We had reached a tiny intersection. It was like a roundabout, with a grated floor and three passages branching off of it. One was the one we had followed to get here, the second went up at a slight angle, with rivulets of water running down it into the central grating, and the third one looked just like the one we had used. The blind goblin took the third passage — so far, our routes lined up. However, it wasn’t the blind goblin that made me stop and crouch down. I was looking at the medium-sized wall grate. I thought I had caught a slight flicker of movement behind the bars, several shapes moving in the direction of the third passage, like something behind the wall was chasing the blind guy. Warm, damp air came out of the floor grate, forming a pale fog over the floor that hid us from sight. I looked at the wall grate above the haze for thirty seconds… A minute… Nothing. Not the slightest hint of movement in the darkness beyond the grate.
Almost silently, I whispered:
“Did you see something moving over there?”
“No,” Yorka shook her head. “What was it?”
“I don’t know…”
“Maybe it was just your imagination? The fog kind of swirls around here… And goes that way…”
“Maybe.”
The fog really was swirling all over the place in curly, quivering clouds, slowly being sucked into the wall grate. The whole intersection seemed like a living, breathing, moving creature. It would have been easy to start seeing things.
“How much further?”
“Almost there!” Yorka answered, her cheerfulness back. “Let’s move! Thirty more steps, then we’ll turn to the left and we can get started on our night job.”
“Night shift,” I corrected her.
“What? What’s the difference?”
“That way it sounds way cooler.”
“Hell no, it doesn’t!”
“What do you know!”
“Pff! I’m not convinced, Elb the goblin. That still sounds pretty lame.”
Yorka’s estimate was right. In a few minutes we reached the biggest hall I’d ever seen. There were two rails on the ceiling with two domes that moved back and forth rapidly, occasionally disappearing into the hallways, then returning. I automatically noted that the system saw what happened in this hall all the time. It only took a few minutes to figure that out, since the domes moved impressively fast. The ceiling was low — that same old-fashioned design.
There was no one in the hall except us and the blind guy.
I didn’t know if he was completely blind. He was about forty steps away, but he didn’t hear us approaching — there were a lot of noises coming from all directions, masking the sound of our steps. The guy stood by a small platform in the middle of the hall, doing something with a piece of cloth. He had thrown the loose end around his neck and was tying knots, as far as I could tell. Yorka dragged me over to the same spot, so I assumed it was where we’d be starting our work.
Yorka muttered something under her breath, probably ‘blow up and die,’ knowing her, while I followed, looking around and studying every detail.
It was a huge hall with six routes in and out. The tunnel that brought us here was labeled 13. Three walls of the hall looked similar — tarnished metal, grates at regular intervals — but the fourth wall was… strange, even compared to all the other strange things I’d seen here. There were no grates, just rows of square holes covered with numbered metal hatches. Seven rows in total. Steep iron stairs led to the upper ones, and each row had a letter at either end. The highest one was A, then came B…
“We’ll be sweating today,” Yorka sighed, then immediately reassured me. “Keep your chin up, goblin, we still have to wait for the hatch to open. It’s a hell of a job to lift them, though — they’re heavier than they look!”
That’s when the blind guy heard us. He stopped what he was doing, raised his head anxiously and moved a hand towards his belt bag. I took a step forward and said calmly:
“Hello there. Stay cool and keep working.”
He said nothing, just tilted his head to one side, pointing the brim of his hat toward us, contemplating. His lips were tight and his shoulders were tense. He didn’t let his guard down, not knowing whether to expect trouble or not.
I repeated:
“Stay cool. My partner and I aren’t going to bother you. If any griefers show up to mess with us, we’ll deal with them.”
“Hello. And thank you.” There was still some nervousness in his voice, but at least he moved his hand away from his bag. “Griefers don’t dare cause trouble around here.”
It wasn’t my words that reassured him. He was talking about the domes above us. At least one of them was watching all the time, and that’s what kept the griefers at bay. He was clearly thinking about the hallways. Finishing the job was just one part of the story — he also had to make it back to the safer tunnels.
“That’s great,” I said, and turned to the platform.
