She threw herself down the last of them. She had no other choice: the steps were slipping and rattling underneath her, breaking in places and bucking between the narrow walls of the corridor.
Nia landed hands-first against the huge doors. The weight of her body slapped them out into the garden. Outside, the world was still crumbling and quaking, but at least there was no more roof above her that threatened to fall.
The orange trees and pine trees were flinging fruit and boughs to the ground. Shrubs were leaning and tipping into ragged red cracks that opened between the footpaths. If the quake continued, the garden would sink. When Nia looked out across the plains below the Iron Mountain, she thought that maybe the whole earth would topple behind it.
As far as the eye could see, the world was moving, and up beyond sight, the bells were playing.
Above, some large piece of the Singing Tower slipped, scraped, and loosed itself into the air, whistling as it descended. Nia moved in time to dodge it. She ducked a second and third piece, too; but the fourth came terribly close. Then a fifth plummeted from someplace high, and cast a shadow as it dropped.
From the corner of her eye, Nia saw the dark patch grow larger as the slab of marble fell. Before she had time to think, her legs shoved underneath her and she escaped in the only free direction—away from the tower, across the gardens.
And into the moat.
She splashed through a film of algae and rust scum, into the filthy trough where the water burned everything it touched. There was no salt and no prickling, briny bite; there was only the taste of ashy fire and brittle chains in her mouth when she did not close it fast enough.
Nia flailed. Her entire body—her skin, and the angry muscles beneath it—objected to the water. It was thick and smelled like a volcano; it was dark, like the color of pollen in oil. There was no tide to tug it, and no current to draw it anywhere at all. It simply surrounded the tower in a flat ribbon of grease.
The water in the moat was strangely heavy and difficult to swim through. Nia kicked against it, struggling to find the surface. She’d fallen in fast, and she was heavy—hadn’t Sam said so?—so much heavier than she looked. Panic clutched at her throat. What if her new form couldn’t make it to the surface? Would she be forced to sink to the bottom and crawl or climb up the sticky bloodred dirt into the light?
She beat her arms and jabbed her legs scissor-style, which slowed her descent, but didn’t cause her to rise much.
Her eyes fluttered open, and for an instant she could see nothing but the dark, mucky shadows. The liquid seared her eyes worse than salt ever did, but she fought it like she was fighting everything else. She fought the urge to breathe because she knew, deep down, that she didn’t really need to. She fought the urge to scream because she knew it would only hurt; she fought the terrible branding smolder of the tainted water against her flesh. And she fought against the determined tug of gravity as it sucked her down deeper.
It was a test of everything, seeing how much she could stand and how far she could sink.
A pinprick of light sparkled somewhere, presumably the light of the sun glittering on the moat’s surface. But when Nia tried to chase it, she found it easier than she expected, because her goal was not actually on the surface. It was a deeper thing, shining below. There was no need to swim, only to quit fighting and drop.
And she found she could stand it.
She could stand the ferocious burn of the scalding water between her fingers, under her eyelids. It sizzled against her softer spots like the dirt had scalded Bernice’s skin, but Nia could stand it. She was made of harder stuff, made to survive, and endure.
The pinprick of white flickered and split. It twisted and fluttered in a huge, slow spasm like a dreamer shuddering against some nightmare.
When she turned her head and peered through the heavy coils of her own hair, she could see a wall, somewhere down beneath her—somewhere down along the column of rock and earth that lifted the tower up through the moat.
Only it wasn’t a moat. It couldn’t be. It was a lake of rancid water, hidden mostly underground—and the tower was perched atop its only island. From underneath it looked so fragile and unlikely, this arrangement of water and stone.
And whatever was beneath it . . .
As her eyes adjusted, Nia watched the writhing sparkles of light, color, or simple reflection bounce slowly in a wave; and it was only when she thought of it like a wave that she realized that what she was looking at through the water was not a wall, or a floor, or the bottommost segment of the world. She was watching something alive as it shifted slowly and with a ponderous rhythm.
She scanned the underwater lake, looking for the edges of the monstrous undulating thing, but she couldn’t find them. At no point did it seem to end or fade, and at no point was there any indication of limbs or gills, or eyes, or teeth. It was smooth and vast, and if she judged its position correctly, some part of it was pressed up against the underside of the column that propped the tower up into the sky on the earth above.
It chilled her, looking at that skinny column. It didn’t look any wider around than a drinking straw or a pencil, not from where Nia drifted. She knew it wasn’t right, but the lake was too huge and the moat’s slim margins were too deceptive. It must have been hollow, all of it: the Iron Mountain, the groves around it, the sand that stretched for miles on every side.
And what was that thing? Was it alive?
One sturdy flutter—a gesture that had all the gentleness of two ships colliding—flapped underneath the tower’s support, and the water around Nia reverberated hard, pushing her back and tumbling her topsy-turvy away from the bottom, if there was ever a bottom that she’d been sinking toward.
She struggled to right herself, but the waves were coming faster, and she was too unbalanced to find which way was up. And besides, she wanted to see.
She could stand it.
She craned her neck and pushed the water aside, trying to shove herself closer despite the pain of the terrible water.
Beneath her, as she was pushed away and back, a fissure as long as a river split open, and something bright but black spread underneath it. The split widened, then slammed itself back into a seamless line—and the force of the motion slammed a tidal wave up, and out, and Nia could hold her place no longer. The force of the water rejected her, throwing her up and out, facefirst into the sunlight and the air. As she hung there, in the handful of seconds before she fell back down to earth and all but forgot the sinister cracking, splitting, and severing of the world underneath, she imagined an eye the size of a continent opening in the midst of an unhappy dream. And as she dropped back to earth she thought,
This is how it always goes. Easier to fall than to climb.
Isn’t it?
She slammed against the ground and rolled, and the world was rolling with her; and somewhere up above, she could hear the sound of bells ringing hard—banging out a determined tune despite the quake.
The bell player had made it to his song.
He beat down the giant leverlike keys, coercing the enormous instrument into a melody that barely quivered above the violence of the background.
Down below, Nia scrambled to her feet and tried to hold that stance. She lifted her hands up to her mouth and yelled between them, “Mossfeaster!” But the creature didn’t answer, and she couldn’t see any sign of its hulking, decomposing shape.
Then, from behind her, something soft but insistent said, “Shhh!”
Nia froze. She stood there dripping and tender, her skin blistering but healing. She was still barefoot, and her hair was wetly fetid. She imagined she must look otherworldly, and ghastly, and she was horrified to think that someone might be watching her.
She turned slowly to look over her shoulder.
With her back braced against the wheel of a fat black sedan, a little girl held a finger up to her lips. “You have to shush,” she said in half a whisper. “You have to let the dirt man sing.”
??
?The dirt man?” Nia asked, though she didn’t need to. She only needed something to say.
The child nodded, and her hair bobbed in a rabbit-brown halo. “Sit down. It’ll be fine. The rocking will stop in a minute,” she said. Nia could hear the worry in her words, though. The rocking didn’t usually last this long, or run so rough, Nia could guess that much.
But, yes, as she listened she could hear something like words rumbling alongside the pounding cacophony of the bells. As they roared and mumbled, the swelling and cresting of the Iron Mountain began to slow, steady, and dim itself down to a gurgle of motion instead of a coughing fit.
“See?” said the girl. She pushed her shoulders against the car’s wheel and used it to push herself upright. “See, lady? See? It’s fine. You don’t have to be scared,” she said, and Nia suspected the girl was parroting some assurance she’d once been given. “The dirt man knows what to do.”
“I don’t understand,” Nia replied, and it was the only true thing she could say.
What’s to understand?
“Edward?”
He was facing away from them, the small stone woman and the little girl. He was staring up at the tower, its lavender, pink, and cream facing casting a shadow that swallowed them all. In another moment, the ground was still. But the unearthly voice continued its song for another moment more, finishing its verse and holding the last note as long as the bell above cast an echoed ring.
He said, It’s a lullaby.
After Dreaming
Upstairs, the bell player was restoring the carillon. He tightened the cables that had stretched in the terrible quake, and he made note of which ones had snapped altogether and would need replacing. His daughter stayed out of the way for the most part; and while her father worked, she chattered at him about the big dirt man and the stone-skinned lady down by the car.
Ever since the child had first begun to mention the big dirt man, the bell player had assumed she was telling tales. The Iron Mountain was isolated, and there were few other children anywhere nearby. The girl must be lonely. She must have invented friends for herself.
But time and experience had taught him that perhaps there was more going on than he claimed. He’d seen footsteps as broad as dinner plates, nearly black with mulch and rot. He’d heard movement and rustlings, and the dim, faint echoes of something, somewhere, singing or speaking.
It worried him. But the little girl said she wasn’t afraid of the big dirt man, or of the ghosts, either.
But ever since she’d mentioned the ghosts, the bell player had taken care to avoid the grave down by the front door. Just in case.
Edward noticed the bell player’s caution, and he approved of it—even as he was amused by it. The spirit felt no shock or tickle from mortal feet when they tiptoed across his resting spot.
He felt no discomfort or displeasure. But he appreciated the respect.
He watched the bell player clean, straighten, and do his best to make what restorations he could. Workmen would need to be called this time. Carpenters would need to shore up the frames that held the big bells. Things had cracked. Things had rocked free, and dropped, and broken.
But it could all be fixed.
Edward drifted down and around the angular, circular stairwell.
He skimmed past the closed and debris-littered doorways of the library, the workshop, the office, and the study. He dipped down into the main atrium, and then back around to his own grave and the spot beside it that was freshly disturbed. He stopped, but only for a moment. He slipped down past the gleaming stone with a tiny hidden latch marked by a figure of the sun. He passed his own coffin on the way down, farther, lower, deeper.
The next set of stairs was the mirror of those above—angular, circular, spiraling jerkily down into the earth instead of to some high point above it.
The stairs went down through the column of stone and earth that held the tower up on the Iron Mountain; they were not carved by human hands and they were rough, barely recognizable as stepping places. As far as the tower extended into the clouds, these reflecting notches went down into the earth.
Edward navigated the coiling passage until he reached its bottom, a place where there were no bricks and no seams—just a smooth, slick patch of blank floor surrounded by a ledge.
The ghost knew about the floor. It was damp and muddy, and if he stared at it long enough . . . if he waited and watched it for hours at a time, he could almost convince himself that some strange blood flowed beneath it, as vast and hard as a river’s current.
Once every hundred years, the creature had told him, you can hear his heart throb one great beat.
The creature itself sat on the ledge, its broad, rough back to the dead man, its face toward the living ground at the bottom of the earth.
“You understand why I had to send Arahab away. You understand why she must not trouble you, end your dreamless sleep . . . ,” it said. The words trailed off as if some other thought had interrupted them. “She’ll come no closer.”
It stepped down from the ledge, very gently and with all the softness it could wring from its ponderous bulk. The creature knelt, then placed its head lower, resting against the sleeping form.
“I do wonder,” it whispered. “What would happen if you were to awaken, after all? Would you know me? Would you remember me? Would it matter that I’ve kept steward over your peace? The dreamless sleep was your own choice. This stewardship is mine.”
Mossfeaster let its knees fold up and laid itself down.
“To you alone I make my confessions, and promises, and bargains. To you alone I swear. Sometimes I wish to wake you and shout, only to know that I’ve been heard. But . . .”
It reached out one hand-shaped palm and rubbed it gently against the floor.
“Did I tell you? I’ve made something new. I was not even sure it was possible, but she is smart and hard. I made her out of a mortal girl. They are stronger than they look, these spindly creatures of salt and skin.”
It curled itself tighter, nearly into a ball. “But I do not think she will stay with me.”
Even Edward could hear it, how the anger was only a coating for the monster’s grief, smoothing and hiding it like the layers of a pearl.
“You alone abide. But if you rise, this wretched world falls, and I have nothing—not even this miserable half life farmed from the cleft between the living and the dead. And that . . . I will not let go of it. It is all that I have.
“You are all that I have.”
Edward felt like an intruder, watching the creature whisper its secrets to a deaf and slumbering god. He knew, as surely as the creature knew, that the Leviathan must never wake to listen.
Edward closed his eyes, a leftover mortal habit that spoke of sadness, or sympathy. He returned to the rough spiral and rose up through it, back into the brighter shadows of the tower proper.
Inside, the tower was damaged but not desperately so. Books had fallen, paintings had dropped, shelves had collapsed—but the walls were built to stand, and they had held. Edward noted that the floors were ruined in parts and would need to be restored or replaced.
Several stairs were likewise broken, and he was staring down at one of the worst when he realized he was being watched. He raised his eyes and saw that the bell player’s daughter had come quite close.
Usually, she kept a little distance.
Hello, he said to her. “Hello,” she said back. “Is the dirt man safe?”
He hesitated. The dirt man is always safe.
“Always?”
Edward did not say, “As long as we are safe, he will be safe,” because she was so little. Instead he said, Always. And then he added, Child, I must ask you a small favor. Will you do something for me, please?
She nodded.
You must not enter the library on the second floor. He remembered his own grandchildren, and then he changed his approach, lest he make the library look too attractive. Child, he tried again, Do you trust me to tell you the truth? Do you
trust that I mean you no harm?
She nodded again, more vigorously.
A little too trusting, Edward thought. But she was so small; it was to be expected. I’m going to tell you a terrible truth, and it is one that your father will not believe. But it is very, very important all the same. You must not, under any circumstances, enter the second-floor library. There is a monster inside that room—an awful creature who will hurt you very badly if she catches you. She is ruined and bad, not like the dirt man. Something else occurred to Edward, and he added it for good measure, even though the creature downstairs might have objected to it. If you ever see the monster in the library, you should cry out for the dirt man. He might protect you.
Or, then again, the creature might not. But the ghost believed it was worth saying, if only to give the child some comfort. He could not tell her stories of monsters without assuring her that they could be conquered.
“The monster can’t hurt the dirt man?”
No, I don’t think so.
“Okay,” she said, as if his word was good enough for her.
Satisfied, he left her. He faded from her sight and returned to his study.
And in the second-floor library, Bernice huddled, and hated.
Twice a day, at one and three o’clock, the great bells above rang, playing their ponderous lullabies for thirty minutes even though the tower itself was in tattered shape. At first, the song was a little bit broken, missing a note from a chord here or there—because up in the tower’s crown, a handful of bells had not yet been replaced. But workmen came every day, and the bells were lifted up and hung in their trapeze framework, and within a few weeks, the songs were smooth again.
For one hour every day, Bernice wished she were dead.
Hell could be no worse than the banging, beating, and clanging of the big bronze bells, casting their weird magic across the Iron Mountain. No fire could burn worse than the breeze that carried bits of iron dust through the open windows.