Nassun puts down her hands, which she’s raised without thinking while her fleshless senses flicker and search. Inadvertently she glances down, which makes the distance between the stair she stands on and that sandy cavern floor yawn and seem to stretch. This makes her step back closer to Schaffa, who puts a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
“This city,” Schaffa says. She glances at him in surprise; he looks thoughtful. “There is a word in my mind, but I don’t know what it is. A name? Something that holds meaning in another language?” He shakes his head. “But if this is the city I think it is, I have heard tales of its grandeur. Once, they say, this city held billions of people.”
That seems impossible. “In one city? How big was Yumenes?”
“A few million.” He smiles at her openmouthed gape, then sobers somewhat. “And now there can’t be many more people than that, altogether, across the whole of the Stillness. When we lost the Equatorials, we lost the bulk of humanity. Still. Once, the world was even bigger.”
It can’t be. The volcanic crater is only so vast. And yet … Delicately, Nassun sesses below the sand and debris, searching for evidence of the impossible. The sand is much deeper than she thought. Far beneath its surface, though, she finds pressed pathways in long, straight lines. Roads? Foundations, too, though they are in oblong and round and other odd shapes: hourglass loops and fat S-curves and bowl-shaped dips. Not a single square. She puzzles over the odd composition of these foundations, and then abruptly realizes that it all has the sess of something mineralized, alkaline. Oh, it’s petrifying! Which means that originally—Nassun gasps.
“It’s wood,” she blurts aloud. A building foundation of wood? No, it’s something like wood, but also a bit like the polymer stuff that her father used to make, and a little like the strange not-stone of the stair they’re standing on. All the roads she can sess are something similar. “Dust. Everything down there, Schaffa. It’s not sand, it’s dust! It’s plants, lots of them, dead so long ago that it’s all just dried up and crumbled away. And …” Her gaze is drawn back up to the lava canopy overheard. What must it have been like? The whole cavern lit up in red. The air too hot to breathe. The buildings lasted longer, long enough for the lava to start to cool around them, but every person in this city would have roasted within the first few hours of being buried under a bubble of fire.
That’s what’s in the sand, too, then: countless people, cooked into char and crumbled away.
“Intriguing,” Schaffa says. He leans on the railing, heedless of the distance to the ground as he gazes out over the cavern. Nassun’s belly clenches in fear for him. “A city built of plants.” Then his gaze sharpens. “But nothing’s growing here now.”
Yes. That’s the other thing Nassun has noticed. She’s traveled enough now, and seen enough other caves to know that this place should be teeming with life, like lichens and bats and blind white insects. She shunts her perception into the realm of the silver, searching for the delicate lines that should be everywhere amid so much living detritus. She finds them, lots of them, but … Something is strange. The lines flow together and focus, tiny threads becoming thicker channels—much like the way magic flows within an orogene. She’s never seen this happen in plants or animals or soil before. These more concentrated flows come together and continue forward—the direction in which the stairway is going. She follows them well past the stairway she can see, thickening, brightening … and then somewhere ahead, they abruptly stop.
“Something bad is here,” Nassun says, her skin prickling. Abruptly she stops sessing. She does not want to sess what’s ahead, for some reason.
“Nassun?”
“Something is eating this place.” She blurts the words, then wonders why she’s said them. But now that she’s said it, she feels like it was the right thing to say. “That’s why nothing grows. Something is taking all the magic away. Without that, everything’s dead.”
Schaffa regards her for a long moment. One of his hands, Nassun sees, is on the hilt of his black glass poniard, where it’s strapped against his thigh. She wants to laugh at this. What’s ahead isn’t something he can stab. She doesn’t laugh because it’s cruel, and because she’s suddenly so scared that if she starts laughing, she might not stop.
“We don’t have to go forward,” Schaffa suggests. It is gentle, and badly needed reassurance that he will not lose respect for her if she abandons her mission out of fear.
It bothers Nassun, though. She has her pride. “N-no. Let’s keep going.” She swallows hard. “Please.”
“Very well, then.”
They proceed. Someone or something has dug a channel through the dust, beneath and around the impossible stair. As they continue to descend, they pass mountains of the stuff. Presently, though, Nassun sees another tunnel looming ahead. This one is set against the floor of the cavern—at last—and its mouth is immense. Concentric arches, each carved from marble in different shades, loom high overhead as the stairway finally reaches the ground and flattens into the surrounding stones. The tunnel narrows further in; there’s only darkness beyond. The floor of the entryway is something that looks like lacquer, tiled in gradient shades of blue and black and dark red. It is rich and lovely color, a relief to the eyes after so much white and gray, and yet it, too, is impossibly strange. Somehow, none of the city’s dust has blown or subsided into this entryway.
Dozens of people could pass through that archway. Hundreds in a minute. Now, however, only one stands here, watching them from under a band of rose marble that contrasts sharply against his paler, colorless lines. Steel.
He doesn’t move as Nassun walks over to him. (Schaffa comes over, too, but he is slower, tense.) Steel’s gray gaze is fixed on an object beside him that is not familiar to Nassun but which would be to her mother: a hexagonal plinth rising from the floor, like a smoky quartz crystal shaft that has been sheared off halfway. Its topmost surface is at a slight angle. Steel’s hand is held toward it in a gesture of presentation. For you.
So Nassun focuses on the plinth. She reaches toward it and jerks back as something lights up around its rim before her fingers can touch the slanted surface. Bright red marks float in the air above the crystal, etching symbols into empty space. She cannot fathom their meaning, but the color unnerves her. She looks up at Steel, who has not moved and looks as if he’s been in the same position since this place was built. “What does it say?”
“That the transport vehicle I told you about is currently nonfunctional,” says the voice from within Steel’s chest. “You’ll need to power and reboot the system before we can use this station.”
“‘R-re … boot?’” She tries to figure out what putting on boots has to do with ancient ruins, then decides to run with the part she understands. “How do I give it power?”
Abruptly, Steel is in a different position, facing the archway that leads deeper into the station. “Go inside and provide power at the root. I’ll stay here and key in the start-up sequence once there’s enough power.”
“What? I don’t—”