Sarah Zettel - Reclamation

She tried to pray that King Silver’s troops were mustered and giving the First City troops all the hell there was to hand out. They had to win so the Unifiers could win.

In the end, all she had the strength to try to do was not be sick.

Up ahead, the canyon had gone black. The oxen dragged them past the shadow line and Cor squeezed her eyes shut. She opened them and peered through the murky night. She didn’t look back. She’d never learned to enjoy watching the daylight get swallowed up.

Jay was rummaging around in the cargo boxes. The noise stopped and he came forward to hook a pair of powered lanterns to the sledge’s awning, one on either side of Cor’s head. He looked at her, but neither one of them said anything.

The lanterns made a clear puddle of light to show her which way to drive the oxen, but did nothing to draw the teeth of the wind that had turned vicious in the darkness. She tried to read the mottled clouds. No breaks in the sky meant rain all too soon. Just enough light touched the Wall ahead to show her the jag and split that marked the entrance of the thread canyon where the shelter waited.

She halted the sledge and, even though she could feel Jay’s impatience like a weight on her shoulders, she unhitched the oxen. If the gods knew what was going on or how long it would take to clear it up, they weren’t talking. She slapped the oxen alternately with her hand and her stick until they ambled away. Somebody’d find them and take them in. Left tied up to a tree, they might just freeze before sunup. The Realm held no warmth at all after dark. No one was sure why. Cor had a theory, but she kept it to herself. Theorizing wasn’t part of her job.

Jay had both lanterns in his fists and handed her one. He’d stowed the gun out of sight. The numbing horror of watching him fire so calmly on the crowd was beginning to thaw, but she still couldn’t make herself speak. She motioned for him to go ahead of her.

He grunted something she didn’t try to hear and started up the crevice in the wall that held their little, domed base.

The cold had gotten its teeth well and truly into her bones, as they said, by the time Jay opened the shelter’s door and they stepped, blinking, into the light and warmth. Lu was nowhere to be seen.

“He must be downstairs,” said Jay.

He said it very casually, but that casualness vanished as soon as they peeled back the hatch that covered the tunnel entrance.

Once the silicate had been discovered, she and Jay had paid half a dozen Bondless to take them around to all the exposed patches they could find near Narroways. They’d carried on for only a week before they’d found the hatch.

It had taken Lu three times as long to pry the thing open. At the bottom of the well, a corridor ran straight into the canyon Wall, smooth-sided with an arching roof and level floor and no lighting fixtures at all. The surface of the walls seemed to shift and flow wherever their lights touched them.

About twenty yards past the entrance, the tunnel under the wall turned into another shaft. The platform that covered half the tunnel mouth and was obviously supposed to be used to navigate it was even more stubborn than the hatchway had been. Since they had used the ladder they were issued to get down the first shaft, they had been forced to commission something the people of the Realm actually excelled at. A native-made rope ladder dangled down into the darkness.

Ladders and rope bridges were a part of her daily life now, but it had taken Cor a long time to get used to climbing the thing. It swayed and wriggled under her hands as she descended. Although it was really only ten meters or so to the next level, it always felt like a hundred. She breathed a sigh of relief as the tunnel’s lip came within reach of her toes and she could stand on her own and pry her fingers off the braided rungs. She waved up to Jay’s silhouette so he could start down.

Light shone softly from down the end of the tunnel, too much light for it to be just Lu’s lanterns. Eerie shadows shifted on the wall, even though the light burned steadily. Voices echoed unintelligibly off the walls, but someone was crying.

“Lu?” Cor hurried forward.

“Here.” Distance and echoes made the word ring around her ears.

The light grew and enveloped her as she reached the threshold of the room they’d dubbed “Chamber One.” The curved walls were all made of the same strangely shifting stuff as the tunnel. The frames of the furniture, chairs presumably, were thick with dust from rotted padding. In the sockets on tables set flush to the wall waited fifteen of the gleaming white stones, which the People called arias.

The really unnerving thing was the tanks. After who knew how many thousands of years, there was still liquid in them and in the liquid, there were shapes of things. Whether they were grown things or manufactured, Cor couldn’t have said, but they moved sometimes, sluggishly and without purpose, waiting for commands she didn’t know how to give. She couldn’t help looking at them now, and was relieved to see that the liquid turned smoky in this new, bright light, and she still couldn’t tell what was in there.

Lu stood over the two Notouch waving his hands helplessly, like a father who didn’t know how to comfort a crying child. Trail had her head cradled in her hands and was weeping—long, shuddering sobs that shook her whole body. Cups had her arms around her and crooned to her softly.

“What happened?” asked Cor as she felt the blood drain from her cheeks.

“The lights came on,” said Lu, still gaping down at the Notouch.

“What?” Jay came up behind Cor, breathing hard from his climb.

“The lights came on,” said Lu again, gesturing around the room. Cor saw that the ceiling was glowing in random patches as blobby as the shadows behind the walls, but thankfully, they stayed in fixed positions. “It seems Trail here really is related to Stone in the Wall. She touched the stones"—he waved one hand back toward the banks of holes and arias without looking at them—"and poof!” He spread his hands helplessly.

Cor knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to touch the crying women to comfort them with a friendly hand and kind words. He also knew what would happen. They’d flinch and cower and try to get away. They didn’t know how else to act. They were Notouch.

And if the gods know what else they are…

“You’d better see this, too.” Jay took two hesitant steps toward Chamber One’s “back door,” another threshold leading to a tunnel that was indistinguishable from the one they came down, except for the sign Jay had painted over it saying NOT THIS WAY.

Cor leaned into the corridor. Instantly, a flash of ruby light dazzled her eyes. She blinked hard. Another flash bounced off the tunnel walls, and another.

“Gods in Earth and Hell,” she whispered. “What’s doing that?”

“I haven’t had the guts to go look,” said Lu. “I’ve got a feeling those cables we found got switched on, too.”

Jay slammed both fists against an empty table. “We don’t have time for this!”

Startled, Lu jerked his head up. “What’s with him?”

“First City broke the diplomatic truce,” said Cor. “The war’s going on in Narroways’ streets now.” She gazed around at the arias in their control boards and the creeping things in their transluscent tanks and the shifting, meaningless shadows on the walls.

Lu’d spent days, weeks, recording and cataloging every feature of Chamber One. They’d all spent months entertaining themselves with speculation about what it all meant, and not once did they even come close to understanding it. Then, a superstitious, enslaved woman touched a stone and this room of shadows and riddles lit up like morning itself.