“Maybe she went back to…the Deep, I guess? Maybe she liked it underwater.”
“You only say that,” Yael countered sourly, “because you haven’t taken any Cultural Xenoanthropology courses.” This was true. “The Deep Empire isn’t the sort of place where anyone would prefer to remain.”
“What about the fish-people?”
“The Servants of the Deep? They don’t have much choice in the matter, I’m afraid.”
“Okay. Assuming you’re right and Madeleine never left. Why the deception? If Madeleine decides to stay in the city, then who could possibly stop her?”
That was a dumb question. Unfortunately, I realized that shortly after I said it aloud. We both took a moment to appreciate fully my failures of comprehension.
“Her middle sister. Holly Diem,” Yael said, lost in contemplation of the observatory. “Who else?”
“How, though?”
“I’m not sure, but Holly must have been responsible.” Yael sounded as if I was tiring her. “Madeleine’s only rival was her older sister, Constance, right? Unless…”
I don’t need help across the finish line, as long as I’m in sight of it.
“…she had two rivals.” I felt stupid, and full of admiration for the beautiful woman who lived on my roof. “Constance and Holly.”
“Holly lied by omission,” Yael concluded gravely. “She never really did say much about how she and Madeleine got on, did she?”
“Holly was the one who told me about the observatory in the first place, though,” I objected. “She sent me here.”
“Knowing full well that you would be unable to enter.”
“I don’t know…”
“It’s a theory, Preston,” Yael said, sighing. “Do you want to test it?”
My head buzzed and ached, full of needy ideas.
“I still don’t understand why Holly would keep this a secret.”
“If I’m right, then Madeleine Diem never left the Nameless City,” Yael explained, pinching the bridge of her nose as if fighting a headache. “I assume Holly was responsible for that, among other things she’d rather we not know. Witches are highly concerned with appearances, Preston.”
I joined Yael in weary contemplation of the decrepit observatory. The stone on the first two stories had developed a healthy coating of vivid green moss, but the stone above it was free of any such constrictions, and I idly wondered why. Far away across the water, the rain had started up again, little more than a blur near the horizon and a scent carried by the wind.
“You think she was here the whole time.” The words, if they had not been, became true as I said them aloud. At least, it felt that way. “Holly had Madeleine shut up somewhere in this observatory for years, and nobody had any idea.”
“Yeah. That’s my guess. Holly couldn’t risk confining Madeleine in her former home, and I doubt she wanted to store her at the Estates.”
I turned it over in my head, tried to knock some holes in it.
“That’s…grim, Yael. Probably right, but…”
“Yes. Grim. The Nameless City doesn’t seem to believe in pleasant surprises.”
“Holly’s been keeping secrets.”
“Well, she is a witch.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know that. Even so…”
“We are going to need to have a talk with her.”
“Not looking forward to that.”
“Me either.”
There was something covert in her hesitation.
“What? Just tell me.”
“Not to make your mood worse…”
She seemed genuinely sorry. Not that it made any difference.
“What is it?”
“I think Madeleine is in there, right now,” Yael said, nodding at the observatory, “watching us.”
I followed her gaze, but the weathered stone of the observatory offered me no clues.
“Why would she come back to her prison?”
“I haven’t a clue,” Yael asked, shoving her hands in her pockets and looking generally anxious. “Shall we ask her?”
The door was as imposing as I remembered. The sound of Yael’s knock disappeared into the massive timbers the same as mine had. The only major difference was the dwindling sunlight, and that the door opened for Yael.
I’m not bitter.
“Neat trick. I’m impressed,” I lied. “How did you…”
“Maybe Madeleine feels like company?”
Yael paused at the doorframe, hesitating like an uninvited vampire, before turning and whispering something to Dunwich. The cat received his instructions mutely, along with a quick pat to the top of his head, and then he trotted swiftly back down Prospect Hill.
“Ready?”
Yael nodded, and I followed her.
The room on the other side was empty and small, with crude stone walls and exposed electrical wiring. Inactive light fixtures were crammed into the glass housings of old gas lamps, PVC conduits ran helter-skelter, and it smelled of dust and dry mold. I ducked my head inside, and then waited for my eyes to adjust, but there was nothing to see. Whatever mechanism had opened the door, I couldn’t find it, but there was no sign that the room had been occupied any time in recent history, either. The dust on the floor was undisturbed, and centimeters thick.
“Guess nobody uses the front door here.” Yael pulled her gas mask over her face. The mask was covered with sparkling stickers and holograms, like a teen girl’s diary, making quite a juxtaposition with the military-issue olive paint beneath. “I’m going up. Are you coming?”
“I guess.” I followed Yael through the door cautiously, giving her a sizable lead. “You sure this place is occupied? Looks like no one has been here forever.”
“A person would use the front door.” Yael flicked on her flashlight, something I had neglected to bring along, and promptly located the rickety wooden stairwell. “Not too many people using the observatory these days, I suspect. They probably have another entrance.”
I tried to remember the exterior of the crumbling observatory.
“You mean a back door or something? I didn’t see anything like that, when I walked around it the first time.”
I wasn’t sold on the idea, and I let that come through in my tone.
“No.” On the other side of impervious lenses, I suspected that Yael rolled her eyes. “That’s not at all what I mean. Come on.”
We emerged from the dusty stairwell into the main chamber of the observatory. It was an enormous whitewashed dome, with orderly lines of antiquated machinery and a broken cradle, which should have held a telescope. It looked as if electricity was added to the building when the practice was still in its infancy, with wiring crudely attached to the walls, and ancient filament bulbs humming in the fixtures. There was a faint, but distinct smell within the dome, recalling desiccated rose petals and crushed grapes. The only light came from the slot in the concrete dome, left open presumably for years, allowing a significant accumulation of leaves and debris around the dormant machinery.
“Someone made a real mess of things.” I pointed at the damaged cradle, bolts crudely severed and metal struts bent during the violent process of the telescope’s removal. “Who do you think did that?”
“Not who,” Yael said, with a wince. “What.”
“You sound like one of the damn cats.”
“Up there.” Yael ignored me, pointing at the underside of the apex of the dome, where a small complex of rooms and a glass-fronted office were slung. A circular stair wound about the perimeter of the observatory, climbing the dome gently, in several revolutions. “Let’s go.”
We wandered the concrete chamber, looking for the base of the stairs. Piles of vacuum tubes and primitive capacitors were strewn across the tops of damaged machinery, and a number of maintenance panels were pried open, as if a lone technician had made a valiant and ultimately futile attempt to return the observatory to functionality. Cracks in the stone produced a whistling tone that gave me goosebumps, each time the wind
blew in from the ocean. The sound of our footsteps echoed at unexpected intervals.
“There.” I squinted, following the line of Yael’s pointing finger. “The stairs.”
I took her word for it.
Our path took us close by the violated steel cradle. There were gouges in the metal and extensive warping, as if the machinery used to extract the telescope had been attached to the cradle, for leverage or position. The steel itself was marred and discolored due to extensive chemical burning, and the concrete around the cradle was cracked and broken from some enormous weight. The center of the room was flooded, for meters on every side of the cradle, which itself sat partially beneath the waters, surrounded by something of a pond. Yael and I made our way along the bank, which was colonized by a scanty collection of grasses and reeds.
Stepping cautiously, I approached the edge of the flooded area. The water was clear, gentle waves lapping at banks of corroded machinery. I dipped a finger in the water; tasted it. Brackish, from the ocean, below and distant.
“Seawater,” I marveled. “How is that possible?”
“The same engineers who made Sumire’s new arm, I imagine.”
Yael picked up one of the broken stones that made up the observatory floor, and then heaved it into the center of the flooded area. The water was clear enough in the middle of the pond that we were able to watch it sink for a few seconds, before it disappear into the depths.
“A tunnel, do you think? A flooded tunnel?”
“The Deep Empire could do that,” Yael said, with grudging respect. “The Empress counts engineers among her servants, and they have a penchant for large machinery.”
“How do you know all that?”
“I’m still in school, Preston.”
“I remembered that. I just forgot what sort of school Carter is, that’s all.”
The interior of the observatory was far from silent, thanks to the wind, decay, and debris. I found myself flinching and looking behind me with regularity. It was the sort of place that art students like to film creepy movies, the sort of place kids break into to get high and have sex – or it would have been, anywhere but the Nameless City. Here, it was an object of more specific and concrete terror, and for good reason.
The stairwell was surprisingly ornate, composed of rusted wrought iron with brass and pewter detail work. On either side of the base of the stairwell were columns of tooled metal, each engraved from top to bottom. The lines were even and regular, machine-cut, and grotesquely vivid. There were dozens of symbols inscribed in the metal, and I had seen each before, in dreams I refused to recall. Yael shivered and shoved her hands in the pockets of her windbreaker, hurrying past the posts and up the stairs, and I followed closely.
The stairs made four complete circuits of the observatory. The first arc was elevated four meters off the main floor and perfectly flat, likely designed for viewing. The next two spans clung to the walls of the observatory, terminating near the crown of the dome. The final stair orbited the central offices like a halo, with platforms for observation. The wrought-iron stairs were originally painted the same gleaming white as the walls, but time and weather had removed most of it, leaving the metal beneath notably corroded. The handrails were molded into vague organic designs, the details lost to corrosion.
I hurried along, grateful that Yael set a brisk pace, and tried not to think about how far we had to fall.
The first circuit gave us a fuller picture of the disarray of the observatory. There was a flooded trough in the concrete floor between the initial breach in the floor and the telescope cradle, as if something heavy had rolled or been dragged across the surface, pushing aside tons of machinery in the process.
“Someone really wanted that telescope.”
“Possibly.” Yael’s mask bobbed along with her gate. “Or they simply hated it.”
We found the staircase to the second circuit. This one was more of a ramp, the incline slight and noticeable primarily in the steady burn in my calves. After making it nearly halfway around the observatory, we found a door, heavy and wood like the one out front. I shrugged at the girl in the bug-eyed mask, and then tried the knob. I think we were both relieved when it didn’t budge.
The third level was incrementally steeper than the previous stair. The ironwork was increasingly corroded, and the metal groaned and sang in the wind, and trembled underfoot. Below us, the seawater rippled with the wind that whistled through the observatory. I tried not to look through the spaces in the ramp toward the distant concrete of the observatory floor.
We crested the final ramp, grateful to finish the climb, if nothing else. A rickety catwalk connected us to the final ring, the viewing halo, and then the safety and stability of the offices within. I hurried, perhaps more than I should, and in my haste kicked a loose bolt, sending it over the railing and the down to the floor. I grimaced at the clamor.
“Preston, be careful.” Yael spoke urgently from behind her mask. “We aren’t alone.”
“What?”
“Down there.” I glanced over the railing. There were monsters wading out of the floodwater. “Servants of the Deep.”
Distance made details hard to make out, but I had seen these particular monsters before – in the basement beneath Madeleine Diem’s former home. The bipedal fish men with gills were pouring from the pool of seawater in the observatory floor, wearing gilded ornaments and wielding bizarre instruments of brass and unfamiliar silver metal. Some rode larger, winged things, which stayed mercifully below the water, only the general outline of their bulk visible.
I counted dozens, and then I tired of counting.
“Guess we aren’t going back that way.” She shrugged as if it didn’t really bother her. “Do you think there is another exit?”
I eyed her like she was a madwoman.
“From the roof? Of an observatory?”
“As I recall,” Yael said thoughtfully, ignoring my scorn, “the Visitors preferred to stay off the ground. I recall watching their zeppelins dock to the spires of downtown Roanoke many times, particularly as a child. What did you think the door we passed on the stairwell was for?”
It seemed ridiculous to me, but there was no point in argument. I didn’t have any better ideas to offer.
We watched as fish-people swarmed the base of the long stairwell. Their movements were clumsy and sluggish, as if maybe dry land was not the ideal operating environment, but they would catch up to us eventually, and in numbers. They emerged from the pool in legion, like spawning frogs, trailing kelp and smelling like a fish market.
“We can’t wait here,” Yael said, starting forward. “Let’s see if we can get a door between us and them, at least.”
We circumnavigated the final ring of the stairwell rapidly, occasionally sneaking glances at the slow motion calamity below. From this elevation, the fish-people emerging from the water looked like an algal bloom, from the mottled green-grey of their scales to the intestinal pink of their gill slits as they flared uselessly, gradually swelling to cover the observatory floor. I couldn’t imagine that the creaking, fragile iron that we hurried across could bear the weight of hundreds of servants of the Deep, but I suppose there are always more where those came from. The Deep Hatcheries are busy and sprawling.
The structure grafted to the top of the dome wasn’t large. One-half of it was an observation chamber, complete with a wall of pre-digital instrumentation and a pneumatic document system. Through the large glass windows, I could see what looked like office space behind.
There was another heavy timber door preventing access. I tested it with a hand, and then my shoulder, but the bolt held firm. Yael pushed past me as I readied myself for another go, grumbling as she peeled off her mask. She produced a small velvet bag from within her windbreaker, and then spread a roll of cloth carefully before her, meticulously maintained lock picks laid out beneath her nimble fingers. I watched over her shoulder while she went to work, eyes closed so she could focus. I have some experience with the art myse
lf, but I have to admit that I didn’t recognize half of her tools. Her technique was equally foreign, employing a third tool along with a pick and rake, the purpose of which was never clear to me, my wits dulled by the aftereffects of the Azure. Regardless, she had the lock open astonishingly fast.
Yael gathered her tools, and then burst through the door into the empty observation chamber, her image reflected in a hundred glass dials. I followed closely behind as she moved to investigate the offices down the hallway. When she came to an unannounced stop, I practically ran her over. We untangled, but before I could ask, the reason for her sudden halt made herself apparent, on the other side of an open door at the end of the hall.
“How excellent!” Madeleine Diem sat at the end of a long conference table, clasping her hands – one mechanical, the other stolen – in front of her décolletage. “You are very prompt in fulfilling your commitments, Mr. Tauschen.”
I am certain that Yael meant to respond, but the knock on the back of the head I gave her dropped her like a bag full of rocks. I put the sap – just a nylon filled with coins, really, but it did the trick – into an interior pocket, stepped carefully over the fallen girl, and gave Madeleine Diem a grin designed to imply all sorts of things.
“I like to think so. Let’s talk about payment.”
***
The view from the top of the observatory was ridiculous.
I could not see the whole of the city from the glass chamber atop the observatory that Madeleine led us to, because it is impossible to see the whole of the Nameless City, from any perspective, save that of a dream – and the residents of the Nameless City have forgotten how to dream. The view from Constance’s former observatory in Iram was, however, the next best thing.
The Mysteries of Holly Diem (Unknown Kadath Estates Book 2) Page 21
