you have no gods in Okhamba,’ Kaiku said. ‘And you do not believe in your ancestors living on in anything but memory.’
‘It is addressed to the pash,’ he said. For the first time, she saw him embarrassed. ‘I was asking for your protection, and offering you mine. It is merely a custom.’
Kaiku wiped the sodden hair back from her face. ‘And how am I supposed to respond?’
‘Hthre,’ he said. Kaiku repeated it, unsure of her pronunciation. ‘It means you accept the pledge and offer your own.’
She smiled. ‘Hthre,’ she said, with more conviction this time.
He looked away from her. ‘It is merely a custom,’ he repeated.
They crept out of the water and along the widening pipe. After so long in night and darkness, the warm, fiery glow at the end made them feel uneasy. Their progress was wary, hugging the walls as they flattened out, their fingers running over rusting panels fused together by some craft that neither Kaiku nor Tsata knew. As they neared the light, they saw that it was not a wall at the end but a steep slope, like a chute, which they were at the bottom of. They peeked out of the end of the pipe, but there was nobody there. Above them, they could see only darkness, and around them were the walls of the chute that fed into the pipe where they emerged. The source of the glow was similarly obscured.
But there was a ladder, made of metal, fixed against one side of the chute.
Kaiku climbed. There was nothing else to do, and no other, more subtle way up. Tsata remained at the bottom, his hide clothes dripping and forming a puddle around his shoes. She wished suddenly that there had been some way to waterproof her rifle and bring it along. It would have comforted her, even if she knew it would be little help in the event that they were discovered.
She reached the top of the ladder, and her stomach fell away as she saw the true immensity of the Weavers’ mine.
The humped roof of the building was not, as she had expected, the ceiling of some kind of dwelling; rather, it was the cap of a colossal shaft that plunged down into abyssal depths. The shaft was not a straight drop; the blackness at its bottom was obscured by stone bulges where the sides narrowed and jags of rock that projected into the centre. Vast ledges scarred it, and pillars rose up like blunt needles, made small by comparison to their surroundings.
The chute that Kaiku had clambered out of was set on the edge of a great semicircular sill. Its lower lip continued up above her to an enormous dump-tank which sat upright in a cradle of curled iron. A pair of spiked wheels rotated slowly behind it, huge cogs dragging up scoops affixed to rattling chains which tipped water into the dump-tank and then headed monotonously downward again to collect more.
Kaiku, peripherally aware that the immediate vicinity appeared to be deserted, clambered out of the chute and stood there gawking, awed by the sheer size and strangeness of the place.
The illumination that she had seen from the bottom of the chute was provided by metal torches and pillars which burned with flame; but it was not like any normal flame, being more similar to combusting vapour. They billowed clouds of smoky fire that trailed upward and then dissipated, turning to noisome black fumes which floated away to collect at the top of the shaft. She realised that the darkness above her was not through lack of light, but that it was a churning pall of smoke which slowly vented itself into the clean air outside through pores in the cap.
The multitude of ledges and pillars were linked with a network of precarious walkways, rope bridges and stairways that hung like spiderwebs across the shaft. Walls were scabbed with props and joists of wood and metal, delineating pathways for mine carts to travel, and caves opened all over the shaft, glowing from within. Paternosters groaned and steamed in the depths, furnaces blazing at their heart as they rotated in idiot procession. Iron cranes jabbed out into nowhere, still carrying loads, abandoned. Thin waterfalls plunged endlessly, issuing from cave mouths to fall into nothingness, or to strike a rock ledge further down in a mist of spray before running off and down again. Kaiku saw small, ramshackle wooden huts clustered together, sometimes built on the tip of a pillar and linked