I should add that Tom Compton, ordinarily the staunchest of pragmatists, seems more unnerved than either Sullivan or I. He said a peculiar thing tonight as I began this entry… mumbled it, leaning into the fire so intently that I worried an ember would ignite his briar-patch beard.
“I dreamed of this place,” he said.
He wouldn’t elaborate, but I felt a chill despite the fire. Because, Caroline, I’ve dreamed of this place too, dreamed of it deep in the fever sleeps of autumn, when the poison was still coursing through my body and I couldn’t tell day from night… I dreamed of the city too, and I don’t know what that means.
… and dreamed again last night.
But I have more than that to tell you, Caroline, and not much time. Our supplies are limited and Sullivan insists we use each moment as economically as possible. So I will tell you in the plainest and most direct words what we found.
The city isn’t just a grid of squares. It has a center, as Sullivan suspected. And at the center is not a cathedral or a marketplace but something altogether stranger.
We came upon the building this morning. It must once have been visible from a great distance, but erosion has camouflaged it. (I doubt even Finch would deny that these ruins are terribly old.) Today the structure is surrounded by a field of its own rubble. Huge stone blocks, some polished as if fresh from the quarry, others worn into a grotesquery of angles, impeded our progress. We left our sledge behind and hiked through the maze-like passages created by chance and weather until we found the core of the central building.
Rising from this bed of rubble is a black basaltic dome, open on roughly a quarter of its periphery. The vault of the dome is at least two hundred feet high at its apex and as broad as a city block. The unbroken sections are still smooth, almost silky, worked by a technique Sullivan can’t identify.
A perpetual fog cloaks the dome, which is perhaps why none of us had seen it from the slopes of the valley. Melted snow and ice, Sullivan guessed, heated from below. Even in the rubble field the air was noticeably warm, and no snow had collected on the dome itself. It must be well above the freezing point of water.
The three of us gazed mutely at this scene. I mourned my lost camera. What a plate it would have made! The desolate Alpine ruins of the European hinterland. Caroline, we might have lived for a year on a photograph like that.
None of us voiced his thoughts. Maybe they seemed too fantastic. Certainly mine did. I was reminded again of E.R. Burroughs’ adventure stories, with their volcanic caverns and their beast-men worshiping ancient gods.
(I know you disapprove of my reading habits, Caroline, but the fantasies of Mr. Burroughs are proving to be a fair Baedeker to this continent. All we lack is a suitable Princess, and a sword for me to buckle on.)
We returned to the sledge, fed our snake, gathered what supplies we could carry and hiked back to the dome. Sullivan was as excited as I have ever seen him; he had to be restrained from dashing madly all over the site. He settled for a camp just beyond the rim of the dome and is obviously frustrated we haven’t gone farther — but there’s a lot of territory under this incline of polished stone, all strewn with rock, and it’s frankly a little unnerving to have that unsupported mass of granite hanging over our heads.
The interior was nearly lightless, in any case — the sun had declined beyond a gap-toothed rank of ruins — and we were forced to build a hasty fire before we lost the light entirely.
We met the night with a mixture of excitement and apprehension, crouched over our fire like Visigoths in a Roman temple. There is nothing to see beyond our circle of firelight but its flickering reflection on the high inner circumference of the vault.
No, that’s not entirely true. Sullivan has drawn our attention to another light, fainter still, the source of which must be deep inside this rubble-choked structure. A natural phenomenon, I dearly hope, though the sense of another presence is strong enough to raise hackles.
Not light enough to write by, though. Not without risking blindness. More tomorrow.
HERE THE JOURNAL ENDS.
“A little more rope, please, Guilford.”
Sullivan’s voice rose from the depths as if buoyed on its own echoes. Guilford played out another few feet of rope.
The rope had been one of the few useful items rescued from last summer’s attack. These two spools of hempen fiber had saved more than one life — provided harnesses for the animals, rigging for tents, a thousand useful things. But the rope was only a precaution.
At the center of the domed ruin they had found a circular opening perhaps fifty yards in diameter, its rim cut into a spiral of stone steps each ten feet wide. The shallow stairs were intact, their contours softened by centuries of erosion. A stream of water cut the well’s southern rim, fell, became mist, merged into fog-hidden deeps. Faint daylight came from above, a cool lambent glow from beneath. The heart of the city, Guilford thought. Warm and still faintly beating.
Sullivan wanted to explore it.
“The slope is trivial,” he said. “The passage is intact and it was obviously meant to be walked. We’re in no more danger here than we would be out in the cold.”
Tom Compton stroked his mist-dewed beard. “You’re stupider than I thought,” he said, “if you mean to climb down there.”
“What would you suggest?” Sullivan wheeled to face the frontiersman. He was as angry as Guilford had seen him, his face a thunderous brick-red. “That we walk back to our pathetic little shambles and pray for sunny weather? Creep north to the Bodensee come spring, unless cold kills us first, or the Partisans, or the Rheinfelden? Damn thee, Tom, this might be our only chance to learn something from this place!”
“What good is learning,” the frontiersman asked, “if you take it to your grave?”
Sullivan turned away scornfully. “What good is friendship, then, or love, or life itself? What don’t you take to your grave?”
“Wasn’t planning on taking anything there,” Tom said. “At least not yet.”
He reeled the rope from his hands.
It won’t be so bad in daylight, Guilford thought, and there was daylight here, through the breached vault of the dome, dim as it might be. In any case, the rope was reassuring. They rigged harness to link themselves together. The slope might be gentle but the stone was slick with moisture, a fall could turn into a slide, and there was no telling how far into the fog this decline might reach. Below ground level the limit of visibility was a scant few yards. A dropped stone gave back uncertain echos.
Sullivan went first, favoring his bad leg. Then Guilford, favoring his own. The frontiersman followed behind. The down-spiraling walkway was broad enough that Guilford was able to avoid looking directly into the well’s smoky deeps.
He couldn’t guess what this well had been made for or who might have walked this way in ages past. Nor how far down it might descend, into what lava-heated cavern or glowing underworld. Hadn’t the Aztecs used wells for human sacrifice? Certainly nothing much good could have happened down this rabbit hole.
Sullivan called a halt when they had descended, by Guilford’s estimate, a hundred feet or more. The rim of the well was as invisible now as the bottom, both hidden in lofting spirals of fog. Sullivan was winded and gasping, but his eyes were bright in the strange, dim radiance.