Just now, in any case, the Sanders-Moss table talk turned most often to the loss of the Finch expedition, the prospect of war. The Hearst papers had been touting a war with England, claimed to have evidence that the English were funneling weapons to the Partisans, which would make them at least indirectly responsible for the loss of American lives. An issue Vale cared nothing about, though his god apparently took an interest.
When they were together in the town house they tried to ignore one another. When they did talk — generally after Vale had taken a drink — they talked about their gods.
“It doesn’t just threaten,” Vale said. Another cold night, trapped in doors with Crane for company, a bitter wind rattling the casement windows. Tennessee whiskey. Timor mortibus conturbat me. “It promised I would live. I mean live… forever.”
“Immortality,” Crane said calmly, paring an apple with a kitchen knife.
“You too?”
“Oh, yes. Me too.”
“Do you — believe?”
Crane peered at him quizzically. “Elias. When was the last time you cut yourself shaving?”
“Eh? I can’t remember—”
“Long ago?”
“Long ago,” Vale conceded. “Why?”
“Appendicitis, influenza, consumption? Broken bones, toothache, hangnail?”
“No, but — what are you saying?”
“You know the answer, Elias. You just don’t have the nerve to test yourself. Haven’t you ever been tempted, standing over a basin with a razor in your hand?”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
Crane spread his left hand on the dining table and drove the knife smartly through it. The blade cracked through small bones and into wood. Vale recoiled and blinked.
Crane winced, briefly. Then he smiled. He tightened his grip on the shaft of the knife and pulled the blade out of his hand. A drop of blood welled out of the wound. Just one. Crane dabbed it away with a napkin.
The skin beneath was smooth, pink, seamless.
“Christ,” Vale whispered.
“Apologies for damaging the table,” Crane said. “But you see what I mean.”
Chapter Eighteen
From the Journal of Guilford Law:
Excuse my handwriting. The fire is warm but doesn’t cast much useful light. Caroline, I think of you reading this and take some comfort in the thought. I hope it is warm where you are.
We are relatively warm here by the standards we’ve grown accustomed to — maybe too warm. Unnaturally warm. But let me explain.
We left this morning on our hobble-legged expedition to the heart of the ruins, Tom Compton, Dr. Sullivan, and I. We must have made a comical sight (Diggs certainly seemed to think so) — the three of us bundled in snake fur, white as dandelion clocks, two of us limping (on opposite legs), four days’ supplies lashed to a sledge behind a grunting snake. A “snipe-hunt,” Digby calls this little voyage.
In any case, we ignored the jibes, and soon enough our beast had pulled us deeper into the ruins, into the oppressive silence of the city. I cannot communicate, Caroline, the eeriness of this haunted place, its slablike structures so uniformly arrayed and far extended. The snow, as we made our way southwest under a sunny sky, lay bright and crisp beneath the sledge. But the low angle of the winter sun meant that we traveled most often in shadow, down broad avenues cloaked in wintry melancholy.
Tom Compton led the fur snake by its rope halter. The frontiersman was in no mood to talk, so I hung back with Dr. Sullivan, hoping the sound of a human voice would dispel the gloom of these immense, repetitive alleys. But the mood had affected Sullivan, too.
“We’ve been assuming the city was built by intelligent beings,” he said. “That may not be so.”
I asked him to explain.
“Appearances are deceptive. Have you ever seen an African termite hill? It’s an elaborate structure, often taller than a man. But the only architect is evolution itself. Or think of the regularity and complexity of a honeycomb.”
“You’re saying we might be inside some kind of insect hive?”
“What I’m saying is that although these structures are obviously artificial, the uniformity of size and presumably of function argues against a human builder.”
“What kind of insect carves granite blocks the size of the Washington Monument?”
“I can’t imagine. Worse, it’s unprecedented. No one has reported anything like it. Whoever or whatever built this city, they seem to have left no progeny and had no obvious antecedents. It’s almost a separate creation.”
This mirrored my own thoughts too closely. For all its strangeness, Darwinia possesses its own beauty — moss-green meadows, sage-pine glades, gentle rivers. The ruins have none of that charm. For endless hours we traveled the city’s relentlessly regular streets, sun angling low behind monoliths of cracked stone. The snow ahead of us was trackless and blank. Neither Sullivan nor I thought twice about that until Tom pointed out the peculiarity of it. In the four or five days since the last snowfall no animal had left its track here, nor any flying things, not even moth-hawks. Moth-hawks are common in these parts; whole flocks of them roost in the ruined structures at the rim of the city. (Easy game, if you’re desperate enough to want to eat the things. You sneak up on a roosting flock at night, with a torch; the light dazzles them; a man can kill six or seven with a stick before they gather their wits and fly away.) But not here. Granted, there’s little enough forage deep in these stone-choked warrens. Still, the absence of life seems ominous. It heightens the nerves, Caroline, and I admit that as the afternoon passed and the shadows lengthened we were all three of us on our toes, apt to start at the slightest commotion.
Not that there was any commotion. Only the crackle of hidden ice, the soft collapse of sun-softened snow. With dusk we made our camp, undisturbed. It speaks to the size of this place that we have still not reached what Sullivan calculates to be the center of the city. We carried kindling with us, mosque-tree branches, dense but hollow and not especially heavy; we used them to make a fire in one of the structures with a more or less intact roof. We couldn’t hope to heat the cathedral-sized interior, but we were out of the wind and able to make a cozy-enough corner for ourselves.
In any case it is warmer here than at the perimeter. Sullivan points out that the stone floor is warmer than he can account for, almost warm enough to melt ice, perhaps due to an underground spring or other source of natural heat. Tom Compton overcame his wary silence long enough to tell us that, one clear night when he camped in the hills after a snake hunt, he had seen a blue-green fairy glow shining deep within the city. Some kind of vulcanism, maybe, though Sullivan says the geology is wrong. We’ve seen no sign of it ourselves.
I should add that Tom Compton, ordinarily the staunchest of pragmatists, seems more unnerved than either Sullivan or I. He said a peculiar thing tonight as I began this entry… mumbled it, leaning into the fire so intently that I worried an ember would ignite his briar-patch beard.
“I dreamed of this place,” he said.
He wouldn’t elaborate, but I felt a chill despite the fire. Because, Caroline, I’ve dreamed of this place too, dreamed of it deep in the fever sleeps of autumn, when the poison was still coursing through my body and I couldn’t tell day from night… I dreamed of the city too, and I don’t know what that means.
… and dreamed again last night.
But I have more than that to tell you, Caroline, and not much time. Our supplies are limited and Sullivan insists we use each moment as economically as possible. So I will tell you in the plainest and most direct words what we found.
The city isn’t just a grid of squares. It has a center, as Sullivan suspected. And at the center is not a cathedral or a marketplace but something altogether stranger.
We came upon the building this morning. It must once have been visible from a great distance, but erosion has camouflaged it. (I doubt even Finch would deny that these ruins are terribly old.) Today the structure is sur
rounded by a field of its own rubble. Huge stone blocks, some polished as if fresh from the quarry, others worn into a grotesquery of angles, impeded our progress. We left our sledge behind and hiked through the maze-like passages created by chance and weather until we found the core of the central building.
Rising from this bed of rubble is a black basaltic dome, open on roughly a quarter of its periphery. The vault of the dome is at least two hundred feet high at its apex and as broad as a city block. The unbroken sections are still smooth, almost silky, worked by a technique Sullivan can’t identify.
A perpetual fog cloaks the dome, which is perhaps why none of us had seen it from the slopes of the valley. Melted snow and ice, Sullivan guessed, heated from below. Even in the rubble field the air was noticeably warm, and no snow had collected on the dome itself. It must be well above the freezing point of water.
The three of us gazed mutely at this scene. I mourned my lost camera. What a plate it would have made! The desolate Alpine ruins of the European hinterland. Caroline, we might have lived for a year on a photograph like that.
None of us voiced his thoughts. Maybe they seemed too fantastic. Certainly mine did. I was reminded again of E.R. Burroughs’ adventure stories, with their volcanic caverns and their beast-men worshiping ancient gods.
(I know you disapprove of my reading habits, Caroline, but the fantasies of Mr. Burroughs are proving to be a fair Baedeker to this continent. All we lack is a suitable Princess, and a sword for me to buckle on.)
We returned to the sledge, fed our snake, gathered what supplies we could carry and hiked back to the dome. Sullivan was as excited as I have ever seen him; he had to be restrained from dashing madly all over the site. He settled for a camp just beyond the rim of the dome and is obviously frustrated we haven’t gone farther — but there’s a lot of territory under this incline of polished stone, all strewn with rock, and it’s frankly a little unnerving to have that unsupported mass of granite hanging over our heads.
The interior was nearly lightless, in any case — the sun had declined beyond a gap-toothed rank of ruins — and we were forced to build a hasty fire before we lost the light entirely.
We met the night with a mixture of excitement and apprehension, crouched over our fire like Visigoths in a Roman temple. There is nothing to see beyond our circle of firelight but its flickering reflection on the high inner circumference of the vault.
No, that’s not entirely true. Sullivan has drawn our attention to another light, fainter still, the source of which must be deep inside this rubble-choked structure. A natural phenomenon, I dearly hope, though the sense of another presence is strong enough to raise hackles.
Not light enough to write by, though. Not without risking blindness. More tomorrow.
HERE THE JOURNAL ENDS.
“A little more rope, please, Guilford.”
Sullivan’s voice rose from the depths as if buoyed on its own echoes. Guilford played out another few feet of rope.
The rope had been one of the few useful items rescued from last summer’s attack. These two spools of hempen fiber had saved more than one life — provided harnesses for the animals, rigging for tents, a thousand useful things. But the rope was only a precaution.
At the center of the domed ruin they had found a circular opening perhaps fifty yards in diameter, its rim cut into a spiral of stone steps each ten feet wide. The shallow stairs were intact, their contours softened by centuries of erosion. A stream of water cut the well’s southern rim, fell, became mist, merged into fog-hidden deeps. Faint daylight came from above, a cool lambent glow from beneath. The heart of the city, Guilford thought. Warm and still faintly beating.
Sullivan wanted to explore it.
“The slope is trivial,” he said. “The passage is intact and it was obviously meant to be walked. We’re in no more danger here than we would be out in the cold.”
Tom Compton stroked his mist-dewed beard. “You’re stupider than I thought,” he said, “if you mean to climb down there.”
“What would you suggest?” Sullivan wheeled to face the frontiersman. He was as angry as Guilford had seen him, his face a thunderous brick-red. “That we walk back to our pathetic little shambles and pray for sunny weather? Creep north to the Bodensee come spring, unless cold kills us first, or the Partisans, or the Rheinfelden? Damn thee, Tom, this might be our only chance to learn something from this place!”
“What good is learning,” the frontiersman asked, “if you take it to your grave?”
Sullivan turned away scornfully. “What good is friendship, then, or love, or life itself? What don’t you take to your grave?”
“Wasn’t planning on taking anything there,” Tom said. “At least not yet.”
He reeled the rope from his hands.
It won’t be so bad in daylight, Guilford thought, and there was daylight here, through the breached vault of the dome, dim as it might be. In any case, the rope was reassuring. They rigged harness to link themselves together. The slope might be gentle but the stone was slick with moisture, a fall could turn into a slide, and there was no telling how far into the fog this decline might reach. Below ground level the limit of visibility was a scant few yards. A dropped stone gave back uncertain echos.
Sullivan went first, favoring his bad leg. Then Guilford, favoring his own. The frontiersman followed behind. The down-spiraling walkway was broad enough that Guilford was able to avoid looking directly into the well’s smoky deeps.
He couldn’t guess what this well had been made for or who might have walked this way in ages past. Nor how far down it might descend, into what lava-heated cavern or glowing underworld. Hadn’t the Aztecs used wells for human sacrifice? Certainly nothing much good could have happened down this rabbit hole.
Sullivan called a halt when they had descended, by Guilford’s estimate, a hundred feet or more. The rim of the well was as invisible now as the bottom, both hidden in lofting spirals of fog. Sullivan was winded and gasping, but his eyes were bright in the strange, dim radiance.
Guilford wondered aloud whether they hadn’t come far enough. “No offense, Dr. Sullivan, but what exactly do you expect to find here?
“The answer to a hundred questions.”
“It’s some kind of well or cistern,” Guilford said.
“Open your eyes, for God’s sake! A well is what this is not. If anything, it was designed to keep groundwater out. Do you think these stones grew here? The blocks are cut and the joints are caulked… I don’t know what the caulking material is, but it’s remarkably well preserved. In any case, we’re already below the water table. This is not a well, Mr. Law.”
“Then what is it?”
“Whatever its purpose — practical or ceremonial — it must have been important. The dome is a landmark, and I’d guess this passageway was meant to accommodate a great deal of traffic.”
“Traffic?”
“The city builders.”
“But they’re extinct,” Guilford said.
“You hope,” the frontiersman muttered from behind.
But there was no end to the descent, only this spiral of stone winding monotonously into blue-tinted fog, until even Sullivan admitted he was too fatigued to go any farther.
“We need,” he said at length, “more men.”
Guilford wondered who he had in mind. Keck? Robertson? One-armed Digby?
Tom looked up the way they had come, now a colorless overcast. “We shouldn’t wait to turn back. Daylight’ll be gone soon — what there is of it.” He cast a critical eye at Sullivan. “When you get your breath back—”
“Don’t worry about me. Go on! Reverse order. I’ll follow behind.”
He was pale and dewed with sweat.
The frontiersman shrugged and turned. Guilford followed Tom, calling a halt whenever the line between himself and Sullivan grew taut. Which it often did. The botanist’s breathing was audible over a considerable distance now and it grew more labored as they climbed. Before long Sullivan began to
cough. Tom looked back sharply and slowed the ascent to a crawl.
The fog had begun to thicken. Guilford lost sight of the far wall, stone steps vanishing behind a twining curtain of vapor. The rope served a purpose now, as even Tom Compton’s broad back grew faint in the mist.
With the loss of visible landmarks came disorientation. He couldn’t guess how far they had come or how much of the climb remained. Doesn’t matter, he told himself sternly. Every step is one step closer. His bad leg had began to hurt him, a vicious pain that ran like a wire from calf to knee.
Shouldn’t have gone so far down, Guilford thought, but Sullivan’s enthusiasm had been contagious, the sense of some immense revelation waiting, if only they could reach it. He stood a moment, closed his eyes, felt chill air flow past him like a river. He smelled the mineral smells of granite and fog. And something else. Muskier, stranger.
“Guilford!”
Tom’s voice. Guilford looked up sheepishly.
“Watch where you’re standing,” the frontiersman said.
It was the brink of the escarpment. Another step and he might have fallen.
“Keep your left hand on the wall. You too, Sullivan.”
Sullivan came into view, nodding wordlessly. He was a shade, a wraith, a gangly spirit.
Guilford was groping his way behind the frontiersman when the rope suddenly cinched at his waist. He called a halt and turned.
“Dr. Sullivan?”
No answer. The rope remained taut. When he looked back he saw only fog.
“Dr. Sullivan — are you all right?”
No answer, only this anchoring weight.
Tom Compton came scrabbling out of the mist. Guilford backed up, slacking the rope, peering into the dimness for any sign of Sullivan.
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