A mixture of wanting to apologize and sheer delight at the scenario sent her after him, her hair clouding around her when she caught up. Like the tail she’d been granted, it was more brilliant in color than she was accustomed to, though not as unearthly as her guide’s. “How are you giving me the memory? Can siryns do that, too?”
“No. This all takes place within the gargoyle histories. I utilize their ability to share memory in order to make you more comfortable. You could traverse this realm in your own form, if you so wished.”
“In other words, this is all happening in my mind.” Margrit drew another deep breath, feeling water flood her ribs, and smiled against the coldness. “Guess I might as well enjoy it. Where are we going?”
“Where does your heart tell you we are going?”
“To the heart of the world,” Margrit said promptly, then coughed on her own pomposity. “I don’t know why I said that.”
Laughter washed through the siryn’s voice, high notes on a piano rendered into something impossibly pure. “Because your heart told you to. Now, hush. We will not want to speak as the pressures grow stronger. The depths are not comfortable, even for our kind, and we need what air we can steal from the cold, black water.”
It wasn’t until she didn’t find it that Margrit realized she had truly expected to see Atlantis when her blue-haired guide finally drew to a halt, closer to the dark ocean floor than Margrit had ever imagined being. Instead of the fabled city, though, there was merely a rent in the earth, so broad and deep that both heat and light rose from it even in the icy depths. A primitive impulse to run—or swim—as fast as she could, as far as she could, set Margrit’s heartbeat racing until she felt dizzy from it. This was not a place humans were meant to be, and the sensation that a price would be paid for intruding weighed on her as heavily as the ocean pressure did. Hell had much in common with this stretch of barren undersea land. Even the juxtaposition of hot and cold promised to punish the wicked with one form of misery, then another.
When a serpent of impossible length and breadth slithered free of the torn earth, Margrit laughed, then shoved her hands against her mouth as though she could push the sound back in. There would be a serpent; of course there would be a serpent. She could hear the hysteria in the laugh she tried to swallow, and dared not follow her own thoughts too closely for fear of finding madness in them. She knotted her hands more tightly, and realized something cut into one palm.
A sea-serpent chess pawn floated a few centimeters away when Margrit opened it, caught in the current its make-sake created as it swam. The tremendous serpent circled her and her companion, watching them as it wound around time and time again. Its great length putting Janx’s dragon form to shame: it was as though it had been born at the beginning of time, and had grown slowly, constantly, ever since. It had too many, or too few, colors to name, all of them shimmering and changing as the creature made a whirlpool of itself around Margrit and her guide. They were turned in its vortex, unable to meet the monster’s eye with their own.
Its miniature representation floated away, just out of Margrit’s reach, insignificant beyond words in comparison to its model. The carving looked like the toy it was; the real serpent looked like a limbless dragon, broad-snouted with wide-set eyes, a Norse carving come to life.
“Oh.” Margrit’s voice cracked even on that single word. “Oroborus. My God.” She heard more fervency and devoutness in her near prayer than she’d ever heard in her life, and wondered what her mother, her father, her kindly priest at her church, would think of that. Her chest ached, delight borne from someplace so deep within her she had no idea where it began. It stole her breath, stole the form she’d been given and left her dangling in the water as a mere mortal, ordinary human. Warnings whispered that she should be frightened, she should be drowning, she should be crushed, she should be dead, and none of it, not one of those true and dire thoughts, could unman the consuming, heartbreaking joy that welled inside her.
She stretched her hands out, not so much daring to touch the monster from the heart of the world as in worship, felt more deeply than she had words for. “My God, look at you. Thank you. Thank you for letting me see you.” She caught the tiny chess carving and held it up in her fingertips. “This is for you,” she said impulsively. “We do remember. Even humans. We do remember.” That the serpent in her personal mythology was most often passed off as a thing of evil seemed shallow and absurd in face of the great Leviathan. That it had offered the path to knowledge seemed the important part.
The serpent’s swirling vortex slowed as it brought its head in to examine the chess piece. Its eye was taller than she was; taller than herself and her guide put end to end. Margrit had no way to give words to the creature’s size, only that it dwarfed any living thing she’d ever imagined, and that she thought the earth’s molten core would look small in its coils. It studied her and her gift with inexpressible calm, then with great and slow deliberation, opened its mouth.
It did so very carefully, as if aware that it would suck Margrit, her guide, everything around them and half the ocean’s water in if it were to do so quickly. Even with its jaws barely parted, its gaping maw was cavernous, so dark and huge it couldn’t conceivably be something alive, but had to be some new-born formation torn from the ocean’s bed. Margrit hung in the water, frozen in bewildered incomprehension before realizing the vast serpent was accepting her gift. Trying not to laugh with terror, she kicked forward and very, very cautiously dropped the chess piece into the serpent’s gum beside a tooth so large it reached a vanishing point when she craned her neck to look up at it.
With a delicacy that belied its size, the serpent dipped its tongue—forked and unbelievably long—into its gum, wrapping it around the minuscule carving and flicking it back into its throat. It swallowed once, an action that slid along forever, then, with what seemed to Margrit to be incalculable amusement, flicked its tongue a second time, this time at her.
The world spun head over heels, and she opened her eyes in Grace’s council room to find she was soaked through and through, and that she held nothing at all in her hand where the chess piece had been.
CHAPTER 17
The silence in the audience chamber was as impressive as the crushing pressure of the ocean depths. Biali, still across the table from her, stared wordlessly at her clothes. He looked as he had before their journey into memory: scarred and angry, but now also confused. Margrit stood up, water spilling down her thighs to puddle at her feet. “What the hell happened to me?”
“We thought you might tell us that yourself.” Alban, voice dry to hide concern.
Margrit turned to him helplessly, then back to the others. “I take it I’m not supposed to come back soaking wet.”
“It has never happened before,” Eldred allowed. “What memory did you follow? What words were you given?”
“Words? I—Ah, crap, I forgot all about that part of it. He—it, whatever—didn’t say anything. I don’t even know if it could talk. It probably would’ve vibrated me to pieces if it had.” Margrit closed her mouth abruptly, stemming her babble, then said more carefully, “I had a serpent in my hand. What was I supposed to see?”
“One of my long-lost brethren, presumably.” Janx opened his hands expansively, as if inviting the whole of the room to fall into that category. “One who might perhaps share some salty bit of sea wisdom to guide us all with. One who might tell you if any of his kind still live,” he said more quietly, and more sharply. Margrit’s face crumpled.