The Grandmaster's Gambit

27. What The Walls Remember

[Day-30 (16:30)]

(The inner room, consolidation waterworks, under Sector 7, Alexandria)

The right gallery ended at an iron door that someone had left open. A wedge of rust held it, and the rust had grown into the hinge.

Marcus put his lamp through first, then his head. "Soft," he said.

Kai's arm had stopped being a pain somewhere in the last hour and become a place. It sat at the end of his shoulder, hot and tight under the dried strip, and every time he forgot it the sleeve found it again.

The room was round and brick, and the roof came down over it like the inside of a bell. Three low iron steps ran round the floor, one inside the next, like seats in a chapel. The floor between them was green plate again, but one green this time, and it dipped toward the far wall. Cass's lamp made a red room on it, and the red did not reach the edges.

The far wall had a niche. A thin line of pale light ran round the recess like a door left open on a lit room. Inside sat a plaque of dull bronze as broad as a baker's tray. A spread hand was cut into it, and under the hand ran one line of script, worn down to a rumour. Beside the niche stood a small iron door with a barred slit at head height.

A hum came out of the place. It was too low to be a note. Kai felt it in his back teeth and in the bones of his wrist.

"Heads," said Marcus.

"Here."

"Here."

"Marcus, here. Heads in." He stopped on the threshold, and his hand went to his breast pocket and stayed there. "Sealed."

"Sealed what?" said Kai.

"Technique. Some contractors leave one behind for whoever comes after. A son, a pupil, somebody they trusted." Marcus nodded at the plaque. "It's a lock, and the key's a hand. Whatever hand touches it gets tested. If it's the wrong hand, it gets thrown."

"You said anything that shines, we leave."

"Anything you can pick up. That's a lock. Different rule."

"Thrown how?"

"Depends on the lock. I've known one knock a man across a room. I've known one do nothing but go cold on him. It doesn't kill, as far as I've heard."

Cass had not moved. She stood two strides inside with her lamp hanging low. "There's one in a vault in the Nine," she said. "Behind glass. The Rampart showed it to us once, to make a point."

"What point?"

"That you could stand in front of it your whole life and it would never ask your name." She said it flatly. "Everything I can do, somebody showed me. A sergeant. A book. Him." She tipped her head at Marcus without looking at him. "Somebody had it first. These are meant to be handed down, and I've nobody to hand down from and nobody to hand down to. I'd like to find out if it would have me anyway."

"It won't," said Marcus. He said it gently.

"Then it won't."

"Cass."

"One hand. I know the price, Marcus."

She crossed the room in two strides, and Kai's eyes were still on the place she had left. She laid her left palm flat on the bronze.

The pale edge of the niche turned white, and the hum jumped a note. Then something shut like a door. There was a flat slap that Kai felt in his chest, and Cass went back a pace on her heels. She did not fall. She stood with the hand held out in front of her and looked at it.

The palm was black across its whole width and already blistering. On the brick beside the niche, level with Kai's chest, a hand had printed itself as black as a stain in a sink. Five fingers and a heel. Three more stood beside it, grey and old as shadows.

"Rejected," said Cass, the way a clerk says it.

"Heads," said Marcus. His voice was too loud again.

"It's my hand, Marcus, not my head." She tucked the hand into her armpit, walked to the wall, and put her back against it with her face to the door. Marcus took a rag from his belt and held it out. She shook her head. "Cold iron's better." She laid the palm flat on the nearest step and shut her eyes.

Kai had not looked at the plaque. He had been looking at the room, because the others were not.

*There's steps. Three rings of them, and every one faces that wall. You don't build seats to face a wall. So it's the plaque they face. Everyone sits down and watches someone put a hand on it.*

*And the floor tilts in. Look at the plates. There's a groove in every one, all running the same way, like the veins in a leaf, and they end at that little grate under the niche. A drain. Somebody put a drain under a - hang on. The drain's the lowest place in the room. If water ever came up in here, that's where it would come.*

*Never mind. Later.*

The hum under his teeth was lower than it had been. He rubbed his jaw.

"You've been looking at everything but it," Cass said. She was still looking at her hand. "Go on, then. You're the one who reads floors."

"Cass," said Marcus.

"What? He's got no rune. There's nothing in him for it to test."

"He's got a hand. A hand will burn."

"Then he'll have company." She lifted the black palm an inch and let it drop. "Go on, Aeron. I'm not asking you to marry it."

"I'd rather not."

"I'd rather you did. I'd like to see it turn something down that isn't me."

*Fair enough. That's fair, actually.* He crossed the floor. The plates sloped under his boots, and he kept his steps small.

At the junior tournaments in Peckham there had been a real arbiter, an old man in a blazer who walked behind the blue plastic chairs with his hands clasped. He would stop behind you for three seconds and move on. You never found out what he'd seen. You sat there with two fingers on a piece you hadn't decided to move.

Kai laid two fingers on the bronze.

It was warm, like a plate just out of the drying rack. His stomach tightened and his shoulders came up, because he knew the next thing was a burn. It did not come.

The bronze turned brown under his fingertips. It was the warm brown of old ink, and it spread outward from his touch toward the edges as if a slow hand were washing it over. The plaque hummed once, one long note that he felt in the small bones of his hand, and then it was quiet.

He looked round. Cass was looking straight at the plaque and her face did not change, and neither did Marcus's.

On the floor between his boots a pale square as big as a slate lay for the length of a breath. Then it was gone.

"Nothing," said Cass.

"Nothing," Kai agreed. His voice came out level.

"There's nothing in a commons' hand for it to test," said Marcus. "To a lock like that it's only a hand."

*Cass touched it and it hurt her. I touched it and it didn't. All right, so it couldn't be bothered with me. That's what he said. And no black hand on the wall for me, either. Four on there now, and none of them mine.*

*Except it went brown. Under my fingers, and the two of them watched it go and saw bronze. Brown. I've seen orange and green and gold and that lilac one. I've never seen a brown one.*

*And that square again. Gallery floor, then this floor, and no one else so much as glances at it. Last time it turned up when I was wrong. What was I wrong about? I thought it would burn me. That's the only thing I had in my head.*

*Say nothing. Her hand's black and mine's fine. If I say it went brown for me, she'll want to know why, and I've got no answer that doesn't make it worse.*

He took his fingers back. The brown stayed on the bronze for as long as it took him to turn his head, and then there was only bronze.

"Which makes you the one it doesn't mind," said Marcus. He said it low, like something he had been saving. "That's the second rule, near enough. Down here the place minds a rune. It minds a lamp, and it minds a footstep. It doesn't mind you."

"I'm a pipe," said Kai.

"You're the one who can walk. If the light goes, nobody moves and nobody speaks. We stay where we are until you say our names. Then we answer, one word, and I tell everyone what comes next."

"Why me and not you?"

"Because I'll be busy keeping something off my back." Marcus's thumb moved on the pocket. "Somebody has to know where the heads are."

"And nobody stamps," said Cass. She still had her palm on the step. "I'd have said it in the hall if I'd thought. Anything wild in water doesn't hunt by light. It hunts by feel. A rune rings in it like a spoon in a cup, and a boot on iron rings further. If you have to run, don't."

"What's through there?" Kai asked.

"The tank." Marcus nodded at the little iron door. "Dace's cache is on the other side of it. It was always going to be through the tank."

The hum had been dropping, and Kai had been thinking of it as the plaque's. Now he heard it rise. It came from the floor and the pipes and the brick, climbing like a note on a glass that is being filled.

Marcus had gone to the slit. He stood with his head on one side and his lamp up to the bars.

"It's level," he said.

At the foot of the niche, in the little grate, a bead of water stood up. It trembled and ran out along the nearest groove. Then there was another. In the red light the grooves began to shine, one after another, outward from the niche. Soon the whole floor was veined with wet, and the veins ran the wrong way, toward their boots.

"It's coming up from the tank," Marcus said. "The ladder's the lowest place in the whole works. That goes first. The only way out left is the Wrights' stair on the far side." He did not turn round.

Kai came to the door and Marcus made room. Beyond the bars lay black water, flat and still. It was higher than the stone lip it ought to have lapped. A long way off, far across the dark, something moved under it. The colours of it slid by in a smear. A green, then an oily brown, then a bruise-purple. None of them was a colour he had seen on a rune.

Then it slid out of the red light, and there was only black.

The first wet reached the toe of Kai's boot, cold through the leather, and kept coming.