Month 1, Day 4, Evening
We had gone maybe twenty steps further into the dark when the cold changed. It came down from above now instead of pressing in from the sides, a slow steady draft out of the black over our heads, and at the same time the sound of our boots stopped coming back off the close walls of the passage and went out wide and returned late, from high up and far away on every side of us.
The elf woman was near the front with Basha, and she stopped, and the breath went out of her in one long push. She said a single word in her own language, too quiet for the others, and the meaning of it arrived in my head without my asking for it, and the word was up. So I looked up.
Far over our heads, higher than the torch had ever thrown its light, there was a thin grey line in the black. It was not bright. It was a pale seam with only the last weak edge of daylight left in it by the time it reached down to us, and what little came down fell across things too big and too far for me to sort out at first, because my eyes had been holding nothing but a torch flame for hours. I stood with my head tipped back and let them work, and slowly my eyes turned the grey into shapes, and the shapes were a city.
Behind me the line had stopped. I heard the others come up out of the passage one by one and stop too, and the low talk that had been going at the back of the group quit, all of it, until there was nothing left but the draft and the sound of us breathing.
The first thing I understood was that it went upward, away from us, in great rings of stone laid one above the next. Each ring was a level of its own, walled along its outer edge and set back from the level beneath it, so the whole place rose and drew in as it climbed, ring above ring, until the highest of them was barely a shape in the last of the grey. Roads ran up the flanks between the levels, and broad stairs joined road to road, and every line of the place leaned the same way, inward and upward, toward the single high point where the grey from the seam came down strongest of all.
The longer I looked the more of it I could make out. The lowest levels were broad, with room between the buildings, and each level above was smaller and tighter than the one beneath it. Here and there along the outer walls the light caught rows of openings, square and even and black, hundreds of them, set at heights no ladder of ours would have reached. No light showed in a single one. No smoke stood over any of it. Nothing crossed the high roads and nothing stood on the stairs. The whole of it sat under that pale seam of day with not one thing moving in it but us, far down at the bottom, and the torch.
We were standing at the foot of it, on the lowest ring, where none of that far light reached and there was only the torch and the few meters it held. Up close the stone was white, or near enough to it, and there was not a mark on the whole of it. No crack ran up a wall. No stain darkened a corner. Nothing had grown in the joints between the blocks, and no dust had settled into them. Somebody had set these walls so a slab met a floor without a line you could feel, and then they had left, and left every door standing open, and behind the open doors the torch found nothing at all. The doorways began over my head. The steps up to them rose in slabs that came to my waist, one above the next. Whoever had climbed those steps and walked through those doors had stood three of my height, maybe four.
I put the torch into the nearest doorway, up on my toes to lift the light over the lip of it. Inside was a single great empty room, its floor swept and bare, and at the back of it a stair climbed away into the dark, each step a tall slab I would have had to haul myself up. Nothing stood on that floor. No table, no bed, nothing broken, nothing dropped, no sign at all of the people who had cut these stones and fitted them and then walked out and never come back. The street outside ran straight between the building fronts, broad and level, and empty the whole way to where the torch gave out.
The things that had followed us up out of the deep dark came into the city behind us. They held to the black at the edges of the torchlight, sliding along the bottoms of the walls and in and out of the open doorways, and not one of them put itself in the fire and not one of them came at us. They only kept pace and kept close, and there were more of them now than there had been down in the passage.
Mirae was not looking at any of it. While the rest of us stood with our heads back, she had crossed to the nearest wall and put her face a hand's width from the stone, her fingers moving above a band of marks cut into it at the height of her shoulder. They were the same marks from the carvings up in the hall, the ones the thing in my head would not turn into words. She read along them without a sound, her lips shaping pieces of something, and when Basha said her name she held up a finger for one second more before she came away.
I went back to looking up, because there was something at the top I had not made sense of yet, and the longer the grey worked on my eyes the clearer it came, and the thing at the top was a tree.
It stood on the highest ring, over the whole of the city. The trunk came straight up out of that top level, and the buildings on the top ring stood against the foot of it and did not come anywhere near to reaching around it. It went up dark and unbroken, past the place where the grey could still hold it, on into the black above, and my eyes lost it a long way before it ended. Where the trunk climbed out of the light there were branches, and on the branches there were leaves, dark ones, a great many of them, and there was no sun anywhere down here for a leaf to live on and they hung there anyway. Not one of them moved. The draft was on my own face the whole time, cold and steady, and that high up nothing stirred.
Up where the trunk and the lowest branches stood in the grey, the daylight from the seam reached them and went no further, so the top of the tree held a little of that pale light and the rest of it went up into a black I could not see into at all. The branches spread out over the top ring and past its edges, out above the levels below, and the dark leaves hung off them in their thousands and did not move. There was no sound from up there, and no sound from any of it. The only noise in the whole cavern was us breathing and the dry shift of the things at the edge of the light, and it all stayed down at the bottom with us and went no higher.
I ran my eyes back down to the roads, the one we had come in by and the others I could pick out climbing away through the rings, and every one of them went the same direction, up through the levels toward that one high point, toward the foot of the tree. Every street in the place ran up to it. For a while nobody said a thing, not even the dwarf, who had found something to complain about at every step since the stairs and now stood with his mouth shut and his head tipped back.
The grey seam sat directly above the tree. When I first caught it I had taken it for a crack in bare rock, but with the city beneath it now to give it a size, I could see it for what it was, a long thin gap in the roof of the whole cavern, far enough up that the daylight through it had gone pale and colorless before it ever found the top ring. The tree reached straight toward it. Whatever was up there in the dark, the trunk and every branch I could make out were all going the one way, toward that single gap, toward the only daylight in the place.
"That's the way out." Rafi had come up next to me with his head back as well, and he kept his voice down. "Up there. That's the only one."
"That's two kilometers straight up a wall, if it's even that close," the dwarf said. "Nobody is climbing to it."
Basha had already turned her back on the tree and was looking down the road we had walked in on. "We're not climbing anything. We came in through a gap in the rock and we go back out the same gap, now, while we still know where it is. On me."
Antoine had not turned around. He stood with his face up toward the city, and when he answered her he did not bother to look down. "Back out to what? We climb a week to the surface so you can tell Lydia we found this and walked away from it because the dark made everyone tired."
"We found a good place to starve in," Basha said. "Move."
We went back down to the lowest ring and along it, to the place where the cut stone of the city ran out and the rough rock of the tunnel started, and the mouth of the passage we had come through was not there. A single block of pale stone filled the opening, set into it from one wall to the other. I put the torch right up against it. The line where the block met the rock was tight the whole way around, too tight for a fingernail, and the floor in front of it was bare, no chips, no grit, nothing shaken loose. Stone that drops cracks and scatters when it lands. None of this had dropped. Somebody had sealed the way out behind us, and done it carefully. I kept that to myself and watched the others instead.
Nikita put his shoulder low against the block and drove with his legs until the cords stood up in his neck, then eased off and stepped back from it. "It doesn't move," he said. "Not for the few of us that can reach to push."
That was when Viktor started, fast and high, the words falling over each other, that there was no other way and the thing had shut them in on purpose and they were all going to die down here in the dark with those things, and his voice broke apart in the middle of it. Two of the others began answering him at the same time and it ran together into everyone talking and nobody hearing anyone.
"Enough." Basha did not raise her voice. She said it flat and hard and they stopped. "Nobody here dies because Viktor talked himself into it. We have fire, we have a wall at our backs, and we hold together. Rafi, count me the torches and the heads. Jonas, you've gone grey, sit down before you go down on your own. We do not move one step blind."
Jonas lowered himself onto the bottom slab of the great stair, his bad leg straight out in front of him, his boots not even near the step below. After a moment he looked over at me. "Whoever built these," he said, and lifted his chin at the steps, "my legs would have been a real disappointment to them." His voice did not hold steady through it, but Rafi huffed out half a laugh in the middle of his counting, and a couple of the others almost smiled, and even Viktor stopped pushing at the stone.
Old Ben had drifted a few steps out from the wall while all that went on, and he turned slowly on his heel with his head back, taking in the height of the place. He came back working his jaw on a grass blade that was no longer in it. "Nobody is getting up to that light," he said. "Not climbing it, not flying to it, not in the shape we're in." He looked at the sealed block. "And we are not going back out the way we came. So there's a third way out of here, or there isn't one."
The sound came while he was still talking, and it did not come from the things at the edge of our light, because those had gone still and silent a moment before, every blind head turned the one way. It came from out in the city and from above us, up the road and down through the open doors and the empty levels, a dry hard scrabbling that was in one place and then in several and then all along the streets at once, feet on clean stone, far more of them than the handful that had trailed us in, all of it coming down through the rings toward the lowest one, toward us.
I lifted the torch. The light pushed a little way up the nearest road and quit, and the open doors stood black down both sides of it, and nothing had reached the edge of the fire yet. Behind us the only way out we knew was sealed with set stone. Above us the only other one was a thread of daylight two kilometers over our heads. And down through all those dark and perfect streets in between, more of them than I could count were coming.