CHAPTER NINETEEN
Digging In
The Gunner’s wrongness seemed to be getting worse. He felt tired beyond normal exhaustion, and his hands and limbs were beginning to not do what he wanted them to, as if the instructions coming down from his brain were subject to a game of Chinese Whispers and losing a lot of the detail in translation.
His hands had begun to feel as if their normally strong, agile fingers were wrapped in stiff new boxing gloves. His back ached, and he was fighting the overwhelming desire to find a piece of ground and just sit down for a bit. He knew this was a fatal impulse, because once he sat, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t want to get up again. So he wiped his now-clumsy hands across the rough stone of the wall and confirmed to his satisfaction that there were no more heart stones left on it.
He grinned and hefted the oilskin bag that his groundsheet cape had become. It clinked satisfactorily.
He had two choices, he thought: he could drop the bag underwater, which would leave the Walker floundering around in the dark, trying to find the heart stones. The only trouble was that the tank floor was barely two meters below water at its deepest points, and a lot shallower over most of its area. Floundering around would eventually lead the Walker to trip over the package, and then when he opened it, he would have all the light he could want.
“Bury it,” he grunted. “Smart arse didn’t say I couldn’t dig downward, did he?”
He stumbled up onto the gravel, moving by touch alone. He found the back wall and dropped to his knees. He put the bag of heart stones on the ground next to him and allowed himself the luxury of a cigarette.
The match scraped, and he ignited the end and sucked in the smoke. He pulled the pewter plate out of his jacket and looked at it in the light of the match as it burned down to his fingers.
“Dream of four castles, my Aunt Fanny—know what you are, my beauty?” he asked it as the match died and darkness swept back in from the edges of the tank.
“You are a bloody short-handled shovel.”
He rolled the cigarette to one side of his mouth and chunked the plate into the pea gravel at his knees. He hoisted a plateful of stone to one side and dug in again, pleased to see that the injunction forbidding him to dig up was not preventing him digging in the opposite direction.
And as is often the way of it, once he was working he felt less tired. It was as if the physical labor took some of the worry out of him, and the rhythmic shoveling left less space for him to worry about the wrongness of things at his core.
He knew he had plenty to worry about, not least of which was the fact that he was running out of time. Turn o’day must be approaching up on the surface. And if his plinth was empty at midnight, he knew he was a goner. He didn’t know how being a goner would work with the fact that he seemed to be under a curse. Perhaps it meant he’d be a walking dead statue, a sort of pair of dead hands, the same way taints were, only ever moving from the plinth to do the Walker or the Stone’s bidding. The thought of becoming a taint in spit’s clothing turned his gut, and he took it out on the gravel by digging faster and harder. Whatever happened, even if he kicked the bucket at midnight, he was going to bury the Walker’s profane booty as deep as he could. He dug so hard that the pewter plate buckled in his hand. He put it aside and started digging with his hands alone.
And for the longest time in the darkness, the only sounds were the chunk and hiss of gravel being scooped out of a hole and tossed aside onto more gravel, and the quiet pop of a man working with both hands, a cigarette parked in the side of his face.
He wondered what George was doing right now.