He had been walking for two hours when the bridge changed.
Not the planks, not the railings. The walls. They had been pulling back, widening the gap between the railing edge and the rock face, giving him more space on either side than he had had since the start. Now they were coming in again. Narrowing. Ten metres from the railing, then eight, then six, and by the time he registered the pattern they were close enough that he could see the individual texture of the stone.
And the holes.
More of them than he had seen in any previous section. He slowed and counted what he could make out in the grey light. Left wall, right wall, close and dense, some at head height and some at mid-chest. The spacing between them was different too. Tighter. Where previous holes had been separated by three or four metres, these were a metre apart, sometimes less.
He stopped before he entered the section and looked at it from a distance.
The corridor, he was thinking of it now, ran for perhaps thirty metres. He could see the far end, which was something. The walls widened again beyond it. He just had to cross thirty metres of dense, close-walled, heavily-holed bridge and then he was through.
'Read it first. Then move.'
He studied the left wall from where he stood. The holes were circular, same forty-centimetre diameter as the others, but their placement was different. Most of the previous holes had been at head height. These were distributed across a range, high, mid, low, in a pattern that looked almost deliberate rather than random. He noted the low ones especially. A person walking upright would not be watching their knees.
He also noticed, after a moment, that on the left wall there was a section of about five metres with no holes at all. A gap in the distribution. Either that section had nothing in it, or whatever was there was recessed far enough to be invisible from this angle.
He looked at the right wall. No equivalent gap. The holes ran continuously.
He had a working model from his earlier tests: the trigger was positional, not timed. Move into a specific zone in front of a specific hole and it fires. Stay out of that zone and it does not. The zone was roughly centred on the hole's line of fire, extending perhaps a metre in front of the wall.
He looked at the width of the bridge. Nine metres. The walls were six metres from each railing. Fifteen metres from wall to wall in this section. His trigger zone model said he needed to stay more than a metre clear of each wall. That left him seven metres of bridge to work with, which was more than enough as long as he stayed in the centre.
He started walking.
The first eight metres passed without incident. He kept his eyes moving, left wall, right wall, floor, left wall, right wall, floor. The burn on his forearm throbbed steadily. He held that arm slightly out from his body and let it throb and kept moving.
Then he saw it.
A hole on the left wall, mid-height, positioned slightly differently from the others. Not circular. Elongated. And around the edge, barely visible in the low light, a faint discolouration on the stone, older than the surrounding rock, darker. Something had come out of that hole many times before.
He changed course without breaking stride, shifting three steps to the right. The hole passed on his left. Nothing came out of it.
He had read it correctly. He kept that somewhere useful and kept walking.
The gap section on the left wall was ahead now, the five metres with no visible holes. He stayed in the centre, watching the right wall instead, which still had holes running continuously. He was twelve metres into the corridor. Eighteen metres to the far end.
He was watching the right wall when the arrow came from the left.
It did not come from the gap section. It came from a hole he had not seen, recessed deep enough into the rock that it was invisible until it fired. It caught him in the left shoulder from behind and slightly to the side, the impact spinning him a quarter turn to the right, and he went down hard on one knee with his right hand hitting the planks.
He stayed there.
The arrow was in him. He knew that before he looked. The weight of it was wrong, a foreign weight, something that did not belong attached to his body and was attached to it anyway. He looked at the left shoulder. The shaft was there, dark wood, protruding maybe fifteen centimetres behind him and buried in the shoulder muscle. It had not gone through. That was either very good or complicated. He did not know enough about arrow wounds to say which.
His left arm still worked. He tested it carefully, opening and closing the hand, lifting the elbow slightly. The movement pulled against the shaft and produced a sharp, specific pain distinct from the burn below it. He stopped testing and held still.
He was fourteen metres into the corridor. Sixteen metres from the end.
'Get up.'
He got up.
Moving was manageable if he did not move the left arm. He kept it pressed slightly against his body, the shaft protruding behind him, and walked the remaining sixteen metres through the corridor watching both walls and watching the floor and trying to ignore the way the arrow shifted fractionally with each step, the head moving inside the shoulder muscle, the shaft catching the air.
Nothing else fired. He made it through.
On the other side the walls widened again and the hole density dropped back to the normal sparse pattern. He found a section of railing he had tested and considered reliable and sat down against the post with his back to the left side and took stock.
The shoulder was bleeding. Not heavily, but steadily, a slow seep around the entry point that had soaked into the tracksuit fabric and was spreading. He needed to deal with that before he dealt with the arrow itself. Bleeding he understood: pressure and elevation, stop the seep, then address the cause. The arrow was the cause, but pulling it was a separate problem with its own set of things that could go wrong.
He looked at what he had to work with. One full water container. One food block. A burned left forearm with a torn sleeve used as covering. The tracksuit top minus the left sleeve. He was going to need cloth.
He pulled the right sleeve off at the shoulder seam, the same way he had done the left. The movement required using both arms and it cost him. He held still for a moment afterward, breathing through the specific pain of having moved the arrow, then continued. He folded the sleeve into a pad and pressed it against the entry wound as firmly as he could manage with his right hand reaching across his body.
Not a good angle. The pressure was uneven. He thought about it and then bit a strip off the hem of the tracksuit top instead, worked it around his shoulder and under his arm with the patience that pain required, and tied it over the pad. Tight enough to hold pressure. Not so tight that he lost the arm.
He sat against the post and let the makeshift dressing do what it could.
The arrow was still in him. That was the second problem.
He had read, from somewhere in the knowledge he still had, that arrows were not always best removed immediately. A lodged arrow tamponaded the wound, slowed the bleeding. Removing it opened the channel fully and could cause more damage than leaving it, depending on the angle and depth. He did not know the angle and depth. He knew the shaft was in the shoulder muscle and had not gone through to the other side and that his arm still functioned. Beyond that he was operating without information.
He decided to leave it. Not from hesitation. From the available logic. He would remove it when he had more water, better light, and something to pack the wound with. Right now he had one container of water and a tracksuit that was running out of fabric.
He ate the food block while he sat. He had been walking for two hours before the corridor and he needed it. The pain made chewing feel strange but he ate anyway, slowly, and drank a quarter of the water container, and sat with his back against the post until the worst of the shoulder pain had settled from sharp to dull.
The arrow shifted when he breathed. He learned to breathe shallowly on the left side.
After a while he looked at his inventory. The food block was gone. He had roughly three quarters of the water container remaining. He had a burned left forearm, an arrow in his left shoulder, a tracksuit that was now sleeveless and missing a strip from the hem, and he was somewhere past a hundred metres into a bridge with no visible end.
He noted all of this.
Then he got up, kept the left arm close to his body, and kept walking.