Page 48 of The Book that Broke the World

“I had one of those too,” Hellet said. “But you took it away from me.”

“Me?” Celcha put her sack down, retaining enough self-control to do it gently. “How is any of this my fault?”

“You made me send Maybe and Starve away.”

Celcha couldn’t deny that. Who better to guide them than ghosts who could fly through stone finding new ways, discovering connections? “Well...” She tried to think of some defence and found none, other than her flimsy lack of trust. “What’s done is done. It’s not like you can call them back.” She lifted her gaze from studying her feet to meet Hellet’s eyes. “Is it?”

Hellet leaned against the nearest wall, his chest heaving as his lungs hunted for what they needed. “In the past, I’ve found that angels have a habit of turning up... at significant times. I don’t know how they know or how they find us, but it seems they do. Perhaps it’s what Yute said: that we’re cracks in the world, in time itself, and that leads them. But if you want me to call them back, I’ll try.”

Celcha slumped beside her brother and slid to the floor, struggling for breath. She had never wholly trusted Maybe and Starve, but the darkness of the dig had been hell and their golden light could paint them as nothing but angels. In the library light, and the comfort offered by the librarians, the angels had become ghosts. Since the only direction was no longer up, the ghosts also offered the danger of down, and Celcha’s suspicions had hardened.

But here, in the dark once more, lost in endless caverns, her resolve faltered. Hellet wanted to find the gas house’s intake. If the ghosts led them to it, where was the harm?

“Call them.” Her voice wheezed out of her.

Hellet nodded and opened his mouth to speak—and as he did so, the air between them began to sparkle.

—

The two ghosts led them through the tangle of caves where hidden waters must once have run in astonishing abandon among the roots of the dusty mountains above. Sometimes one ghost would vanish, scouting ahead for a route that the ganar could follow.

In time they came to a chamber which, although sculpted by a long-vanished river, showed the marks of chisel and hammer. The mouth of the gas house’s intake was a wide horn of the same metal that the access hatch had been made from. It yawned from a low roof and sucked with a deep, constant moan. The gas flowed towards it at a speed that ruffled the fur across Celcha’s back and sides as she stared up it.

Hellet lifted a flask from his sack and swirled its heavy contents. The absence of light stole the quicksilver’s gleam, leaving it a curious deep purple colour in Celcha’s augmented sight. A coughing fit seized him, and he almost dropped the glassware. He doubled over until it passed, then stood, wheezing.

“We could empty the flasks out here and hope that there’s enough time for the reaction as the gas passes over.” Hellet looked up at the mouth.

“But?” Celcha heard the unvoiced qualifier.

“But the changed gas is heavier. It will sink rather than rise.”

“That tube leads to the concentration chamber.” Celcha followed Hellet’s stare.

“There are other stages, purification stages, but yes.” Hellet nodded.

Celcha put her sack down. “Get me up there.” She felt too weak for any climbing, but they’d come this far...

—

It took a few tries but at full stretch Hellet managed to provide a platform from which a similarly stretched Celcha could snag a seam inside the pipe. From there, with a degree of swearing and swinging, she managed to use what remained of her digging muscles to haul herself further up. She hung there breathlessly for a while, trying to recover from the effort.

The next part proved tricky. Celcha had to catch a heavy sack of precious, fragile objects whilst bracing herself against the walls of the pipe, all beneath the heavy burden of the knowledge that should she miss then the flasks would almost certainly shatter as Hellet caught them, rewarding him with a faceful of glass shards and toxic metal.

She caught the first one, just barely, and found herself slipping, her descent accompanied by the sound of tearing fabric. With a scream she jammed her elbows into the pipe walls and prayed to any god who might be listening, all of them in fact, in one wordless plea. Whether by divine intervention or basic physics, Celcha didn’t fall. She repositioned herself, sure that only the upwards rush of gas inhaled by the gas room far above had kept her from a disastrous plunge.

The torn sackcloth exposed a flask but had released none of them so far. She took the neck of the bag in her teeth, put her trust in her footholds, and reached for new handholds. In this manner, with her back to the pipe’s wall and the sack almost scraping the opposite side, she inched upwards.

The nightmare struggle that followed felt as if it took hours. At several points she thought she’d passed out for a few moments but had managed to jam herself in the pipe too tightly to fall.

In the end, long after she felt she’d exceeded the limit of her endurance, she reached a level section and was able to painstakingly manoeuvre the sack past her into the relative safety ahead. With all her muscles trembling, and her lungs aching with the effort to find what she needed, Celcha began to descend for the second sack.

It felt unreasonable that their success should hinge on feats of athleticism and dexterity that Celcha would have bet on herself to fail ten times in a row. She found herself angry that Hellet and his damned ghosts had put her in such a ridiculous position: saviour of a plan that had no right to succeed. But somehow, against all odds, Celcha caught the second sack and managed to position it beside the first.

The climb felt as if it was at the very least a hundred yards. Celcha knew that without the regular rims where one section was fixed to the next, she would never have made it. Without the upwards rush of gas trying to lift the snug ganar-sized blockage she constituted, she would never have made it. And without the iron in her arms from a lifetime of digging, she would never have made it.

Celcha lay in the horizontal section gasping for breath and trembling with fatigue. She could hear the machinery of the gas room up ahead. She was within striking distance. She had in the sacks before her the alchemical magic needed to put an entire city to sleep.

At last, she crawled on, pushing the sacks ahead of her as gently as she could, glass squeaking against glass. A crunching sound told her that at least one flask had already broken, but whatever effect its contents might be having on the methalayne were swept ahead of her.

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