“Good,” she says, crouching down. “Because that is what it will cost.”
With one hand on the lock, she produces a key from thin air and sinks it in with a click. A moment later, the lock swings wide and the latch is in her hand, turning. The bolt slides back, a mighty clang resounding through the cavernous room, and the little door at last cracks open.
19TO CAGE A DRAGON
I shield my eyes from the light until they can adjust. Overhead, a sturdy fixture of dark metal comes into focus, cupping a glowing, old-fashioned bulb. I had to crouch and scuttle through the door, but the walls are a reasonable twelve feet apart. I can see now that they are lined not only with brick but also a thick spread of black tar over which a dizzying pattern of words and drawings has been scribbled in something similar to white chalk, but gritty, more permanent. I recognize the same soft-slanting script from the outside, lean and fast as letters go but not ours. These look older than the Roman alphabet, Middle Eastern maybe, but I couldn’t say what the language is. The words move in all directions, as if the writer had no sense of bearing, no care for the readers who came after. And they are broken up only by geometric drawings—circles, lines, triangles—that have been fitted with the writing and intersect in such complex ways as to remind me of crop circles, blighting the fields of England in beautiful, fractal designs. Even the ceiling and floor are rendered in a crazed aberration of letters and drawings, which circle the light as if holding it in place. It seems to draw the walls inward in an optical illusion, making the space smaller than it is, stifling the air. A wave of claustrophobia overcomes me.
A clang echoes off the walls, reverberating through me, and I realize Arla has closed us in, locking the door from the inside.
“Just a precaution, kitten.” She steps toward the center of the room.
Dubious, I spin slowly, taking everything in, afraid to touch the wall in case the frenzy is contagious. The room is empty except for a ring of dull, unexceptional stones rising from the center of the floor, maybe six feet across, mortared tightly together and capped by an iron lid cast with the same symbol I’d seen drawn at the bottom of the note cards. The entire thing is slick with glistening slime mold, blazing a deep purple-black. Gelatinous and sleek, it branches and trails, rushing from beneath the lid in a semiaquatic mess crisscrossing the structure like ganglia in the brain.
“A well?” I ask, incredulous. “Here?”
“Did you have somewhere else in mind?” she retorts.
I shake my head, baffled. “Elliott Bay is right outside your door. The flooding, the saltwater infiltration—”
“Relax, kitten,” she says, stopping me. “It’s not for drinking.”
“It’s not?”
“No.” She stifles a simpering smile. “You might even say it’s not really a well.”
“What is it?” I ask.
She approaches the stones and lays the tips of her fingers gently against the iron lid. “This, Jude,isthe Fathom.”
I look at her. “I thought you were the Fathom, you and Brennan and the rest.”
“I am,” she says, smiling sweetly. “And now so are you. But this…” she says, tapping the broad iron circle, “thisis the source.”
“The source of what?” I step nearer but remain cautiously apart from her, uncertain of what she might reveal next.
“Oursource, Jude.” She turns, sits lightly against the edge of the stone circle, resting her hands on it. “Do you remember the story I told you about the great fire and the second Seattle?”
I nod.
“Many people attribute that fire to a carpenter’s overturned glue pot. At least, that’s the official account. But if you look at the original reports, there were discrepancies. First it was a paintshop, then a boot and shoe store, then the poor young cabinetmaker. Fact is, it was pandemonium. You can’t blame them for getting it wrong.” Arla crosses her arms.
“Getting what wrong? What does any of this have to do with this room?” I slide a step away, wary.
“The truth,” Arla says, “is that it wasn’t a man who started that fire at all. Just like it wasn’t a man who was responsible for the flooding that plagued the first version of our city and forced them to build up.” She stands, reaching over to untwist a large dogbolt like those seen on a porthole cover, then another and another, each one scraping and squealing as they give.
“Then what was it?” I ask, watching her, curious despite my concerns. I know a thing or two about inexplicable fires. Heat blazes against my fingertips, the memory trapped forever in my skin.
Arla grins as if she hoped I’d ask this question and lifts the heavy iron lid, which swings up on an equally heavy iron hinge. “This.”
I step forward, neck craning, eyes darting from Arla’s face to the opening yawning before me. This is the moment when the villain pushes the unsuspecting damsel over the ledge. I’ve seen it in enough movies to know. If I were smart, I wouldn’t get near that ring of eldritch stones. But I’m like Anneli now, less smart than I am driven, and by something I can no longer contain.
When I get close enough to peer over the edge, my toe bumping a seeping stone, all I see is a ripple of black water, the light above reflecting off its gently swaying surface. I look at Arla, confused. “It’s just a well.”
“Look harder,” she says, encouraging me like she would a scared child, with a fake smile and a friendly dip of her head.
I look down again, watching the reflected light move gently across the surface of the water, at times taking the shapes of the letters written around me. Until suddenly the picture changes, and I don’t see the letters at all but the glittering white columnsof Solidago, the house spreading over the water in a pale shadow, exactly as it was the day I first saw it.
A cry emits from my throat, horror and grief commingling, and I clap a hand over my mouth.
