Seraph shrugged and continued walking back inside.
“They don’t skim an abundance, and no one is swimming in extra water; I’ll grant you that. But they get enough between this and our stores below. Our skimmers are excellent at their jobs.”
Kindred followed him under the archway leading back into the City, her confusion and skepticism pulling at her brow, thinning her lips.
At the central staircase, they went down to the Forest where Kindred saw Yllstra, the guard who had guided her to the Grove.
But Seraph continued down to the third level, Wisdom. There were a few guards there, too, four or five standing around, a mixture of young and old, looking bored and tired.
“Councilman,” one of them said, nodding at Seraph, who waved in return before walking right past.
The staircase ended on Wisdom, the last step flattening into the rough floor of the level, and Kindred followed Seraph off as he moved with confidence between the low-humped buildings. Quickly, the path grew labyrinthine, and the buildings seemed to grow closer together. As she walked behind him, that broken song she had heard just before her first meeting with the Council sounded in her head again, doubling and tripling and rounding back on itself, confused and confusing. Whatever was wrong with the Once-City’s hearthfire, it was something big.
Kindred looked around, trying to see the entrance to the cells, but her memories of this place were scattered and partial, and she couldn’t remember which edge of Wisdom the cells were on.
“Almost there,” Seraph said, his voice quiet now, matching the somber silence of this place and the low light managing to filter down through the Sea and in through the apertures cut into the walls. “The builders of the Once-City wanted the hearthfires out of the way, but I’m convinced they get harder to reach each day—the path through these buildings seems to be always changing!”
“Did you say hearthfires?” Kindred said. “Multiple hearthfires?”
“Of course!” Seraph said, offering a distracted smile back at her. “You don’t think something this large could be held up by just one, do you?”
That explained the strange plurality of the hearthfires’ music in her head: not just one broken voice but many. But how many? Five? Ten? She would know soon.
The buildings all looked the same to Kindred, and after no time at all, she found herself lost. She remembered the eeriness in the watcher’s words after Kindred had gotten out of the cells: Sometimes, they whisper. We’ve cracked open a few, but they’re always empty.
And she could hear them whispering now, words in languages she couldn’t identify, languages that sounded strangely similar to the tongue of the poets Seraph had shown her. But they were moving, and Kindred didn’t have time to investigate.
Twice, Seraph led them in circles, and somehow, what had once seemed a field of short, rounded buildings had become structures tall enough to block her view of the central staircase, its rise lost amidst the near-darkness and crowding buildings.
Seraph muttered as they walked, always something like “nearly, nearly” or “getting there.”
The structures, after a time, began to take a strange shape in Kindred’s mind, as if they weren’t external walls at all, not breaks between exterior and interior. Not walls holding anything; instead, the buildings became the fabric of the world, a thin curtain between this place and something else, perhaps many somethings, like hands reaching from a land of eternal night, pushing at the boundary between that world and this one.
Buildings became monstrous fingers pushing at this reality; domed structures became faces and fists stretching ever outward; peaked buildings were claws and swords nearly torn through.
With each step deeper into Wisdom, Kindred grew more unsettled. This was a place she did not belong, a space of curves that stretched too far, of darkness descending into abysses. She began to imagine eyes watching her from shadows, bodies following her own just out of sight. The eeriness of Wisdom culled every bit of self-possession she had; this was a place for fear.
The music in her head had grown too, louder and stranger and more unsettling, beating behind her eyes and edging toward painful.
“Aha!” Seraph said, startling Kindred. “Here!”
He had stopped before a building no different from any other, perhaps bigger or smaller than some but still made of darkness, still curving toward insanity.
Except for the door.
A green door, plaited grass resonating in the low light, offered reassuring angles and purpose in this strange place. Kindred had seen rotted wooden doors on a few of the other buildings, doors that looked to never have been opened, but this was something else.
“Are you ready?” Seraph asked, smiling back at her, his hand on the handle of the door, as if this place had no effect on him.
“I . . . don’t know,” Kindred said, language strange in her mouth, strange in this place. At first, she thought herself scared, lured into fear by this place, but that wasn’t quite right. She felt . . . alien. Wrong. A person living in a place that cared nothing for her.
Somehow, it was deeply exciting.
“That’s the right answer,” Seraph said, pushing open the door and stepping inside, revealing a well-lit passageway. Kindred followed, at once relieved and surprised to be out of the darkness.
It was a staircase, descending.
“I thought there were only three levels in the Once-City,” she said, standing on the top stair.
Here we are, my girl, on the edge of everything.
“Not quite,” came Seraph’s voice as he descended, his words framed by a smile she couldn’t quite see. “There’s a fourth level below, and even the remnants of more below that. Anyone with the right permissions is allowed down here. It’s not so much a secret as just a place most people don’t go or aren’t allowed to. But you are special, Kindred! You get to see how it all works!”
Kindred teetered on the edge and then stepped down.
And down.
And down.
* * *
At the bottom of the staircase was another door, braided again, and Kindred found herself admiring the craft of it, her recent lessons with Ragged Sarah fresh in her mind, the fear of the darkness gone like a dream.
A sudden pressure bloomed in her mind as the music of the hearthfires swelled.
Seraph stepped through.
So did Kindred.
“Welcome to the Gone Ways,” he said, gesturing out, giggling the tiniest bit.
It had once been a level like any of the others, Kindred could see. The floor on which they stood extended in each direction, unencumbered by more than a handful of small buildings, reaching out toward the remnants of a wall.