Isles of the Forsaken (41 page)

They both looked at the only alternative, the black tunnel ahead. Innings above, Mundua below. They were caught between mortar and pestle. There was a soft plop of something disturbed by their presence dropping into the water.

“Well, let’s go on then,” Spaeth said, gripping his hand hard.

The first stretch of tunnel seemed interminable. Nathaway went first with the lamp, lighting the slimy walls. The passage took several turns before they came to another overhead grate. This time, it was only a storm drain half clogged with refuse and far too narrow to squeeze through. As they went on there were others, connected to the main conduit by chutes like narrow chimneys. The city surface was drawing farther away above them.

The tunnel began to slant sharply downward, and the water picked up speed, gurgling past their legs. From time to time they passed a gap in the wall and a dank draft marking the opening of a tributary tunnel. The blackness pressed around them like a palpable substance. For a long time there had been no openings above. Glancing back to see if he could glimpse any light from the last one, Nathaway realized his eyes were playing tricks, for spots of light floated in the blackness, disappearing as soon as he tried to focus on them.

At last he came to a halt. “I don’t know where this is leading us,” he said, “but it’s not toward the street.”

A cold, steady wind was blowing past them. Spaeth was shivering with the chill, so he put his arm around her. “If we keep going down, we’re sure to come to the harbour,” she said.

“That’s true.”

They went on. The water grew knee-deep; it was hard to keep a footing in the current. From somewhere ahead, a steady rushing echoed down the tunnel, growing ever closer.

Nathaway felt space in front of him, and came to a sudden halt. Spaeth pitched into him from behind. He said, “Watch out!” The words echoed till they dissolved into a sound like hollow laughter.

Cautiously, he held out the lantern as far as his arm would reach. They stood at the brink of a waterfall where the conduit emptied into a cavern. From the echoes, it sounded like a vast underground lake before them. No, not a lake—a river. “The River Em,” he said softly. Once, the city had stood along the banks of the Em. But successive generations had bricked the river over. It hadn’t seen the light of day in two centuries.

“The river must run down to the harbour,” Spaeth said. “All we would have to do is follow it.”

Nathaway gave a strained laugh. “You jump first.”

Spaeth pried loose a piece of masonry and tossed it down, but the sound of the waterfall drowned out everything else. There was no judging how high the fall was.

“Go back?” she said.

“We can’t go forward,” Nathaway answered.

As they headed upstream again, Nathaway prayed that they could find their way back to the one grate they could have escaped by. The branchings of the tunnel had been numerous, the way far. If they became lost, they might wander down here for a long time.

A phantom light was floating before his eyes again. He blinked to make it disappear, but it didn’t. It seemed far down the tunnel. He stopped, shielding the lamp. “Do you see that?” he asked.

“What?”

Without answering, he turned down the lamp wick till it barely glowed. As their eyes adjusted, they could see the walls of the passage ahead. The tunnel was no longer made of brick here, but of a chalky stone. Every ten feet or so there was a ridge in the wall, dividing the tunnel into segments.

He said, “Maybe it’s getting light outside, and we passed an opening without seeing it.”

He started toward the light. On the third step he realized the tug of water against his legs was gone. Looking down, he found himself standing on a dry tunnel floor. He dropped to one knee and felt it to make sure. The floor was smooth and white. As the grey light grew around them, he realized they were walking on bone.

Ahead, the tunnel curved away into the distance, the ridges in the wall standing out like ribs. No, they
were
ribs, curving up to meet overhead at a gigantic spine. Before either of them could move, a creak of bone on bone echoed down the tunnel, and a massive jaw began to close ahead of them. Sabre-shaped teeth clashed together like a gate, barring their way.

Nathaway’s first instinct was denial. It had to be an illusion: the world was not a place where corresponding things could transmute into one another. This time, he was going to fight back with all his knowledge. Resolute in disbelief, he started to walk forward, and saw a doorway he had not seen a second before, framed by grey stone pillars and a triangular pediment. Spaeth caught at him, trying to hold him back.

“Not there,” she said.

“Yes, this way!” he insisted, and dragged her forward, across the threshold into a circle unknown even to the Mundua.

*

They stood on the outer perimeter of a rotunda in a great building long ago entombed by an eruption of Mount Embo. It looked strangely familiar to Nathaway. The architecture, miraculously undamaged by the cataclysm that had buried it, had a serene geometry of proportion. The domed ceiling rising to a starburst skylight, the inlaid onyx underfoot, the railing surrounding a central well—all provoked a haunting sense of déjà vu.

Spaeth looked back toward the dark door they had emerged from. But there was no sound of pursuit. There was no sound of anything. There hadn’t been for centuries, here.

Nathaway walked slowly forward, his footsteps echoing loud in the great vault. He wondered if anyone else knew of this buried monument under the city. Only yards above, people slept thick in their tenements; but here all was serene. The room was a huge circle, lit—strangely, he had not noticed it before—by a grey light filtering through a layer of dust on the glass skylight. He took out his pocket watch to check the time. It was after midnight. It could not be daylight—or if it was, it was the light of a long-gone day that had been caught by the volcano and entombed along with the building. No, he caught himself. That was ridiculous.

In the centre of the room, a balustrade ran around a large, square opening to the floor below. When he came to the edge, he stepped back with a twinge of vertigo. He stood on the lip of a square well that plunged down floor upon floor until lost to his eyes in dust and darkness. On each floor a railed balcony overlooked the drop on all four sides. A staircase connected the floors, each flight on a different side of the square, so that it spiralled clockwise around the well.

Spaeth came to his side. “What is this place?” she asked in a whisper.

“How should I know?” Nathaway said.

“You brought us here. It must be a place that has to do with the Innings.”

This made no sense; the Innings had only been in the Forsakens for sixty years.

“You mean our ancient past?” he said.

“Or your future.”

He shook off the feeling that gave him. “This has to be the ruin of some great civilization, far back in history. A civilization much like ours—our ancestors, perhaps.”

Spaeth glanced apprehensively back at the door they had entered by. “We shouldn’t stay here,” she said. “The Mundua have sharp noses. We should be moving on.”

“On to where?” he said.

“I don’t know. Not back, that’s all I care.”

They circled the room then, looking for an exit. There were many doors, but one by one they all turned out to be false panels that opened on brickwork, or trompe l’oeil illusions of inlaid stone. There was only one real entry—the one they had come from—and one exit, by the stairs.

Spaeth leaned over the banister. She looked unsettled at the thought of going down. “We are trapped,” she said.

“Perhaps there is a way out on the floor below,” Nathaway said.

It was the only choice, so hand in hand they descended the first flight of stairs.

On the floor below, the walls were set back from the edge of the well by a wide hall. At the centre of each wall was a double door standing open, one on each side of the square. Going to the nearest one, Nathaway turned up the wick on his lamp and held the light high to see inside.

It was the entry into a huge library. Parallel rows of shelves marched away into shadow as far as his light reached, all of them packed with books. Entranced, Nathaway walked down the centre aisle. The rows of books to either side seemed endless. Turning right, he passed between towering shelves, his light picking out the soft glint of gold lettering on calfskin bindings and ornate clasps on vellum covers. There was a soft litter of crumbled paper underfoot. The first book he picked off the shelf was in an alphabet he had never seen. The second was written all in straight hash marks tilted right and left at various angles. The third was all neat rows of fingerprints, arranged in a way that suggested meaning without communicating it.

Far away, someone was calling him. Returning to the centre aisle, he looked back and saw that he had come much farther from the door than he had intended. The entry was only a dwindling point of light down an endless corridor of books. Silhouetted against it he could see Spaeth. It took a wrenching effort to turn back. On either side were mysteries begging him to stop and study, to admire their illuminated pages or feel the soft leather between his hands. There was a civilization’s worth of knowledge here, all undiscovered. Spaeth called urgently as he slowed at sight of a volume with a strange map traced on its cover. It took all his will to ignore it and continue on.

When he came out into the stairwell again, Spaeth grasped his shoulders, looking pale and anxious. “You must not go in there again,” she said. He realized belatedly that he had frightened her.

“There’s nothing to fear,” he said, wanting her to understand. “It’s a treasure trove. Think of all the knowledge preserved here! This is a priceless collection. The world needs to know about this.”

“Promise me you won’t go past these doorways again,” she said severely.

“Why not?”

“Because this place has power over you.”

Of course it did. He looked to right and left at the doors on the other sides of the square. If each of them opened into a room as large as the one he had just emerged from, then the library held acres of shelves, running far into the rock on every side, and more below.

She shook him urgently to call his mind back to her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t leave you alone again.” He gestured with the lamp. “Let’s go on.”

They descended the next flight down in silence. The layout here was identical to the floor above, but when Nathaway held up his lamp to see what lay inside the doorway, he discovered that the books on this level were enormous tomes with spines half as tall as he was; it looked like it would take two people to wrestle them off the shelf. On the floor below that, the books were tiny, the size of little jewellery boxes. After that came the books in red covers, then books bound in metal.

Down flight after flight they passed. After a dozen floors the shelves were filled with tall stacks of scrolls. Then came levels of hinged wooden panels carved with symbols, books that opened like fans, spools of ornately knotted strings, and books shaped like vases. On one level, the doorway was blocked by an impenetrable mass of spiderwebs. Through it, Nathaway could dimly see where collapsed shelves had spilled boxes of etched slates onto the floor. As they went ever farther down, the air grew stale, as if it, like the dust, had lain undisturbed for centuries. It pressed close and stifling, and their footsteps sounded muffled.

At last they stopped to rest on a floor where the shelves were filled with white rhomboids. Nathaway leaned over the railing to see how far they had come. The well towered above them, the skylight only a tiny spot at the top. He peered down then, to see how close they were to the bottom. A draft of stale, wet air blew up past his face. As far as the light could reach, the flights of steps descended. And beyond that, somewhere down in darkness, a dim speck of light was moving on invisible stairs. It was the greenish colour of phosphor.

Nathaway beckoned Spaeth over. “Look, we’re not alone,” he said.

She looked uneasy. “I never thought we were.”

“Who is it?”

“Bone-lights,” she said. “We don’t want to get near them.”

“Are they the Mundua?”

“No. There are some circles even the Mundua and Ashwin shun. This may be one of them.”

They went on.

Deeper, they came on floors of statues with strange, elongated features. There was a floor of masks staring blankly out, and one full of plaster casts of hands. Then came floors of everything triangular, then feathers in gilt frames. Once, as he stood looking at rows and rows of braided hair, Nathaway thought he saw far down the aisle a moving light. For some reason his gorge rose at the sight; the light looked unwholesome, the colour of something rotting.

The grand scale of the place still stirred him; it was a marvellous achievement of architecture and collection. Here was all their history, all their belief, all their art, classified and categorized. It must have taken centuries of effort. There was something a little insane about it.

They began to pass bricked-up doorways. The ones left open led into cavernous spaces where rusting machines squatted in rows: silent, towering cylinders, castles of gears and pistons with ladders leading up their sides to catwalks for the operators. The architecture had begun to change, too. Now the stones were huge and rough-cut, the doorways’ low arches supported on squat pillars carved in spirals. From time to time the sound of dripping water echoed out into the stairwell.

It had grown very dark by the time Spaeth came to a halt, holding her finger to her lips for silence. As the sound of their footsteps faded, Nathaway became aware of a soft babbling and cooing from somewhere ahead. He leaned over the banister to look down, and saw a swift, dark shape wing out from the balcony several floors below. As if attracted by the light, it veered in midair and swooped past Nathaway’s head. He ducked. It came to roost on the ceiling overhead. Gingerly, Nathaway held up the lamp. Black batwings unfolded to reveal a baby’s face, moonlike and cherubic, staring at him with the blank innocence of a china doll. Its mouth opened to coo, and he saw needle-like teeth.