“Stay, speak,” Tuttugu urges. “I’ll deal with them.”
Snorri moves to stand by Tuttugu’s side, reaching for his own axe.
Tuttugu shakes his head, closing his faceplate. “You didn’t come here for this.” He turns away. “Neither of us can count the number of battles you saved me in. Now it’s my turn. Go.”
Snorri looks once more at his friend and nods.
“We’ll meet again in Valhalla.” Tuttugu grins. “I’m not facing Ragnarok without you beside me.”
“Thank you.” Snorri inclines his head, eyes full once more.
Tuttugu squeezes Snorri’s shoulder a last time and leaves the house.
As the long silence wore on I began to glimpse the tunnel, Kara’s orichalcum light throwing our shadows across the curve of the wall, no sound, our footsteps deadened by the dust of a thousand years.
“Did you speak to them?” My voice came rough and echoed ahead, following the arc of the Wheel, vanishing into the darkness.
“I did,” Snorri said. “And it gave me peace.” The Viking paced a hundred yards before he spoke again, and while he held quiet I started to hear distant hints of pursuit from behind us.
Snorri cleared his throat. “When I came out of the house Tuttugu was waiting for me. He said he would guard them as long as he could. I told him I would stop the Wheel’s engines and free Freja and my children from Hel. Or die trying.”
“Where will they go?” I hadn’t quite followed that part, or thought Tuttugu capable of delivering such a speech. But then, I’d underestimated the man time and again.
“To whatever has always waited for us beyond life,” Snorri said. “They will be free of the Wheel. Released from man’s dreams and stories and lies. You’ve seen it yourself, Jal. Is that where you want those you love to spend eternity?”
My mother was assuredly in Heaven, but on the other hand my father, cardinal or not, was definitely in Hell if the rules he occasionally preached held any truth. Most importantly though, it was not where I wished to spend forever.
“What’s this?” Hennan pointed to a sign fixed to the wall, so covered in grime that we had nearly passed it by.
“We don’t have time!” I stared back into the darkness, ears straining for those sounds again. At any moment Cutter John could race into view.
“International . . .” Kara was already rubbing dirt away from the sign with her sleeve. “Kollaboration . . .”
“It looks like gibberish to me, come on!” The lettering was alien, though faintly familiar.
“It’s an old version of Empire tongue, very corrupted.” She rubbed away more of the dirt. The sign seemed to be enamelled metal and in many places corrosion had broken up the surface beneath the grime. “I can’t read the rest. The first letters are bigger though. I.K.O.L. That last word might be ‘Laboratory’.”
“What’s a laboratory?” Hennan asked, looking up at me for some reason.
“It’s something that wastes your time while monsters creep out of the dark to kill you,” I said.
“There’s a picture here too.” Kara wiped at it with her filthy sleeve. “It can’t be . . .”
Despite my fears I moved to join her. Beneath the large title running several feet across the top of the sign were three pictures, side by side, head-and-shoulders portraits, painted with exquisite detail. A balding grey-haired man with glass lenses over his eyes; a middle-aged man, black-haired and serious, his face divided by a beak of a nose; and a young man with a wild shock of brown hair, his features narrow, eyes large and dark.
“Professor Lawrence O’Kee,” I read, puzzling through the twisted lettering. “Dr. Dex—no, Fexler Brews, and Dr. Elias Taproot!”
“Taproot was in charge of the Wheel?” Snorri asked, looming over us as Hennan wriggled between Kara and me for a closer view.
“Important enough to be on this sign,” Kara said. “I’m guessing this one is in charge, though.” She set her finger to the oldest of the three, the professor.
The sound of running brought an end to the questions, feet pounding the dusty tunnel, coming up fast behind us. I started off without the others, sprinting into the darkness and got about twenty paces before hitting something very solid. I saw a dim outline with just enough time to get my arms up—even so, the next thing I knew was being helped up off the floor by Snorri.
“Where is he?” I threw my head left and right, hunting the gloom for Cutter John.
“The footsteps vanished when you hit the bars.” Kara stood behind me with the light.
“Bars?” I saw them now, gleaming pillars of silver steel, each as thick as my arm.
The sound of charging feet started up again behind us, maybe fifty yards back. I pushed Snorri away and fumbled for the key. It slipped from my fingers, treacherous as ice, but the thong held it and I caught it again. “Open!” I tapped it against the closest bar and all of them slid back into their recesses, the top half into the ceiling, the bottom into the floor.
I stepped over before they sunk from sight and turned, sharpish, the others following. The shadows spat Cutter John out at a dead sprint. “Close!” I slapped the key against the gleaming circle of a bar, now flush with the floor. I stood, frozen by the sight of that goggle-eyed monster racing toward me. Snorri jerked me back, but not before I saw Cutter John leap for the narrowing gap . . . and miss. He hit with awful force and I swear those bars rang with it.
“Come on.” Snorri dragged me forward.
“The bars will hold him,” I said. I almost believed it.
Fifty yards on the tunnel entered a chamber as big as the new cathedral at Remes. The black tube that had run along the tunnel core continued through the centre of the open space and vanished into a tunnel mouth on the opposite side. Its path took it into the jaws of a vast machine that sat upon the chamber floor fifty feet below us and extended another fifty feet above the point where the black tube passed through it.
Lights set into the ceiling, too bright to look at, lit the chamber from top to bottom as if it were a summer’s day. The air smelled of lightning, and throbbed with the heartbeat of huge engines.
We stood at the edge where the tunnel gave out onto a sheer fall to the floor far below. If there had ever been any supporting rail or stairs they hadn’t been made of such durable material as the bars back along our path or the titanic machine before us, and perhaps now accounted for the brownish stains down the walls and across the floor.
“There’s someone down there.” Hennan pointed.
At the base of the towering block of metal an alcove had been set into the bulk of the machine, an alcove lined with plates of glass all aglow with symbols and squiggles. In the middle of it, from our angle only visible from the shoulders down, stood a man in a white robe or coat of some kind, his back to us.
“He’s not moving,” Kara said.
We watched for a whole minute, or at least they did: I kept looking back in case Cutter John caught us up and pushed us over the edge.
“A statue?” Hennan guessed, stepping to the edge of the drop.
“Or frozen in time, like Taproot in that Builder vault.” Snorri pulled Hennan back.
Far behind us a dull clanging started to sound. “We should get down there and find out,” I said.
“How?” Kara approached the edge less boldly than Hennan, on hands and knees.
“Fly?” I flapped my arms. “We’re wrong-mages now after all!” I willed myself off the ground, lifting my shoulders, standing on tiptoes. Nothing happened save that I was forced to take a stumbling step forward to keep from falling, and was very glad I hadn’t tried closer to the drop. “Why won’t it work?”