“Very well,” he agreed, taking up the map.
They retraced their steps along two passageways, and Shadrack led them through a low tunnel whose floor curved like the inside of a pipe. Sophia counted her paces as they traveled deeper and deeper into the labyrinth. The air around them was surprisingly varied—dry and warm in some places, cold and damp in others—but the darkness remained absolute. The nighting vine grew in fitful bursts along the labyrinth walls. Climbing stubbornly over broken stones and through narrow openings, the pale vine’s map grew stunted and distorted.
All conversation slowly died away, and they trudged on in silence. Their footsteps and weary breathing transformed as they walked, amplifying in the high caverns and shrinking down to muffled rasps in the narrow corridors. The tunnels seemed to wind onward interminably, and still the labyrinth led them deeper. They paused several times so that Shadrack could consult the map, and as they stopped a fifth time, Sophia heard the sound again. “Does anyone hear that?” she asked. “It—it sounds like people running.”
“I hear it, too,” Veressa replied from behind her. “But it’s not people. It’s running water.”
Sophia shook her head, unconvinced, but said nothing. The stone walls narrowed almost to the width of Burr’s shoulders, and then, to her surprise, a break in the wall transformed the passageway. The pockmarked stone wall gave way to smooth bricks of greenish-gray, and the air felt less stale. “This is a different Age altogether,” Martin muttered, without taking his hand from Theo’s shoulder. They walked along the corridor for nearly two hundred paces, winding right repeatedly as the tunnels forked.
The sound Sophia had heard was replaced by the unmistakable sound of running water. Veressa must be right, Sophia thought. I was only hearing the water.
“Watch your step!” Shadrack called back. Sophia watched as each person before her dropped out of sight, and she realized, as Theo crouched abruptly, that they were passing through an opening in the floor. Martin eased himself into the hole and Sophia followed. Calixta handed her torch through and then jumped down. Sophia looked around, taking in the strange walls. Cut from smooth, white stone tinged with green, they had shallow depressions with curious adornments—statues calcified and stained from their long entombment. Shadrack, already leading the way along the corridor, climbed a short flight of steps through a curved archway and disappeared.
Sophia heard exclamations from those at the front of the line, and she waited impatiently. The air around them changed yet again, becoming warm and humid with a heavy, earthy smell. Then Martin stumbled out of the way ahead of her, and she found herself in a vast chamber as large as the palace dungeon. But the room had obviously never been a dungeon. As Burr walked tentatively forward with his torch, pieces of it came into view. The curved walls, where the nighting vine grew unencumbered, climbed two or three stories high. Pale statues of standing figures—men and women with long, obscured faces—stood in the walls’ niches and at intervals along a staircase that crossed the room at a diagonal. A rush of clear water ran down the steps, vanishing into a dark tunnel.
Sophia looked around her in amazement. There could be no doubt. The room was not a room at all—it was an underground garden. Only the nighting vine survived, but stone walkways and pale urns across the dirt floor outlined where other plants had once grown. Martin, standing next to her, bent down to take a pinch of soil between his fingertips. His voice was hushed and full of wonder. “I believe we are in the ruins of a lost Age!”
34
A Lost Age
1891, July 1: #-Hour
Certain architectural remains are particularly difficult to date, since even in their corresponding Age they are considered ruins. For example, the ruins of an earthquake might survive for five hundred years, just as in some Ages cherished monuments and dwellings survive for hundreds of years. Thus the ruins—abandoned, partially disintegrated, and entirely uninhabited—seem to belong to an earlier Age while in fact belonging to a later one.
—From Veressa Metl’s Cultural Geography of the Baldlands
WHILE THE OTHERS fanned out, taking in the sculptures and the cascade of water, Sophia crouched next to Martin. “What is a lost Age?” she asked.
“Lost,” Martin said, pushing himself to his feet, “in the sense that these are the ruins of a civilization that declined within its own Age.”
“What do you mean?”
“You see,” he said, moving excitedly over to the staircase, all exhaustion suddenly forgotten, “when the Great Disruption occurred, these ruins appeared. That means they were already ruins. I would guess that this underground garden had already been abandoned and quietly disintegrating for”—he paused, rubbing the pale marble— “perhaps six hundred years.”
“Six hundred years,” Sophia breathed. She looked up at the staircase and realized in astonishment that Theo, knee-deep in rushing water, was climbing it. “Theo?”
He turned to wave. He was more than twenty feet above her, near the arched entryway through which the water descended. “This is really warm,” he called down. “And there’s something up here.”
Slowly, the others assembled near the staircase and looked upward. “It’s incredibly warm,” Veressa agreed, testing the water. “There might be a hot spring below the caves.”
Theo climbed the last few steps. “I can’t see,” he called, his voice faint over the rushing water, “but it looks like there’s a big cavern.”
“Onward,” Burr said eagerly, mounting the stairs.
Shadrack frowned thoughtfully, scrutinizing his map. “That must be it. We came in through the only entryway that doesn’t have running water. According to this, we turn. Veressa? Sophia?”
Sophia nodded, reading her own map by Calixta’s torch. “I think so.”
“Let’s try it,” Veressa agreed.
One by one, they mounted the staircase. The warm water immediately seeped through Sophia’s thin boots, and more than once she almost lost her footing. She was glad to see that Shadrack was helping Martin.
The others had reached the archway and were standing just beyond it on the embankment. With the torches held high, Sophia realized that the stream of water emerged from a shallow aqueduct cut into the stone. They all turned toward the vast cavern that they could feel but not yet see. The murmur of water came from deep within the darkness, echoing quietly. Holding the torches higher only made the ground below dim. They could see nothing but the entryway to the subterranean garden behind them and a short portion of the aqueduct.
In the moment that the group stood there, pondering the depth of the dark cavern, Martin reached into his pocket and tossed a seed onto the stony floor.
“What was that?” Veressa asked apprehensively.
“Nothing,” Martin replied. “Just a seed.”
As he spoke, a strange rustling, distinct from the murmur of water, sounded in the darkness. After a moment’s hesitation, Burr held his torch high and stepped forward. And then he stopped, aghast. A pale tendril had burst out from the loose soil. Burr bent forward as if to swipe at the vine with his arm.
“Wait!” Martin exclaimed. “Leave it!” They watched in silence as the vine spiraled into the air, turning into a slender sapling before their eyes. “I’ve been dropping seeds,” he explained quickly, without taking his eyes off the growing plant, “in the hopes that this would happen.”
The sapling thickened, throwing branches in every direction. Its metallic roots punctured the cavern floor, anchoring the little tree firmly. Then the branches began to grow shoots that unfurled into pale, silvery leaves. As the trunk sprouted upward, the leaves stretched far beyond the faint light of the torches. And then, to everyone’s astonishment, the leaves themselves emitted a bright, silvery light that shone like the moon into the dark recesses of the cavern.