by Matt Wallace
She peers over her shoulder, staring at the heavy slab of wood and metal. She hears a heavy metal “snap” followed by a brief grinding of steel against steel. It doesn’t take a mind as keen as hers to know the door has just been locked from the outside. Dyeawan’s heart begins beating faster and she realizes she’s stopped breathing for several moments. She inhales sharply and grips the edges of her tender’s paddles.
“All right,” she whispers to herself in the darkened space lit only by a few gentle flames. “All right.”
Dyeawan turns from the door and rows her tender forward, halting at the threshold of the corridor. Instead of staring down its pitch length, she examines the entrance and what she can see of its structure.
The corridor is far too narrow to permit her tender. It looks barely wide enough to allow both her shoulders movement through its confines, and that’s if she were to drag herself over the ground as she used to in the streets and alleys of the Capitol. She finds the very thought of doing so here, now, fills her with dread and something deeper, a sense of intense loathing, frustration, and even anger.
Dyeawan pushes herself up on her tender’s platform, straining to reach the torch on the wall above her. Grunting from the effort, she manages to snatch the torch from its sconce without losing her grip and dropping its flaming head. Leaning over the front of her tender, Dyeawan extends the torch to the bottom of the corridor. What she sees first causes her to squint, then makes her eyes widen in disbelief.
Most of either wall is smooth. However, beginning perhaps a foot from the floor, sharp, jagged spikes begin protruding from both sides of the corridor. Some are set lower and some higher, but a spike on the opposite wall matches each one, so closely no human body could fit between them. What’s more, the floor between the corridor walls is also covered in spikes, much shorter than the ones above, but so many of them that a person with full use of their legs couldn’t take a step without piercing their foot.
She couldn’t even crawl under the wall spikes.
This seems impossibly cruel. It seems to go against everything she’s heard and experienced in her time with the Planning Cadre. This is the Crache Dyeawan glimpsed so often in the streets, from her many hiding places and while sliding away from Aegins and drunkards and sneak thieves.
It’s a test, she reminds herself. This is the test Edger talked about. This is the test they give planners.
The knowledge, the certainty of it, brings her little comfort. Clever puzzles in the comfort of a soft bed that belongs to her seem like a very distant memory, something that happened in another place, or perhaps another life.
Either you want this or you don’t, another voice that sounds much like Edger’s goads her. You can pound on the door and beg to be let out of this place. They will open it. You know they will. You can go right back to sweeping the floor and delivering parchment scribbles and the inventions of others. You can spend the rest of your life here in comfort, like blind old Makai toiling every day in his kitchen, or the one-armed mute who tends the sconces, never having to face another test again. You can still be Edger’s favorite pet cripple. You don’t have to do this.
She doesn’t have to, but she wants to. For the first time, Dyeawan admits to herself that she wants what Edger has dangled in front of her. In truth, she wants even more than that. She doesn’t just want to be part of the Cadre, and she doesn’t just want to be a planner; Dyeawan wants to be Edger. She wants to be the one who can reach into the gutters of the Capitol and scoop out the unwanted at will. She could do so much more with that power than he has.
Her mind begins to unfurl such pictures, such fantasies of the knowledge she could attain, the wonders she could create, and the souls she could save. Dyeawan forces that mental scroll to wind back up so she can stuff it away in a corner of her head somewhere. Desire is dangerous, especially for someone like her. It can drive you insane, or worse, it can drive you to act foolishly, even lethally against your own survival.
Is that what I’m doing now, she wonders.
Dyeawan drops the torch to the floor. She slinks from the tender’s platform and lowers herself onto the antechamber ground outside the corridor. Situating herself in front of her tender, she reaches up and strokes a hand against the steel frame of its front wheels, against the fine polished grain of the wood. She’s come to love the contraption as much as she loves Riko or Tahei. It’s allowed her to be more than she ever thought she could.
It has allowed her to fly.
As gently as possible, Dyeawan reaches up and rips loose one of the cords that connects the left paddle to the wheel track. Her body jumps, just so, as she feels it tear away, almost as if she’s dealt her body a physical blow. The next piece she removes from the tender is easier, and by the time she’s disassembled the left paddle her mind is focused only on the mechanical task she’s given herself. It takes her more than an hour to carefully demolish the tender and lay out each individual part before her meticulously.
She’s left both wheel tracks and their axles mostly intact, only removing the large front and back wheels. Between the remaining axles of the smaller wheels, Dyeawan lays a single plank from the tender’s wide platform, just wide enough to accommodate both her knees if they’re pressed tightly together. She snaps off several thin metal wires from the frame of a large wheel and bends them into “U” shapes with her hands. Dyeawan uses one of the disjointed paddles as a hammer to pound them through the plank and secure the axles to its bottom. The points that poke through the top she bends against the wood’s surface covers with strips she tears from her tunic so they won’t cut into her legs.
When the base is ready, Dyeawan hoists herself up onto the plank between the wheels. It’s snug and she barely fits, but the wheels will still turn. She uses several lengths of the extra cord to lash her folded legs to the wood securely. Leaning forward, she touches her hands to the ground and pushes and pulls the wheels back and forth experimentally. They roll evenly enough, and the entire sled contraption seems to hold together.
It’s better than sliding, anyway.
Dyeawan takes up the torch from where she dropped it on the floor and casts it down the length of the corridor. It lands on the ground beneath the spikes halfway down the corridor’s length, spreading enough light in the narrow space to brighten her way.
Dyeawan wheels herself to lip of the corridor. The first pair of wall spikes rises just above her knees. She inhales deeply and exhales with purpose. It takes all her strength and several attempts, but Dyeawan lifts her body and the front of her wheels onto those two slender steel spikes. Leaning into the corridor, she presses her hands against either wall and, gritting her teeth, pulls the rest of the wheels up and over.
She’d hoped to wedge them between the next set of spikes and then repeat the strenuous action, however difficult it would be on her arms and on her makeshift miniature tender. Dyeawan should’ve known Edger and his planners weren’t testing her mastery of brute force, however. As soon as her back wheels clear the first set of spikes she dips dangerously forward. Dyeawan closes her eyes and throws her arms in front of her face, expecting to be spilled onto the razor-sharp floor below.
Instead her makeshift tender glides down and then back up effortlessly, with only a few gentle bumps, clicking to a stop and remaining there, suspended.
Dyeawan lowers her arms and opens her eyes, her breathing still elevated. She looks down. The next pair of elevated spikes is holding her front wheels. Looking behind her, she realizes that what seemed like a random pattern of spikes is actually a track built specifically for exactly the wheeled contraption she’s constructed from her tender. The spikes continuously dip and rise like the curls of waves in perfectly symmetrical sequence.
All Dyeawan has to do is grip the walls and urge her wheels over the highest peaks in the pattern of spikes. Once they’re tipped past the peak, she rolls easily down the next sets of spikes and that brief but powerful momentum is enough to carry her back up to the next peak. The st
rain on her arms is minimal, and after she adjusts to the ebb and flow of the track, Dyeawan even begins to enjoy the short rides. The sudden dips create a wonderful dropping sensation in the pit of her stomach, and the upturns cause the space between her ears to fizzle delightedly.
Halfway through the corridor she finds herself laughing and envisioning a much larger version of the tracks, perhaps as tall as the Spectrum itself. People in wheeled carts could be propelled across them purely for fun. Even imagining these sensations on such a massive scale makes her dizzy with pleasure. As she reaches the end of the corridor, however, Dyeawan forces herself to put away such flights of fancy, reminding herself she’s in the middle of a test that will see her become a planner like Edger or return to battling dust and footprints on a daily basis.
The final dip in the spike track has no upturn; it merely ends, sending Dyeawan careening out the other end of the corridor. Her front wheels hit the floor and she leans far back to compensate and prevent herself from tipping dangerously forward. Fortunately her back wheels touch down evenly enough that she stays righted, even if it is a hard landing that jars her from her gut to her jaw.
The chamber beyond the corridor isn’t like any she’s seen in the Planning Cadre, other than its circular shape. It’s almost completely empty and there are no windows. The floor is smoothly cobbled, like rolling over the scaly back of some great unimagined beast. It’s an impossible room; Dyeawan knows that the door through which she entered belonged to Sanitation. Unless the spiked corridor wound so deftly, it seemed to be a straight path while leading her into a completely different part of the keep.
Resting in the center of the chamber, slightly tilted to one side, is a rowboat barely large enough to fit one fully grown person. There are no oars, only large and empty rusted rings. It sits there, looking particularly lonely in these contrary surroundings.
The chamber’s only other distinguishing features are torches lit in sconces and half a dozen or so wrought-iron grates bolted along the walls. The grates are set much higher than the sconces, several dozen feet above the cobbles. Their bars are thick and the grates themselves are large enough to herd hogs through.
“Hello?” Dyeawan calls out, mostly to break the oppressive silence of the space.
It’s no surprise when only her echo answers.
She urges her wheels forward, staring at the shoddy little rowboat that looks as though it’s been left behind in the wake of some hasty rush to clear out the chamber. Dyeawan knows it must mean something; every choice Edger and the planners have made thus far has been deliberate, precise, and connected somehow to another piece of a puzzle.
Her mind is racing to discover that missing piece when a very distinct scent hits her and Dyeawan sniffs at the air.
She smells the sea.
That might only have puzzled her further, except for one alarming and undeniable fact; she did not smell the sea just a moment ago.
She hears the first dribbling of water before she sees it, a stream of unending tears pouring onto the shiny cobbles beneath her. Dyeawan looks up and sees the bay water beginning to spill through all the grates in the walls. At first it merely drips through the bottoms of the heavy iron bars, but a deep and distant rumbling informs her ears of what her eyes will confirm moments later, that more water is coming, and it sounds as if it might be the whole of the bay.
Dyeawan, panicked, grabs for her wheels and begins whirling herself back toward the corridor. She stops midturn, remembering the locked door beyond the rough ride over those spikes. Surely they can’t really mean to drown her here in this dark place. It’s still a test. Perhaps she can retreat and use the remnants of her tender to force the door open or otherwise disable the lock.
No, that can’t be the test. They wouldn’t have created such an elaborate chamber just to have her unlock a door. Tahei could unlock a hundred doors, and no one was leaving puzzles at his bedside.
The rowboat.
By the time seawater is blasting through the grates full-force and from every direction, Dyeawan has wheeled herself beside the tilted ramshackle-looking vessel in the middle of the chamber. She’s reaching down to untie the cords encircling her folded legs when a new thought halts her anxious hands.
She looks up at the chamber ceiling. There are no openings there, not even more grates. Inside the rowboat she’d rise to meet solid stone, and if the water didn’t cease filling the chamber, the small wooden vessel and she would be crushed against the ceiling with no other way out. And even if she managed to steer the boat to one of the grates set in the walls before the water rose above them, she has no way of opening the grates.
It didn’t make any sense.
Unless.
Dyeawan forgets about untying herself from her wheels. Instead, with the water already swirling around her waist, she angles herself up against the small vessel’s port. She leans over the tilted side of the rowboat and takes hold of the large, rusted ring on the opposite side. She’s thankful the deceptive strength in her arms hasn’t abandoned her totally. Dyeawan is able to capsize the rowboat and pull the inside of its hull over her. She takes hold of both its rusted oar rings for support, gripping them tightly and pulling the rowboat as deeply around her as possible.
The weight of her wheels and axles helps keep them both anchored to the cobbled floor. Inside the rowboat, the water is up to her chest, but there it stops, even as the chamber continues to fill and the upended bottom of the rowboat slowly becomes completely submerged. Dyeawan can breathe, for now, but she knows every hole in a boat fills eventually.
Dyeawan knows there is a way out of all this. She knows that’s the entire point of this room, to find that way out. That’s the test.
The water around her is dancing in the faint amber light cast by the torches on the walls. Dyeawan stares at that light, thinking, recalling every detail of the chamber, the corridor, the antechamber, even the locked door. None of those perfectly rendered pictures in her mind yield a solution, or even another piece of the puzzle.
Eventually, inevitably, the water overcomes the torches on the walls, extinguishing each flame. The water below Dyeawan goes dark. That water is now threatening her neck, filling the inside of the upended rowboat as it has filled the chamber around it. Dyeawan’s breathing becomes as shallow as the depths in which she’s anchored. Until now she wasn’t truly afraid of dying or failing, and now both feel like the tips of very sharp swords pressed to her temples.
She closes her eyes, preferring the darkness behind her eyelids to that of the drowned chamber. When she opens them again, Dyeawan discovers a new light spreading through the water surrounding her. It’s not the fiery reflection of torchlight, or any kind of flame Dyeawan has seen. Glimpses of bright and unnatural blue begin blinking in and out all around her. Curious, Dyeawan stretches her arms and dips her head below the surface of the water, eyes open and ignoring the salty sting.
It’s fish. They’re swimming into the chamber through the grates. That isn’t particularly odd or alarming, but Dyeawan quickly notices they are all the same kind of fish, dozens and dozens of them, and no other type of sea life is finding its way in.
She’s also never seen fish like these before. They’re almost more like sea snakes with fins as thin and willowy as wisps of smoke stretching their length. They appear almost black, but every few seconds their bodies come alight, crackling blue like tiny lightning strikes underwater. Their luminous forms flicker and pop with some palpable energy, then the light once again goes dark.
One of the creatures swims across the sole of her foot, close enough to brush the unnaturally soft skin there. The first sensation experienced by Dyeawan is surprise, followed by two bouts of brief yet intense pain. The first bout surges through her entire body. The second bout is focused solely on her hands grasping the rowboat’s oar rings, both of which let off a volley of sparks even beneath the water and cause her hands to lose their grip.
Dyeawan’s head is thrust beneath the surface. Her stung hand
s scramble to regain their grip on the rings. She grasps their rough edges, ignoring the pain, and pulls her head above the water, although now her chin is barely able to clear the surface that’s almost reached the bottom of the rowboat’s hull. Almost as dire, whatever coursed through her and touched off the oar rings has left them loose and threatening to pull free of their wood and steel moorings.
Dyeawan blinks, her focus recovering from the painful contact with that fish. Her body is quaking and she can feel the residual touch of the creature in the ends of her hair. She struggles to both push the oar rings back in place while also holding the rowboat over her, a task that seems completely contrary and is starting to feel impossible to enact as her stinging hands begin to numb.
However, it’s the loosening of those rusted rings that plants an idea in the back of her mind. If everything in this chamber has been erected deliberately, then all these fish are no different, and Dyeawan is quickly becoming convinced their purpose is not to provide her with sporadic light. That grain of an idea becomes a fully formed plan, but it’s one that calls for a possibly lethal amount of conjecture.
In that moment Dyeawan has to decide exactly how much she believes in her own mind. If she has as much faith in herself as Edger claims to, then there should be no doubt she’ll choose the right course of action.
Dyeawan hooks one arm around the large plank at the rowboat’s bottom to steady the vessel while her other arm delves deep beneath the water. It’s difficult untying the cords around her legs with one hand, but it gives her time to take deep, measured breaths and steel herself for what’s to come.
Dyeawan spent most of her life in the Bottoms, next to the ocean, and much of that while blessed with motion solely from the waist up. Every brief friend she made in the streets, every drunken sailor who took pity on her, they all warned her never to fall into the water. A cripple without the use of their legs would surely drown, they said. She never believed it. She’s seen a dog with no back legs paddle to safety. She’s seen motionless hunks of wood float perfectly well, not to mention more than a few still bodies.