This was before we knew he was innocent. This was before we knew that Alexander was our Betrayer, and all Amon had done was be a little too smart for his brother's comfort. Burned and drowned. But not, apparently, killed.
* * *
How do you kill a god? I had been giving this a lot of thought. Admittedly, I only started thinking about it when I learned that perhaps it was Alexander who had put a knife in Morgan's back. And my thoughts mostly involved ways in which I'd like to shoot him in the face. But these were unrealistic and, honestly, insufficient. Morgan had suffered grievous wounds in his life, wounds that would kill the strongest of mortal men. There was something special about the Betrayer's blade that killed the Warrior, probably something to do with the fact that it was held by someone he trusted so deeply, that the hand that pushed the knife into him was that of his brother.
I was no god's sister, and no scion of the Betrayer, either way. I had always assumed that, because Alexander bound the chains and kindled the fire, there was something special about it that could kill a god. But what if it had only been simple flame? Simple water? Surely these things wouldn't kill Amon. So what then? He sank to the bottom of the lake, undying? Eternal?
Apparently. Because, as I strapped on the suit that Malcolm handed me, a lot of what he was saying involved water.
"We don't know what's at the end of it. They monitor the chains, so we don't get near the pool. But the cable should lead the whole way. I've made the appropriate modifications, here," he said, tapping the new helmet, the tank that clipped on my belt, "that should let you make the descent. After that, I'm no help."
"How long have you known?" I asked.
"Since I came here. It's openly known, among the scions who are brought from the Library. It's why we work so hard to please Alexander. To preserve the body. As long as we're useful to him, he keeps Amon alive."
"And when you're not?"
"Then? I would not want to be in the Library Desolate on that day. I would not want to be wearing the chains when Alexander drives in that knife."
"They'll be coming, soon," I said. We had secured the door, Malcolm applying various invokations to strengthen the steel and seal the portal. But it wouldn't last forever. "He'll discover that his gambit with Barnabas failed, and he'll send someone else."
"Don't worry. I'll keep the girl safe."
"I meant you, old man." I shrugged and fitted the helmet over my head. "The girl can keep herself."
"Of course," he said, patting my shoulder. "You meant me. Nevertheless, I assure you, the girl will be safe."
I looked across the room at her. Sitting against the wall, staring at her hands, and at the bloody print on her chest.
"Okay," I said. Then I unsealed one of the pressure doors, and went inside to the mind of Amon the Scholar.
* * *
Just about a foot below the lip of the door, there was a narrow walkway that went all around the inside of the dome. It was stone, and the first of many concentric steps that led down into a pool of water. The water came up to the third step, splashing lightly over it with each swell of the tide. The pool was cold and clear; I could see that the dome was in fact a sphere, and the steps went all the way to the bottom of it. A round opening at the bottom of the sphere, about five feet in diameter, led out into some darker space.
The archive itself sprouted like a flower from that opening. It was a series of thick cables, ranging in size from the width of a pencil to a couple that were as thick as my wrist. On the end of each cable was a cylinder of some translucent material, each sized according to the width of its cable. The cylinders glowed with an inner light, shimmering in the water like bottles of lightning, with the pulse turned way down. Most of the cylinders stayed below the surface, but those that had bobbed to the top shifted and hummed with a constant chiming sound.
"Leave it to the Scholars to make it all so damn complicated," I whispered to myself. I could see damp tracks where Cassandra had emerged from the water just a little while earlier. I put my hand beneath the surface and found it to be warm and… sticky. Not really water. Too thick. When I took my hand out it dried quickly, though where the water had splashed against the stone it remained. Water that wasn't really wet. Of course.
I sat by the edge of the pool and then slowly eased my way into it. The suit constricted as it came in contact with the water. The liquid. Whatever you want to call it. What had been comfortable a moment before was now too tight. Half in the water, warmth tingling along my bones and light flashing in my eyes, I pulled the helmet up and sealed it, then cut the bottle on and breathed in a healthy gasp of iron-laced air. Do it quick, Malcolm had said. Do it quick, and don't look back.
I plunged into the water and understood what he meant, right away. I also understood why Cassandra was out there, babbling to herself. And Amon wasn't even my god.
The water opened to me, opened fully to me, filled me with light and lightning and a glowing warmth unlike any I have ever known. Underwater, the chiming of the cylinders cascaded into more than sound, into pain and madness, and through it all there were voices, a single voice, a thousand times a single voice reciting prayers of madness and mathematics that slid over me without sinking in, drowned me without water, tore me without blood. I was no longer seeing a pool of water, a flower of light and sound, a dome in a building under the city of Ash. I was seeing formulas from the inside of numbers, knowledge from the inside of words. I was seeing the greatest mind our world had ever known, with an eternity of knowledge flowing out in a breath, half a breath, a never-ending sigh of…
What saved me was the mud between my own ears. I was an idiot. I mean that in the best possible way, the sort of idiot who can get by and take care of herself, but also the sort of idiot who looked at all this and could just let it slide over her without it sinking in. A duck in the water of genius, you could say. But I saw what had driven Cassandra a little insane. The initial blast had done a number on me, though. I was floating limp in the water, tangled in the cords of the mind, wasting the limited breath in my bottled lung.
I shrugged out of the coils of light and pushed to the bottom of the pool. The stalks of the cables thickened near the opening, and I dragged myself down by pulling on them. As I got close to the opening, the warm, clear water became mixed with patches of darker, colder stuff. Actual water, I thought. Lakewater.
The helmet had a tiny light. I turned it on, and could see that there was a disk, wider than the opening and about a foot below it, that held all of the bundles of cable together. I squeezed between the opening and the disk, and came out into the lake, at the bottom of the city.
I'd been underneath the city before, along the edges. Never this deep. The water here was impenetrably black, swallowing the beam from my lamp in a matter of feet. The underside of the city disappeared in blackness. I couldn't see any of the familiar blinking pathlight from the waterways, or swirling dock indicators or… anything. It was just watery night.
Examining the disk with my feeble light and my hands, I could see that it was shaped like a barrel, slightly bowed at the middle and warm to the touch. Metal, but old and pitted with corrosion. A single cable emerged from the bottom, heavy and thick. It descended into the depths of the lake.
Stay close to the cable, he said. It interacts with the suit, and keeps you from experiencing… something. Something to do with pressure and depth and blood. I hadn't understood most of that, but the illustration Malcolm had used when he could see that my eyes were glazing over was a tube of meat, filled with blood, and a hundred hammers hitting it from all directions at once. So I was going to stay close to the cable.