The Retired Abyss Innkeeper-Chapter 81: Bram Was Still Talking When The Fracture Took Him
The presence stopped moving away from us.
It had been retreating since the main corridor. Just far enough ahead to keep us walking. Through turns, through passages, deeper in. Now it stopped in the chamber and simply existed there.
There was flesh. A lot of it. Arranged in ways I didn’t have a reference point for, which is saying something after running an inn long enough. And eyes. Many eyes. They were looking in different directions. None of them were aimed at each other.
I once had a guest arrive through a third-floor window.
The front entrance had a delivery happening and they’d decided to go around instead, which was entirely reasonable. They were carrying luggage, perfectly calm about it. By the time I got upstairs they were already seated. They asked for tea. I brought it. They stayed six nights.
Bram held the lamp forward and looked at the entity for a long moment.
"Y’know what that is," he said.
"Tell me," I said. "I’ve been looking at it since the corridor and the pipe question keeps pulling my attention the wrong direction."
"Old growth timber," he said. "Th’kind that’s been in th’same ground long enough to grow through every rock in th’soil. Th’grain goes everywhere at once. Shouldn’t hold together at all."
He stepped forward once.
"Holds better than anything y’ve ever cut."
Several of the entity’s eyes turned toward him. The rest kept watching other things.
Bram’s big, scarred hands found the wall beside him before his eyes had finished with the entity. He read it for a moment. Then he looked back at the entity.
"Th’stone hasn’t decided where it’s going yet." He moved his hand along the surface.
Two of the entity’s eyes shifted in his direction.
"What y’want to do with that," Bram continued, "is brace from th’outside in. Not th’inside out. Inside out just drives th’problem further down. Y’think y’re solving it but y’re relocating it."
He looked at the entity as he would look at a building he’d been asked to judge.
"Now th’material." He put his knuckle to the wall and knocked twice. "Most people reach for lime render first. Looks right. Feels right in th’hand. Wrong choice." He shook his head slightly. "Lime render in a space like this cures at th’surface and leaves th’interior unsettled. Y’get a clean face over a problem y’haven’t solved. Could hold a season. Could hold three. Then one morning it decides it’s had enough."
Several of the entity’s eyes had found his hand on the wall now. He kept going.
"Th’right material is hydraulic. Sets in moisture. This chamber has moisture in th’air that’s been here longer than th’stone." He stepped back half a pace. "And y’test it before y’commit. Not after y’ve already mixed th’batch."
He looked at the entity directly.
Arveth said, "This entity has been here since before there was a way to say what it is. It has been here since before the hallway existed, since before anyone came to build a hallway, since before there was anyone to..."
Two of the entity’s eyes did something. They moved independently from the rest of it.
The floor near the far wall changed. The way a building changes after something heavy had been sitting near it long enough. Except it went the wrong direction. Toward something that wasn’t there.
Arveth watched the floor.
"Since before the hallway," he said. "Since before the stone was laid."
The entity arranged three eyes toward him. The ceiling followed in sections.
Bram looked up at it.
"Since before," Arveth said.
The walls didn’t move immediately. They looked like they were considering the idea.
Then one wall began working slowly toward a new opinion about its location. The direction it moved wasn’t left or right.
It didn’t have a clean name.
"Before," Arveth said.
The floor moved properly this time. Toward something that wasn’t there. The ceiling kept going in sections. The wall that had been considering continued considering, and then committed.
The fracturing spread.
The heavy one had been ahead of us since the main corridor. It continued being ahead of us now. It stepped into a section of floor that was currently in the process of being somewhere else.
The chamber received it without comment.
Four seconds passed.
"The transit continued," said the grey-green one.
"Constitutional," said the third one. It tightened its grip on the bundle.
The grey-green one took two steps toward something inside a fracturing wall. The stop arrived somewhere that was not the chamber.
Gone.
Four seconds.
"The burst." said the third one, from somewhere it couldn’t have been.
The grey-green one’s confirmation came back muffled, from the wrong direction entirely.
Something inside a fracture had the bundle now. The bundle was moving into a gap in the floor that the floor had recently decided to make available.
The third one watched this for a moment. Both hands came free at its sides.
Then it followed the bundle.
Four seconds passed.
Bram was still talking. He had moved on from the material to the season.
"Y’want th’walls dry first," he was saying, lamp in hand, eyes on the fracture lines. "Not surface dry. Through dry. Y’can tap th’stone and hear th’difference if y’know what y’re listening for. Green stone sounds like it still has something to say. Through dry stone sounds finished, done with what it was before."
He paused to look at a fracture running along what had been the floor.
"The difference between lime render and hydraulic under that kind of pressure is."
Gone.
Arveth had been watching the entity ever since the heavy one left with hands clasped behind his back.
"Ante." he said.
Gone.
I once had a supplier ship the same order to three different addresses simultaneously.
Standard error, he told me. The delivery route had forked. I pointed out that the three addresses were in three different cities and that a route technically couldn’t fork to three different cities. He agreed that was technically correct. The shipment still arrived at all three.
The fourth one’s edges had been pointing toward six separate fractures for several minutes now. Each fracture took what was pointing at it.
The fourth one went in six directions, each one steady. The trailing of it simply followed the directions it had already been pointing.
As distributions went, it was fairly tidy.
The chamber calmed down.
The entity remained. Its eyes continued distributing themselves across whatever caught their interest. A few of them were pointed at me.
The pipes were still running along the wall. At least the portion of the wall that continued being a wall.
"I’ve been following those since the maintenance room," I told it. "The mortar around the entry point upstairs is older than the pipe, which means someone put the hole there first and the pipe came later. I’d like to know what the hole was originally for."
I walked toward the pipes.
[SYSTEM LOG]
Pre-settlement chamber. Entity: present. Non-hostile. Classification: pending, indefinitely.
Party: dispersed. Heavy one, constitutional transit. Grey-green one, burst into fracturing wall, stop arrived elsewhere. Third one, followed bundle into floor gap. Fourth one, distributed across six fractures simultaneously. Exit locations unconfirmed. All entries filed under single record.
Bram: mid-sentence, lime render and hydraulic distinction.
Arveth: two syllables.
Aldous: present.
Pipes: continuing.
