The City Beneath the Sky

The corridor ran for a long time.

Elias counted two hundred paces and then lost count. The blue fire did not flicker in drafts, because there were no drafts. The walls were close and damp and carved all over with tiny seven-lined rings, hundreds and thousands of them, as if some patient hand had been repeating the same prayer for a very long time. Mara walked ahead without looking back. Noah walked behind him and talked.

"I'm just going to say it. I think we should be taking notes. For later. If we survive. 'Item one, the hidden corridor. Item two, the girl who isn't answering questions.'"

"I am answering questions," said Mara, without turning.

"You're answering different questions. It's very sophisticated."

"Noah," said Elias.

"What? It's how I cope. You go quiet and I get loud. It's a system."

It was a system, Elias thought, and not a bad one. Walking behind that thin, unbroken stream of nonsense, he found he was less afraid than he had any right to be. Noah's chatter was like a handrail on a dark stair.

The roar did not come again.

Instead, the corridor ended.

It simply opened, without a door, onto a wide stone landing. Elias took one step through it and stopped walking altogether.

Above him was a sky.

A real sky. Not a ceiling painted to look like one, not an illusion cast by the blue fire. It arched overhead enormous and dark and glittering, and the stars in it were silver and far too large. Clouds drifted slowly across it, and, impossibly, drifted beneath him as well, so that he seemed to be standing on the rim of a bowl of weather. He felt the particular dizziness of someone who has looked down from a very high place and realized there is no ground.

Then he looked down properly, and understood it was not a drop at all.

It was a city.

It lay spread out below the landing like something spilled from a jeweler's tray. Towers of black stone rose in clusters, their windows glowing amber and rose and the pale blue of the corridor fire. Bridges curved between them, thin as eyelashes. Rivers of blue light flowed through carved channels in the streets, running uphill and downhill with equal calm, so that the whole city seemed to be breathing through them. He could hear it now: voices, wheels, bells, the clatter of metal on stone, the beat of some drum in a far district. Smoke rose from a thousand chimneys and was caught by the wind and carried toward the stars.

People walked everywhere.

Ordinary-looking people, mostly, in coats and cloaks and long dresses of unfamiliar cut, hurrying to errands with baskets and parcels. Merchants called from stalls hung with copper, with dried fruit, with glass vials of colored smoke. Armored guards in bronze stood at the corners of bridges. Children chased each other along a parapet, shrieking, in a game that involved leaping from one rooftop lamp to the next. And among them moved beings Elias could not name. A woman whose skin shimmered like wet slate. A man twice the height of the others, walking carefully, stooping beneath every arch. Something small and furred that rode on someone's shoulder and seemed to be complaining.

At the center of the city, rising above all the towers, stood a mountain.

It did not look like a natural mountain. It was too symmetrical, its flanks too smoothly cut. Along its face ran terraces and stairways, and halfway up its height, small as a keyhole at this distance, there was a door.

Mara said the name before he asked.

"Asterion."

Elias could not find a reply.

"The City Beneath the Sky," she said, and there was something in her voice, a very small and carefully guarded softness. It was not quite pride. It was the way a person talks about a home they are not sure they are allowed to love. "It's been here a very long time. Longer than most of the places on your maps."

"It's underground?" said Noah. He had lifted one hand toward the stars, as if testing whether they were hot. "We went down. I'm sure we went down."

"Mostly."

"Then where is that coming from?"

"That," said Mara, "is one of the questions you will stop asking in about a week."

Noah took the coin from his pocket and stared at it. His face did a complicated thing.

"Elias," he said.

The coin had begun to move.

It was lying flat on his palm, but the seven-lined ring on its face was turning slowly, as a compass needle turns. Then it stopped and a small bright point at the edge of the ring pulled toward the center of the city, firmly and unmistakably, like iron toward a magnet.

It pointed at the mountain.

* * * They were taken through the city on foot.

Elias would remember the walk later in pieces, the way you remember a dream you've been trying to hold on to. A bridge so high that the wind pulled at his hair and he refused to look at the river of light far below. A market where a woman with silver in her braids pressed a hot pastry into Noah's hand and said something in a language that made the pastry glow faintly. Noah ate it with enormous caution, and then asked for another. A street of clockmakers, each window crowded with brass faces, and every single clock showing a different time. A fountain in whose basin the blue light pooled and rose in slow spirals, forming for an instant the shapes of faces. They looked at Elias as he passed, and he felt, for the second time that day, the weight of being known.

People stared at him.

Not rudely. Carefully. Conversations faltered as he went by, and then resumed behind him in lowered voices. A man selling lanterns put down his tray. A girl about Elias's age, carrying a stack of books, stopped dead on the steps and stared with her mouth slightly open, and then, with great dignity, resumed climbing.

"They're looking at me," Elias said quietly.

"You look like her," said Mara.

"Like who?"

She did not answer. She walked a little faster.

At the foot of the mountain stood a guard post. The soldiers on duty saluted Mara, which Elias noticed, and looked at Elias and Noah with open curiosity, which he also noticed. Then they were let through a gate in the rock and conducted up a long staircase, cool and echoing, to a circular hall.

It was a plain room. Elias had expected something grander. It had a floor of dark stone worn smooth by centuries of feet, a high round window through which the strange stars looked down, and a ring of plain wooden chairs. Beside the chair farthest from the door, an old man was waiting.

He was tall, though age had bent him a little. His hair was white and thin, and his face was the sort that had once been severe and had been softened by long grief. He wore a plain gray robe with one small bronze pin at the collar, shaped like seven lines in a circle. His hands were folded in front of him, and he stood very still, as old people stand when they have learned that waiting is the only power left to them.

His name was Cael.

He studied Elias for a long time. Long enough that Noah shifted his weight, cleared his throat, and decided against saying anything.

"You look like her," Cael said at last.

His voice was quiet and dry, like pages turning.

"Like my mother?" said Elias.

Cael did not answer the question.

Instead, he asked, "What do you remember?"

It was an odd thing to be asked. Elias had expected a speech, a welcome, a warning, anything but that. He found himself telling it all in a rush, as if to someone who had a right to know: the desert city under glass, the staircase in the sea, the forest of nameplates, the black river and the bakery with the unreadable card in the window. The door in the field of ash. The scar on his mother's hand.

As he spoke, Cael's face hardened, slowly, like water freezing.

When Elias finished, the old man said nothing for several breaths. He looked toward the arched window, toward the mountain's far side, where no window opened.

"The Gates are waking," he said.

"What does that mean?"

Cael lifted his eyes toward the ceiling, as though he could see through the stone, through the stairs and the vaults and the foundations of the city, down to something that slept below.

"It means," he said, "that something imprisoned before the gods is becoming aware of the world again."

A tremor passed through Asterion.

It was not the shaking of an earthquake. It was gentler, a long shiver, like the skin of an animal twitching over a sleeping muscle. The plain wooden chairs rattled against the floor. Dust sifted down from the high window. And every light in the hall, the lanterns, the blue fire, the stars in the round window above them, went dark.

In the blackness, for one second, a voice filled the room.

It was not loud. It did not echo. It simply was, the way cold is in a cellar.

"The Titans know."

Cael went pale.

Then the lights returned, one by one, flickering up like candles lit by an unsteady hand, and the room was ordinary again, and Mara was gripping the back of a chair so hard her knuckles were white.

Elias looked at her.

"What are Titans?"

It was Cael who answered.

"Ancient powers," he said slowly. "Powers the gods themselves feared."

He paused. The silence that followed was careful, deliberate, like a man laying a stone he does not want to drop.

"And one of them," said Cael, "has begun searching for you."