Fathom (43 page)

“You,” Mossfeaster told her. “You’d feel better if you’d sit on the grass. The dirt here is what burns you, you little fool. And you,” it said to Nia. “I am answering your question, too. The earth that this hill comprises, it is too dense and dead for me to navigate in my usual fashion. I move through it slowly, so it is faster for me to tread upon it like a beast. And you are better built for running than I am.”

Bernice lifted her chin, and Nia was almost certain that her face was mostly the right shape now. There was still that atrocious dent in her head, but it was filling out.

“It’s the dirt?” she asked.

“It’s the dirt. Stand up and move, before the natural toxin weakens you further. It is as I said: This is a safe place. This soil burns the water, makes it an acid. I don’t know the mechanics myself—the whys and hows of the mystery. I only know that it is so, and if you look down there, over by the swamp pit, you can see how she lingers. If she could come closer, I promise you—she
would.
”

From the relatively high vantage point of the Iron Mountain, Nia could see down across the plains for what felt like miles. And down in the mucky, wet depression where there were no trees and no brush, a soggy mass was struggling against the terrain and losing.

“She can’t come here?” Bernice asked again. She sounded small and cornered, and she still hadn’t moved.

“No, she can’t. I’m quite certain of that.”

“Quite certain?”

“Get up, unless you want to hurt yourself further. I’m tired of helping you if you’re just going to argue with me. Do as I say, or don’t.”

“I can stay here,” she said. There was a faraway note to her declaration that told Nia she hadn’t been listening.

“As you like,” Mossfeaster replied without looking at her. “We should go. You have the call?”

Nia held up the scarf. “I’ve got it. Now what do we do with it?”

“We take it up there.” It pointed up at the tower, to some very high point at the top of it. “You’ll take the call, and affix it however you can inside the largest bell. You’ll see it right away. It’s big enough to hide you and me, and possibly her, too. Tie it up inside there, with the scarf or with anything else at hand. Secure it, and leave it. And do it quickly, because we’ll need to be out before the bells are rung, and we must not be seen. The Singing Tower’s song will undo me altogether if I listen from inside.”

Nia couldn’t stop staring up. “That’s amazing. The whole thing is amazing. What’s it made of?”

“Marble and coquina. They are elements that give me strength, even as the earth around it drains that strength away. They call it the Singing Tower, and soon you will know why.” They reached the gate’s entrance, and although it was unlocked, Mossfeaster urged Nia to open it. “I don’t care for its texture,” it told her. “You are designed to resist such things better than me, and better than your cousin, who is most vulnerable of all as a child of the water witch. I chose this place to keep her out, and to discourage her minions. I did not intend to bring one so close.”

“But I
want
to come close. I
want
to come inside, if she can’t get me here.”

“I know,” it said. “But you won’t like it very much.”

“Don’t care,” she mumbled.

Nia reached for the latch. She stood under the sharp-ended frowns of the guardian creatures that lined its spiked top, and she lifted the lever. She pushed the great gate with her shoulder and it swung inward, creaking on hinges that almost stuck.

The gate opened onto a bridge with a marbled surface and railings that had been decorated with iron swirls and flourishes. The water beneath it barely moved; it was dark green with cadaverous currents that were flushed with red. A pair of snow-white swans, each the size of a German shepherd, swam out from under the bridge and paddled away at an insolent, leisurely pace.

The nearer she drew to the tower, the bigger it looked. When the gate clacked closed behind them, she felt a peculiar sense of privacy and quiet, even though the fence was fashioned from latticed iron and anyone could peer through it. But the trees were closer together inside the confines of the moat, and the grass was taller and the flowers grew more thickly in the garden plots between the pathways. Stepping stones were laid out in paths up to the doors, and everyone in the party made a point of using them. Even Nia, who supposedly had some resistance to the rust, could feel it trying to repel her, so she lifted her feet away where she could.

“Is that—?” Nia pointed down at a flat, polished marker on the ground.

“That’s where Edward is buried. He wanted to stay here, so they humored him. The
carillonneur
finds it morbid, and does his best to avoid it.”

“The car . . . The what?”

“The man who plays the bells.”

And as they all gazed up at the crown-shaped peak, it began to slowly wobble.

Subterranean Advent

N
ot only the tower but the hill itself was quivering, bumping softly against its foundation. The swans in the moat honked loudly and leaned themselves against the breeze, charging with their umbrella-sized wings until the sky could hold them and lift them up, away from the sliding, splashing water that bubbled around the tower’s base.

“We’re too late?” Nia asked, because it had to be a question. “Are we too late? But Arahab doesn’t have the call!” She squeezed the shell in its scarf cocoon. “She hasn’t gotten to use it!”

“She may not need it here. He is so very close.” Mossfeaster’s voice, always unearthly, now held a timbre of astonishment or fear
that made the creature sound almost human. “I do not think she knows how very close he is.”

No,
Nia thought.
It’s not surprised or terrified. It’s in awe.

“What do you mean
he’s close
?” Bernice shrieked. “You brought us here—you brought the call here—to deliver it in person?
You’re
the one who wants to destroy the world, aren’t you? You’re the one—”

She would’ve gone on, but Mossfeaster cuffed her with the back of its hand, and she tumbled against the iron fence. She huddled there, legs drawn up beneath herself and shaking, hands squeezing at her skinny arms.

“We’re
not
too late for anything,” Mossfeaster said, answering Nia and ignoring Bernice. “Arahab has not succeded yet, nor has she failed. The Old Father shifts in his slumber, but he may yet be soothed. Come, to the tower. Get her or leave her, I do not care—just do it quickly.”

Bernice whimpered and gathered herself as if she meant to run. She was covered in the dusty cherry-colored earth, and a rash was forming where it met her skin. It bubbled and sizzled, but Bernice behaved as if she didn’t notice it. She looked nothing at all like her usual self, nothing like a human being, except for the angry air of frailty that covered her like a shroud.

Nia crouched beside Bernice, balancing herself on feet that struggled to hold still even as the ground beneath them wiggled and rumbled. “We have to cross the water, but you don’t have to touch it. I see a bridge.”

“A bridge?”

“Come on.” Nia took Bernice by the less-damaged hand and locked her fingers around Bernice’s wrist.

In the distance, the tower had looked tall and thin, more like a big pole than like a structure. But up close, it was wide around the
base—as big around as her grandmother’s farmhouse had been. It jabbed straight up into the sky for hundreds of pink, blue, and ivory feet.

And the whole thing, every inch of it, was wavering, shimmering almost, against the clouds behind it. Flecks of stone and chips of glass drifted down and shattered on stone walkways or thudded into the glass.

Under all the rumbling chaos fuzzed a strange hum, so low that it was almost more of a growl. It made the air quiver, like heat over a dark road; and it made Nia’s teeth itch.

Mossfeaster waited for her, then waited beside her at the door in the tower’s base. He looked no better than she felt: awash with the deep, melodious growl from up above. The creature’s skin was vibrating, shifting and shattering in clods and lumps.

“What
is
that?” she asked.

“The bells.” Its voice shook even harder than its bones. “If he moves anymore, if he even blinks, they’ll fall. The whole thing will fall. We have to hurry.”

“He
who
? The bell player?”

“Leviathan,” Mossfeaster said. “Nia, pull the ring. Open the door.”

She pulled the ring. The door swung outward, and inside the world was warm, dusty, and cut with long shadows and thick beams of light. Books were piled high against corners and along shelves, and a beautiful mahogany desk was littered with papers, pens, and bottles of ink. The floor gleamed as if it were swept and polished daily, but onto it clattered the looser things from the tops of cabinets and the edges of shelves.

“Edward’s study,” Mossfeaster explained. “Close the door, Nia. The bell player is coming, and we have many stairs to climb.”

“Stairs?” Bernice was whining, but at least it was a soft kind of whining, a token, weak objection. “This place is awful.”

“Nia, go first. You have the call. As fast as you can, run. Or it will all come down, every inch of it.”

The stairs were as smooth and bright as the floors, and they spiraled in an angular way out of the study and up. They shook back and forth beneath Nia’s feet as she tried to scale them.

There were platforms and entrances to new levels on the second-and third-story landings, but Mossfeaster urged them past them. Nia held the rail out of habit and planted one foot in front of the other in a mind-numbing rhythm that made her teeth bang together.

“Mossfeaster?”

“Go on,” it told her. “I must go another way.”

“Another—
what
?”

“Keep
going.
Only two more flights to the bells. I warn you—” Mossfeaster wagged a fingerless hand at Bernice. “—you will not care for it at all. You should stay here.”

“And let the place come down on top of me?”

“The farther from the bells, the better,” it told Bernice. “Better beneath the rubble than in the midst of it.”

Nia shook her head as she ran, and she didn’t look back. “It can’t fall. You said this was a safe place!” But the tower swayed like it was drunk, and she staggered along the stairs, moving up too slowly for her own satisfaction.

“There’s something about the metal in the bells,” Mossfeaster mumbled, as if that were a sufficient explanation. It shouldn’t have been a mumble at all, but the monster’s structure was shifting and bubbling, keeping time with the giant purring roar that was singing up from overhead. “This is what you were made for, Nia. You are the little stone troll who handles the metal, for I cannot do it very well. You are a new creature, and stronger than the rest.” It looked
pointedly at Bernice. “Now hang the call and set it aside; its unrestrained presence makes our predicament all the worse.”

With Nia speeding ahead, the others reached the next door and Mossfeaster pushed it open with the back of its hand. It guided Bernice inside and to the farthest corner of the octagonal room, where she folded up like a chair and leaned her head back against the wall.

Nia was barely in front of them, and she hesitated when a massive wedge of rock crashed on a stair above her.

She charged back into the room with her cousin and the creature and held on to the doorframe, as if it were any steadier than the floor.

Inside the room, there was a clavier bigger than any piano Nia had ever seen. It was as if someone had turned a church organ inside out, displaying levers and cables, pedals and keys the size of soda bottles. It could have been the knobby, organic offspring of a harpsichord and trapeze.

“There’s no time for this,” Mossfeaster told Nia. “She may not survive the song, but she’ll stay until you return. So make your mission fast, child.”

“All right, I’m going!” Nia squinted up the spiral, which was growing dark with debris and dust. There weren’t enough windows to compensate. She bashed her leg against a freshly fallen stone and stumbled up it, over it, back onto the stairs.

The call was hanging from the sturdy silk scarf, and it was dangling in a swaying circle, swiveling midair like a pendulum suspended from a gypsy’s fingertips. It didn’t want to be there either.

This would have to be fast.

Nia’s legs weren’t tired, so she wasn’t certain what slowed her, but the final flight of steps passed more onerously than the first six. The gravity was stronger there; the higher she went, the harder it
pressed against her, and she wondered how immune to the metal she could really be if it gave her this much trouble.

But at the top of the last stair there was a wooden platform that opened into a cluttered room that was packed with the most astonishing assortment of bells she’d ever seen. She’d never even heard of such a place, or such an instrument—since that’s what the bells combined to form.

From the ceiling to the floor, they were stacked and strung across beams, cords, and cables for support. The smallest bell Nia saw could have fit in her palm; the largest, at the far end, was so immense that she could have ridden a horse beneath it and it would have blotted out the sun. It was dark there, and bright, too—but only in short slivers and in cut, crossed lines where the grates around the bells were open for the sake of ventilation and acoustics.