“This isn’t a magma chamber,” she tells Schaffa in an awed tone. “It wasn’t a cavern at all when this city was built.”
“What?”
She shakes her head. “It wasn’t enclosed. It must have been… I don’t know? Whatever’s left when a volcano blows up completely.”
“A crater?”
She nods quickly, excited with the realization. “It was open to the sky then. People built the city in the crater. But then there was another eruption, right in the middle of the city.” She points ahead of them, into the dark; the stairwell is going right toward what she sesses is the epicenter of this ancient destruction.
But that can’t be right. Another eruption, depending on the type of lava, should simply have destroyed the city and filled the old crater. Instead, somehow, all the lava went up and over the city, spreading out like a canopy and solidifying over it to form this cavern. Leaving the city within the crater more or less intact.
“Impossible,” Schaffa says, frowning. “Not even the most viscous lava would behave that way. But…” His expression clouds. Again he is trying to sift through memories truncated and trimmed, or perhaps simply dimmed by age. On impulse Nassun grabs his hand, to encourage him. He glances at her, smiles absently, and resumes frowning. “But I think… an orogene could do such a thing. It would take one of rare power, however, and probably the aid of an obelisk. A ten-ringer. At least.”
Nassun frowns in confusion at this. The gist of what he’s said fits, though: Someone did this. Nassun looks up at the ceiling of the cavern and realizes belatedly that what she thought were odd stalactites are actually – she gasps – the leftover impressions of buildings that are no longer there! Yes, there is a narrowing point that must have been a spire; here a curving arch; there a geometric strangeness of spokes and curves that looks oddly organic, like the under-ribs of a mushroom cap. But while these imprints fossil all over the ceiling of the cavern, the solidified lava itself stops a few hundred feet above the ground. Belatedly, Nassun realizes that the “tunnel” from which they emerged is also the remains of a building. Looking back, she sees that the outside of the tunnel looks like one of the cuttlebones that her father once used for fine knapping work – more solid, and made from the same strange white material as the slab up on the surface. That must have been the top of the building. But a few feet below where the canopy ends, the building does, too, to be replaced by this strange white stair. That must have been done sometime after the disaster – but how? And by whom? And why?
Trying to understand what she’s seeing, Nassun looks more closely at the cavern’s floor. The sand is mostly pale, though there are mottling patches of darker gray and brown laced throughout. In a few places, twisted lengths of metal or immense broken fragments of something larger – other buildings, maybe – poke through the sand like bones from a half-unearthed grave.
But this is wrong, too, Nassun realizes. There isn’t enough material here to be the remnants of a city. She hasn’t seen many deadciv ruins, or cities for that matter, but she’s read about them and heard stories. She’s pretty sure that cities are supposed to be full of stone buildings and wooden storecaches and maybe metal gates and cobbled streets. This city is nothing, relatively speaking. Just metal and sand.
Nassun puts down her hands, which she’s raised without thinking while her fleshless senses flicker and search. Inadvertently she glances down, which makes the distance between the stair she stands on and that sandy cavern floor yawn and seem to stretch. This makes her step back closer to Schaffa, who puts a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
“This city,” Schaffa says. She glances at him in surprise; he looks thoughtful. “There is a word in my mind, but I don’t know what it is. A name? Something that holds meaning in another language?” He shakes his head. “But if this is the city I think it is, I have heard tales of its grandeur. Once, they say, this city held billions of people.”
That seems impossible. “In one city? How big was Yumenes?”
“A few million.” He smiles at her openmouthed gape, then sobers somewhat. “And now there can’t be many more people than that, altogether, across the whole of the Stillness. When we lost the Equatorials, we lost the bulk of humanity. Still. Once, the world was even bigger.”
It can’t be. The volcanic crater is only so vast. And yet… Delicately, Nassun sesses below the sand and debris, searching for evidence of the impossible. The sand is much deeper than she thought. Far beneath its surface, though, she finds pressed pathways in long, straight lines. Roads? Foundations, too, though they are in oblong and round and other odd shapes: hourglass loops and fat S-curves and bowl-shaped dips. Not a single square. She puzzles over the odd composition of these foundations, and then abruptly realizes that it all has the sess of something mineralized, alkaline. Oh, it’s petrifying! Which means that originally – Nassun gasps.
“It’s wood,” she blurts aloud. A building foundation of wood? No, it’s something like wood, but also a bit like the polymer stuff that her father used to make, and a little like the strange not-stone of the stair they’re standing on. All the roads she can sess are something similar. “Dust. Everything down there, Schaffa. It’s not sand, it’s dust! It’s plants, lots of them, dead so long ago that it’s all just dried up and crumbled away. And…” Her gaze is drawn back up to the lava canopy overheard. What must it have been like? The whole cavern lit up in red. The air too hot to breathe. The buildings lasted longer, long enough for the lava to start to cool around them, but every person in this city would have roasted within the first few hours of being buried under a bubble of fire.
That’s what’s in the sand, too, then: countless people, cooked into char and crumbled away.
“Intriguing,” Schaffa says. He leans on the railing, heedless of the distance to the ground as he gazes out over the cavern. Nassun’s belly clenches in fear for him. “A city built of plants.” Then his gaze sharpens. “But nothing’s growing here now.”
Yes. That’s the other thing Nassun has noticed. She’s traveled enough now, and seen enough other caves to know that this place should be teeming with life, like lichens and bats and blind white insects. She shunts her perception into the realm of the silver, searching for the delicate lines that should be everywhere amid so much living detritus. She finds them, lots of them, but… Something is strange. The lines flow together and focus, tiny threads becoming thicker channels – much like the way magic flows within an orogene. She’s never seen this happen in plants or animals or soil before. These more concentrated flows come together and continue forward – the direction in which the stairway is going. She follows them well past the stairway she can see, thickening, brightening… and then somewhere ahead, they abruptly stop.
“Something bad is here,” Nassun says, her skin prickling. Abruptly she stops sessing. She does not want to sess what’s ahead, for some reason.
“Nassun?”
“Something is eating this place.” She blurts the words, then wonders why she’s said them. But now that she’s said it, she feels like it was the right thing to say. “That’s why nothing grows. Something is taking all the magic away. Without that, everything’s dead.”
Schaffa regards her for a long moment. One of his hands, Nassun sees, is on the hilt of his black glass poniard, where it’s strapped against his thigh. She wants to laugh at this. What’s ahead isn’t something he can stab. She doesn’t laugh because it’s cruel, and because she’s suddenly so scared that if she starts laughing, she might not stop.
“We don’t have to go forward,” Schaffa suggests. It is gentle, and badly needed reassurance that he will not lose respect for her if she abandons her mission out of fear.
It bothers Nassun, though. She has her pride. “N-no. Let’s keep going.” She swallows hard. “Please.”
“Very well, then.”
They proceed. Someone or something has dug a channel through the dust, beneath and around the impossible stair. As they continue to descend, they pass mountains of the stuff. Presently, though, Nassun sees another tunnel looming ahead. This one is set against the floor of the cavern – at last – and its mouth is immense. Concentric arches, each carved from marble in different shades, loom high overhead as the stairway finally reaches the ground and flattens into the surrounding stones. The tunnel narrows further in; there’s only darkness beyond. The floor of the entryway is something that looks like lacquer, tiled in gradient shades of blue and black and dark red. It is rich and lovely color, a relief to the eyes after so much white and gray, and yet it, too, is impossibly strange. Somehow, none of the city’s dust has blown or subsided into this entryway.