She remembers, again, the boy in the jail cell. How I repeat myself.
The flaming creature veers across the salt ring, seeming to bounce off of invisible walls. Scraps of flickering cloth float away from it like glowing orange cherry blossoms. It grasps its head, its monstrous mouth open in a silent cry.
Its form fades; the flames die away; a gust of ash dances around the candelabras. Then it is gone, leaving only scorch marks on the floor.
And Olvos said:
“Nothing is ever truly lost
The world is like the tide
Returning, for an instant, to the place it occupied before
Or leaving that same place once more
Celebrate, then, for what you lose shall be returned
Smile, then, for all good deeds you do shall be visited upon you
Weep, then, for all ills you do shall return to you
Or your children, or your children’s children
What is reaped is what is sown.
What is sown is what is reaped.”
—Book of the Red Lotus,
Part IV, 13.51–13.59
Re-creations
Shara strides across the room. As her feet cross the salt, she braces for some terrible misfortune—perhaps the thing will resurrect itself and fall upon her—but there is nothing.
She feels the crack in the wall, pries at it with her fingers, but it does not budge. “Come and look,” she says. “Do you see a handle? Or a button? Or maybe a lever …”
Sigrud gently pushes her aside with the back of one hand. Then he takes a step back and soundly kicks the door in the wall.
The crack sounds deafening in this silent place. Half of the door caves in. The remainder, suddenly powdery, shatters and falls to pieces like a mirror. White, acrid clouds come pluming up.
Shara touches the broken door, which leaves a chalky residue on her fingers. “Ah,” she says. “Plaster.” She cranes her head forward to look into the dark.
Earthen stairs, going straight down in a steep angle.
Sigrud picks up one of the sputtering candelabras. “I think,” he says, “we may need one of these.”
*
The stairs do not end: they stretch on and on, soft and moist, formed of dark, black clay and loam. Neither she nor Sigrud talks as they descend. They do not discuss the horror they just encountered, nor does he ask her how she knew how to dispatch it in such an able fashion: eight or nine years ago, they would have, but not now. Both of them have been at this strange sort of work for so long that there are few surprises left: you encounter the miraculous, do as you need with it, and go back to work. Though that, Shara reflects, was the worst in a long while.
“What direction do you think we’re going?” asks Shara.
“West.”
“Toward the belfry?”
Sigrud considers it and nods.
“So, soon we will be … underneath it.”
“More or less, yes.”
Shara remembers how the gas company gave up this quarter, choosing to leave what was buried below Bulikov alone.
“A question comes to me,” says Sigrud. “How could someone make this without anyone noticing?”
Shara inspects the walls of the tunnel. “It looks like it’s been in use for a while. Much of it’s been worn away. But it almost looks like, when this tunnel was first made, they made it by burning it.”
“What?”
She points to the char marks, and the sandier places that are molten, like glass.
“Someone burned a hole this deep?” asks Sigrud.
“That’s how it appears,” says Shara. “Like a blowtorch flame through a stack of metal.”
“Have you seen such a thing before?”
“Actually … no. Which I find quite troubling, frankly.”
The white candlelight prances on the earthen walls. A strange breeze caresses her cheek. Shara adjusts her glasses.
The stairs seem to melt away below her. The walls fall back, then become stone—no, a stone mural, carved in a marvelously intricate pattern. Though the fluttering light makes it hard to see, Shara is sure she spots the slimsy form of Ahanas and the hand point of Taalhavras among the patterns.
The walls keep falling back. Then they aren’t there at all.
“Oh my word,” says Shara.
The candlelight beats back the dark. The shadows withdraw like a curtain to reveal a vast chamber. …
Shara catches glimpses, flashes, flickers of distant stone. …