The train rolled on. The lammergeiers lived – or used to live – in the fast-tower, on the 9th level. I reckoned there was something going on up there. The freight train would pass almost underneath the fast-tower. Good enough for me. The 9th level sounded a bit high and cold and inaccessible but I’d burn that bridge when I came to it.
I almost decapitated myself jumping off the train when it went through another set of points in a wide bit of tunnel the length of which I slightly overestimated, but apart from banging a shoulder on a wall and skinning one knee I escaped unscaved. I climbed a ladder, walked a bit of service tunnel and took a service elevator up to the main floor level. I found myself in what looked like a giant chemical works, all pipes and big pressure vessels and leaking steam and funny smells. Sure enough, a quick check on the crypt and I confirmed it was a plastics refinery.
After a lot of fancy and highly technical crypting, some walking and climbing over pipes and ducts and avoiding the dodgier-looking shadows I found an automatic freight elevator taking vats of some sort of fertilizer up the tower and hitched a ride up in that.
My ears popped after two minutes, and after about five, and ten.
Some more fancy crypting got the elevator to go a floor above where it was expected; this was as high as it could go. I got out in a sort of tall open gallery where a fierce cold wind blew and the view was of babil plants forming a fretwork of gnarled branches letting in a spare icy light.
I let the elevator take itself back down a floor.
There was a pillar about 100 metres away which supported the roof of the tall gallery. The one in the other direction was twice as far away. I set off towards the nearer one.
I was still only dressed in my usual clothes and this wind was making me shiver already, but then it had been fairly warm further down so maybe it was just the suddenness of the change. I walked along the gallery, between the silhouetted babil and the smooth ashlar of the tower’s barely curved wall. The floor felt cold through my shoes and I wished I had a hat.
The crypt started to get a bit vague and unhelpful about the layout of the fast-tower at around this level. I just had to hope the pillar might have a set of stairs in it.
It didn’t. It had two sets of stairs in it, intertwined in a double helix like DNA.
Didn’t seem to matter which one I took. I started climbing.
I went fast at first to try and warm up but the breath just whistled out of me and my legs turned to jelly; I had to sit down and put my pounding head between my knees before I could continue, more slowly.
The steps went round and round and round; pretty steep.
I plodded on and up, trying to settle into a rhythm. This seemed to work but I was getting a hell of a headache. Lucky I was fit, not to mention determined. (Not to mention bloody stupid, it was starting to occur to me.)
The pillar got to the next storey – another open gallery – and didn’t stop; it went on up. Seemed to go on for a good ways yet so I stuck with it. The stair case had no handrails and though it was a good couple of metres wide it would have been frighteningly open and exposed on the outer side if the babil plants hadn’t been hanging growing all over the outside of the tower. As it was it was still pretty frighteningly exposed on the other side, but the best thing to do was not to think about it and certainly not to look.
I kept climbing.
Another level. My head was hurting like mad. I looked for the pillar but it wasn’t there any more. Instead there was a whole network of twisted pillars, weaving this way and that with high altitude babil – thin weedy stuff – all over it, coating the floor of the gallery, netting the weave of the fretted stone wall.
I wandered, my feet tripping over the babil, looking for a strand of stonework with steps in it or on it so that I could go higher, my vision getting dark at the edges, my legs feeling bouncy and strange and something howling in my ears that might have been the wind and might not.
I don’t know how long it was before I found the spyer, fallen amongst the babil, dead, crumpled, head shattered, skin dried, white bones poking through his kneepads. I remember looking up and thinking he must have falling from the open-work ceiling, and I saw his mask and the cylinder on his back but I just wandered off again, feeling like I was walking along this tunnel because that was all I could see and it seemed like hours later while I was still searching for another stairway or at least a door or something that I thought, Hey, maybe I could use the spyer’s gear! and I started to turn round and almost tripped over him because I’d wandered in a circle.
There was old brown blood dried on the face mask but it fell away like dark dandruff when I knocked it. The oxygen in the tank was cold and it felt like it was freezing my lungs but my headache started to go and I wasn’t looking down a tunnel all the time no more.
I finished the water in his canteen, took his jacket, hat and torch and left the poor bugger lying there.
The stairs were in a really obvious place, just along from the top of the pillar I’d climbed.
The lammergeiers’ roost was on the next level. I got there at dusk and collapsed in a nest of dry babil and huge scratchy feathers. The din waked me and I started investigating, ending up looking down the big shaft.
I hear the crunching noise.
I swing the torch round aiming the beam down the tunnel; the warm breeze coming up the deep black shaft tugs at my jacket. The torch beam just disappears into the dark, swallowed up.
Something crunches again, then there’s a noise of something coming whistling towards me.
I don’t have time to duck and I don’t see what hits me, but it bashes into my chest and knocks me backwards, the breath going Hoof!, out of my lungs. I feel myself start to go over the edge of the shaft and grab with one hand as the lip of stone skates under my bum. My hand misses.
I fall into the black throat of the shaft.
The roar of air builds up around me, tearing the mask off my face.
After a few seconds I get my breath back and I start screaming.
Next original section
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TRANSLATION – EIGHT – 4
Original text
I get tired screaming. Even more I get tired of getting bashed on the head with the mask what has come off my face; it’s still attached to the air tank on my back and it’s slipped round behind my neck and is going thump thump thump on the back of my bonce.
I feel behind me and tear it away.
My ears are going pop pop pop. The air is blasting round me so hard there’s hardly any point in me screaming anyway. It’s almost totally dark; I’ve got a sort of gray sensation of the walls rushing past around me, and if I twist round I can look up and see a vague impression of a tiny patch of dark gray on the blackness.
Downwards, there’s just blackness.
I try to crypt but I can’t; don’t know if it’s because I’m moving too fast or because the shaft is shielded or because I’m too terrified to concentrate properly. I start screaming again, then stop, gulping for breath.
I’d have shat my pants by now but it’s been so long since I ate that I can’t.
The air is cold and I’m shivering but it’s not freezing. I settle into a sort of floppy X-shape after a while, like I’ve seen skydivers do; I drift towards one wall, then manoeuvre myself away again. I have to keep swallowing to keep my ears from bursting. I try to think how far up I was and how long it’s going to take me to fall to the bottom, if it’s the bottom that’s going to break my fall. I realise that there might be something between me and the bottom and I could hit at any moment and I start screaming again.
I stop after a while. Tears get whipped off my face but it’s not me crying it’s just the fierceness of the wind tearing at my eyes.