When she asked me where that might be, I shook my head. I could not use Didir to fish for answers. We knew that Manacle would go there, however, and he was easy enough to find¾we knew where his quarters were. “Manacle,” commented Mavin, as we went toward his rooms. “The techs hate Manacle. I think some kind of mutiny brews there, my son, an old mutiny.”
I thought of Laggy Nap and his power over the boots. “Perhaps the contrivance which controls the boots has fallen into disrepair. Perhaps, if techs are expected to repair things and techs are also controlled by the boots, they have found a way to disrepair it.”
“As I said,” she murmured, “mutiny. Something brews.” Though I had not seen Huld since he had stormed away from us outside the room of the defenders, I felt his presence still like a weight upon my lungs. Without Didir to protect me, I had to be more sly and secretive than heretofore. Thus, it took a sneaking time to come to Manacle’s place and hear his rumbling whine through the open door. Shear came out, then went in again, several times. Flogshoulder, too, went in and out, bearing garments of some ceremonial type. They emerged together to go to a dining place, from which we later stole food which was of better quality than that given to Tallmen.
“How long until this ceremony?” I muttered. “How long must we lurk in this way?”
“We are so far underground time is without meaning,” she said. “Nonetheless, if Manacle said ‘two days’ when we came into this place, then it cannot be long now. We have blundered about in here for the better part of two days at least. Time grows short, and I am glad of it. I could not bear much more of this.”
I felt it, too, the being without sunlight, without passage of day and night. I wondered if this was how ghosts felt in the grave, separated not only from life but from time as well. This led to other thoughts of gloom and destruction, from which Mavin had to rouse me when Manacle came from his quarters for the final time.
We had no doubt he came out prepared for ceremony. There were stripes of gold upon his sleeves and his high square cap was splattered with gold as well. Shear and Flogshoulder came behind, also decorated, and we went in procession down and down corridors toward a distant gate. It was truly down, as though toward a valley, and it was into a valley we came to see the first light of dawn rouging the heights before us, brightening the cliffs with morning while the forests lay still in night below. Here was a green meadow crisscrossed with metal tracks, heaped with mounds of wrack and jetsam (or so they appeared), with a blackened tower standing at its center, silvered at its tip. A tiny opening gaped high in the side of the tower, like a missing tooth, and a tall spidery ladder stood beneath it. Upon the valley floor small groups of techs removed covers from machines which had been covered against the depredations of time and weather. Near the tower was a machine similar in every respect to that one which had so changed Himaggery and Windlow.
“The blues,” whispered Mavin. “See, they are carrying the blues into the tower.”
She was right. Some of the techs were carrying boxes of the blues to the tower where a lower section had been opened into some large cargo space. There were no Tallmen on the field. We would have to take the form of techs, and I looked at them closely with my Shifter’s eyes before fading back into the shadows to take their shape. Even as we emerged onto the field, the wagons of bodies came out of the tunnels to clatter their way toward the tower. We went purposefully after it, looking neither right nor left, intent upon our pawnish, techish duties.
When we arrived at the tower, we began helping with the loading. Mavin went up into that cargo space, then I. We lifted body after body into it, stacking them, within moments ceasing to think of them as bodies at all. They were only things. When the tech outside put Windlow’s feet into my hands for a moment I forgot what I was doing. Mavin brought me to myself.