The Grandmaster's Gambit

30. Every Vessel

[Day-30 (17:32)]

(The tank, consolidation waterworks, under Sector 7, Alexandria)

He waited. The tank stayed quiet. Then, from the landing, came the scream of iron, long and tearing. A flat crash followed, like a cart going over a bridge, and then the splash of something very heavy dropping into water.

White light stood up on the landing. A line of it was drawn along the rail, and the bars under the rail went brown and orange and white. Somebody had set fire to the iron. In the glare he saw the beast rearing out of the water with both forelimbs on the white-hot bars. It shrieked, the high thin sound of a kettle. It let go and went down, and the white went out.

"Heads!" Kai shouted, and the word went out over the water and came back off the dome. "Heads! Cass, heads!"

"Here!" It was Cass, and her voice had cracked. "Marcus is under! The grating came down on him, and he's under it! I've got the line, I can't lift the iron!"

*Under.*

*The end of the line. I'm on the wrong side of the tank. What do I do?*

*First rule. If the number's wrong, nobody leaves, you find who's missing. I know who's missing. I know where. And if I turn this, it knows where I am, and there's nobody on the landing to make a bigger noise.*

*If I don't turn it, there's no point in the rest.*

*I have to finish the wheel.*

He set his feet in the groove and took the rim in both hands and pulled. His left arm tore at the burn. He felt the strip let go and the wet go down to his elbow, and he pulled, and the wheel came a quarter, and then another, grinding.

Out in the dark, the knock came up.

This time the thing that drew it was him, not the gong. It came across the tank in a straight line, and he heard it hit the wall below him with its whole length. The stone rang. A hooked forelimb came up over the lip of the stub and clamped on the iron by his boot. Another struck higher, and above his head a bolt went off like a pistol shot.

The pipe lurched. He looked up and saw the end of it, barrel-thick, come swinging down out of the dark. It took him across the ribs and drove him into the wheel.

He heard the rib before he felt it. Then he felt it.

He did not fall. His right arm was through the spokes, and it held. His left was a wet rag. He hung off the rim with his feet kicking and his whole weight on the wheel. The pipe swung away over his head, and the wheel went round with him.

It went a half. It went three-quarters. The catch fell home.

CLACK.

Something very big let go in the wall.

It was a thud he felt in his chest, like a door the size of a house dropped on its frame, and then the roar came.

The whole tank turned. He felt it through the wheel, through the iron, through his teeth. The black water leaned toward the far wall and began to run. It ran with a long, deep, swallowing sound, as though something had opened its throat. The surface went down in front of his eyes, a hand and then another, and the water tore along the wall beneath the stub in a shining rope.

The forelimb on the iron by his boot slid off, and the beast went with it, rolling.

It tried to hold. Kai saw it six paces down and below the wheel, rolling against the current with its pale blisters turned up. The water took it along the wall and pinned it against an iron grille set low in the brick. It lay there, held like a leaf over a drain, and the tank went on falling round it.

The steam had thinned. Out in the middle, small and red, the lamp came sailing back. It rode the dropping surface down and down, turning on the current, and as it came it lit the beast's back. The back rose out of the water, slick and mottled with oily green, brown and purple. It came up like the hull of a boat.

Kai hung on the wheel with one arm and looked.

It was alive, and worse than before, because it had stopped floating. The tank fell away from it, and it dragged against the grille, and its weight settled on its own bones, and it began to understand. It heaved itself off the bars with a noise like a sack of wet sand, and it hit the mud and started to crawl.

Across the floor of the drained tank it came on its two forelimbs, dragging the rest. It was slower than it had been in the water, but it was still faster than a man could run, and it went straight for the landing. Straight for the contractors and the rope and the gong it had been following all along.

*Cass.*

The landing stood a dozen paces above the mud now, with the grating torn open at one corner. A line of black water was draining off the gap. In the gap a hand came up out of the water, and then a head. Marcus coughed, a long wet sound that carried all the way across the tank, and Cass had him under the arms, the line still looped round his waist.

The beast reached the foot of the landing and reared up with its hooks on the edge of the iron.

Marcus got to his feet.

He did it with one arm hanging, the water streaming off him. He said a word Kai could not hear. His left arm rose and stopped, and the whole of him went hard, the way he had in the beginning, a post in a coat. The beast's mouth opened sideways to take him. The jaw closed on his forearm with a sound like a gate slamming.

It did not crush it. It could not move it. It pulled, and Marcus rooted, and the beast stayed where it was, with its mouth full of his arm and its pale blisters turned up to the dome.

"Now," said Marcus, in a voice that was nothing but rasp.

Cass came up beside him. Her left hand hung at her side. She held her right hand out flat with the fingers spread.

A thread of white crossed the gap. It was so thin it was hardly a light. It went six paces in the time it took Kai to blink, down into the open mouth. It did not glow so much as cut, and the beast stiffened all down its length.

It did not scream. The knock came once, deep and low and flat, and then did not come again.

The tank was silent for the first time since Marcus had opened the door. Water ran down the walls. The stacks went on coughing their steam, tick, tick, HISS, as if nothing had happened.

Kai let go of the wheel and slid down it and sat on the stub with his back to the brick. The rib told him about every breath, and he started laughing anyway.

It came up out of him against his will, hard enough to hurt, and he could not stop it. He laughed with his good hand pressed to his side and the lamp swinging on his belt. The sound went out across the empty tank and came back off the dome. His whole body was shaking. He had not felt like this since a Saturday when a rook came down the board and he saw the mate in four.

*That was brilliant, that was properly, actually brilliant.*

He climbed down by the iron ladder at the side of the stub, one rung at a time. He crossed the mud of the tank floor with the lamp in his right hand. The mud was wet and cold and full of bars and ropes of green weed. The red lamp lay on its side near the middle, still burning, and he passed it.

In front of him, on the wet floor, two pale squares lay side by side. They shared an edge, as flat as slates, a breath long.

Then they were gone.

*It seems they're increasing... Not sure why though.*

He stood where they had been. Then he walked on, and he did not mention it.

At the foot of the landing the beast lay with its length stretched out on the mud, and its colours were fading. They went out of it slowly, green first, then the brown, until it was only grey and wet. The knock was gone. It was a big, still thing now, longer than a cart, with its mouth open and its jaw hanging from Marcus's arm.

Marcus sat against the landing's wall with his right arm across his lap and his coat running water. Cass knelt beside him with her left hand held up in front of her face.

"Does it hurt?" said Kai.

"Like a bastard." She did not look up. She looked at the cage on the far side. "Dace takes his f*e out of that cage first. The rest is ours."

"Tomorrow," said Marcus. "The husk of this thing too, before it goes off."

Kai bent for the lamp. The rib caught him halfway, and he took it in his right hand and straightened up slowly, with the light held out in front of him, toward the stair.