Siren and Annabella made slow
progress to begin with. It was partly
because of the dim lighting and the rough nature of the slabs of rock which
made up the flooring. Siren doubted the
dungeons could be all that old, given the generally new appearance of the city
above it, but if it was a recent construction then it must have been very
shoddily put together. Later other
details would make her doubt that theory even more.
The main reason things were
slow-going to begin with, however, was Annabella. For all that she had agreed to come along, she seemed terribly
reluctant to move and any time there was a drip of water, or Siren stubbed a
toe on a jutting-out piece of rock and bit back a curse, the girl would shriek
and run back several metres before falling to the floor and cowering once
more. It was frustrating, but Siren
realised that she had to be patient. It
might have been better to go on without the girl, but Siren wasn't sure she
could live with herself if she did that.
Besides, it might have been imprudent, all things considered.
Each time Annabella ran away
Siren would have to spend a few minutes calming her down and setting her back
on her feet so they might make a little more progress and, gradually, as they advanced
along the wide dungeon passage, the girl started to show some signs of
confidence. She held tight onto Siren's
hand and stared into the darkness like it was about to devour her, but she
managed to put one foot in front of the other more often than not and,
eventually, when there was a sudden noise, she simply froze and no further
ground was lost.
After maybe an hour like this
they reached a sort of crossroads. They
spotted it quite a while beforehand as there was a little more light at the
crossroads than there had been anywhere else.
The spot lamps had faded away some time ago, but something like
bioluminescent corals appeared to cluster around the portholes, adding an eerie
glow all their own and at the crossroads they all but covered a thick glass
dome braced with brass which loomed overhead.
The light revealed eight
passages, including the one which they had just traversed, heading off at
slightly odd angles so that despite the even number they appeared irregular and
unsettling. Siren was able to see the
stone of the walls here more clearly as well and noticed that they looked like
they had been carved once, like the walls in Enoch had been, only here the
carving had faded until it was impossible to tell what it might once have been.
So not very recent after all,
she wondered.
"Which way, do you
think?" Siren asked Annabella as they turned around and looked at each of
the passageways in turn, remembering to keep in mind which one they had just
followed.
"That one!" Annabella
said at last, pointing to one which appeared better lit than most of the others
and proceeded to the left and away from the passage they had just exited.
"Good choice," Siren
said, "we'll take that one, then."
At first the new passage was
just the same as the old one, but soon it began to have doorways to either
side, heavy, stone lintels that seemed to emanate their very age, leading into
a blackness so complete Siren found herself unwilling to peer into it for too
long. It felt like anything could be
peering back out at her, unseen, unheard, unknown.
As the number of doors
increased, so too did the complexity of the layout they were walking
through. The passage veered left and
right around rooms which seemed to jut out from the wall and sometimes the
ceiling, regularly peppered with coral-encrusted portholes and domes to light
their way, would rise two, three or even four times the height it had been to
start with. In these sections the
'rooms' they passed seemed to have multiple storeys, with empty windows at each
level. By the time the passage widened
into what was undeniably a square, Siren knew the truth of where they were.
This is a city, she told
herself when she could deny the evidence no longer, they built Fracture on
another city, one considerably more ancient.
She looked at the once-carved walls and wondered, could it even be
more ancient than Enoch, or did the Fallen somehow preserve their city in the
way this place's inhabitants could no longer.
The question of who those
inhabitants were and what had become of them occupied Siren's mind for the next
portion of their journey, as they travelled through squares and passages (which
she now thought of as streets), crossroads, flyovers and underpasses of
increasing complexity, all lit by the same rippling, coralline glow.
"Do you know anything
about this place, Annabella," she asked once when she and the girl had
stopped for a rest in what she assumed was some kind of park, a large chamber
well-lit from above and filled with strange, plant like organisms whose stems were like rock and whose
fibre-like tendril rippled in the constant cool breeze which pervaded the
tunnel city.
"My parents mentioned a
city beneath Fracture," she said after a moment's thought, "but they
didn't say much about it. I think it might
have been the reason Fracture was built in the first place, but I don't think
they liked it very much. I think it's
why they wanted to leave."
Siren glanced around at the
cold, dark stone, the empty doorways leading into brooding blackness, the ghosts
of carving on every surface and could only nod. "I don't blame them for that," she said.
They resumed walking again not
long after that, making their way through the city as quickly as they could,
but Siren was beginning to wonder a number of things she wished she could keep
out of her mind. What had happened to
all the other prisoners Annabella had spoken of? They had seen no sign of them.
Equally there had been no sign of the monsters the girl had expected
either, and for some reason that worried Siren more than reassured her. Finally she wondered if there was any point
to their travels through this vast, passage-ridden metropolis beneath the
sea. Was there any hope of a way out
amidst such ancient, forgotten stone, and, if there was, what were the chances
of it leading anywhere but the blackest depths of a breathless ocean?
And then, as they were passing
through a sort of plaza they came across a set of edifices which resembled
statue-encrusted fountains, albeit ones in which the statues had all worn down
to unrecognisable lumps and the water had dried up centuries ago. They stopped to stare at them and Siren
tried to trace the lumpy shapes to work out what they might once have looked
like. They weren't so worn down that no
details remained and that made her wonder if the shapes they represented,
stocky, barrel-like, with many limbs, were more accurate than she might have
first thought. Could whatever lived in
the city be so far from human?
But that was the moment when
all questions proved moot. She could
not have said what triggered it, what strange conditions had been met to bring
about such a terrible chain of events, but somewhere in the deepness of the
city something like a gong rang out, echoing around the passages, plazas,
streets and rooms to reach their ears in a reverberation of maddening
intensity. Both woman and girl were
forced to clutch their hands to their ears and even when the terrible sound
stopped they found their ears ringing to its echoes.
But those weren't the only
noises.
As the ringing died down a new
sound filled the tunnels. It started
like the moan of the wind, but it grew and multiplied, as if there were a
hundred winds, a thousand, and with the moaning came a slipping, sliding,
slithering sound, of flesh pulling itself and being dragged across stone. Siren froze as she listened, tensing for
whatever was about to come, then she motioned for Annabella to get behind her,
so that she was shielded by the pirate on one side and the misshapen fountain
on the other. Together they stared into
the little pools of darkness which lay in windows and doorways all around them
and they waited.
The first glimpse was not the
worst, but it was a shock nonetheless.
A thin, sickly pale, greenish tentacle slipped out of a nearby doorway,
latched onto the stone and began to pull.
It was quickly followed by another and another, all hauling
together. Annabella let out a shriek
and though she quickly muffled it with her hands Siren doubted it
mattered. The gong had woken them,
after all. What difference would a
little scream make now.
The tentacles pulled and pulled
until the body they dragged behind them began to emerge. The moment Siren saw it she knew that it was
the same shape that the statue on the fountain had once represented, a big,
blocky, almost barrel-like carapace in which no humanoid features could be
discerned, and from the chinks in that natural armour many, many tentacle limbs
licked the air and suckered to the floor, the walls, the ceiling, anywhere
within reach, to pull the monstrous shape along.
And it was moving more
quickly. The initial few tentacles had
seemed to strain with the weight of the beast's body, but now it was starting
to limber up and the tentacles moved more quickly, more easily, lifting that
chitinous barrel off the floor to sway, gently as it slid out of the building.
Siren's attention was fixed on
it for that moment, letting the horror of the thing sink in, but already she
could sense others coming out of other dark doorways, seeking the coralline
light, tasting the air with their limbs and moving, inexorably, towards the
centre of the square, towards their visitors.
But there was something
mindless about the creatures. They slid
towards her without any sign of comprehension, without any obvious
intelligence. Siren found it hard to
believe that it had been these things which had built this city, which had
carved the statues in their own likeness.
Remembering the state of the city as they has seen it passing through
and the way all its ancient carving had faded to notches on the walls, she
wondered if these hideous being had once been something greater, something
civilised, but if that was so they had lost that a long time ago. Now all they seemed to possess was a desire
to move, to investigate their visitors and there was something about the way
their tentacles twitched which told Siren something else. They were hungry.
"We need to run," she
said to Annabella, still hiding behind her, "now!"
She grabbed the girl's hand,
yanked her away from the statue and then ran in a tight semi-circle around the
fountain, narrowly avoiding the tentacles of a dozen of the creatures, until
she found a slight gap in the growing throng which she could sprint along.
Annabella was screaming as they
zipped through the closing gap, swirling tentacles all around them, the air
filled with the hungry moans of countless monsters. Siren wasn't sure they could actually make it across the plaza
without being captured, but there was no way she wasn't trying. She put all her energy into just running,
trying not to think about what would happen if they were caught, trying not to
think of whether there would be anyway out once they escape the creatures. She just ran and ran and ran.
And then they were free,
sliding out from the crowd into empty space, a tunnel looming ahead of them as
if offering them a way out. Siren
didn't know where it would lead, but without stopping she took it, still
holding tight to Annabella's hand, Annabella herself still screaming.
Ten minutes later and Siren no
longer knew how far they had run, wasn't sure even how far they had travelled
before that. She collapsed against a
wall, panting hard, as Annabella slipped from her fingers and fell to the
floor, also exhausted. Behind them she
could still hear the moans and slithers of the creatures, but they seemed far
away and impotent. Siren leaned against
the worn, cool stone and let her breath return to her in searing gasps and only
when she felt she could stand properly and breathe normally did she take a look
at where they were.
"This is some kind of
machine," she said aloud as the realisation came to her. They were standing in a little dead end
room, filled with stone weights on cables made of an unfamiliar metal, each
connected to a series of large stone blocks with glowing lines of bluish
symbols. It didn't look like a machine,
really, and yet Siren knew that it was.
A machine of the ancients, from before they became monsters.
"What do you think it
does?" Annabella asked as she picked herself up from the floor and warily
examined the room before them.
"I have no idea,"
Siren replied, approaching one of the stone consoles, "but I'll try
anything once."
She reached out towards the
glowing lights and, before her hand was within an inch of the glimmering stone
there was a soft humming sound, the light flared brighter and the stones all
around them began to vibrate and move.
Weights shifted, pulling their chains up, or down, whilst other stone
mechanisms caused blocks to slide from one corner of the room to another. The walls seemed to reconfigure themselves
and suddenly, where once there had only been stone, there was now a kind of
transparent panel looking out onto the ocean depths.
Behind them a door slid shut
and then a series of sounds like jets of steam being let off erupted from
beneath them. Through the panel outside
Siren could see that they were moving.
"This is a
submersible!" she cried out, "We're free!"
"Are you sure?" asked
Annabella, her voice trembling, "Are you really sure?"
But even she could see the
gradually lightening water through the viewing panel and, as Siren stepped back
to the console and moved her hands over the glowing lights, they were able to
turn and see the ruined city with its tunnels and domes and towers behind them,
glowing in forgotten, coralline majesty.
Beyond that lay the lights of Fracture and beyond that, Siren knew, was
the kelp forest. She made towards that
as she rose, knowing that the Ebon Crest wouldn't be too much farther
away.
She glanced back at Annabella
often as they made the lengthy journey back to the surface. The little girl looked so innocent, so lost
and so glad to be free that Siren smiled in spite of herself. There would be difficult moments to come,
she was sure, but just then, just for that instant, she felt she could be happy
for the girl.
When they eventually rose to
the surface alongside the Ebon Crest, her crew ready to shoot them from
the railings, Siren took Annabella by the hand and, with another pass over the
glowing lights, was able to open the door behind them once more and step out
onto a kind of deck. They waved at the
crew and a ladder was dropped down beside them so that they might climb up to
the deck of the pirate galleon.
Harker was waiting for them,
his expression one of pure relief, although he soon stared at Annabella with
puzzlement.
"You made it back!"
he began, "What on Shadow happened to you down there? We were nearly ready to give up."
"It's quite a long story,
Harker, but I'll tell you it soon enough, once I've had a chance to have a cup
of tea and something to eat."
"Of course, of
course. And who's the girl?"
"She's the most
interesting part of the story. I'd like
to introduce you to Annabella, Harker," the girl stepped forward, all
smiles and noble curtsies, "I found her at the bottom of the ocean,"
Siren continued, "and I have reason to believe that she's a spy for the
Noble Society of Hypostatick Philosophers."
Annabella let out a sudden gasp
of shock and made to run across the deck towards the ladder and the
submersible, but Siren grabbed her arm almost immediately.
"I think we better keep
her in the brig for a while, don't you?"
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