Isles of the Forsaken

by Ives Gilman, Carolyn

  Both of them shook their heads. “I do,” Goth said bitterly. “I grew up here. The best way for you to escape is by the Gallowgate. If you cannot make it out that way, there is another way, but use it cautiously. This palace was built on a crack in the world. In the passages below us, the other circles ebb and flow into our own. When I last went that way it was a borderland. You must not stray into the realms of the Mundua, but keep to our circle.” Moving painfully, he went to the hearth and sketched out a diagram in the ash there, explaining the route. “Do you understand?”

  They both nodded.

  With a swipe of his hand, Goth erased the map. “Then go.”

  Neither of them moved.

  “Come with us,” Nathaway said. “Please. You can show us.”

  Goth shook his head. “I would only draw the Innings to you. If they found I was missing, there would be a pursuit. But you can leave without suspicion, and they don’t even know Spaeth is here.” He paused. “You are her bandhota now. I know you will treasure her as I did. She needs to be free of me.”

  “But I don’t want to be free of you!” Spaeth protested.

  “Oh, my dear girl.” His face was a map of thwarted desire. “What is worthy of love in me is present in all creatures. As long as your love is fixed on a particular object, a particular person, there is some taint of self-gain in it. You must learn to purge your love until all that is left is the essence. Obliterate all that is you in your love, and you will find that you have obliterated all that is me as well.”

  It seemed to Nathaway as if the Grey Man were speaking as much to himself as to Spaeth. She said in a small voice, “And what about you?”

  “I will be all right,” he said. Now his eyes were fixed on something far away, beyond them. “I have discovered a new road, a strange and backward one, but I think it may lead me—well, to my heart’s desire.” For a moment an ironic smile flickered across his face. Then he turned to them sternly. “Now, go. It is not safe for you to be here.”

  Nathaway rose, pulling Spaeth to her feet and toward the door. She reached out toward Goth one last time, but he turned away with a grim effort. The last sight Nathaway had of him, he was gazing into the fire like a statue of frozen misery.

  *

  As soon as they were out in the dark-windowed gallery, they pressed against each other and kissed again. Nathaway’s desire was blazing so hot, his body was acting on its own; everything else was burned from his mind. This time, it was Spaeth who fought for control, pausing with both hands on his face. “We’ve got to get away,” she said.

  He couldn’t understand what had come over him. He felt drunk, infatuated, unable to stop touching her. But, taking a deep breath, he put his arm around her waist and made for the door.

  The building had a strangely awake air for so late at night. Though the corridors were dark, twice they had to stop when they heard a door closing ahead and swift, booted footsteps receding. They heard the hum of voices before they came to a doorway that opened onto the head of a broad ceremonial staircase leading down into a large hall, brightly lit and thronged with soldiers. Sharp orders cracked like pistols, and a company formed up to march out the great double door into a courtyard.

  “That is the way to the Gallowgate,” Nathaway said grimly as he and Spaeth peered down from behind a stone balustrade.

  “We’ll never get out this way,” Spaeth said.

  “Did you understand Goth’s map?”

  “No. Did you?”

  He felt far from certain. “I think so. Down, then eastward.”

  They turned back into the empty corridor they had come from. Soon, coming around a corner, they saw ahead a servant woman carrying a lamp and a tray, walking away from them. Spaeth shrank back, but Nathaway boldly hailed the woman.

  “Excuse me, what’s the shortest way to the kitchen?”

  The woman turned, her eyes widening as the light from her lamp revealed a dishevelled Inning with a Grey Lady at his side. “Well?” Nathaway said as if he always wandered halls at night in a ripped and bloodstained shirt.

  The woman recollected herself. “That door leads to a stair, sir. Can I fetch you something?” Her eyes strayed again to Spaeth.

  “Show us the way,” he said.

  “Follow me, sir,” she said, turning to lead them.

  The stair descended past four doorways and came out into a long, arched room of pitted, smoke-stained stone. Even at this hour, the depths of the palace were stirring. Across the way an opening glowed with the orange light of the roasting pits, and farther down the hall, fire-lit steam escaped from another cavern mouth. With a rattle of wooden wheels, a boy hurried past them, pushing a handcart piled high with tubers shaped like withered hands. Another trudged past, bent under a heavy sack of lentils.

  “Which way is east?” Nathaway asked their guide. She looked momentarily uncertain, then pointed left down the hall.

  “Say nothing,” Spaeth told her gravely.

  They passed by gnarled rock arches that opened into the bakery, glowing with the heat of brick ovens, its floor sanded with flour; and the slaughter room where carcasses hung over stone troughs, slowly draining of blood. Beyond this, the huge corridor grew dark. Nathaway paused to take a mirror-backed lamp down from a hook. Spaeth did the same, but blew her lamp out to save the oil.

  The floor sloped down. More openings gaped on either side, barred with steel grates. In the dark beyond one cave mouth they could hear the rustle of movement; the smell told them that here lay the pens for the animals waiting in perpetual darkness for the slaughter room. As Nathaway’s light passed the next cave mouth, storage bins full of turnips the size of children’s skulls loomed from the dark.

  At last the corridor ended in a rockfall where the great ceiling had caved in. On the left-hand side, half blocked by rubble, was a small doorway barred and locked with an iron grate. A chill wind blew out from it, smelling unpleasant.

  Nathaway’s lamp flickered as he shone it on the lock; it was rusted into a lump.

  “Try it,” Spaeth said.

  Nathaway grasped the lock; it crumbled in his hand. He gave a jerk and the grill rained down in fragments. He kicked away the remainder and bent almost double to enter the low door. A flight of stone steps led down, and he followed them till they ended in oily black water.

  As he turned back, he realized that Spaeth had not followed him down the steps. Panic shot through him, and he dashed back up, his heart racing wildly. She was standing at the top, just inside the grate. He pressed her close to him till the feeling of empty desolation subsided. “Don’t do that to me,” he said. “I thought I’d lost you.”

  She drew back, studying his face in the dim lamplight. “I don’t understand,” she said. “How can we be bandhotai? Did I give dhota for you?”

  “No,” he said. “Goth gave it for you. I . . .” He stopped, uncertain what he had done. Never had he felt this way before, nor acted so unlike himself. All he knew was that being parted from her was like having a limb severed. “I helped, I think,” he said.

  She touched his face with fingers that gave him an electric thrill. “Innings can’t give dhota, can they?” she whispered.

  “No,” he said. “Not that I know. Of course, I don’t know anyone who’s ever tried. Why would we?”

  “I don’t even know what to call you,” she said. “Talley, that’s all I remember.”

  “Call me Nat. That’s what my family does.”

  The island under them growled in a deep-buried throat. Crumbled mortar sifted down as bricks in the arched ceiling grated against each other like red teeth. Spaeth looked up, alarmed.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “The Mundua. They are very close, here. We need to get away. Sacred horns, they are angry at us!”

  Once, he would have dismissed her words as quaint su
perstition. But the memory of the last time they had been together flashed strongly onto his mind. He glanced down the steps. “This passage just leads to the sewer. Should we search for another way?”

  She stood paralyzed, obviously afraid to go on, but equally reluctant to go back. He took her hand. “We’re going on,” he said. “At least the soldiers will never follow us.”

  The water in the drain was only ankle-deep, but bone-chillingly cold. It was flowing sluggishly eastward, into an arched brickwork tunnel. Underfoot was a clammy muck that oozed into Nathaway’s shoes. As they splashed on into the tunnel, invisible cobweb strands brushed his face.

  At length his straining eyes made out a glimmer of light ahead, reflecting on the scummy water. As they came up, it turned out to be torchlight filtering down through a grate in the high ceiling, dimly lighting the slippery stream on the floor. A metal ladder led up to the grate. Nathaway had put his foot on the first rung when they heard tramping footsteps approaching. The light was briefly cut off as a troop of soldiers passed overhead, then on. They both flinched back into the darkness.

  “Where are we?” Spaeth whispered.

  “Beneath the plaza in front of the palace, I think.” Shouted orders filtered down from above. “We can’t go that way. The place is crawling with soldiers. We’d be seen in a second.”

  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.r />
  “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.