Night had fallen when Bela and Tewrick left Kolum’s home and followed him out into the dead city, but the moon was high and full. They did not have far to go, and Kolum knew the way. The Citadel wasn’t far.
At every turn, Bela expected another attack, another strange scream, another aluman in the street. But none came. The city was silent. The streets were empty but for the rubble. The only footsteps she heard were Kolum’s metal feet falling and gripping on the pavement, stride by stride, taking them closer to the Citadel and the portal somewhere inside it.
At last, they faced the great building across an open square. Far above, beside the Citadel’s white tower, the airship that they now knew to be Kolum’s floated in the moonlight. Before them, at the building’s front, wide steps led to a pair of shadowed doors.
For a minute, they stood and watched. Nothing moved.
“How many alumen did Asryth send to kill us?” Bela whispered. Kolum had killed two in saving them. But they’d heard the screams of at least one more that day.
“This is something I do not know,” Kolum said, then moved out into the open. He motioned them forward, and the three of them walked out across the moonlit pavement and up the wide steps to the entrance. Still, there was silence.
The doors of the Citadel were massive, made of thick planks of old wood, and there were shapes carved into the surface of the stone wall beside them. Letters, Bela supposed, though she could not read them. The snow clung to the carvings like white moss. She watched the reader brush the surfaces clean. He studied the letters carefully, mumbling to himself as he tried to make them out.
Kolum loomed over them both. “There is no time. We must go inside. I will take you to the portal. I will see you close it.”
Bela looked up at the big metal man. “Do you know how to shut it down?”
“It is machine and magick. Destroy one or the other.”
“But how?”
“I have not done this,” Kolum said.
“Your sword?” Tew asked.
Kolum’s torso moved slightly from side to side. “It is not a weapon for this purpose.”
“Well,” Bela said, “if you think of anything else, tell us.”
“I have thought long about many things. More thoughts on this I do not think I will have. I will see it destroyed.”
As Kolum turned to the entrance, Bela saw that Tew’s gaze had returned to the writing on the wall. His shoulders seemed to have fallen. She patted his arm. “After this is done,” she said, “we’ll come back out. You can teach me how to read it.”
He brightened a little. “I’d like that,” he said.
The doors were closed, but Kolum had no difficulty pushing one open enough for him to get through. Bela and Tew followed inside before he turned and pushed it shut again.
A wide and straight hall stretched out before them, lit by Kolum’s eyes and the moonlight coming down through glass windows in the roof above. Lining the sides of the hall, like sentinels, stood statues of ancient people, carved in gleaming white rock. The statues were mounted upon black marble bases, and each of them was crowned. Many of them, to Bela’s surprise, had the trimmed beards of old men.
Bela noticed that some of the statues—men and women alike—had their hands clasped to the hilts of swords that stood point down before them. Others held open books, as if they had just looked up from reading. They reminded her of Tew, and she smiled.
The floor beneath the statues was paved with black stone. It was littered with tiny ridges of snow that had blown in through the open door. They melted quickly.
The reader had noticed it too. “I think the building is built on the same heat that keeps the lake unfrozen.”
“Asryth’s design,” Kolum said. There might’ve been pride in his voice.
“It’s amazing,” Tew said.
It was, Bela thought. Truly so. The air was hardly what she would have once called warm, but it was far warmer than anything they had felt since leaving the cave on the distant shoreline.
They stood for a minute just inside the doors, staring at the statues. The darkness of the floor, Bela suspected, was meant to give the statues a sense of inner vitality, a light glow as if they might be warm to the touch. She’d never seen anything like it. No one from the Fair Isles had, she supposed.
Kolum seemed content to let them adjust to the warmth of the air and the scale of what lay before them. It was, Bela was certain, the biggest room in which she’d ever stood.
At last, the metal man stepped forward, and they followed at his side, walking down the hallway toward the center of the building.
There was another set of double doors at the other end of the hall. After listening at it for a moment and hearing nothing, Kolum pushed it open. They slipped through.
The chamber they entered was large, circular, and from the shape of the dome above it, the center of the Citadel. It also seemed to be a throne room of some kind. At the far end of the room, beyond a long and low firepit whose grates were still caked with black, was a simple seat of stone, set upon a small dais that rose three steps from the level of the floor. That floor was tiled with the same bright-white rock used to fashion the statues in the hall, as were the walls.
The inside of the dome was tiled likewise, and its solid, smooth surface far above them was broken with a ring of long rectangular shapes of crystal pane. The moonlight outside gave them a dull glow. A low stone bench encircled the whole of the chamber, but otherwise the room was starkly bare but for five sets of double doors around it, just like the one they’d come through.
“The court of Ealond,” Kolum said quietly. “A busy place once.”
“This is where you met her,” Bela whispered.
Kolum stood still, a metal statue in the room of stone. “Yes.”
Bela turned, saw that Tew had drifted over to the closest door to their left, which was slightly open. Walking over, she joined him and looked over his shoulder. The room beyond was walled with shelves stretched from floor to ceiling. On the shelves were piles of dust and rotting bits of leather.
“What is it?”
“A library,” he whispered. “An ancient library.” There was a reverential sadness in his voice.
“Do you want to look?”
Tew sighed. “Looks like it’s all gone.” He brought a hand to his face where she couldn’t see before he turned back around. “Anyway, it’s not what we came for. The portal. That’s what matters.”
Kolum’s feet hadn’t moved, but his upper torso had rotated to follow their movements. When they came back, he reached out a long arm toward Tew. The reader flinched, but he didn’t run away as the clawed hand rested on his shoulder. “I have saved some of the books,” the metal man said. “When this is over, you shall have them.”
The reader smiled. “I would like that. Thank you.”
Kolum turned and crossed the court to a set of doors on the other side of the room. One of these was open. He led them through and down a hallway that was so large that even he only half-filled it. His metal feet echoed along the warm stone floor, and Bela flinched at nearly every step.
Remembering how the swords they’d had were lost in the avalanche, she almost stopped to ask Kolum if there was an armory somewhere nearby in the Citadel, some place she might get a weapon. But without one arm, she figured she was no more of a fighter now than she was a shipmistress.
And what good would a sword be against an aluman, anyway?
Doors and other corridors broke off from the hallway they followed. Kolum took one turn only, which seemed to carry them deeper into the great building. That hallway ran straight to one more set of large double doors, which were closed. Kolum stopped in front of them. Again, he listened. They did too.
“The portal is here,” he finally said. His torso turned to face Bela. “I will see you close it.”
“I promise,” she said.
The torso bent slightly—an acknowledgment, she thought—and then turned back to one of the doors. His metal hand reached up and pushed it open.
The room beyond was as big as the entrance hall: a long rectangle with a tall ceiling. But unlike that room, no statues lined the walls here. And they also hadn’t entered it on the floor.
Instead, they stepped out onto a metal platform at its mid-height.
The room, in fact, appeared to be divided in two. Not far ahead of them, the platform they were on gave way to what looked like a kind of checkerboard whose squares were open frames. The lines between the squares were gridded metal sheets at least three feet wide, and the squares of their intersecting paths were at least twice their width. The ceiling high above was glass from wall to wall, and though it was mostly covered with snow, there were places where the moonlight still shone through, like pillars of white light. Where they fell upon the checkerboard, the squares weren’t empty. Plants filled them, clinging to the spaces. Between the moonlight and the blue light of Kolum’s eyes, Bela could see that the wide fronds of the plants were still green and alive, stretching up from round and flat bulbs grown and laced to the metal.
“Taproots,” Tew said. His voice echoed through the chamber.
Bela turned to reprimand him for the noise, but then she saw that while she’d been staring out across the top level, the reader had stepped forward to look down a stairway to the lower level. Even from where she stood, she could follow his gaze through the open grids to see that much of the dusty floor of the room below them was littered with the brown twists of decayed plants. But under the still-living bulbs, there were tangles of roots that hung down. They seemed to shimmer even in the dim light. Golden.
Mother, Bela thought. They were taproots. Zambaru. The same plants that grew in the rootfields surrounding the Spire. That meant the shimmering she saw below—
“Char,” Kolum said. The metal man’s voice was still quiet.
Bela shivered, thinking of how the bent-men—men like Tewrick, but ones for whom the Mother had chosen another path—made their way through the rootfields day after day, breathing through their masks to be sure they didn’t inhale the powerful Char and die screaming in agony.
Tew was nodding. If he was thinking of such dark thoughts, he didn’t show it, though from his rooms in the Spire, he would’ve heard the screams anytime one of those unfortunate mundane men had died. “The grids,” he whispered, apparently having realized the degree to which noise carried in the cavernous room, “they’re watering the plants?”
Bela tried to look closely without leaning closely. But she could see what the reader was talking about now: thin pipes webbed under the walkways, still audibly trickling water through the grid even after so many centuries unattended. It was remarkable, she thought. As was the system of suspending the plants to make it easier to harvest the Char from the taproots. It was far better than the way the evokers did it now, forcing the bent-men to hunch along the dirty ditches between rows.
“Yes,” Kolum said. “A gift Asryth made to me. These were my plants.”
Bela looked at him, wondering what emotions lay behind that truth. Pride in what she’d built? Gladness at the memory of the gift? Sorrow at what happened? Sorrow to see so many of the plants dead?
But Kolum only stood over them, unblinking. One clawed arm raised up. “The portal,” he said, “is there.”
Bela and Tew both turned in the direction he was pointing. Beyond the long stretch of the checkerboard with its scattered plants, at the far end of the room, there was a larger platform. On it was what Bela would have described as a workshop, with shelves and tables and chairs—but all of it had been pushed back, like the furniture in Kolum’s home. Only here it wasn’t to make headspace for an aluman; it was to bring one to life. In the middle of the space was a metal machine, shining as if it had just been made. Great gears were turning at its side in complete silence. They spun two rings of silver, one inside the other. Between them floated a perfect circle of perfect blue.
The portal.
Bela took in her breath, and then, in the heartbeat that followed, she heard an aluman’s angry scream from the hallway behind them.
The three of them turned back. The pounding of approaching footsteps was unmistakable. More than one.
Kolum pulled the sword from his back. The edge crackled to blue life. “Here will I hold,” he said.
Bela opened her mouth to respond, but before she could, the metal man stiffened and shook. “The Stream,” he said. “Flashes. Somewhere.”
Tew looked every bit as confused as she was. “You’re seeing something through the Stream?”
“I see fire and war,” Kolum suddenly said. “And I see the Bone Pirate.”