The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [99]
He swore again.
Descending the small hill, he found only a dry brook at the bottom but, as he looked down at the ground he struck lucky – there were footsteps in the sand. He followed them a short way up, but found the way blocked by a giant boulder. The footmarks ended just before the stone.
Where did they all go?
He began searching the stone, his hands touching the rough, warm surface in search of a hidden spring, some kind of artificial control, but could find nothing but unbroken rock.
He swore again and sat down. It was all part of a big, invisible web, he thought. With the spider forever hidden, weaving forever more strands to confuse and entrap. Where did they go?
He let his mind wander. Suddenly, none of this seemed particularly important. How was he to sabotage the cannon, anyway? And for what? Should he prevent the lizards from calling to their own people? Were they planning invasion – or did they simply desire to escape a backwards world that was for them a prison?
Perhaps, he thought, it was a little of both. His eyes tracked a column of ants across the sand. A lizard darted out of nowhere and snatched several of the ants with its tongue. The remaining ants continued to march, despite the attack.
Are we the ants? he thought. Or… His train of thought was interrupted. Where had the lizard come from? He could no longer see the reptile, but his eyes caught the quick darting trail it left across the sand. There!
He bent down on his knees and crawled forward in the sand until he was directly beneath the boulder, in its shade. Something flashed. He cleared sand with his hands.
Below him there was, revealed, not more earth but bars of dull metal, stretching away from him. He was standing on some kind of a ramp!
Before he could move again the ground shook, and for one terrified moment he was convinced the boul der was about to roll over and crush him. Then the ramp descended, sand, ants and all, and he found himself voyaging once more below ground.
"It is I," Orphan muttered, "Quod feci, Arne Saknussemm," and he thought of Verne, the fat writer's image forming before him in sharp relief, and he suddenly missed home very much indeed.
The ramp did not travel far. Orphan found himself in a small antechamber, empty, with no features or signs of life. As the ramp touched the ground it almost immediately traversed its course and began to slowly rise. Orphan rolled away and landed on the stone floor. The ramp rose and soon blocked out the sunlight. Orphan stood for a moment and let his eyes adjust to the semi-darkness. Something crawled on his hand and he panicked, but it was only an ant, separated from its comrades in the disturbance. He put it down on the floor and wished it well. It was lost, just like him.
Then he got up and stepped through the door of the antechamber, and into a corridor and the sight of guns aimed levelly at him.
THIRTY-ONE
Moriarty
"Who, then, is Porlock?" I asked.
"Porlock, Watson, is a nom de plume, a mere identification mark, but behind it lies a shifty and evasive personality. In a former letter he frankly informed me that the name was not his own, and defied me ever to trace him among the teeming millions of this great city."
– Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear
This time he couldn't fight. There were three of them, and they were armed. What's more, they had obviously been waiting for him.
The soldiers didn't speak to him. First they frisked him, finding no weapons but confiscating the book, his mother's book. He tried to protest but they merely pushed him along. They were young, about his age, and they marched him along the corridor, their guns at his back, making sure he followed the route to wherever he was being taken. Orphan breathed in air and tried to calm himself down. All in all, his attempt to sabotage the cannon, such as it was, had not gone very well.
The soldiers led him further