Fathom (44 page)

All of them dipped and ducked in their holdings, humming and rattling as the world quaked around them.

Nia found the largest bell and stood before it for a moment, then reached up a hand to knock on it. It reverberated against her hand, vibrating so slowly that the sound it made was deep and low. She couldn’t hear it so much as she could feel it, singing through every drop of blood in her veins. It tingled to the tips of her eyelashes.

She ducked her head underneath the great bell’s lip, and it was black inside. It smelled like a million pennies, or like the burning room in the Greek’s incinerated shop out in Ybor.

Up above her head, she felt around, and she found a loop of metal at the apex of the bell’s interior. It might have been made to help them transport it, or perhaps it once might have been planned to hold a clapper. Nia didn’t care. It would work.

She undid one of the knots that held the call in place in the scarf, then held the whole package up above her head while she tied it tightly up there, up beyond where she could even see it.

When she took her hands away, she waited for the swinging sway of the call to settle, but it did not. It hovered in place and hummed, fighting against the metal shell and fussing, fuming against the echo that trapped it.

When she was sure it was secure, she dodged back under the bell’s enormous lip and ran back to the wooden platform, back to the sliding, shaking stairs, back down to the next floor where Bernice was sobbing.

Nia burst through the door and said, “Let’s go!”

But Bernice shook her head violently and backed herself farther into the corner. “I’m not leaving. No. Forget it. I’m staying here, where she can’t get me.”

“Didn’t you hear Mossfeaster? The bells, when they play—they’ll tear you apart. I was just up there, and it was . . . it was hard even for me. Godammit, Bernice, you can’t stay here! When the bells start playing, it could kill you!”

“I’ll risk it,” she insisted, dragging herself away from her cousin and clinging to the wall. Her fingers twined around the ornate bars over the window. “I’ll stay here, up in the tower, and it won’t be so bad. It’ll be like a fairy tale or something. You can’t make me go. You
can’t.
”

Nia hugged her back against the wall, even as it shifted. The mortar that held the bricks together ground together and dusted the floor with sand.

“Mossfeaster?” she called, only just then realizing that he wasn’t present. “Bernice, where did Mossfeaster go?”

“I don’t know.” She didn’t look up; she only crammed her face deeper into her arm.

Nia glanced over at the stairs. Over the commotion of the wobbling building, she heard the frantic patter of feet. “Oh no,” she said. “The bell player’s here. What on earth is he doing here? Doesn’t he know—? He’s going to get himself killed, too!”

Bernice writhed against the window, trying to anchor herself to the bars and hold herself off the floor.

The other windows were covered with shutters, and the whole place felt stifling and hot. Stacks of shelves lined the places between the windows, and collected in rows in the center of the room like the orange trees outside. The air tasted like paper and metal, and the books jerked, scooted off their shelves, and tumbled to the floor in loud, fluttering crashes.

Down the stairs and rising up them, Nia could hear the bell player coming up fast. His footsteps were steady and swift; he’d climbed these stairs dozens of times, and his legs were strong and smooth with the everyday memory of the motion. Even as the stairs rattled beneath him, he was making good progress.

Bernice had gotten quiet. Even her whimpering had gone soft and self-contained, and what remained couldn’t be heard over the atmospheric wreckage of the earthquake. Nia held her breath, her foot against the door in case anyone tried to enter.

No one did. The bell player had passed them, charging up the ragged coil for some goal Nia could not comprehend. Why did he rise, when the building threatened to fall?

“Bernice.” She tried again to jolt her cousin with her name, but the girl would not be budged. Nia took her by the shoulders and tried to pull her up and lift her out. “Come on, you can’t stay here. I’m leaving, and you’re coming with me.”

“
I’m
not leaving, and I’m
not
going with you!” She kicked out and smacked Nia’s hands away.

“If he starts playing, you might die! If the place comes down . . . I saw those bells, Neecy, they’ll kill you!”

“But if Mother catches up with me, I’m
definitely
dead!”

“I can’t just leave you here!”

She looked down at Bernice and saw a thin, angry, sick-looking
beast that wasn’t human and didn’t wish to be. The inverted bulge on her head was still something too terrible to be covered, and her clothes were tragic. Her skin was pasty and blue, as if she were drowning on the air around her, and her eyes and lips were ringed with ghastly ripples of violet.

In the back of Nia’s head, she heard Mossfeaster’s voice, and she didn’t know if it was because the thing was speaking to her, or if she was just imagining what it might say.

“She’s objecting, she’s dying, and you owe her nothing. Leave her. Stop swearing by the things you must do, and see how few are set in stone.”

“No,” Nia said, but she was backing away as she spoke.

“I might not die.” Bernice pulled her feet up. She hugged herself hard and put her head down. Her skull bounced against the floor, which waggled back and forth so hard that Nia found it increasingly difficult to stand.

Nia went back to the door, though she couldn’t take her eyes off her cousin. Inside that pitiful shell of sinew and skin, Bernice had been beautiful and wicked once, and she’d been murderous and mad. Had there ever been anything redeemable there?

But finally some other force—not herself, but not Mossfeaster or anything else she could name—hauled Nia down the stairs, because up there, in the top of the tower just beneath the bells, the clavier was being tapped and tuned. The bells would soon begin, and the tower would sing as it was meant to.

One chord, amazing in its loudness, chimed from the floors above. The big bells rang and played, plucked and pounded into a tune even as they shuddered in their moorings.

“Too late,” she said, breathing hard as she set her feet down one shuddering stair at a time, then two at a time, then three.

Nia outran the tumbling stairs until she was only falling. There
was nowhere to go but down and out. Nowhere to run but away. The stairs were jagged under her feet, and the descent was so much faster than the trip up.

She threw herself down the last of them. She had no other choice: the steps were slipping and rattling underneath her, breaking in places and bucking between the narrow walls of the corridor.

Nia landed hands-first against the huge doors. The weight of her body slapped them out into the garden. Outside, the world was still crumbling and quaking, but at least there was no more roof above her that threatened to fall.

The orange trees and pine trees were flinging fruit and boughs to the ground. Shrubs were leaning and tipping into ragged red cracks that opened between the footpaths. If the quake continued, the garden would sink. When Nia looked out across the plains below the Iron Mountain, she thought that maybe the whole earth would topple behind it.

As far as the eye could see, the world was moving, and up beyond sight, the bells were playing.

Above, some large piece of the Singing Tower slipped, scraped, and loosed itself into the air, whistling as it descended. Nia moved in time to dodge it. She ducked a second and third piece, too; but the fourth came terribly close. Then a fifth plummeted from someplace high, and cast a shadow as it dropped.

From the corner of her eye, Nia saw the dark patch grow larger as the slab of marble fell. Before she had time to think, her legs shoved underneath her and she escaped in the only free direction—away from the tower, across the gardens.

And into the moat.

She splashed through a film of algae and rust scum, into the filthy trough where the water burned everything it touched. There was no salt and no prickling, briny bite; there was only the taste of ashy fire and brittle chains in her mouth when she did not close it fast enough.

Nia flailed. Her entire body—her skin, and the angry muscles beneath it—objected to the water. It was thick and smelled like a volcano; it was dark, like the color of pollen in oil. There was no tide to tug it, and no current to draw it anywhere at all. It simply surrounded the tower in a flat ribbon of grease.

The water in the moat was strangely heavy and difficult to swim through. Nia kicked against it, struggling to find the surface. She’d fallen in fast, and she was heavy—hadn’t Sam said so?—so much heavier than she looked. Panic clutched at her throat. What if her new form couldn’t make it to the surface? Would she be forced to sink to the bottom and crawl or climb up the sticky bloodred dirt into the light?

She beat her arms and jabbed her legs scissor-style, which slowed her descent, but didn’t cause her to rise much.

Her eyes fluttered open, and for an instant she could see nothing but the dark, mucky shadows. The liquid seared her eyes worse than salt ever did, but she fought it like she was fighting everything else. She fought the urge to breathe because she knew, deep down, that she didn’t really need to. She fought the urge to scream because she knew it would only hurt; she fought the terrible branding smolder of the tainted water against her flesh. And she fought against the determined tug of gravity as it sucked her down deeper.

It was a test of everything, seeing how much she could stand and how far she could sink.

A pinprick of light sparkled somewhere, presumably the light of the sun glittering on the moat’s surface. But when Nia tried to chase it, she found it easier than she expected, because her goal was not actually on the surface. It was a deeper thing, shining below. There was no need to swim, only to quit fighting and drop.

And she found she
could
stand it.

She could stand the ferocious burn of the scalding water between her fingers, under her eyelids. It sizzled against her softer
spots like the dirt had scalded Bernice’s skin, but Nia could stand it. She was made of harder stuff, made to survive, and endure.

The pinprick of white flickered and split. It twisted and fluttered in a huge, slow spasm like a dreamer shuddering against some nightmare.

When she turned her head and peered through the heavy coils of her own hair, she could see a wall, somewhere down beneath her—somewhere down along the column of rock and earth that lifted the tower up through the moat.

Only it wasn’t a moat. It couldn’t be. It was a lake of rancid water, hidden mostly underground—and the tower was perched atop its only island. From underneath it looked so fragile and unlikely, this arrangement of water and stone.

And whatever was beneath it . . .

As her eyes adjusted, Nia watched the writhing sparkles of light, color, or simple reflection bounce slowly in a wave; and it was only when she thought of it like a wave that she realized that what she was looking at through the water was not a wall, or a floor, or the bottommost segment of the world. She was watching something alive as it shifted slowly and with a ponderous rhythm.

She scanned the underwater lake, looking for the edges of the monstrous undulating thing, but she couldn’t find them. At no point did it seem to end or fade, and at no point was there any indication of limbs or gills, or eyes, or teeth. It was smooth and vast, and if she judged its position correctly, some part of it was pressed up against the underside of the column that propped the tower up into the sky on the earth above.

It chilled her, looking at that skinny column. It didn’t look any wider around than a drinking straw or a pencil, not from where Nia drifted. She knew it wasn’t right, but the lake was too huge and the moat’s slim margins were too deceptive. It must have been
hollow, all of it: the Iron Mountain, the groves around it, the sand that stretched for miles on every side.

And what was that
thing
? Was it alive?

One sturdy flutter—a gesture that had all the gentleness of two ships colliding—flapped underneath the tower’s support, and the water around Nia reverberated hard, pushing her back and tumbling her topsy-turvy away from the bottom, if there was ever a bottom that she’d been sinking toward.

She struggled to right herself, but the waves were coming faster, and she was too unbalanced to find which way was up. And besides, she wanted to see.

She could stand it.

She craned her neck and pushed the water aside, trying to shove herself closer despite the pain of the terrible water.

Beneath her, as she was pushed away and back, a fissure as long as a river split open, and something bright but black spread underneath it. The split widened, then slammed itself back into a seamless line—and the force of the motion slammed a tidal wave up, and out, and Nia could hold her place no longer. The force of the water rejected her, throwing her up and out, facefirst into the sunlight and the air. As she hung there, in the handful of seconds before she fell back down to earth and all but forgot the sinister cracking, splitting, and severing of the world underneath, she imagined an eye the size of a continent opening in the midst of an unhappy dream. And as she dropped back to earth she thought,

This is how it always goes. Easier to fall than to climb.

Isn’t it?

She slammed against the ground and rolled, and the world was rolling with her; and somewhere up above, she could hear the sound of bells ringing hard—banging out a determined tune despite the quake.

The bell player had made it to his song.

He beat down the giant leverlike keys, coercing the enormous instrument into a melody that barely quivered above the violence of the background.

Down below, Nia scrambled to her feet and tried to hold that stance. She lifted her hands up to her mouth and yelled between them,
“Mossfeaster!”
But the creature didn’t answer, and she couldn’t see any sign of its hulking, decomposing shape.