The water near the cable was warm and tingled across my skin, or at least it felt that way through the suit. When I put my hand on the cable the bones of my wrist hummed. Didn't like the feel of that, but I liked the idea of hammered meat even less, so I held on while I followed it down into the lake. Every once in a while one of my feet or the tips of my fingers would stray a little too far away from the cable as I swam, and an instant numbing coldness would fill them. That was all the instruction I needed, really. I was not a complete idiot.
It was a long, cold trip. The pressurized bag that held the sword and bully creaked on my back, the water tingled through my skin, the light disappeared, and my eyes swam as the cable and the darkness seemed to be the whole world. Down and down and down, lake without end.
And then there was light.
The structure looked like a madness of junk. It was nestled at the bottom of the lake, burrowed into the stony bed. It was ringed with light, coming from a circle of globes that whirled inside like starry tornadoes. Their glow leaked across the lake floor in murky blueness, picking out details of wrecked buildings and toppled pillars. These were the remains of the Titan city, drowned by the Feyr under this great depth of water.
And crouching at the base of the ruins, the cable's end. I descended toward it, the scale of the place slowly coming into perspective. Enormous. Larger than most of the towers of the city above, flat on its side, rippling with currents of light and shadow. The building shifted in the tricky light, pulsing like a drum soundly struck. I could feel the song of it in my mind, humming through the water. The closer I got, the bigger this place seemed, until I got so close that I could see that the building itself was quite small. Most of what I could see, what I had taken for structure, was just edifice. A web of beams and pillars and buttresses that arced and crossed through the water, supporting each other, building and descending without any central plan. The lights that pulsed through this open framework seemed to emanate from the stony arches themselves, without power or purpose. Beautiful, in the way that madness can be beautiful if seen from afar, like battle, or a storm cloud.
At the center of this openness was a single building. It looked like a pile of iron clamshells, carelessly shucked and stacked on top of each other. Long arcs of light lined the edges of the protruding shells, like rows of windows or the glittering bevel of a blade. When I got a certain distance from this structure, the cable branched and then branched again, a dozen times, each split diminishing the size of the cables until there was nothing but a thin vein-work of cables that led out into the stony arches around the building. Hoping that whatever magic kept me safe when I was close to the cable would transfer to this strange architecture, I let go and drifted toward that building of shells.
Luck held, and there was no more bruising coldness to greet me. I set foot on the sandy bottom of the lake. The grit was shallow, just covering a floor of sharp angles. Uncomfortable to walk on, but great traction. I felt light as air. Too light, in fact. I looked down at the iron lung, but the dials made no sense to me. I was getting featherheaded. That was indication enough for me. I rushed to the central building, kicking up in great long strides that bounced me across the lakebed.
Even dwarfed as it was by the brooding archwork all around, the building was huge. Maybe as large as the Strength, maybe larger. There was no perspective here, and I was running out of air. The swirling globes of light, embedded in the ground, were scattered around the approach to the building. Some of those were as large as buildings, some as small as eyes, all of them peering up out of the sand like crabs scuttling up from the tide. I stopped to put my hand against one, and felt the warmth of it shoot up my arm like a knife. I shivered and drifted away, smiling happily in the light and the lightness of my body. My body. My body was going away.
I bit my tongue and rode the pain toward the shell building. I panicked as I approached. Such a large building, but not built for people. Certainly not for intruders. I was going to starve for air, battering myself against its pebbled sides. I reached a near lip of shell, the band of light nearly as tall as I was, translucent and yellow-white in the murky water. I reached out for it but my hands were turning numb. I watched my fist beat senselessly against the colored wall, scrambling at the lip of it, striking my fingers on the smooth, cold edge of the shell building. There were no doors. There was no entrance.
The building settled, and I felt movement around me. Suddenly I was… breathed in. Inhaled. Shooting up, pausing some distance away from the building, then the water swirled and I was going up again. I turned my head and one of the upper decks of the building rushed at me, a black void at its center, flexing as I slithered bonelessly toward it.
A smack of air pressure, the suit spasming against my ribs and legs, and then I was through and flopping up onto a beach of smooth pebbles. I lay there, still gasping for air, my lungs starving, and then I got a tingling hand up to my mask and threw the dogged seal away. A rush of air and I was alive. Alive, but trapped at the bottom of the lake without a breath of air to get me back.
I lay there for a while, breathing, aching as the blood surged back into my hands and feet, my lungs shredded with the effort of inhaling vacuum. I tossed the bottled lung away and listened to it clang loudly off stone. A big room. I forced myself to my knees for a look around.
It was a cancer of a cathedral, drowning at the bottom of the lake. Swirling constellations of naves led to fluted columns, supporting gothic arches that climbed out into midair, themselves supporting nothing. The whole space felt like the inside of a dead thing's shell, chambers whirling into smaller chambers, stairwells that started broad and narrowed into nothing, melting into the wall dozens of feet over the floor. Everything was smooth and dry. Organic.
I stripped off the pressure suit and refitted what remained of my holy vestments. Still on my knees, I rolled out the sealed weapon pack and settled the revolver and articulated sheath properly on my body. I fed the sword into the sheath, checked the load on my bully, then got to my feet and headed down into the convoluted center of the building.
This place wasn't built for traveling through. I felt like I was behind the stage at a carnival show, with half-built sets and stage tricks that stretched away into forever. Stairways ended abruptly. Doors opened into nothing, or wouldn't open at all. Arching paths led to other framework catwalks that led back to the start of the path. More than once I found myself jumping from one tilted floorscape to the next, leaping over chasms that yawned down for hundreds of feet, maybe more. Wicked gusts pulsed through the building, like the startled breathing of a dreaming child. The air smelled of dust, then of fire, then of mold. The air smelled of madness.
I rested on a terrace of pews. It amazed me, how much this place resembled the Grand Library, in the Scholar's prison up above. The same wild logic of architecture and landscape permeated everything, though here the logic slipped into dream as much as reality. And no books, I realized. There were no books here.
The farther I went, the narrower things became. Ceilings dropped claustrophobically low; walls pressed in. The stairways were mere wisps between rooms. The logic of the place was compressing into a single, disjointed note. I felt more and more like I was pressing on into a dollhouse, hunching down to pass through doors, stepping over walls that had never been closed. I was about to invoke Morgan's strength to clear a little space when I passed through the final door, and came to the heart of it all.
The central chamber was enormous and smooth. White walls raised up dozens of feet, a cylinder of arches, each arch leading off to tiny rooms like the one I had just left. It was as if the architecture of the building was an ever-expanding note, and this was the bell that had sounded it. I looked around once, then saw what was at the center of the room.