The City Above the City

The clue led them to another hidden settlement.

It lay far to the north, beneath an ancient mountain whose name Mara refused to say. They went by way of two Gates and a long cold walk over bare scree under a sky the color of iron. Noah complained about his feet, his stomach, and the fundamental injustice of mountains. Ilyan said nothing at all. He walked a little apart from them, always. Elias noticed that he never took the watch with anyone else, and that he looked at the sky a lot.

Unlike Asterion, this city was abandoned.

Its buildings had been carved into the mountain itself, tier on tier of dark windows and empty balconies, the stone worn smooth by wind. No lamps. No smoke. No sound but the wind moving through the empty galleries with a long hollow note like someone blowing across a bottle.

At the center rose a giant staircase.

It climbed the face of the mountain in a single sweep, its steps broad enough for twenty to climb abreast, and it did not end at a summit. It ended in the sky. At the very top, miles above, the steps vanished into cloud.

They climbed it. It took the rest of the day.

At the top stood a second city.

It was upside down.

Elias stopped on the last stair, one hand on the cold stone, and could not breathe. Above him, hanging from the ceiling of the world, towers of dark rock pointed down toward the ground. Their spires dangled like icicles. Their bridges swayed like fallen bridges. Their windows glimmered, though no lamp was lit, with some reflected light that had no source. It looked like a city that had been dropped, and had stopped, and had decided to stay.

"Stone trees," Noah breathed. Then, with feeling: "I officially hate this place."

Elias almost laughed.

Then they heard footsteps.

They were slow and measured, and they echoed from the empty galleries around them in a way that made it hard to tell where they came from. Ilyan's bow came up. Mara's hand dropped to her sword.

A woman stepped out of a doorway.

She wore a long gray robe and a mask of bronze that covered her whole face. It was a calm, symmetrical face, smooth and expressionless, with two narrow slits for eyes. It was beautiful in a distant and unfriendly way, like a statue in a temple.

"Welcome," she said. Her voice was low, and amused, and tired. "I am Selene."

"Selene," Mara said quietly. She had lowered her hand, but not far. "You're the one who sent word."

"Of course."

"You know the Gatekeepers."

"I know you," said Selene, and the mask turned toward Elias, "and I know him. I would know him anywhere. He has her chin."

Elias flushed, annoyed to find that it pleased him.

"The Covenant is failing," Selene said, "because someone is removing the seals."

"Who?"

Selene turned her masked face toward the upside-down city. She stood a long time looking at it. When she spoke again, it was with the heaviness of someone saying a thing she had said to herself many times and still could not believe.

"The gods."

Elias refused to believe her.

It was an instinctive refusal, an immediate and total no. He did not know the gods. But all his life he had heard, in half-remembered stories, in school assemblies and picture books, that the gods were what held the world together. That they were the good ones. That the monsters were below and the gods were above.

"Why would they do that?" he said.

"Because the gods are afraid."

"Of the Titans?"

"No."

She reached up with both hands and took hold of the mask.

She lifted it away.

What lay beneath was a woman's face, older than he had expected, perhaps sixty, lined with the long weariness of someone who has been awake for a very long time. But it was her eyes that held him. They were pale, almost silver, and they were wet. She looked at him with an expression he could not name. It was something between grief and pleading.

"Of what the Titans were protecting us from," she said.

Before Elias could ask another question, a horn sounded.

It came from somewhere above, from the roof of the world, from the upside-down towers. It was a long, ragged, terrible note, like the cry of a very large animal in pain. The sound ran across the sky like a crack across glass.

Selene pushed the mask back on, quickly, with a practiced motion. Her fingers were shaking.

"They are here."

A storm rolled through the upside-down city.

It came out of nowhere, a boiling mass of black cloud that spilled from the upside-down towers and fell upward and sideways and every other way, so that the whole inverted city seemed to be sinking into a sea of thunder. The air filled with the smell of ozone. The first fat drops hit the stone with a sound like thrown coins.

Elias felt the hair stand up on his arms.

And above them, one by one, seven lights appeared in the storm.

They were not stars. They did not twinkle. They were steady and pale, set in an uneven ring high in the thunderheads, like the points on the map beneath Asterion. They burned there for a long moment, sullen and silent.

Then, one after another, they flickered.

Far away, under the world, something huge turned over in its sleep. And the Gates began to answer.