Page 113 of The Shuddering City

Brin had taken the lead and never once looked back to see if the others were following. Stollo fell in next to Dessa, and the two of them seemed to be having a grand time attempting to communicate. Pietro thought they were trying to teach each other words likesky, rock, black,andmountain, but they were laughing so much it was hard to tell. He had never seen anyone to compare with Stollo for putting people instantly at ease. He’d like to see him make the attempt with Jayla; if anyone could win her over in five minutes, it would be Stollo.

That left Pietro paired up with Jino. As the oldest two members of the party—and the two that were clearly in the worst physical shape—they didn’t have much breath left for conversation, but whenever they reached relatively level land, Jino began questioning Pietro about life back in Corcannon. They had a few acquaintances in common, so Pietro could supply updates on their lives, and he described some of the new buildings that had been constructed in the last three decades.

“But I wouldn’t say the changes have been sweeping in the past thirty years,” Pietro said. He sighed. “Nothing like the changes that may come.”

Brin stopped the group once, and briefly, for a refreshment break, then set off again without a word. Pietro was generally good at judging the passage of time, but between the heat and the unrelentingly monochromatic landscape, he was beginning to lose his bearings. The trip had seemed to last far longer than two hours by the time Brin slowed and came to a halt. He pointed up the steep mountainside to a narrow slit in the sleek black wall.

“Here we are,” said Jino.

Stollo glanced back at Pietro, grinning. “Looks like a bit of a climb.”

Jino pushed ahead of the others and set his foot carefully on the narrowest imaginable path. “It’s not so bad,” he said. “Just go slowly.”

Brin said something that Pietro guessed meantWe’ll wait here, because the two islanders seated themselves on boulders that didn’t look quite as spiky as some of the others. Pietro took a deep breath and followed after Jino. Over his shoulder, he said to Stollo, “You can catch me if I fall.”

“You won’t fall,” Stollo said confidently and started after him.

They climbed cautiously up the slope, finding handholds when they could, suspending their breathing when loose stones rolled out from under their feet. But all three of them made it without mishap to the small door in the side of the mountain. From this vantage point, it was clear that it had once been a grander opening, perhaps three times as wide and fronted by a modest plaza of fired bricks laid in a complex pattern. But an avalanche had covered half of the door and most of the decorative entrance, and all that remained was a slim slot that could only be reached by clambering over a pile of stones.

“Be careful here,” Jino said. “Sometimes the rocks shift underfoot.”

Pietro glanced back expressively at Stollo, who grinned. But they had come this far. They would find the broken lever or die in a glorious tumble of black stone.

Jino picked his way up the layered rocks and disappeared inside. Pietro nerved himself before reaching for the first handhold and pulling himself up. He made sure he had both feet firmly on one stone before attempting to climb to the next one. Once or twice, his landing spot shuddered beneath his feet, but everything stayed solidly in place.

Jino helped him down the other side into a space that was blessedly cool and dark. Pietro dropped his bag of provisions next to Jino’s and let his vision adjust while they waited for Stollo. Like the formal entrance, the interior was a mix of ancient artefacts and obliterating rockfall. In the faint sunlight that drifted through the narrow opening, Pietro could make out mosaics and murals climbing up the walls, carved pillars lying on the floor. Everything was obscured by layers of dust and ash.

“Well, this is a treasure trove,” he said in a hushed voice. “What could we learn about our past if we had a few days to spend here?”

“I wonder sometimes if Cossi’s people would help me excavate the place,” Jino said. “There are three corridors that branch off this first room. Two are completely blocked by debris, and I always want to know—what lies beyond those impasses? Was this a temple? Would we find rooms where the priests lived? Archives with their writings? Would anything be salvageable? I would love to know.”

Stollo’s form briefly blocked the sunlight, then he dropped easily to his feet on the other side. “Incredible,” he said, gazing around.

Jino gestured toward the back of the cave, which disappeared into darkness. “Brin is a patient enough man, but I don’t think he’s disposed to linger. Let’s find what we came for before we waste time exploring.”

Pietro felt a stab of dismay. “It’s too dark to see anything.”

Jino began rummaging in his bag. “Perhaps Cossi thought to tell her people to supply us with candles.”

Stollo reached into his pocket to pull out a short stick. “I’ve got a chemlight,” he said. “I usually carry one.”

“A what?” Jino said.

Pietro was grinning. “I forgot to mention that particular innovation when I was recounting stories of the city,” he said. “Very useful.”

Stollo scraped the stick along a rough wall, and an orb of milky illumination sprang up along one end. “This direction?” he asked, and led the way forward.

They found themselves in a narrow corridor whose walls were mostly intact, though bare of any decoration. At intervals, they came across small glasslike disks that had been set into the walls—lights, Pietro guessed, that had once been animated by the same kind of engine that powered Corcannon. In the near-dark, it was difficult to judge distance, but they had gone unnervingly deep into the mountainside before the corridor abruptly opened up into a small cavern that seemed to be about twenty feet in each dimension.

Well, “opened up” was the wrong phrase, Pietro thought, as the three of them crowded at the entrance and looked around by Stollo’s handy light. Pietro could still make out the walls and part of the ceiling, but the chamber was about half filled with a clutter of stones, ranging from pebbles to boulders, that appeared to have gushed down from some shaft overhead and buried a central feature of the room. Time and inevitable settling had rearranged the rockfall so that it made a waist-high mound around that middle point, and it was possible to make out only glimpses of what lay beneath the rubble.

A gleam of metal, twisted and blackened. Maybe a basin of gold, designed to catch a body’s worth of blood. A stone pedestal, no doubt with a hollow core that fed to some collection point thousands of feet below the surface.

Pietro cast his gaze upward, seeking to pierce the shadows overhead, but he could not see to the top of the open shaft. “A little different from the arrangement in the city,” he murmured. “Instead of walls closing in, there must have been—what? A pile or column overhead? And when the mechanism was oiled, the pile remained suspended. And when it was not—the rock came crashing down.”

“That’s how I interpret it,” Jino said.

“This does not give me any clues,” Pietro said, “on how to stop it from happening again.”

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