Episodul 65 · Red Light

Krista did not come.

She stood on the threshold of the wooden door with the paper in her hand and her face toward him. Soles saw her eyes through the gap, through the black strands falling from the vault, and there was no fear in them. There was a strange, deep calm, like someone woken in the middle of a sentence she can still hear.

— Krista! Come on!

Her lips moved. Nothing reached him. Behind her the man with the ink-stained fingers had sat down again and was writing, bent close to the page. The afternoon light lay over him like honey.

The water was halfway up Soles’s thighs. It was cold, and it pulled. Not toward the tunnel. Toward the gap, toward the round room, the way water pulls toward a drain.

If he let go, the stone might close. If he held on, he could not reach her.

— Soles. Let go of it!

Maxim had reached him, waist-deep, the crowbar raised over his head like a dead torch.

— I can’t. She’s on the other side.

— Then I’ll get her.

— You won’t get through. Look at it.

Maxim looked. In front of the gap the current turned in a black whirl and swallowed dead lanterns, splinters of board, mud from the vault.

Someone laid a palm on the slab beside Soles’s hand.

— Go, Varren said. I’ve got it.

Soles did not turn to look. There was no time and no room in him for another question. He only felt the warmth under his palm change, the way a cup changes when two hands hold it and you can no longer tell which one is carrying it.

He took his hand away.

The stone did not move.

Soles threw himself at the gap. The current took his legs and pulled him through faster than he could have walked. His ribs caught fire all at once. He hit the edge of the slab, held on with one hand, lost it, and landed on his knees in the round room with his mouth full of water.

Here the water was lower, only ankle-deep, gathering in the middle around the carved man as if he lay in a riverbed. On the walls the rows of signs shone wet in the light from the door.

Krista stood on the threshold.

Soles caught her arm. Her hand was warm. Dry. She looked at him as at someone she had known for years and had not seen in a long time.

— He wrote it for me, she said. Long ago. As if he knew I’d come.

— Tell me outside.

— He isn’t lying to me, Soles. Everyone else is lying about something. He isn’t.

The man at the table stopped writing. He did not look up. He laid the pen on the paper, carefully, as if it must not make a sound.

Soles pulled.

She came. She did not fight him. She took one step back from the threshold, then another, the paper pressed to her chest, and the moment her shoes touched the water of the round room the wooden door closed behind her. Not with a bang. Not with a creak of hinges. It closed the way an eye closes.

The wall was a wall again, with signs.

Soles dragged her toward the gap. The current came at them now, and they had to go back through it. He caught the edge of the slab with his free hand and hauled them along it, Krista clinging to his arm, step by step through the black torrent, his ribs screaming.

They made it through.

In the low chamber the water had reached their waists. Soles stumbled, went down on one knee, came up. Beside the slab someone caught his collar and yanked him upright.

Tesa.

She stood with her broken hand against her chest and her shoulder pressed to the slab, her face white as lime. Varren was beside her. He stood with his back to the stone now, not his palm. His hands were in his coat pockets, though the water came up to his chest. He watched Soles and Krista with the warm, calm look of someone who had been there all along.

Behind them the slab slid back into place without a sound.

Soles looked at the slab, then at Tesa’s shoulder against it.

She held it.

The thought came simply and settled before he could question it. Tesa had held it on Thursday. Tesa had her shoulder to the stone.

— Thank you, he told her.

Tesa did not answer. She was looking at Varren.

Above them the vault cracked again. The crown stone dropped another hand’s width, and beside it the water burst through in one thick black column that hit the floor like a fist and sent a wave up to their shoulders.

The lamp on Maxim’s forehead went out.

The dark was total. Not the dark of a room with the light switched off, where the eyes slowly find the furniture. The dark of a place light had never entered. Soles could not see his own hand. He could not see Krista, though he was holding her arm. There was only the water: falling, running, rising.

— Maxim! someone shouted. Krista!

— Here!

— Where’s the tunnel?

No one knew. The water had turned them, pushed them, spun them. The tunnel might be ahead. It might be behind. It might have been underwater for some time.

— I’ve got a wall, Tesa said. I don’t know which one.

— Don’t hold the wall! Krista shouted. If they come out of it—

She did not finish.

The water reached Soles’s neck. He lifted his chin. He felt the blade under his jacket, cold through the leather. He felt the place in his chest that had opened three times and now stood open like a broken window letting in the cold. Whatever had been in his arm, he had spent it on the vault. He had nothing left to push with.

Then, across the dark water, a light appeared.

Red. Unsteady. Like the glow of a fire seen at night in the window of a far-off house. It spread over the surface in thin trembling bands and grew stronger.

Soles turned his head toward it.

In the wall to their left, above the water, where there had been only stone, something had opened. Not a wooden door. A round opening with worn edges, like the entrance to a tower. Beyond it a stone staircase climbed in a spiral, and from high up, very far up, came down the light of a great living fire.

On the first step stood a man.