Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

troughs and turned down it, walking in the same overall direction
as we had been following in the tunnel – downwards, towards
the old power-station.
    ‘Hey!’
    One of the growers came hurrying up. He was a stocky, dark man
with sharp, darting eyes. His overalls were blue, dusted with
white powder that caught the light like ground glass. He stopped
a couple of metres in front of us and glared.
    ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded. ‘How
did you get in?’
    ‘We’re – ’
    Druin motioned to me to be quiet.
    ‘We’re just passing through,’ he said. He
gazed around the chamber with an expression of slack-jawed
wonder. The other tinkers had stopped workand stood about
watchfully. ‘It’s a fascinating place you’ve
got here, I must say.’
    ‘How did you get in here?’ the tinker repeated,
taking a step closer.
    Druin jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Oh, we were
out chasing the deer,’ he explained casually. ‘We
came across a kind of -’ he looked at me, as if searching
for a word ‘- a manhole, would you call it? In the woods up
there. We went down it for a bit of a lark, like, and made our
way down through yon tunnel.’
    Druin hitched his thumb under the rifle’s strap and
added, ‘So if you don’t mind, we’ll just be on
our way.’
    The tinker showed more real amazement than Druin had
feigned.
    ‘You came through the tunnel?’
    ‘Aye,’ said Druin. ‘It’s got some real
eerie hollows in it,’ he added, with an appreciative wink.
He began to walk forward, and I beside him. To my surprise the
tinker stepped aside, with a glance and a small shake of the head
to his colleagues. I suspected that no outsider had made it past
the cavern’s spectral guardians for a long time, and that
the tinkers here just didn’t know what to make of us.
    On either hand of us were the stone troughs; the ones we
passed first each contained a layer of tiny stones, gravel
almost; subsequent ranks had larger and fewer stones, until we
reached the very end, where a trough – or rather, by this
point, a large circular tub – might contain a single
boulder. On the floor below the troughs were oddly shaped stones,
apparently discarded; some of these casualties of quality-control
had evidently ended up in the tunnel. However, we saw no hollows
in that chamber, and I wondered if I’d misunderstood the
implied sequence of events, or if the light in there was too
bright for such displays.
    Within the stones themselves, queerly distorted by the
rippling water, strange fleeting scenes played themselves out
with a coherence that increased with the size of the stones. I
had no leisure to inspect them, but several times I felt that the
faces flickering across these smooth surfaces were faces I had
seen in the tunnel.
    The walls and ceiling of the unnatural cave converged to an
entranceway to another passage, about two and a half metres high
and two wide. It continued for about thirty metres ahead of us,
beyond which a darker doorway loomed. This corridor was
unmistakably artificial, its squared walls and ceiling being made
of the same glazed substance as the shaft. Its lighting, too, was
subdy different from that of the growing-gallery – though
it came from similar glass panels, it had that overtone of yellow
which marked it as ordinary electric lighting, if more powerful
than usually encountered. Our footsteps rang on the ceramic
floor, echoing sharply.
    ‘You carried yourself cool in there,’ I said to
Druin.
    ‘Ah, it’s all bluff,’ he said.
‘They’ve got used to folks being scared by their bluff. But I reckon we’ll soon meet some
who’re ready for us – our friends back there will
have signalled ahead.’
    ‘You’re not bothered?’
    ‘Not a bit’
    ‘I was, but I wasn’t going to show it My heart was
hammering and my head was buzzing with bewildered images, like
the seer-stones themselves, and my hand clutching the
rifle’s strap was slick with sweat.
    The response that Druin had expected – or, possibly, a
stronger response – came when we were about two-thirds of
the way down the corridor. Fer-gal and two other men appeared in
the exit, barring our way. They carried rifles of an unfamiliar
design, not aimed at us but ready for use. We walked forward. He
stepped out in front of the others and raised a hand.
    ‘Stop right there!’ he ordered.
    We stopped.
    ‘What are you here for?’ Fergal asked.
    I decided it was