Maelstrom (10 page)

The immense chamber was filled with smoke and flames. Flames licked up the brick walls, in-curving like the walls of a kiln, which rose fifteen meters to a wide circular balcony. Billows of black smoke poured upward, past a ring of fire on the balcony rim; at the apex of the higher dome above, a chimney sucked out the smoke and kept the flames leaping.

Blake stood watching the scene for a long minute. Then the gates of Tartarus screeched again, and began to close. Hastily, he stepped through them.

The heat was withering. From the smell, Blake judged that the flames were fed by highly volatile kerosene. The hot wind at his back constantly fed oxygen to the bottom of the furnace, and most of the heat was carried to the upper chamber and out the chimney, but he knew he could not stay here for long before dropping of heatstroke.

There was no path around the walls, which were a wall of fire right down to the edge of the fiery lake. There was no bridge across the lake. There were only the six wide brick steps before him, leading down into the floating flames.

The plastic fabric of Blake’s clothes was already softening in the heat. He stripped them off. Naked, he walked down the first two steps. The heat was punishing. He knew he could go no further. He backed away, ran forward and jumped–

–as high and as far as he could, wrapping his arms around his pulled-up knees, ducking his head. He cannonballed into the flames.

The pool was deep, and the splash scattered the flames; immediately he swam up for air. Using the technique that, of necessity, had long been practiced by wrecked sailors and ditched fliers, he swam through the fire– taking a breath, diving, swimming underwater, pushing the floating, burning liquid aside as he came up for air. He knew he could get across the fiery lake. He could only assume there was a way out.

The light below the surface was a weird dance of rippling orange shadows, barely bright enough to see the underwater brick walls. Blake made a circuit of the pool as quickly as he could without exhausting himself and found himself back where he’d entered; he hadn’t seen a hint of an opening in the wall, not even a drain.

There remained the island in the center, the pedestal of the fire god’s statue. Blake moved toward it, his body writhing in the flickering submarine light, gasping harder for air each time he resurfaced. As he neared the towering statue, he felt a light current pushing outward at the surface and a stronger current running toward it a meter below. He surfaced again. Pipes at the rim of the brick pedestal poured fresh water into the lake, creating a zone of clear water. He could wait here and catch his breath, although burning drops of fuel fell from the statue’s flame-spurting mouth, singeing his hair and blistering his shoulders.

He gulped and dove. A meter down, there were grilled drains in the brickwork, wide enough to admit his shoulders. He tried two of them, but they were set fast in mortar. The third gate swung open at his touch.

 

He surfaced behind the statue, avoiding the rain of fire. He breathed long and deep, considering what he had to do.

At the very best, it was a ten-meter swim under water before he reached the edge of the pool. He wondered if the drain was big enough to swim in for the entire distance, if it was blocked or barred inside. If he swam all the way to the edge and ran into a barrier there, would he have enough strength to return?

Blake took a long look around the fiery furnace, soot-blackened with the smoke of centuries. His gaze traveled up past the bronze statue, up to the cathedral-high dome filled with oily smoke and flame. All this had
not
been built to drown would-be initiates miserably, invisibly. If he was to be sacrificed, some more spectacular end must await him. With that line of reasoning, he made up his mind.

When his head was ringing from hyperventilation and his lungs were filled with air, he dived.

The current pulled him into the drain. He bashed his head painfully where the drain took a sharp turn and leveled off. He grabbed at the sides but found them slick with algae. He couldn’t even use his arms, for the brick tube was too narrow. He thrashed his feet like fins and kept his hands to the sides, streamlining himself as much as he could. In moments he was in utter blackness. His lungs were aching unbearably, but he knew he had long minutes remaining before he really began to get short of oxygen. He put his fingers out to trail along the wall of the drain, hoping to measure his progress.

To his surprise, he was darting through the drain like a dolphin through the sea. He had been unable to feel the swift current that sucked him forward, faster and faster. The water became cooler–

 

–then cold, then painfully cold, almost freezing. His ankles and wrists throbbed with pain. His teeth were so many frozen stones in his aching jaw.

 

His shoulder slammed into the wall as he encountered another turn in the pipe. A rush of bubbles overtook him. Blue light speared down from above.

 

He was expelled into air, only to fall flailing back into cold water.

He was in another pool, this one icy blue. Slick irregular blue-white walls surrounded him, their tops lost in bright clouds of thickly condensing vapor. The opening of the fountain that had spewed him out was in the form of a great bronze jar, held in the arms of another colossal statue, a naiad carved of marble–enough bigger than the god of fire to drench him thoroughly:
La Source.

Blake was so cold he could not keep still. He sidestroked swiftly around the base of the statue, examining his new prison. There seemed no way out except, possibly, to climb the walls, and the tops of those were invisible. But he knew he must get out of the water before the last of his strength ebbed away.

He swam to the side and hauled himself out. The walls were wet concrete, shaped and painted to look like the face of a glacier, hardly warmer than the ice they mimicked. But there were ledges and crevices in the concrete, enough to let him climb into the clouds.

As he started up the cliff he heard a trembling groan and the sound of great engines rhythmically throbbing, slowly at first, then with an increasing tempo. The sound was reminiscent of something, but Blake couldn’t place it. Then he realized that the sound was of an old-fashioned steam engine. The technology of this chamber, the chamber of waters, was a century more advanced than that of the chamber of fire.

At the same moment he recalled that the steam engines were first used as pumps to suck water out of flooded mines . . .

A rivulet of water ran down the wall beside him. He was perhaps three meters above the surface of the icy pool. He looked up and got a splat of cold water in the face. As he was clinging to the wall with one hand and wiping the water from his eyes with the other, he was drenched with bucketsful of water falling from above. He looked up again, in time to see torrents of white water erupt from the tops of the walls on every side. He barely had time to thrust his fist into a crack and twist it there, to jam himself fast. Then he was deluged. The water was pounding his shoulders, pounding the top of his head, thundering in his brain. All his weight was dependant on his right arm and fist and the bare toes of his left foot, which clung to a tiny ledge. He had to get out of the waterfall or give up and fall back into the pool. Bracing himself against the tons of water that descended every minute, he blindly felt for another handhold. His hand found a rough nob of cement, his toes reached another ledge. Carefully he transferred his weight sideways. The falling water was dense and blinding. He repeated the cautious process, moving sideways another half a meter. The sting of falling water on his head and shoulders seemed to lessen.

Another slow lateral move and he was in a dancing mist of water droplets, no longer absorbing the full force of the spillway. For the next few meters above him a vertical ridge of cement like a ship’s prow cut through the cascading water on either side. He glanced around and saw tumbling water everywhere, streaming out of the glowing clouds under the roof. The pool was a seething, freezing caldron below.

Oddly, its level remained constant. Blake felt a shiver of respect for the designers of the ingenious hydraulic system of this labyrinth, which functioned as well as it had centuries ago when it was built.

He continued his climb, moving slowly from one finger-and toehold to the next. More than once he clung precariously to the wet cement after his foot slipped or his hooked fingers threatened to lose their grip. After half an hour’s shivering climb he was twenty meters above the pool; even the huge central statue seemed tiny and far away.

He moved into the bright swirling mist. White light was everywhere, filtering through the blowing fog, but he could no longer see farther than the end of his arm. Fumbling in the mist, he came to the last of the bare concrete; the ridge he had been climbing tapered to a knife edge. Above it a smooth sheet of water spilled over the wall’s unseen rim.

He felt for the wall under the falling water. His right hand found a crevice; he wedged his hand in and flexed his arm. His left hand found a knob; he lifted himself. The water poured thickly over his arms and shoulders. He was almost swimming vertically, an oversized salmon headed upstream without a running start. His feet found tiny ledges, enough to lift him to another handhold, and one more–

Then, suddenly, he was over the lip of the falls, lying flat. The force of the water threatened to roll him back, but he felt along the bottom for hand-and footholds and pulled himself along as the water sheeted over his face and forced itself into his eyes and nostrils.

The gasp and shudder of the great pumps ceased. Water drained swiftly away. He was lying in a channel of fitted stone, smoothly eroded by centuries of these artificial flash floods. The channel ran the circumference of the cylindrical room, under a corbeled ceiling slotted with great skylights which infused the mist with light. Somewhere above, the sun was shining.

He heard a rising whistle, and a lower, breathier, fluty sound. The wind came up. The mist stirred and formed into tendrils in which for a moment he fancied he saw human shapes. He stood. On both sides of the curving wall were enormous open drain spouts from which the floods had poured. Now they were exhausting warm air. The moving air was balmy after the freezing water; soon Blake’s skin was dry, although his hair still dripped with moisture. The last of the bright mist cleared away.

The bare vertical ridge had debouched him near the only exit from the chamber of waters, an arched tunnel big enough to stand in. He climbed into the tunnel and clambered up its short, steep slope. The going was easy for a few meters. Then it ended abruptly.
He had entered the chamber of air.

He had been inside the clouds, and now he was above them. Unlike the other rooms, this “room” had no walls except those immediately beside him, glassy smooth, curving away beneath him into invisibility like the interior of a giant bell jar. A few meters down, the cloudscape unfurled, moving layers of cirrus and altocumulus stretching everywhere to a far horizon. In the east, if it were the true east, the sun had risen clear and was sending rosy streams of light to illuminate dark towers of cumulo-nimbus.

The illusion of limitless space was perfect; the technology of this chamber had leapfrogged to the early 21st century.

Lightning forked through a far-off thunderhead. Distant thunder pealed and crumpled. The wind freshened. Blake stood naked on the threshold of a door into the storm, a diver on the highest of platforms. He wondered what was expected of him now. Unless some flying machine or great bird were to rise through the clouds, he could think of no way forward.

The wind continued to rise. It whipped at his hair and pushed him staggering away from the edge. He got to his hands and knees and crept back, pushing his face into the wind. It was a hard, steady wind, as steady as the blast from a giant wind tunnel.

Once, when Blake was little and a late summer hurricane had whipped New York, he had been taken outside on the top of the skyscraper tower to feel eighty-knot winds from the safety of his father’s arms. This wind was stronger.

The cloudscape continued to move serenely and majestically; its projected clouds were insubstantial creatures of light, unaffected by the fast-rising column of material air. The words of the invocation echoed in Blake’s mind–“. . . if he can master the fear of death, he will leave the Earth’s bosom . . .”

Then he knew what he was supposed to do.

 

He crept back from the edge. Once more he tried to reassure himself of his hosts’ sanity, or at least practicality. He raised his arms and ran forward. He dived away from the ledge as far as he could.

Skydiving was not one of his hobbies. He found himself tumbling and struggling, vainly beating the air with his arms and legs. The wind roared in his ears and the clouds rose past him at a terrifying rate–he fell through a layer of cirrus, plummeted haphazardly toward hazy stratus, saw himself drifting toward the skirts of a mushroom-capped thunderhead.

His athletic instincts came to his rescue, and he got his arms out and curved, his legs straightened and parted. Suddenly he found himself gliding like that great bird he had hoped would come to save him, although the roar of the wind reminded him that his speed through the vertical wind was still well over a hundred knots.

He scanned the clouds below. They were rising more slowly now–but it was all illusory. How far had he really fallen? How far down was the floor? What was down there, beside the whirling blades of a giant turbine?

A great canyon of cloud opened beneath him, its walls black with rain. As he gently descended into the airy canyon, he saw what he thought were birds spiraling on updrafts. But the shapes were not birdlike. With a start he realized they were human. They soared toward him, arms outstretched.

These were the initiates who had gone before him. They climbed and dived past him, grinning gleefully. He recognized Bruni, Lokele, Salome, Leo, others, swooping and circling and tumbling naked in the air.

Blake caught himself smiling back. This wasn’t so bad after all: in fact it was fun. He steered himself toward Lokele, who was climbing fast. At the last moment Blake veered and make a grab for Lokele’s outstretched hand, but he miscalculated–and flew right through the man’s body. Lokele kept grinning.