ironclad was looking up at him but Finn stood very still, afraid any movement might give him away. After a few moments the Ironclad resumed marching.

Peering to his left, not daring to lean out too far, he could just make out the edge of a dome, most of it obscured by the tower wall. He was higher than it but he was sure it was the same one he’d seen from the dormitory. Did it look a little closer than it had? Perhaps he was going the right way after all.

Directly in front of him, a vast beam engine nodded to-and-fro like a giant’s see-saw or a titanic set of scales, one end powered by a steaming, huffing cylinder the size of a large building, the other end turning a wheel, half-buried in the ground. A wide belt, driven by the wheel, ran through the air some way below him, to power some other part of the machine. The belt was as wide as the lane back home and sandy-brown in colour. He thought, briefly, about trying to jump down and land on it, in the hope of getting nearer the dome. Of riding the belt across Engn. But he knew he wouldn’t dare.

As he had on the day he’d arrived, he tried to spot signs of wrecker activity. Burned-out towers or broken wheels. But there was nothing. The machinery hummed and roared away in all directions.

He looked into the sky, up the tall wall of stone reaching away from him. He realised where he was. Set back into the wall was the face of a huge clock, its lowest curve just level with his own head. The long hand pointed down at him, accusingly. A tiny number, 72, was etched onto the face below the vast number eighteen. It was the clock, or at least another face of the clock, that he’d used every day to time his ringing of the Sixth bell. The little attic room must be on the opposite side of the tower and further down. He hadn’t really come very far after all.

Leaning out as far as he dared, one hand clutching the handle of the rotting door, he tried to see what time it was. Half way to the Twenty-seventh Bell. Assuming it was still the same day, he’d been walking for nearly twenty hours. He wondered what people were saying about him. He imagined Graves and the others laughing at the thought of him down in the mines. Back in the darkness he’d almost begun to wish someone
had
taken him there. At least he’d have known where he was, then. At least there would have been something to drink. Wandering around alone was terrible. Where was he supposed to go? What was he supposed to do?

He stepped backwards into the alcove and shut the door. He turned to the next door along. This one was heavier, metal, tarnished with a patina of rust. He pulled on the handle but it didn’t budge. A catch mechanism was built into the handle. He lifted this with a finger and heaved hard. The door swung open easily, despite its thickness and obvious weight. He peered inside, wary of another great drop on the other side, but a passage led away, lit by flickering incandescent lights set in regular sconces all the way along. More silvery orbs were set into the walls, too, but these were dark. He stepped over the raised lip of the door and on into the passage.