Chương 78: 70. The Conductor

"The chamber is the test. What survives walks out to spread further. What does not survive is intombed." - Codex of the Long Watch, On the Mechanism of Initiation The Conductor The wavefront left the wall. Air-distortion travelled across the chamber in just under a second, low to the floor and fanning wider as it went. A dust line tracked along the limestone at floor level in a clean curving arc.

It felt like a searchlight being tilted to cover the floor, except instead of a cone of light, this was a cone of shimmering distortion, painting the floor. He planted his boots, brought the Ironhold across his body, and took the wave on the shield-face. The metal rang and the chamber rang with it, reverberating against the limestone walls. A second cone was forming on the south-east arc. Different sector, different angle, fanning into the chamber's eastern half.

"Arthur, move," Donna said. The cone passed where he had been standing and travelled to the western wall, breaking against the limestone with a slap of compressed air that lifted dust off three metres of floor. * The Conductor's hand was lifting again before the dust had finished rising. Steve was at the pit's edge, eyes on the dais.

"His hands. Watch his hands. Each gesture lights a sector."

"How many sectors are in here?" Arthur asked.

"Six. Three each side. He is choosing," Steve said.

"Choosing what."

"That's the question. Watch." Three more cones fired in the next forty seconds. Each one telegraphed by a gesture Steve was mapping. The party moved with the slices, never standing in the cone path when it lit.

"Everyone behind me." Arthur took one on the shield because they had seen the cone late. The metal rang again and his teeth went numb from the vibration. The sector fired again but this time the party was able to move clear.

"His right hand goes up, north fires. Left hand goes up, south. Front-half gesture, west. Back-half, east. Each gesture, one sector," Steve said, wiping his nose, which had started bleeding.

"The sequence isn't fixed. He's not cycling. North then east then west, no pattern I can see. Each gesture is a fresh choice."

"Well, let's stop playing hopscotch and go kill the skeleton," Donna said. The next gesture went to the east sector. Steve called it; the cone fired. Donna cleared. The wavefront passed three metres from the pit's edge. The water churned.

"No, wait." *"The water."

"What about it."

"It moved. The cone went east. The pit is south. The water moved anyway." From edge to edge, the surface pushed up against itself in a single brief shudder, then settled. The cone had gone east. The pit was south. The water had moved anyway. The next cone fired. West sector, nowhere near the pit. The water shuddered the same way. Steve's voice had dropped.

"Every firing. The water responds to every firing. Doesn't matter where the cone goes."

"Move left, three paces," Sarah called from behind Arthur, and the party moved, avoiding the next cone by a foot.

"How is the water registering this?" Arthur asked, scanning the walls for the next wave.

"Coupled medium. Sound transmits through water four times faster than air with less loss. The pit is one connected volume. When the chamber discharges anywhere, the pressure routes through every cubic centimetre of liquid in the basin at once." Archie's geometry brightened a quarter-turn.

"Hydrostatic coupling. The pressure differential equalises through the entire volume in approximately one third of a second. The acoustic continuity is total. Whether a cone passes over the water does not change the result." Arthur registered the obvious question.

"Can we wade it." A cone fired and the party was directly in front of it. Before they could reposition, the edge of the cone rang against the edge of the shield, turning Arthur sideways. The same sector fired again just as Sarah pulled Arthur away. Steve was shaking his head.

"Anything immersed during a firing absorbs the discharge. The pressure couples into the body through every soft tissue interface. Heart, lungs, eardrums, eyes. There is no safe moment in that water as long as the chamber is firing."

"And the chamber doesn't stop firing."

"Doesn't look like it." Donna looked at the pit. Ten metres of flat water between the chamber edge and the dais. The Conductor's hand was lifting again. * Arthur took the next cone on the shield because Steve had called it late. The metal rang. The note carried out across the chamber and faded against the limestone. The Conductor's next gesture lit the west sector. The west sector fired straight at Arthur. Steve straightened.

"Wait. That's twice now."

"What."

"That. That was the same sector twice." The cone fired again. Arthur caught it. The shield rang a second time, louder than the first because the metal had stored some of the previous strike and the new wave landed on a primed surface. The Conductor's next gesture was west again.

"He routed back," Steve said.

"Thrice now. He routed to where the shield rang." Donna didn't wait for him to test it. She swung the butt of her axe down against the limestone floor on the far side of the pit. The strike sounded through the chamber. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. The Conductor's next gesture lit the east sector. The cone fired through the space Donna had just struck and she moved away gracefully.

"Confirmed." Steve was wiping his nose again.

"He routes to the loudest zone. He's reading the chamber for whoever's making noise and discharging into them. The cones are passive. He's the targeting intelligence."

"Then he's been reading us all along."

"We've been the loudest things in here since we walked in. He's been routing to whoever moves or makes a noise. The reason we've been surviving is that we move out of the path before the cone arrives."

"That won't last forever. We need to take the thing down," Arthur said, sidestepping another cone.

"The vibration magnitude is increasing. Even the ones we are stepping away from are hitting the walls and feeding the chamber," Sarah said, hand on Arthur's back.

"We won't last long. All our lungs are going to collapse. I can already feel a hairline fracture." * Donna had her axe up. She was looking across the water.

"We need to kill him and quickly," she said. Arthur looked at the pit.

"He's ten metres in."

"And you can't get into the water," Steve added.

"I'm not wading. I'm running." Steve looked at her.

"On top of the water."

"I think if I activate Drive, I can take a few steps on water without drowning, if I run fast enough."

"That's a theory, Donna. We haven't tested it. If you sink, you will be crushed," Sarah said.

"As opposed to waiting for our lungs to collapse. We have to take the risk. This will work."

"Arthur, you'll have to keep the waves firing on you. If she gets caught on top of the pool when an air wave fires, she's done for," Steve said, panic in his voice. Arthur looked at the shield. The Counterforce Plant option surfaced and he set it aside without considering it twice. The cones had no kinetic content worth converting, and storing a fraction of a foot-pound of acoustic pressure wouldn't do any good.

"Sarah. I will have to take it on the chin," Arthur said.

"I see no other option." Her hand on his shoulder, her Mender's warmth running up his neck, the violet trace under her skin tracking from her wrist to her elbow.

"I can keep you up for ten seconds, maybe. Every strike will compound. By the fourth, I am the only thing keeping you standing. You understand."

"Understood." He nodded once.

"Donna, on my mark. Arthur waited for the next gesture to commit to a sector. East. He let the cone pass and brought the hammer up. He struck the Ironhold deliberately.

"Donna. Go." * Donna activated Threshold Drive. The lattice across her neck and forearms flared bright enough to throw shadows on the limestone behind her. The physics of her movements changed. Arthur caught the moment of acceleration and lost it. She was at the pit's edge and then she was on the water and the water did not give. He could not check her progress further as he slid back a pace when the wave cone hit his shield.

Donna's boot struck the surface, and before the surface could part and accept the offering, her foot was up and away. She was a water strider skittering on the surface. Arthur struck the shield again. The Conductor's gesture went west. The sector lit and the cone fired at Arthur. The pit's airspace stayed clear. Sarah's hand was on his shoulder. Her other hand was on the small of his back. Her Ether ran in a continuous stream, holding nothing back. She had to match the rate the chamber was breaking him.

He took the hit and the shield rang. His right shoulder went sideways inside the joint.

"Plant. Brace. Again," Sarah said, pushing Ether, and his shoulder was back in place. He struck the shield again and triggered Structural Reinforcement. Two cones now carried Arthur's name. Donna was four metres into the crossing. The cones converged at the same time on Arthur and he braced both his arms behind the shield. That did not save his forearm from breaking. He grunted as another wave of healing Ether hit him. Donna was eight metres across. The chamber was humming at a deafening volume.

"South-east queueing," Steve called. He was at the pit's edge with both hands on his rod and a line of blood from each nostril running into the corner of his mouth.

"He's escalating. Arthur, three cones, three angles." The Conductor's hand was at full extension, fingers spread. The chamber answered with three wave-guides lighting in sequence. The cones overlapped on Arthur's position from three sides at once. There was no slice to step out of.

"Sarah."

"Right behind you. I'll keep you upright. Trust me." Arthur angled the Ironhold to catch the largest of the three. The other two were going to land on his sides. Structural Reinforcement or not, this was going to be bad. On the far side of the chamber, Donna's axe was coming down. * The Drive lattice on Donna's body was the brightest thing in the chamber. She was still midstride as she reached the dais and the axe came down with the full weight of her acceleration behind it.

The blade landed across the second cervical vertebra. The calcified neck took the strike and the strike took the head. The head rolled off the edge of the dais and into the water without a splash. The body stood for a long second longer before the chest collapsed inward along the calcification lines and the limbs followed, and what had been a man four thousand years ago lay in pieces on the worked limestone. The three cones aimed at Arthur did not arrive.

They had been gestural cones, ordered by a gestural hand, and the gestural hand was no longer attached to a body. The cones that had been forming at the moment of the Conductor's death lost their direction and air-distortion broke into incoherent compression. Then the chamber began to fire blind. * Every wave-guide that could fire did. Six sectors, simultaneously, none of them ordered.

The chamber's stored potential, five thousand years of resonance hoarded behind a calcified hand that had been sequencing the discharge, released as a single acoustic chaos that filled every cubic metre of air with overlapping wavefronts.

"Cover," Steve managed as he scrambled behind Arthur. Arthur dropped to his knees behind the Ironhold. Sarah and Steve were behind him, their bodies shielded by his. Donna was on the dais. The dais was the centre of the chamber. Pressure waves from opposite sectors converged on the centre and cancelled along the way. The dais was the only place where the chaos did not reach. Donna crouched over the Conductor's broken body and waited. Around her, the chamber screamed. It went on for twenty seconds.

Arthur counted them through the ringing in his head and the screaming of his arms. Three cones hit the shield. Each one was smaller than what the Conductor had been ordering because gestures weren't focusing them anymore, but each one was still enough to take a toll on his body. Sarah was clutching his vest from behind, pouring every scrap of healing Ether she had into him. The wave-guides dimmed by degrees as the chamber ran out of stored potential.

The chaos went quiet sector by sector until the air stopped moving. ETHER ABSORBED: +2, 000 PARTY INTEGRATION: 2, 942 / 2, 440 LEVEL UP: LEVEL 16 INTEGRATION: 502 / 2, 688 ATTRIBUTE POINTS AVAILABLE: 3 Sarah. ETHER ABSORBED: +2, 200 INTEGRATION: 2, 814 / 1, 968 LEVEL UP: LEVEL 14 INTEGRATION: 846 / 2, 200 ATTRIBUTE POINTS AVAILABLE: 3 Arthur could not register the line at first. His shield-arm did not work. His right shoulder had gone out twice during the last three cones and Sarah had put it back in twice.

But his knees were holding and the rest was negotiable. Sarah was breathing in short pulls. A line of blood ran from her left ear. She had not paced the healing and was paying the price. Steve was sitting against the wall with his head between his knees. The rod was on the floor beside him. Donna stood on the dais, her lattice now dim.

"Are you all alive over there?"

"Alive," Sarah said.

"Define alive," Steve said, without lifting his head.

"If you can ask, then you're alive." Donna stepped to the dais's edge. The water between her and the chamber wall had gone flat again. The pit had returned to the same uncanny stillness it had held when they entered. Then the stillness broke. Arthur saw the ring form before any of the others. A slow circle pushed outward from somewhere directly beneath the dais. The water at the centre of the pit rose by a finger's breadth.

"Steve."

"I see it." The water rang again, from underneath, and a single bead of it climbed an inch above the surface and held.