We sandworms are the authorities on what lies underground.
Don't class us with those little bait-worms. A Flowing-Sands sandworm runs thicker than a ship's hawser and longer than three zhang, and spends its whole life boring beneath the riverbed. When the river lived, we were its gut: loosening the bed, letting the water's breath seep down, turning the silt over. How many layers the river-bottom mud holds, and what each layer tastes of — no one knows better than we do.
The night the water was drawn away, I was asleep nine zhang down.
First the whole riverbed snapped downward, like a quilt yanked off a sleeper. And then I heard the sound of the water leaving. You surface-dwellers heard water vanishing. We below heard water moving house. Rumble upon rumble, eight hundred li of weak-water passed just over my head like a dragon crawling backwards — downward, and westward, boring away into the very deep.
The water did not evaporate. It did not scatter. It was collected — and collected neatly.
The rest of my kind fled overnight for other waterways, scared out of their rings. I stayed. My reasoning was simple: the river raised me, and the river moved house without a word to me. Someone owes me the why.
The water went down. So I dug down.
I have been digging for three hundred years.
The first hundred took me through the silt-bed, the cobble layer, the old rock. The silt grew drier and drier — as it should, with the water gone. But in the second hundred years, strangeness: the earth grew damp again. Not seepage-damp. Sweat-damp. The rock lay clammy, like a wall in humid weather, tacky to the touch.
In the third hundred years, stranger still: heat.
Deeper is hotter. Not earth-fire heat — earth-fire we sandworms know, and know to tunnel around. This heat is gentle and patient, like a vast pot of water being simmered somewhere very far down, simmered for many, many years. In certain galleries, with my body against the rock, I can hear it: glub. Glub. Muffled through who knows how many zhang of solid stone — water rolling slowly in a pot too large to imagine.
Beneath the ground, someone is keeping a pot of water at the simmer.
Who simmers water for three hundred years? Simmering it for what? And — the detail that has cost me the most sleep — deep inside the glubbing, at intervals, there comes another sound. Faint. Regular:
ting. Ting. Ting.
Like a ladle touching a pot's rim. Like something coming by, every so often, to give it a stir. And a taste.
Tasting for what? At what simmer does the water count as done?
I told all this to the boy who dug into my gallery — yes, their descent into the sunken palace collapsed a stretch of my tunnel, and they paid me damages of three baskets of stream-snails; good children. When the Taibai-sending heard my glubs and tings, it stayed silent longer than for anything else it had heard. In the end it asked me a single question:
"Does the sound come from the deep in the west?"
I said: not only. From the deep in the west, the deep below, the deep in every direction — as if the pot had no edges at all, and our whole land were spread out on its stove.
The sending said nothing more.
The boy asked if I would come along. I told him: you walk the surface road; I will dig below, a parallel gallery tracking your line of march. The surface has its scenery; the underground has its news. Any day you need an earth-vein traced, an altar's foundation hollowed, or an ear put to what moves beneath your feet — knock three times on the ground, and I am there.
We sandworms hold no grand philosophies. We hold one worm's truth:
a pot kept at the simmer must, someday, come to the boil.
And before it boils, some worm had better find out — whose hand keeps feeding the fire underneath.