“Should we try to climb the waterfall?” Nubry suggested. “Or slide down the drain?”
A series of rooms in clashing colors had presented no real obstacles beyond an increasing difficulty in reaching the exits. Bott looked up the big grey rocks to the grey door waiting beyond the tumbling grey water.
“No, the drain’s got to be too easy. Besides, isn’t that the next letter you need for your sentence?”
The librarian had been noting the letters on the doors they passed, marking each lightly on a slip of paper in the back of her book. The marks, she told him, said “Bow Before His I…” and would be followed, she claimed, by a mountain-shaped letter. Bott could just make out the M in the mists at the height of the cascade before them.
“So it’s just a matter of getting there,” she said, studying the water as it flowed into the hole.
“You could hold your head under the water for a while,” said a voice from Bott’s left hand.
“Are there hidden stairs, Dassie?” Nubry inquired, as Bott extended one finger to test the water.
“No, I just thought the lummox could use a shower.”
Bott pulled his right hand back and shoved it under his vest. “What I need right now is a hammer.”
“Ah, yes,” said the Drover. “He’s going to break a few rocks. Gets to be a habit after a few years’ imprisonment at Ankinkle.”
“A hammer, Bott?” asked Nubry, peering at the water.
He nodded. “I don’t think that thing by the door is a welcome mat but it could be just as good.” Bringing the hammer from the kit for emergency repairs, he lifted his head to squint at the height of the falls. Without warning, he hauled back and let the hammer fly.
It hit the black mat dead center. Hammer and black webbing bounced down.
“A ladder!” Nubry cried, as Bott bent to catch up the hammer and the end of the webbing. “How did you know it was there?”
“You must be smarter than the average lummox,” the Crover agreed.
Bott shrugged with completely feigned modesty. “My father always said you couldn’t tell how far a flamn can fly by the length of its feathers. This should be safe. The only danger I see is if the ladder should break, and that’s not a bad fall if we’re ready for it.”
“Right,” said Nubry. Tucking her book into her collar, she started up. Bott waited, admiring the delicate way she made sure she wasn’t too involved with the webbing, in case it fell. Then he followed.
There was just enough room at the top of the tumbling water for them both to stand. Shaking water from her hands, Nubry took hold of the doorknob and looked to Bott. He readied a grenade, and nodded.
“Oh my!” she exclaimed, folding her arms on top of her head.
“Bilstim ryzores!” Bott agreed, glowering at the white walls and marked doors of the Start Room.
“They could have built more than one,” said Nubry, stepping inside. “Couldn’t they? Yes, they could! To discourage us, or so not every prisoner starts at the same….”
Bott pointed to the landing cushion. A tray waited with two cups, two plates, a pitcher, and a steaming platter.
“We couldn’t let you starve before the game really started,” came the voice of His Imperial Worship.
“We measured your feathers, lummox,” the Drover added. “Welcome back.”
Bott jammed the gold card deep into his pocket and slouched over toward the cushion. “Should we eat? Or do you suppose they’ve poisoned it?”
Nubry joined him. “They wouldn’t poison lumpucks, would they?”
Bott looked over the steamed lumpucks, the most common root vegetable in the galaxy. Perfectly flavorless and uninteresting, they were the model institutional food.
“They would not.” He sank down next to the tray, legs folded under him.
He reached for a plate as Nubry came to sit next to him. Then he set it down, feeling very lummoxlike. The librarian had closed her eyes and raised her prayerstone to her forehead in some pre-meal ritual. He noted the dark stains under her arms again.
Her eyes opened before his could turn away. Her arms came sharply down and she slid a little away. “I’m sorry. I know what I must smell like, after all that running and climbing, and jumping over those pits in that fourth room.”
“I didn’t notice.” Bott shrugged. “That’s nothing I worry about, with the slave ship always telling me what I smelled like.”
The minimal nostrils wiggled. “I don’t notice anything. Well, dirt maybe, but dirt like in the garden ship in our fleet. Clean dirt.”
“It’s the jacket.” He fingered the tattered lapel. “It always smells like that, no matter what else happens. We usually use the cloth for ceremonial clothes.”
Nubry nodded, and spooned a couple of lumpucks onto her plate. “You said those were your father’s clothes.”
“And the jacket was his father’s, and goes back to many fathers before that.” He tucked the lapels under the jacket, for fear of lumpuck juice. “I wanted to save it for some future father, but I wanted it by me, too. It gets more and more torn; doesn’t look anything like when my father wore it.”
The librarian chewed a bit of lumpuck—lumpucks didn’t require much chewing—and asked, “Was he a government official? A religious leader?”
“Both; the title was Elder.” Bott tried to savor the heat, at least, of the lumpucks, but lumpucks defy savoring. “He went into town more often than the others. You could tell by the way he talked and the things he said.”
“He sounds like the right person to be an Elder, then.”
Bott tipped his head back. “He knew everything worth knowing and had done everything worth doing. He was what I wanted to be. Anything more was a waste of time and anything less was failure.”
Nubry was chewing the lumpucks far more than necessary. “What did he think of you being a pirate?”
Bott poured a glassful from the pitcher, knowing that whatever it was would be perfectly lukewarm and flavorless. “He never knew. I was ten years old when he was arrested and burned.”
“Oh!”
“Everyone in town had to be there to watch. Some people fainted. I stayed to the end. I figured that anything I could do to make things worse for the Free Imperial State would be just deserved.”
Nubry had risen to her knees. “So you became a pirate.”
He shook his head. A bit of lumpuck seemed stuck in his throat, but lumpucks always stuck in your throat. “I was going to be a computer technician first class, so I could do real damage. But I flunked the exams.” He swallowed the lumpuck, assisted by another gulp of nothing much from the glass. “Funny. If I ever have nightmares, I don’t see my father burning. I see the examiner, him with the little mustache, coming tot tell me I flunked.”
She was reaching across the food toward him, but he pulled away. “Is there a letter for Nubry?” he asked, looking at the marked doors. “Maybe we’ll be luckier if we start with that.”
“Well, yes.” Her voice was small, as if forcing itself past a crawful of lumpuck. “But we could start the same place we did before but choose different doors along the way. Every pit had a different….”
Both heads went up at the rumble coming from somewhere above them. “Sound effects?” she demanded.
Bott rose as liquid started to bubble up around the cushion. It touched a bit of lumpuck that had fallen from his plate; the lumpuck teistrd and dissolved.
“Oil,” he said, sniffing the air. “They want us to….ow!”
Hot oil was dripping from the ceiling as well. Nubry came to her feet and jumped over the growing pool on the floor. “This way!”
Bott followed, more interested in dodging the hot downpour than asking how she’d picked this exit. Behind the door she’d chosen was a step, and then a long corridor that slanted down, interrupted only by low half-walls on the floor. The walls on each side were close, and the ceiling was low.
Bott didn’t like the look of it, but he disliked the glance behind him more. The hot oil was falling harder now, and hotter, and a groove was opening in the floor to channel the oil in their direction.
They started running together, and leapt the first barrier in unison. “Will that slow the oil down long enough?” Nubry demanded.
“Long enough for what?”
They cleared the second hurdle. “This has to open out somewhere. Hasn’t it?”
Bott knew it didn’t, and knew she knew. But there was nowhere else to go just now. He could hear the oil sputtering as its heat increased.
“Hey!” Looking downhill, he spotted a low box two barriers farther along. “Jump in that!”
“The oil’s going to be too deep,” Nubry told him. “We….”
:It’s a mining boat!’ They made it over a roadblock a little higher than the last one. “They use them on Odeoda for sailing down the streams of lead!”
They made the jump at the next barrier and landed in the boat. Bott grabbed at the side too late, and fell to the bottom, Nubry landing on top of him. On Odeoda, they did not attach the boats to wheels, or set the wheels on rails.
Their vessel shot down the slope, picking up speed as the angle increased. The refugees pulled themselves up to the edge.
“It’s fun!” Nubry exclaimed.
“Wait ‘til we reach bottom!” Bott imagined them coming up against a blank wall and cooking slowly as the hot oil raised the boat to the ceiling. They had not been provided with mining suits.
“There!” Nubry shouted.
Bott saw the blank wall he’d been dreading first, but his eyes widened as the ravine in front of the wall did the same. This was the best they could hope for, he supposed. If the boat was sturdy enough to survive the fall, and they were strong enough to survive the crash, there might be a way out of the ravine before the oil started pouring into it. He felt in his vest for anything that might serve as a helmet.
Then he saw the first head.
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