when Alexander drives in that knife.'
'They'll be coming, soon,' I said. We had secured the door, Malcolm applying various invokations to strengthen the steel and seal the portal. But it wouldn't last forever. 'He'll discover that his gambit with Barnabas failed, and he'll send someone else.'
'Don't worry. I'll keep the girl safe.'
'I meant you, old man.' I shrugged and fitted the helmet over my head. 'The girl can keep herself.'
'Of course,' he said, patting my shoulder. 'You meant me. Nevertheless, I assure you, the girl will be safe.'
I looked across the room at her. Sitting against the wall, staring at her hands, and at the bloody print on her chest.
'Okay,' I said. Then I unsealed one of the pressure doors, and went inside to the mind of Amon the Scholar.
* * *
Just about a foot below the lip of the door, there was a narrow walkway that went all around the inside of the dome. It was stone, and the first of many concentric steps that led down into a pool of water. The water came up to the third step, splashing lightly over it with each swell of the tide. The pool was cold and clear; I could see that the dome was in fact a sphere, and the steps went all the way to the bottom of it. A round opening at the bottom of the sphere, about five feet in diameter, led out into some darker space.
The archive itself sprouted like a flower from that opening. It was a series of thick cables, ranging in size from the width of a pencil to a couple that were as thick as my wrist. On the end of each cable was a cylinder of some translucent material, each sized according to the width of its cable. The cylinders glowed with an inner light, shimmering in the water like bottles of lightning, with the pulse turned way down. Most of the cylinders stayed below the surface, but those that had bobbed to the top shifted and hummed with a constant chiming sound.
'Leave it to the Scholars to make it all so damn complicated,' I whispered to myself. I could see damp tracks where Cassandra had emerged from the water just a little while earlier. I put my hand beneath the surface and found it to be warm and… sticky. Not really water. Too thick. When I took my hand out it dried quickly, though where the water had splashed against the stone it remained. Water that wasn't really wet. Of course.
I sat by the edge of the pool and then slowly eased my way into it. The suit constricted as it came in contact with the water. The liquid. Whatever you want to call it. What had been comfortable a moment before was now too tight. Half in the water, warmth tingling along my bones and light flashing in my eyes, I pulled the helmet up and sealed it, then cut the bottle on and breathed in a healthy gasp of iron-laced air. Do it quick, Malcolm had said. Do it quick, and don't look back.
I plunged into the water and understood what he meant, right away. I also understood why Cassandra was out there, babbling to herself. And Amon wasn't even my god.
The water opened to me, opened fully to me, filled me with light and lightning and a glowing warmth unlike any I have ever known. Underwater, the chiming of the cylinders cascaded into more than sound, into pain and madness, and through it all there were voices, a single voice, a thousand times a single voice reciting prayers of madness and mathematics that slid over me without sinking in, drowned me without water, tore me without blood. I was no longer seeing a pool of water, a flower of light and sound, a dome in a building under the city of Ash. I was seeing formulas from the inside of numbers, knowledge from the inside of words. I was seeing the greatest mind our world had ever known, with an eternity of knowledge flowing out in a breath, half a breath, a never-ending sigh of…
What saved me was the mud between my own ears. I was an idiot. I mean that in the best possible way, the sort of idiot who can get by and take care of herself, but also the sort of idiot who looked at all this and could just let it slide over her without it sinking in. A duck in the water of genius, you could say. But I saw what had driven Cassandra a little insane. The initial blast had done a number on me, though. I was floating limp in the water, tangled in the cords of the mind, wasting the limited breath in my bottled lung.
I shrugged out of the coils of light and pushed to the bottom of the pool. The stalks of the cables thickened near the opening, and I dragged myself down by pulling on them. As I got close to the opening, the warm, clear water became mixed with patches of darker, colder stuff. Actual water, I thought. Lakewater.
The helmet had a tiny light. I turned it on, and could see that there was a disk, wider than the opening and about a foot below it, that held all of the bundles of cable together. I squeezed between the opening and the disk, and came out into the lake, at the bottom of the city.
I'd been underneath the city before, along the edges. Never this deep. The water here was impenetrably black, swallowing the beam from my lamp in a matter of feet. The underside of the city disappeared in blackness. I couldn't see any of the familiar blinking pathlight from the waterways, or swirling dock indicators or… anything. It was just watery night.
Examining the disk with my feeble light and my hands, I could see that it was shaped like a barrel, slightly bowed at the middle and warm to the touch. Metal, but old and pitted with corrosion. A single cable emerged from the bottom, heavy and thick. It descended into the depths of the lake.
Stay close to the cable, he said. It interacts with the suit, and keeps you from experiencing… something. Something to do with pressure and depth and blood. I hadn't understood most of that, but the illustration Malcolm had used when he could see that my eyes were glazing over was a tube of meat, filled with blood, and a hundred hammers hitting it from all directions at once. So I was going to stay close to the cable.
The water near the cable was warm and tingled across my skin, or at least it felt that way through the suit. When I put my hand on the cable the bones of my wrist hummed. Didn't like the feel of that, but I liked the idea of hammered meat even less, so I held on while I followed it down into the lake. Every once in a while one of my feet or the tips of my fingers would stray a little too far away from the cable as I swam, and an instant numbing coldness would fill them. That was all the instruction I needed, really. I was not a complete idiot.
It was a long, cold trip. The pressurized bag that held the sword and bully creaked on my back, the water tingled through my skin, the light disappeared, and my eyes swam as the cable and the darkness seemed to be the whole world. Down and down and down, lake without end.
And then there was light.
The structure looked like a madness of junk. It was nestled at the bottom of the lake, burrowed into the stony bed. It was ringed with light, coming from a circle of globes that whirled inside like starry tornadoes. Their glow leaked across the lake floor in murky blueness, picking out details of wrecked buildings and toppled pillars. These were the remains of the Titan city, drowned by the Feyr under this great depth of water.
And crouching at the base of the ruins, the cable's end. I descended toward it, the scale of the place slowly coming into perspective. Enormous. Larger than most of the towers of the city above, flat on its side, rippling with currents of light and shadow. The building shifted in the tricky light, pulsing like a drum soundly struck. I could feel the song of it in my mind, humming through the water. The closer I got, the bigger this place seemed, until I got so close that I could see that the building itself was quite small. Most of what I could see, what I had taken for structure, was just edifice. A web of beams and pillars and buttresses that arced and crossed through the water, supporting each other, building and descending without any central plan. The lights that pulsed through this open framework seemed to emanate from the stony arches themselves, without power or purpose. Beautiful, in the way that madness can be beautiful if seen from afar, like battle, or a storm cloud.
At the center of this openness was a single building. It looked like a pile of iron clamshells, carelessly shucked and stacked on top of each other. Long arcs of light lined the edges of the protruding shells, like rows of windows or the glittering bevel of a blade. When I got a certain distance from this structure, the cable branched and then branched again, a dozen times, each split diminishing the size of the cables until there was nothing but a thin vein-work of cables that led out into the stony arches around the building. Hoping that whatever magic kept me safe when I was close to the cable would transfer to this strange architecture, I let go and drifted toward that building of shells.
Luck held, and there was no more bruising coldness to greet me. I set foot on the sandy bottom of the lake. The grit was shallow, just covering a floor of sharp angles. Uncomfortable to walk on, but great traction. I felt light as air. Too light, in fact. I looked down at the iron lung, but the dials made no sense to me. I was getting featherheaded. That was indication enough for me. I rushed to the central building, kicking up in great long strides
