The Retired Abyss Innkeeper-Chapter 79: The Stone Antecedes Everything. The Teeth Were Arranged Correctly
The stairs down to the bath were narrower than the stairs upstairs. I noticed that the first time I came down here and found the door unlocked. That was also when I realized something had arranged for a full bath to exist under the north wing without consulting me about the implications.
The stairs handled it well enough. They were just narrow.
Bram went down ahead of me with the lamp. His shoulders filled most of the stairwell. That left me navigating by the light leaking around both sides of him.
His sun-dark hands moved along the walls as he descended. I suspect he was talking with the stone.
Behind me, Arveth came down with his robes sweeping each step in sequence. The stitched symbols on the fabric caught the lamplight and let it go again as he moved.
His four attendants followed after him.
The heavy one reached the lower landing before the rest of us somehow. I didn’t see how it managed that. The stairwell was narrow, and it was not.
But it arrived at the bottom ahead of us anyway and stood there with its flesh arranged in its normal configurations, facing forward and waiting to proceed.
Bram shifted the lamp left. Away from the bath.
"Th’pipes are this way," he said.
The bath itself was to the right. Hot water was still running. I thought that was impressive on the building’s part.
It had arranged the bath without being asked and was now keeping it functional without any reminders from me.
The feed pipe ran along the upper wall of the maintenance area, turned the corner, continued another twelve feet, and then met the foundation stone.
Bram raised the lamp toward the junction. Good pipe. Good joins. The mortar around the entry point into the stone was older than the pipe by a margin anyone who knows stone could see.
"The mortar’s older," I said.
"Aye," Bram said. "Someone made that hole before th’pipe existed."
"What was placed here first," Arveth said behind us, "was not anticipating a pipe."
He stood about a foot from the wall. His head was level with the entry point.
The symbols along his sleeves had gone still in the lamplight the way they did when he was studying something closely.
"The entry point was designed for something coming through from the other side," he said. "The direction is outward from this side, not inward toward it."
Four seconds.
"From the other side," said the heavy one.
"The direction is significant," said the grey-green one. It had stopped mid-step.
"The entry point was designed outward," said the third one.
It set the bundle down with both hands. Then it looked at the wall.
"I had a supplier once," I said, walking toward the maintenance door. "He needed more storage and decided to address that over a weekend without consulting anyone. Found a gap in the east wall of his property and ran a connection through it."
I checked the handle. Good ironwork. Original. The hinges matched. I found that gratifying.
"Good construction. Wrong side of the property boundary. The room wasn’t on any plan I had or any plan he had. I found it by following the plumbing."
I pushed the lock. It turned cleanly.
"He was very matter-of-fact about it. Said he’d measured twice and the space was there, so he used it. I pointed out that the space being there wasn’t the same thing as the space being his."
I pushed the door open.
"He said the plumbing was in good condition."
The stone on the other side was wrong. It was dense and close-grained. Good material.
But it didn’t match the foundation above it at all. The coursework ran horizontal where the inn’s foundation ran at a slight angle. The proportions were off too. The ceiling was too tall.
That was the first thing the lamp confirmed.
I stood there a moment and considered the ceiling height against what was above us. It didn’t account for itself.
"That’s not inn construction," Bram said.
His voice was flat. That was the tone he used when a measurement had arrived and was deciding what to do with itself.
"Or any construction I know from th’surface."
"The coursework is older than the settlement period," Arveth said.
He stepped through the doorway and looked down the passage ahead.
"It preceded the city’s presence in its original region. It preceded the city itself."
He looked up at the ceiling and then down at the floor.
"It preceded the concept of this city having a region."
Four seconds.
"Older than settlement," said the heavy one. It was already ahead of everyone.
"The coursework is old," said the grey-green one.
"The construction preceded relevant frameworks," said the third one.
It picked the bundle up again and came through the doorway.
I thought about a hallway I’d dealt with about decades, or maybe centuries ago on a property I was managing.
"A guest built an unauthorized hallway once," I said as I started forward.
"Between two wings that had always been separate. Good construction. The problem was the wings had gotten used to being separate. For about a season the hallway felt wrong every time you walked through it."
I checked the floor with my foot. Even and old.
"Nothing wrong with the materials. They just needed time to accept they were connected now."
"This hallway," Arveth said just behind me, "does not feel wrong because of an adjustment period."
"No," I said. "I’d put this in a different category."
The eyes appeared in the left wall.
Two of them. Low, about knee height.
They blinked once. Slowly.
Then they stayed open and waited.
Years ago I found a window on the second floor of a property I was measuring for curtains.
The problem was there was nothing outside it. The exterior wall measurement didn’t account for the opening.
I put curtains on it anyway.
The room seemed to expect them.
"Those are eyes," Bram said.
"They are," I said. "Two of them."
"In th’wall."
"Yes." I considered them. "Passive, as far as I can tell."
Bram took a silent breath through his nose. Then he moved the lamp to the right and kept walking.
That seemed like the correct decision.
The grey-green one stopped in front of the eyes. They blinked at it.
It took two steps forward and stopped completely.
The eyes blinked again.
The grey-green one took two more steps and passed them.
"The ocular structures are passive sensory appendages consistent with a class of entity that..."
Arveth stopped.
He resumed walking.
"...the class of entity I would typically attribute these to does not extend into..."
He stopped again.
"They are watching," he said.
Four seconds.
"Watching," said the heavy one.
"The eyes watch," said the grey-green one.
"Passive observation is occurring," said the third one.
The fourth one said nothing.
Its edges had contracted when Arveth’s first attempt stopped and had not adjusted since.
The tendrils started around the next turn.
They moved the way things move when they haven’t decided yet whether investigating something will be worth the effort.
A few stretched toward Bram’s boots and then withdrew.
One reached toward me and I stepped around it.
"Watch your feet," I said generally.
The heavy one walked through several tendrils without seeming to notice.
They parted around its steady movement and came back together behind it.
The third one stopped.
It set the bundle down with both hands. A tendril slid toward the bundle and began investigating it.
The third one watched the tendril investigate. Then it picked the bundle back up with both hands, same order as before, and stood.
The tendril withdrew.
The fourth one was managing three tendrils around its trailing edges. They had found them a few steps back and hadn’t lost interest.
Each time the edges shifted, the tendrils adjusted to match.
Each time a tendril probed further, the edges responded to it.
The fourth one appeared to have reached some agreement with the situation and was allowing it to continue.
Bram said from two steps ahead, "I want y’to know I’ve seen stranger."
"I believe you," I said.
"Much stranger."
"Of course."
He said it slightly louder the second time.
The gap in the right wall appeared about thirty feet further down the hallway. Clean-edged in a way something like that shouldn’t be.
About two feet tall and four inches wide.
Inside the gap, along the upper and lower edges, there were teeth.
Enough of them.
They were arranged correctly for teeth.
They weren’t biting anything.
They were simply present, installed as if someone had thought through where they should go.
A draft came through the gap. Slow and steady. The air was a different temperature from the hallway on our side.
"Drafts coming from somewhere you can’t immediately account for almost always have an interesting source," I said. "You follow the air until it runs out of space or finds a gap. I’ve tracked four drafts in this building so far. Two were settling window frames. One was a foundation seam I fixed with mortar."
I looked at the gap and the teeth.
"This one is going on the list."
Arveth stood with his hands clasped behind his back and studied the gap. The lamplight moved across the symbols on his sleeves in sequence.
"The dentate structure is a boundary marker consistent with entities that..."
He stopped. He crossed to the opposite side of the passage and examined it from there.
"Entities that occupy territories characterized by..."
He stopped again.
The symbols on his sleeves, which had been moving slowly in the lamplight, went abstract. His head tilted slightly. Just enough to notice.
The teeth sat in the gap, patiently. They didn’t offer any explanation.
Ahead of us, the hallway continued.
The lamp reached about twenty feet past the gap.
After that the lamplight ran out.
In the darkness beyond, something had started happening at its own pace, unhurried, in the process of deciding what it was going to be.
[SYSTEM LOG]
Lower maintenance passage, first recorded entry.
Construction type: era preceding settlement, origin structure unclassified.
Ambient features: ocular structures, left wall, knee height, passive; floor tendrils, mobile, curiosity behavior; dentate gap, right wall, atmospheric exchange active.
Structural integrity of passage: sound.
Fourth entourage entity, edge interaction with floor tendrils: complex, ongoing. Classification pending.
Hallway depth: exceeds foundation allowance above. Margin: unmeasured.
