She takes another step forward. Another. She might be telling the truth. But she also might just be intent on protecting her newfound anonymity, making sure I can still show myself to the Nomarch every month. “No closer, Netiqret.” I stand in the water. Knee-deep. The toxins tear at my flesh.
“Alright.” She stops.
I close my eyes. Even after everything, Icanstill use her help, if she’s genuinely willing. I wade deeper. “Meet me here when I come back.”
“How will I know when that is?”
I give her a grim smile. Clenching my teeth against the hot pain that slices across every inch of skin from my stomach down. “You’ll rotting know.”
I twist. Grab the upper edge of the opening, and before she can respond, before I can change my mind, propel myself into the thundering, burning darkness.
MY SKIN IS ON FIRE. IT FEELS LIKE IT’S SLUICING AWAY,layer by stinging layer, and thanks to the awful, murky muck through which I’m travelling, I can’t see to check that it’s not. My body hits the side of the pipe and I suck in an involuntary mouthful of the liquid, my innards screaming the new burning at me. I keep my eyes closed for as long as I can, but eventually I realise I need to see whether I have the chance to stop, to find air. Acidic agony creeps over my eyeballs. I can only just barely make out enough to know thatthe narrow, water-worn tunnel I’m sliding down doesn’t have an air pocket to rescue me.
There’s no retreat from this nightmare, though. No going back. I clench my arms firmly by my sides, legs together. Make my body an arrow and let the vile, scorching torrent take me.
I slide for too long. I’m losing focus, in real danger of unconsciousness. This was a mistake. I am helpless. I begin to panic that the wounds in my arm have opened, that I’ve lost the Vitaeria embedded there. It feels like it. More and more.
I am dying.
Then, air.
I flail and slip and scrabble blindly to stop as I retch and hack, poisonous fluid ejecting from my lungs. My vision is blurred, filmy and vague, but I can make out light. I throw myself upward toward it. There’s a ledge. My fingernails rake along its smooth surface as the water continues to drag me too fast. Enough of the acidic slime coating my hands rubs away and I manage to find purchase on something, a narrow pipe I think, just enough to haul myself out, rolling away from the stream, weeping and choking in alternate fits.
I scrub furiously at my eyes, the act painful but no more so than leaving them alone. I brush against something wet and soft and warm, and recoil but can’t see what it is yet. It doesn’t react to my touch, though. My breathing becomes marginally easier. My head clearer. There’s still pain but it’s background now, not nearly as bad as the still-fading panic.
My vision gradually returns. I clutch at my arm, feel the lumps of the Vitaeria still there. My skin, beneath the burning, remains intact. Unblemished.
Finally, after what feels like minutes of blinking away the remaining sludge from my eyes, I can see again. I’m kneeling on the edge of a narrow canal cut into the stone floor.
I raise my eyes and stand and turn slowly, breath suddenly short again.
I am in a room large enough that I cannot see its end in any direction except the opening-dotted wall from which the water emerges. Mine is not the only canal; stream after stream flows in its own half-cylinder slit, every second one tinted a sickly green. The alternate ones are lit a soft white, and have only trickles of water dribbling along them. Together they provide the dimmest of light, barely enough to touch the low-hanging roof that sits uncomfortably close, not a half foot above my head.
And just enough to silhouette the supine, twitching bodies.
There are hundreds of them. More. Positioned in between the canals on slightly raised slabs, a little like in the Nomarch except these have no light around their edges. Men and women alike, convulsing and shuddering in constant motion. Only in increments, though. A kind of shivering judder, not enough to shift them to one side or the other. They form a dark sea of silent, twisting, trembling flesh.
Stone pipes rise from the canals. Curve up and over the bodies.
Into gaping wounds in their stomachs, pinning them in place.
I just stand there, confused and disgusted and agitated all at once. Wondering if this is some trick of the poison that’s been flowing through me, even as I know it can’t be. I step hesitantly closer. They are clothed like in the Nomarch, but the linen here is tattered, frayed and crumbling around the edges. They’re all wearing collars, too, I can see now. An entire string of small, thin stone discs arrayed against their throats.
In the dim light, each circle shows the faint etching of a scarab beetle.
I gaze at the nearest one, dazed, then touch the pipe I used to drag myself out of the canal. It quivers beneath my fingers. Toxic water rushing through it. I crouch to see another pipe emerging from the base of the table, beneath the shuddering body on it.
A small, steady stream of clear liquid leaks from it into the white-lit canal.
Before I can properly comprehend it, there’s an oblique movement in the far distance, barely visible but above the height of the tables; I drop to my knees, concealing myself behind the nearest twitching corpse. I don’t think I’ll have been noticed. Not with the constant motion around us.
My skin crawls as I peer over my unsettling cover. The silhouetted woman I spotted wanders the rows of tables, examining each shivering corpse as she passes, her attention upon her work. Her black, ragged clothing, as well as her perfectly repetitive motions and unswerving focus, marks her an Overseer—albeit one far more shabbily dressed than any I have seen. No indication she has spotted my presence or anything unusual. I can’t imagine she would have been instructed to look. Wherever this place is, it surely gets few intruders.
The Overseer is closer now, walking off to my left; I move gradually to my right, keeping plenty of bodies between us, and then forward, positioning myself behind her. She never turns as I creep closer.
Twenty feet. I cannot see a way out of here but there must be one, must be some path down through which these iunctii were brought. Ten feet. Two.
I grab her arm. “Remain still and do not make any unusual reports. If you are in communication with any other iunctii, continue that communication as if nothing has happened here and you are successfully going about your task.” It comes out hoarse, barely a whisper, the fire of the toxins in my lungs unabated.
