Chapter 9 The Underground City

The three rubbings gave them a heading, and the heading pointed north and slightly west, to a place that did not appear on any modern map of the region because it did not appear above ground. Tufan knew it anyway. He had been taken there as a boy, he said, by an uncle who had been taken there as a boy, and the local name for it was not on the signposts: Nekhab, the covered place, a city that had been cut into a soft bed of rock and then abandoned when the roof of the world changed and the water forgot it. They reached it on the second evening, walking up a dry wadi that narrowed and then ended in a face of pale stone with a single dark opening at its base, no taller than a man, worn smooth at the edges by a thousand years of wind and a smaller number of hands. Zeyla stood before it and felt the specific hush that comes off a hole in the ground, the sense of air that has been somewhere else and is now coming back to report. "There are levels," Tufan said. "Five, maybe six. Some are stables, some are rooms, one is a church with a painted ceiling that nobody has copied. The people who lived here took the water from a spring below the third level, and when the spring failed they left. It has been dry ever since." "Which means the fourth stone is somewhere a person would only go if they knew it was there." "Which means a person has already gone." He pointed, and Zeyla saw what she had missed: a scrape in the dust at the threshold, fresh, and, just inside the opening, the print of a boot with a tread pattern that had no business in a cave. They went in without a light at first, because a light tells everyone where you are, and let their eyes learn the dark. The passage ran straight for twenty meters and then opened into a chamber where the ceiling lifted out of sight and the air smelled of dust and old smoke and the particular sweetness of rock that has never known rain. Zeyla switched on her lamp, keeping it hooded, and the beam found walls covered in cut niches, hundreds of them, honeycombing up into the dark. "Storage," Tufan said. "For grain. For animals. For people." "For stones?" "That is the question you have been carrying since Belenor." They moved up through the levels, and the city unfolded the way underground cities do, not as space but as subtraction, as absence carved into solid rock. Stairways that turned without reason. Doorways that had been sealed and reopened. A room the size of a church, its ceiling still carrying the ghost of paint. And at the back of the fourth level, where the passage narrowed and the air grew colder and the scrape marks in the dust were freshest, they found that someone had been there before them. The evidence was not subtle. A niche had been levered open, and the stone that had sealed it lay in three pieces on the floor. Inside the niche was a fitted recess, and in the recess, where a marker should have stood, was a rectangle of clean, unsmoothed rock. The stone was gone. Zeyla knelt and picked up a chip from the broken seal, and the chip was cold and unweathered, and she knew before she turned it over that she was holding the same freshness she had found on the ridge at Kirmil. The consortium had been here. But they had been here recently, and they had left in a hurry, and that was interesting. She stood and swept the lamp across the chamber and saw something else, and her skin went tight along her arms. The dust on the floor of the far end of the chamber had been disturbed in a wide, sweeping fan, and the fan ended at a hole in the wall that had been stopped up with rubble and then opened again, and beside the hole, propped against the wall as if it had been set down to be picked up later, was a folding shovel. "They are still inside," Tufan said, very quietly. "Or they left the shovel because they ran out of time." "Men with a truck do not run out of time. They run out of nerve." A sound came from above them, thin and long, rock on rock, and then a second sound that was not rock, and then the unmistakable scrape of a boot on stone, from somewhere deeper in the city, from a level below rather than above. Zeyla killed the lamp. In the blackness, Tufan's hand found her wrist and guided it to the wall, and they stood together and listened to someone moving through the dark with the confidence of a person who had a light and did not care who saw it. The light came around a corner below them, moving up. A single white beam, swinging with the rhythm of a walking man. Then a second beam, then a third, spread out across the chamber floor, and a voice that Zeyla knew from a tea house doorway in Sarnem called out, calm and reasonable and entirely at home in a place it had no business being. "Miss Arkut. I know you are here. I found the fresh dust at the entrance. Come down and we will talk like colleagues, and you will save us both a great deal of walking." Ilgaz Kulin. She did not answer. She was doing arithmetic in the dark, and the arithmetic was bad. Three men, three lights, one exit that she could not see and one that she knew, and between her and the known exit stood the chamber where they had come from. She thought about the folding shovel, and about the hole in the wall, and understood that there might be a fourth way, an old ventilation shaft or a smuggler's cut, and that the hole had been opened for a reason. She pulled Tufan close and put her mouth against his ear. "The hole in the wall. We go through it. If it is a dead end, we come back fighting." He squeezed her wrist once, which was agreement, and they moved by touch along the wall, away from the voices, toward the smell of colder air, and the beams swung behind them and did not find them, and then Zeyla's outstretched hand went into empty space and she pulled herself up into the hole and into a passage so low that she had to crawl on her elbows, and Tufan came after her, and behind them Kulin's voice called out again, patient, unbothered, as if he had all night. The passage ran for forty meters and then rose, and then the air changed, and Zeyla lifted her head into a shaft of night sky and found, above her, a chimney of rock with stars at the top. She lay at the bottom of it and breathed, and beside her in the dark Tufan said nothing at all for a long time. "He has the fourth stone," Zeyla said at last. "He has a stone," Tufan said. "You told me the order is the lock. If he cannot read it in sequence, he has a weight in his pack and nothing else." "That is a comfort I do not believe." She looked up at the stars and counted them, because it was something to do with her eyes while her mind ran the numbers. "He knew we would come here. He knew before we did. Tufan, someone is telling him where we will be." Tufan was silent. The night wind moved across the top of the chimney. And Zeyla, lying at the bottom of a hole in the ground with her grandmother's notebook against her ribs, understood that the silence had a shape to it, and that she had been hearing its shape for days. ---