Then the edge is there, and the vehimal tips forward. Nassun gasps and clutches at the armrests of her chair—but bizarrely, there is no vertigo. The vehimal does not speed up; its movement pauses for a moment, in fact, and Nassun catches a fleeting glimpse of a few of the thing’s cilia blurring at the edges of the view, as they somehow adjust the trajectory of the vehimal from forward to down. Something else has adjusted with this change, so that Nassun and Schaffa do not fall forward out of their seats; Nassun finds that her back and butt are just as firmly tucked into the chair now as before, even though this is impossible.
And meanwhile, a faint hum within the vehimal, which until now has been too low to be much more than subliminal, abruptly begins to grow louder. Unseen mechanisms reverberate faster in an unmistakable cycling-up pattern. As the vehimal completes its tilt, the view fills with darkness again, but this time Nassun knows it is the yawning black of the pit. There’s nothing ahead anymore. Only down.
“Launch,” says the voice within the vehimal.
Nassun gasps and clutches Schaffa’s hand harder as she is pressed back into her seat then by motion. It isn’t as much momentum as she should be feeling, however, because her every sense tells her that they have just shot forward at a tremendous rate, going much, much faster than even a running horse.
Into the dark.
At first the darkness is absolute, though broken periodically by a ring of light that blurs past as they hurtle through the tunnel. Their speed continues to increase; presently these rings pass so quickly that they are just flashes. It takes three before Nassun is able to discern what she’s seeing and sessing, and then only once she watches a ring as they pass it: windows. There are windows set into the walls of the tunnel, illuminated by the light. There’s living space down here, at least for the first few miles. Then the rings stop, and the tunnel is nothing but dark for a while.
Nassun sesses impending change an instant before the tunnel suddenly brightens. They can see a new, ruddy light that intersperses the rock walls of the tunnel. Ah, yes; they’ve gone far enough down that some of the rock has melted and glows bright red. This new light paints the vehimal’s interior bloody and makes the gold filigree along its walls seem to catch fire. The forward view is indistinct at first, just red amid gray and brown and black, but Nassun understands instinctively what she’s seeing. They have entered the mantle, and her fear finally begins to ebb amid fascination.
“The asthenosphere,” she murmurs. Schaffa frowns at her, but naming what she sees has eased her fear. Names have power. She bites her lip, then finally lets go of Schaffa’s hand to rise and approach the forward view. Up close it’s easier to tell that what she’s seeing is just an illusion of sorts—tiny diamonds of color rising on the vehimal’s inner skin, like a blush, to form a mosaic of moving images. How does it work? She can’t begin to fathom it.
Fascinated, she reaches up. The vehimal’s inner skin gives off no heat, though she knows they are already at a level underground where human flesh should burn up in an instant. When she touches the image on the forward view, it ripples ever so slightly around her finger, like waves in water. Putting her whole hand on a roil of brown-red color, she cannot help smiling. Just a few feet away, on the other side of the vehimal’s skin, is the burning earth. She’s touching the burning earth, thinly removed. She puts her other hand up, presses her cheek against the smooth plates. Here in this strange deadciv contraption, she is part of the earth, perhaps more so than any orogene before her has ever been. It is her, it is in her, she is in it.
When Nassun glances back over her shoulder at Schaffa, he’s smiling, despite the lines of pain around his eyes. It’s different from his usual smile. “What?” she asks.
“The Leadership families of Yumenes believed that orogenes once ruled the world,” he says. “That their duty was to keep your kind from ever regaining that much power. That you would be monstrous rulers of the world, doing back to ordinary folk what had been done to you, if you ever got the chance. I don’t think they were right about any of it—and yet.” He gestures, as she stands there illuminated by the fire of the earth. “Look at you, little one. If you are the monster they imagined you to be … you are also glorious.”
Nassun loves him so much.
It’s why she gives up the illusion of power and goes back to sit beside him. But when she gets close, she sees just how much strain he’s under. “Your head hurts a lot.”
His smile fades. “It’s bearable.”
Troubled, she puts her hands on his shoulders. Dozens of nights of easing his pain have made it easy—but this time when she sends silver into him, the white-hot burn of lines between his cells does not fade. In fact, they blaze brighter, so sharply that Schaffa tenses and pulls away from her, rising to begin pacing again. He has plastered a smile on his face, more of a rictus as he prowls restlessly back and forth, but Nassun can tell that the smile-endorphins are doing nothing.
Why did the lines get brighter? Nassun tries to understand this by examining herself. Nothing of her silver is different; it flows in its usual clearly delineated lines. She turns her silver gaze on Schaffa—and then, belatedly, notices something stunning.
The vehimal is made of silver, and not just fine lines of it. It is surrounded by silver, permeated with it. What she perceives is a wave of the stuff, rippling in ribbons around herself and Schaffa, starting at the nose of the vehicle and enclosing them behind. This sheath of magic, she understands suddenly, is what’s pushing away the heat and pushing back on the pressure and tilting the lines of force within the vehimal so that gravity pulls toward its floor and not toward the center of the earth. The walls are only a framework; something about their structure makes it easier for the silver to flow and connect and form lattices. The gold filigree helps to stabilize the churn of energies at the front of the vehicle—or so Nassun guesses, since she cannot understand all the ways in which these magic mechanisms work together. It’s just too complex. It is like riding inside an obelisk. It’s like being carried by the wind. She had no idea the silver could be so amazing.
But there is something beyond the miracle of the vehimal’s walls. Something outside the vehimal.
At first Nassun isn’t sure what she’s perceiving. More lights? No. She’s looking at it all wrong.