Iliana’s voice drifted up to him from below, where the others had rounded the corner. “Lord Carbón? Do you need help?”
“Stay where you are, I’m coming.”
He forced himself to move. There was a heart-splitting moment where he let go of the one rope and lunged for the other, but when he got onto the lower level, he found that the hillside was angled such that he could lean against the wall as he edged his way down. That helped.
From there, the path followed actual steps cut into the rock face. Unlike the ladders and the new rope hooked through iron loops, the stairs were old and worn by the passage of uncounted seasons.
They were soon on a brush-covered hillside, close enough to the edge of the lower terraces that Carbón could see paths through the bushes that people followed to get to the black apple stands when the fruit was in season. The Wood Road was a fat ring above them, and here and there he could see clusters of shacks clinging to the underside of the road.
“Wonder how many of our recruits are hiding under there,” Iliana said to Thiego. “We’ll grab Mota tonight and have a look.”
But Thiego was eyeing Kessie with a curious expression. “How did you get from here to the hillside below the bridge?” He pointed back the way they’d come. “There weren’t any ladders or ropes last fall.”
“You mean when I found your magic for you?” The girl gave an indifferent shrug. “Where else was I gonna be? That’s where them waterworks sluice out. Had to get up there to get to the good stuff that washes out from up top.”
“I know why,” the cabalist said. “But how?”
“I climbed. Same way we come down just now. There weren’t no ropes, but them old stairs was there. I found ’em myself,” Kessie added proudly.
Carbón looked behind them and tried to imagine the girl scrambling up the cliff face like a lizard. No ropes, no ladders, just her hands and feet, with bare toes gripping the tiniest apertures, until she’d reached their starting point and then made her way to the bridge foundation to where the Torre waterworks had scoured a path in the hillside. It was there that Kessie searched for anything from the upper terraces that could be scavenged and sold.
What nerves to make the climb. And coming down again would have been even worse.
Had Carbón ever been that fearless? Shortly after his recovery from the mine accident, he’d followed the man who would soon be his adopted father into the Rift. It had gone well . . . until it hadn’t. No doubt that terrifying incident was the source of his current fear.
Alan and the previous Lord Carbón had descended on a similar set of rope ladders, and he thought they must have come this very direction, though time and subsequent events had rendered that part of his memory hazy.
“We should be safe from prying eyes here,” Iliana told the girl. “How about you tell us how we’re getting the rest of the way down.”
“Not to mention how we climb back up,” Grosst said.
“If you’re having second thoughts,” Carbón told her, “it will be easier to give up the fight now, rather than after you’ve climbed down another three hundred feet.”
This brought a grunt from the Basdeenian engineer, but no further complaints.
“It’s easy getting down,” Kessie said. “There are trails, I mean. And some things that will scare you, but aren’t real. What you gotta worry about is all the ghosts and witherers and stuff at the bottom that don’t want you there.”
“Don’t worry about them,” Thiego said. “I’ve got protection for the group.”
The girl snorted. “You ain’t seen what’s down there or maybe you wouldn’t be so smug.”
“Tell you what.” He squatted and opened his bag. “I show you what I took from the temple, and you can share what you’ve seen, and together we’ll figure out how to get through it.”
“I’ve got a few gadgets of my own, yeah?” Grosst said. “I’ll show you all that, too.”
The breeze was carrying the sharp smell of the dumbre, and together with the sound of the wind, nearly a howl as it ripped through the lowest parts of the Rift, it had Carbón thinking about that day with his father. The conversation of the other four fogged into the background and he stood staring down at the canopy of green below.
Alan had trusted Lord Carbón implicitly, following him down a set of ropes until they reached a set of rusting metal stairs that were fixed into the cliff. Occasionally, the stairs disappeared where rock slides or rust had carried them away, but others had fixed up more ropes or laid ladders flat against the cliff face to bridge the gaps. On occasion, the ruins of a building could be seen poking through the vegetation, and once something that looked like a crane made out of blue glass, so fragile it was hard to imagine how it had survived all the generations, or, for that matter, why someone hadn’t climbed down and attempted to cut it off the mountainside.
Alan and Lord Carbón had still been more than a hundred feet above the tallest tree crowns when the metal staircase disappeared. Carbón came up behind Alan and rested a hand on his shoulder.
“This is where it gets hard,” the man said.
Alan had decided they’d need to turn around, as apparently the rest of it had collapsed into the Rift, and now looked back in surprise.
“There’s a staircase. You can just see it.” Carbón pointed ahead of them. “Right there, do you see how the railing looks like it has been severed? Slide your hand along to the end.”
Alan did as he was told, and was shocked when he reached the end, and could feel the rusted, flaking metal rail continue, though his eyes said that his hand was making a circular shape over clear air. He lifted his hand and tried again.
“Your foot, too,” Carbón told him. “Test it.”
He did, and found that the walkway continued. “So it’s all still there? Is someone hiding it for a reason?”
“The Elders. I’m not sure why they did it, to be honest. But they wanted to make it hard to get into the Rift. People still do, of course. My older brother showed me the way down, and his father before him. It’s something we’ve passed down in the Quinta since the collapse.” The man shook his head. “I don’t know why it was so important. Something about the abandoned machines, maybe. Whatever the reason, it has been lost. But we maintain the custom, the tradition.”
“How do we do it, just walk along, being careful?”
A look passed over Carbón’s face. “It’s . . . not going to be as easy as that. But remember this: whatever happens isn’t real. It’s all in your mind.”
The boy looked at the missing path, more than a little worried that he’d fall to his death if he tried to continue. “I don’t understand. What is all in my mind?”
“You have to experience it for yourself. I’m not trying to trick you—here, I’ll go first.”
Carbón eased the boy behind him and moved to the edge of the metal walkway. Unlike what Alan had seen when he slid his hand along the railing, the instant the man passed beyond the end, his body seemed to be vanishing. First the hand, then the arm up to the shoulder. Face gray with what looked like fear, Carbón winced, then vanished altogether.
“Lord Carbón?” Alan said. “Are you still there?”
No answer. The man either couldn’t or wouldn’t respond.
Alan was still afraid, but he hadn’t come this far to turn back now. Everything the Quinta lord had done since the mine explosion had led him to trust the man, and he didn’t think it was a trick. Alan’s body was still sore, especially after the exertion of coming down the ropes and onto the metal walkways that snaked back and forth down the hillside into the Rift, and he knew if he turned around and labored his way back up top, he may as well continue until he was in the Lower Terraces, back in the dumbre among his own kind.
This was a test, somehow, and he wasn’t going to fail it.
Alan moved to the end of the walkway and gingerly slid forward. He could still see his own body, and expected that once his head had passed through, he’d be able to see and hear Lo
rd Carbón on the other side, waiting for him. The whole thing was like a cabalist trick, nothing more.
But soon he was standing over what seemed to be empty space. Nothing to support him. It was disorienting and more than a little terrifying. Easier to close his eyes and edge forward by feel, and so that’s what he did.
He’d gone no more than five or six paces, when the walkway and rail dissolved. One moment he was inching along, eyes closed, feeling his way forward, and the next he was flailing in the air, falling. He screamed and opened his eyes to see the canopy rushing up on him.
Alan struck the tree hard and felt something break in his shoulder, then felt a tearing sensation in his arm as he smashed through boughs. His shirt caught momentarily on a snag, before the sleeve tore free. He fell, bouncing, still screaming, now in pain as well as terror, and finally fell hard to the ground.
He rolled over to see a piece of broken branch as thick as his wrist sticking out of his chest. The taste of blood filled his mouth. He was almost numb to the pain, and he couldn’t seem to catch his breath.
I just fell to my death. This is what it feels like to die.
The thought was followed by a sense of disappointment. How could Lord Carbón have done such a cruel thing, and why?
And then the boy found himself standing upright, unharmed. His clothes weren’t torn, and he didn’t have any breaks or scratches of any kind. A fading echo of pain hinted at the injuries suffered in his fall, and then that, too, was gone. Lord Carbón stood next to him, looking down at him with a concerned expression.
“Rot the Elders!” Alan said, the low dumbre curse coming out of his mouth before he could stop the blasphemy. “I’m sorry, I just . . . what happened?”
“An illusion. I’m not sure what causes it, to be honest, but it’s likely artifacts in the Rift trying to protect their secrets.”
“Why did you do that to me?”
“What did you see?”
“I didn’t see nothing. Anything, I mean. I didn’t see anything. I fell off! That damn tree broke every—”
Alan looked up and was surprised not so much to see the tree undamaged, but that it was a pine tree, not like the oak or maple that had broken his fall. In fact, he was standing in an entire stand of pine.
Carbón winced. “That’s a rough one. Probably the worst of all the illusions. I was attacked by bats just now, but if I closed my eyes, it wasn’t bad. Not real, of course—none of it is.”
“But how did we get down here if we didn’t fall?”
“We followed the walkways all the way to the bottom.”
“I don’t remember any of that. I fell—it only took a few seconds.”
“Pure illusion. There are other illusions down here, and real dangers, too. It’s hard to tell one from the other, so be careful.”
Alan took a closer look at his surroundings. A large tree had fallen nearby, its trunk at least eight feet thick, its branches rotted off, and with fin-like mushrooms protruding from the decaying surface. Each one was the size of a serving platter in Lord Carbón’s manor, and glowed a faint yellow. The mushrooms seemed to exhale, and puffs of shimmering golden spores lifted into the still air.
“What about those mushrooms?” he asked. “Another illusion?”
“Real. Don’t touch them or breathe the spores. Be careful of the snake, too.”
“What snake?” Alan started to ask, and then saw the creature slithering along the edge of the trunk, body moving in and out of the brush. Its body had alternating purple and white stripes.
No, not slithering, so much as crawling. It seemed to have hundreds of tiny, millipede-like feet underneath it, although the body and head were definitely snake-like. Its tongue flickered in and out.
“The snakes aren’t as dangerous during the day,” Carbón said when the snake had moved along. “More aggressive at night, especially if you’re foolish enough to light a fire or carry a lamp. Then the blasted things will appear from nowhere and bite you repeatedly. The bites won’t kill you, but at some point you’ll wish you were dead. The hallucinations are nightmarish, and it feels like your skin is on fire for days afterward.”
“I’m half wishing I were dead already. What now?”
Lord Carbón pointed to a tree. Someone had cut away its branches and painted a white cross on the trunk. “Now we follow the crosses to the ruins of the old city.”
Chapter Thirteen
Two decades had passed since Carbón had come down here with his adopted father, but the metal walkway descending into the Rift in a series of switchbacks ended in the same place—or appeared to, that was—and he eyed Kessie, curious to see how she would get past the obstacle.
“Someone destroyed it,” Iliana said. “Who would do that?”
“It’s not destroyed, it’s invisible,” Carbón said. The others eyed him. “It’s trying to protect the Rift with illusions.”
Kessie groped her hand along in the air and winced. “Today it’s hot. That one’s the hardest—you gotta let your hands burn all the way down. Try to think about cold water and it helps. Then you’re just fine when you reach the bottom.”
“You’ve only come down alone, haven’t you?” Carbón asked.
The girl looked back at him. “Yes, why?”
“Because the illusions will be different for each one of us. You might fall, you might be attacked by bats. There are spiders sometimes, and a slimy substance that feels like acid. You’ll be compelled to touch your eyes, and when you do, it will feel like they’re melting out of your skull.”
Grosst let out a grunt. “Wonderful. Well, let’s get it over with. It’s still a long way down.”
“Excuse me,” Thiego said, pushing his way forward. He sounded unconcerned. “Let me go first.”
He was wearing a ring on his left middle finger, a heavy brass thing with a curious symbol on the seal like a triangle made of pieces cut from a black circle. He transferred it to his right middle finger and gave it a twist as he put it on.
Suddenly, the walkway appeared, descending all the way to the bottom. Thiego stepped confidently onto it and made his way to the next set of stairs down.
“Well, come on, the lot of you. Unless you want to deal with the fire and the falling and the eye-melting thing.”
Iliana laughed. “Why you smug...” She hurried to catch up with him. “Did you know that all along?”
Kessie was gaping, and Grosst looked annoyed, or maybe she was just in pain from all the hobbling. Carbón brought up the rear, happy to stay within the cone of influence from whatever artifact the cabalist was using to get past the illusions that protected the staircase.
Unlike the rusting metal above them, with bolts rotting out of the stone and segments partially collapsed, the lower walkways were in excellent condition, and the railing seemed to be made not of iron, but a smooth, turtle-shell-like substance that had not corroded over the ages. When the walkway sagged, it was because the cliff face itself had sloughed off chunks of stone, not through any defect in the workmanship of the Elders.
Once or twice Thiego got far enough ahead that the railing seemed to be turning slippery in Carbón’s grasp, and he hurried to keep up with the rest. Down and down they went, until they were below the crowns of the tallest trees.
Iliana fell back from chatting with Thiego when they neared the bottom. “What did you say it was that brought you down here?” she asked Carbón.
“I didn’t say.”
“We’re down here now. There’s no need to keep a secret. Anyway, I thought you mentioned something about your father.”
“He mainly wanted to show me the old mines and the city that grew up around them. To prove what I told you before, that the whole Rift was carved away in the search for coal. He wanted me to see the old equipment—someday, he thought, I might be able to duplicate it to improve the mines on the plateau. Or even haul it up from below to fix it—although frankly it’s too old and damaged. And the magic that created it has all been lost.”
&
nbsp; “What kind of machines?” she asked.
“Hoists without engines. Giant pumps. Digging machines the size of houses. No man dug the coal by hand, so far as I can tell. It was all done by machine, and there seemed to be machines to run the machines.”
They reached the bottom of the walkway—so much easier to stroll down instead of fall or run down in burning terror—but when Carbón set foot on solid ground again, the return climb looked daunting. Better to get matters taken care of during daylight hours. That meant getting down to the river and back before night fell.
“The Luminoso would have loved to hear that he was trying to take artifacts out of the Rift,” Iliana said, evidently still turning over what he’d told her.
“And there were apparently devices to turn coal into a burning liquid, and others to spin it into a hard, corrosive-free substance. They made lubricants and ammonia salts and fertilizers. Strange fibers, soaps, even medicines. All from coal.”
Thiego seemed to have been listening in on the conversation, and now said, “It sounds to me like your father was remembering the old ways, when your family was tasked with maintaining the chemical secrets of the ancients.”
Iliana had told Carbón of the Master of Whispers’ claim that the Quinta and the Luminoso had once belonged to the same organization, and that this organization had been created with the purpose of holding onto the ancient knowledge and easing a transition to the Fourth Plenty. That may be true, but if the former Lord Carbón held any such belief, it was a remnant passed down to him, and only dimly understood.
The enormous rotting tree trunk with the strange mushrooms remained exactly where it had been twenty years earlier, albeit in a more advanced state of decay, but he looked in vain for the white crosses painted on tree trunks that had marked his father’s path through the forest. Instead, the girl, moving cautiously, located a cairn of stones and sticks and gestured for them to join her.
Chasm of Fire Page 12
