Then the shadow comes marching out of the mist and into the empty circle and all such thoughts fall away. Thomas bites back his shock. The creature is bone white, formed—much like the beasts the knights ride—from the trees of Þagalwood. This one, like nothing he’s ever seen, is made of living, flexing pieces joined together by some incomprehensible magical process. Its lower three-legged base flows out from a central spine. Higher up, eight pale arms dangle, seven of them ending in pincers that seem precisely designed for collecting food boards. The eighth arm has extensions like gelatinous fingers with which it anchors itself while it collects the empty pattens. Then off those fingers, it spins on its central axis and launches straight at him. There is no obvious head, no eyes or features he could call a face. Its upper section spins again as it backs in completely—at least he thinks of it as backing. Nowhere to hide and no way to escape. He presses against the curved wall, then crouches down and clasps his knees to take up as little space as possible. He would be invisible if he could, laments how short his freedom has turned out to be. Yet the thing takes no notice of him. The creature, like Taliesin, has some set routine in a mapped-out space. It’s operating on instinct or memory. One of its legs presses up against one of his, cold as stone.
The digits of the creature’s eighth arm flow to a point and press into the wall beside the opening, which shrinks to nothing, sealing them in. Then it’s as if they’re a leaf in a storm, spinning and falling all at once. Lights flow up and then across the door. He’s sure if he were standing he would have fallen over by now. Then silently, abruptly, the compartment stops, the opening reappears, and the creature skitters away. For a second he sees other grotesqueries beyond it, but then he’s sealed in again and falling. He grabs at the wall, certain he’ll float up off the floor.
More lights blip past, faster and faster. It’s as if he’s plummeting to the bottom of Hel. He realizes suddenly that there might be sound but he can’t hear anything, and with his pinkie tries to dig at the beeswax in his ears.
The next time the compartment stops and the portal opens, it’s as if a forge bellows has been pumped in his face. The air is so hot it nearly sears his throat, but he flings himself out of the space anyway and collapses on the floor, dizzy, visible to anyone, but overwhelmed by panic that he’ll be trapped forever inside the tiny space; he rises to his hands and knees, immediately confronts another Þagalwood-made creature. This one is two-legged and has a head of sorts at twice his height. With steely eyes it observes him without interest, passes by, folds itself down and ducks into the compartment he has fled. He recognizes how it fits exactly into the space, as did the creature before it.
The wall contracts, the opening erased.
He gets up and takes a shaky step out onto something like a crystal bridge that extends as far ahead as he can see. He has staggered into an incomprehensible space.
To either side of it are open pits that appear to stretch into infinity, with all kinds of . . . what can he call them? . . . upon the walls. They are like small windows, flickering lights like stars, shapes and bulges beyond his comprehension. Already drenched in sweat, he stumbles slowly along. The air is so thick, he has to rest every dozen steps or so. He won’t survive long down here.
He dares to sidle toward the edge and peer down. Layers of other crystal or glass walkways extend below. Great globes of light go sliding up and down the walls. In places they connect with curious fluttering tentacles on the wall. Exotically woven Þagalwood creatures rise or descend all around him, like flexing jellyfish within a waterless sea. Far, far below, a fiery glow as bright as the sun pulses and throws off lightning-like discharges. Painful to look upon for more than a moment. He moves away from the edge, wipes the sweat out of his eyes, and gazes up instead to behold what seems like an infinity of walkways, of creatures, and twinkling lights overhead. Spinning blades, steadily turning gears, tubes and pipes and things he has no words for. There’s not a single Yvag in sight anywhere. Perhaps they cannot tolerate this hellish pit either. If this is magic, it’s a magic of creatures and machines more advanced than siege engines or mill wheels, which are the most advanced machines he can think of.
As he stands there gawping, another creature comes up silently behind him. It clamps one appendage onto his shoulder and turns him. Glowing red eyes, not human, not alive, like coals in a forge, glare at him from an otherwise featureless head. Another of its jointed arms clips onto his torn clothing, runs gently up and down the rip. The thing’s head tilts as if assessing him. Then it reverses direction to drag him against his will back to the same niche. He’s shoved inside. The creature squeezes in with him. One appendage joins to the wall. The portal seals up and the compartment rises and whirls. Dizzy again, he closes his eyes rather than watch the lights flicking past. When abruptly the movement stops, he pitches against the creature, so close it keeps him upright.
The portal reappears and the creature hauls him out into another vast space, this one with an actual floor of lighted pathways extending to the right and left, and still more crisscrossing those. The air is cooler, the light dimmer.
The creature chooses one path, dragging Thomas along. It releases him at a chamber filled with squat Þagalwood creatures of yet another design: two-legged and four-armed, with various appendages, some ending in a cluster of flexing needles, others in tiny pipes. One of the bone-white creatures turns to him as his captor glides away. Its “head,” on a long, snaking neck, weaves around him, inspecting.
It reaches up, tugs at the torn garment, combs an appendage with needles over the tear, followed by an arm whose pipes discharge a thin bluish mist. Even before it has fully let go, the material comes to life, rippling along the tear; the garment thickens, extending new fibers across the gap, rejoining, closing, sealing the tear until there is no evidence that it was ever ripped. The beater’s uniform shifts then from gray back to bright blue-green with the violet stripe; the sleeves flare out, shoulders grow points, and the leggings once more enclose his feet. As before, he has to raise each one up for the boot soles to weave across under them.
The creature has already turned back to its work, which seems to be the weaving of garments, although the looms—if that’s what they are—look like nothing he’s ever beheld. They flex and spin threads thinner than spiderwebs, glittering like rainbow dew. Not only beaters’ uniforms but loose piles of shiny, almost oily, black—the armor of the Yvag knights, a platform heaped with them. Surely there are enough to equip all the current knights twice over.
The weaver continues to ignore him.
Watching it, Thomas hardly has to lean forward to grab the nearest pooled costume and snatch it away. The nearest loom, as if recognizing its absence, whirls to life and begins knitting more near-invisible threads. Everything in the space ignores him. Nevertheless, he backs away, then runs from the weaver until his lungs burn, and he has to stop and wheeze. Hands on knees, he feels as if his lungs are winching blocks of stone.
At a bend in the pathway, with nothing approaching from either direction, he strips off the beaters’ garment and steps into the knight’s uniform. It’s far too large for him, dangling off his hands, flopping beyond his toes. Then almost immediately it springs to life and shrinks to accord with his body. Spikes sprout along the forearms; the pliable leggings become hard protective greaves below his knees, something akin to leather above them. A helmet flows up around his head while the sleeves shrink back into webbed gloves. Smaller spikes adorn his knuckles. Gingerly, he touches everything. The helmet sports a hard nosepiece but does not cover his lower face, his beard. There’s nothing for that, and he wishes he had an ördstone right now, though it would likely deliver him somewhere underground.
Balling up the now-gray beaters’ garment beneath one arm, he continues on the walkway, trusting—hoping!—it will lead him somewhere he wants to go.
Soon it splits. One path leads to a space where Þagalwood creatures assemble and disassemble more of their own kind. Lying about, the pieces, like those he saw hauled back by Yvag knights, writhe and twist. They are like thick eels or snakes, he thinks, reminded painfully of how Gallorini became part of the wood, stripped of his very flesh. Thomas stays well back as he watches. Placed pieces unite with others, and flow seamlessly together. They appear to know what they are to become. Soon they are assembling themselves, limbs sorting through the collected parts, finding and adding more. One creature, fully assembled, skites right past him and heads back to the transporting cell. He backs up, turns, and keeps going.
He knows he’s too short, too human-looking even in the black uniform to pass close scrutiny when and if he encounters Yvags, but what he’s figured out is that they don’t frequent the subterranean levels of their dazzling city. Never. The Þagalwood creations, like machines themselves, maintain it all. Once he reaches the surface, he’ll have to stick to the shadows. Until then, he suspects that nothing will slow him down other than the air he can barely breathe.
Then, as he approaches a cross-tunnel, something flits past his head. Instinctively he ducks, even as he recognizes it as one of those fae homunculi. For a brief instant its buzzing fills his head. Then it’s gone down the tunnel. He risks glancing back. What was it doing here, is it a guard of some sort? Did it consider him out of place? Does this mean he’s close to the surface? Surely it must. But if that thing is reporting his presence, the best thing he can do is get out of here now.
At the next intersection, the narrow tunnel to his left leads toward a distant yellowish-green glow. He takes a step past it, but then stops. What was it Taliesin said? That somewhere in the city there’s a “golden green pool” where changeling babies are turned into elves. He can’t help but think of Innes’s baby. Maybe it’s futile, hopeless—both the Queen and Taliesin have told him so—and perhaps that light doesn’t even come from that pool. But if it does . . .
He turns into the narrow tunnel and heads for the light.
XXVIII. Thomas Underwater
The golden light is cast by clear vertical cylinders, like two stretched-out tuns made of glass, one to each side of the tunnel and set back from the central path. In one, fluid is flowing down; in the other it’s rising. The liquid itself is the source of the glow. The cylinders go straight through the ceiling and floor. Behind them are dark walls covered with more objects he cannot comprehend, lights that blink or pulse, surfaces dotted with rows of bumps like small bosses on shields, and etched with writing that looks like Ogham or runes, nothing like Janet ever wrote on parchment. The narrow gap between the cylinders ends in a wall of rungs extending through a hole in the floor and, above, through another hole in the ceiling. Even as he holds onto a rung and looks up, another skeletal thing is climbing agilely toward him.
Before it arrives, he’s crouching on the far side of the cylinder again. The thing comes to a stop slightly above him. It has skinny appendages top and bottom connected to a central globe by a sort of spine that displays needle-thin and flexible ribs, reminding him mostly of the skeleton of a trout. The top and bottom halves are mirror images, the appendages end in curved claws that fit the rungs. Two of the flexing ribs stretch and curl to the wall to press on the bumps. Two lights, as yellow as the sun, wink on and off. The fishbone creature, as he now thinks of it, continues its descent, its claws clicking rhythmically out of sight.
He slips through the gap again to peer up the rungs. Nothing else is coming down, and the rungs don’t appear to run much higher.
He grabs hold and starts the climb, becomes aware of a distant roar that grows noisier the higher he climbs. The liquid in the tubes behind him froths and churns; the sound intensifies, finally so loud that if someone shouted beside him he couldn’t hear them.
The rungs end in a blank ceiling. He turns, one elbow hooked over a rung. The massive tubes vibrate from the churning within. So close, he sees that they’re full of infinitesimal glittering, like sparks from a fire, one set rising, the other swirling down.
He pushes against the ceiling. And then again. On his third try, his gloved hand sinks into the solid matter above, and a circular lid, hinged off to one side, slides out of the way. The roar becomes deafening, and the glow intensifies. He tosses the beater’s uniform ahead of him and climbs up through the opening.
Before him is a broad, curving, open window with a cataract of the incandescent liquid roaring past it. The chamber appears to lie behind a massive waterfall. Rungs like those below run in crisscrossing lines across the floor to a curving wall of more flickering lights beside strange little crystalline boxes. The fishbone creature, or something like it, must navigate everything via rungs.
All of the creatures are specialized; they are shapes that already know their tasks by the time they’ve been joined, and it all takes place out of sight down here. They draw their power from the world’s heart. The Yvag live by a magic he cannot begin to comprehend; but he’s seen it now, seen the glowing, pulsing heart of their world that somehow propels it: living branches, trunks, limbs, and twigs that flow into any desired form from knights’ coursers to spidery, headless climbing things; the ördstones themselves; the beads that can crush his throat but also make it possible to breathe their clotted air; the well that shreds living bodies into a million particles, all while the elves drink and debauch and make sport of insignificant humans, trolls, of who- and whatever they like. Their magic is a cruel, labyrinthine system without mercy or care.
What would Alpin make of all this?
Abruptly, the lid slides back into place beneath him, with no trace of a seam. No backing down the ladder, then.
Right in front of him the waterfall roars, yet not a drop of spray enters the chamber. He puts his hand out, finds an unseen barrier preventing him from reaching it. The ceiling and the wall behind him look to be formed from molten metal that’s cooled into layers, like a black sludgy bog standing on end.
The waterfall surely means he’s no longer underground, and below him must lie Taliesin’s magic pool where the changelings are taken. But how to escape? If there is a door, it’s like so many others—seamless, hidden, doors that become doors only when touched. Or maybe where he pushes, a door is created, the way ördstones cut the world anywhere.
First he gathers up the uniform and stuffs it down against one dark wall. With luck no one will notice it, a dark rag in the shadows.
Then he presses his gloved hand against the rough wall, and indeed the section right beneath it becomes transparent, which flows up until it’s become another archway. His hand passes through, as though the wall itself is the illusion. Beyond lies an enormous space, another of the elves’ cathedral-like creations lit solely by the shimmering waterfall and whatever’s below it. He steps through the doorway and it seals up as if it had never been. The chill of the space hits him instantly. He draws a startled breath, exhales a frigid cloud. Has he been imprisoned so long that winter has come to this Ailfion?
With the bright waterfall on the opposite side of this artificial height, he stands in the deepest possible shadow on a tier that appears to run all the way around it, overlooking more levels below, inside a vast open and empty nave. Its ceiling is—what else?—arched, the overall effect that of a giant centipede with immense innumerable legs curving to the floor on either side. The nave seems to have been built for the Sluagh, for a multitude that may no longer even exist in Ailfion. There are steps down to the next tier. He quickly descends, and keeps going.
From the ground he recognizes that this is a four-sided pyramid, a miniature version of tiered buildings he saw on the hunt. He edges cautiously around it until Taliesin’s sparkling pool comes into view. Thin, translucent reeds grow around the base of the pyramid there. In the middle of the reeds stands a great statue of imperious Nicnevin, her arms extended before her, forming a circle. The waterfall cascades down four stories to pour straight through that ring, frothing and crashing around the Queen’s feet.
