The Weave Runs Deep

Low tide was a few hours off, and they spent a good many of the remaining minutes arguing in a potion shop on the Lamp Way. The halfling behind the counter, standing on a stool, wanted four hundred gold a bottle for water breathing and two hundred for buoyancy. He heard Biz float the idea of simply taking one and warned them, mildly, that Captain Mireval would hear about it — then, once nobody stole anything, came down to a hundred. They still could not afford it. Aelion walked out of the shop in frustration and refused to continue the argument indoors. They left with what they had brought.

Down on the wharves they found a fisherman in a yellow raincoat and hat, peg leg, pipe, long patchy beard, rigging his boat for the day. He would sack his day's fishing to run them up the coast for six silver, and for a whole gold piece he would wait five and a half hours before considering them dead.

It was six miles northwest and half an hour on the water. The cave entrance was a barnacle-crusted iron gate set into the black rock at the base of the cliff — eight feet high, bars a hand's width apart, a short flooded corridor receding into the dark behind it. Framing the gate were concentric ring carvings that Aelion recognised at once: the same survey notation they had found in the sealed chamber behind the fighting pit, a little over a week earlier. Studying it, he worked out what the gate was. A tide control mechanism — long broken, hinges gone, the flap that should have sealed the cave missing entirely. Nothing they carried could repair it. Biz picked the lock instead, and the gate creaked open.

The corridor opened into a domed chamber some thirty feet across, its ceiling furred with bioluminescent algae and mushrooms that gave off enough light for even those without dark sight to see by. A raised walkway ran three-quarters of the way around the room above a rising pool. There was a ten-foot collapse in the walkway; a narrow side passage; a large archway ahead and left; and, immediately to the left, a dark opening behind a curtain of seaweed.

Flint knelt to study the moss, which was thriving on rock that should not have supported it, and found behind it a brass plaque gone green with patina.

This is the survey hall. The carvings on the walls are the wayfinding keys for the rest of the cave. Read them on entry. They will not change. The southwestern aspect points to the laboratories. The upper carvings to the throttle apparatus and the cradle. The eastern markings to the way upward, should you ever need it. Take a moment here before going deeper. The geometry begins to bend further in. It will be easier to read if you orient yourself first.

It was addressed to M and signed T.

Knowing to look, Worm found the carvings themselves, recessed behind spots of algae: labs through the small passage, library through the arch, workshops and quarters far ahead beyond the brass corridor, exit through the deep shaft above the workshop. Nothing at all about the seaweed passage.

They crossed the gap. Randy and Flint cleared it, then Biz; Aelion, who had made his misgivings known, jumped short and was hauled up on the rope with nothing hurt but his dignity. Worm came over last.

The lab was a twenty-foot box, thick with grime — two stone tables, a broken stool, a wall of empty shelves, and on one table a clay disc the size of a saucer scored with concentric rings and radial lines. Biz read it exactly right: a prototype, and an annotation on one ring reading this ring is the outer valence of the brass enhancement and it will channel the weave more efficiently. A second plaque sat behind a fallen panel by the shelves.

Begin here. The clay disc on the table is the simplest of the local instruments — apprentice grade, but sound. It will give you the regional weave aspect at a glance: density, dominant orientation, basic resonance. Cross-reference with the library records for the baselines I established in my first three years. I left this room mostly empty when I moved deeper. Do not be discouraged by the dust or the grime. The work matured in further chambers. This is only where it began.

Flint, reaching inward out of habit, found something he had been feeling since he walked in without naming it: his hold on magic was stronger here. Not from the disc. From the place.

The library was fifty feet by forty, with steps down into shin-deep water and rows of stone shelves holding books pulped to a grey-black mulch, the whole room smelling of wet paper and mildew. At the far end, up another flight of steps, stood a plinth with a sealed iron chest on it, scored with three concentric rings.

Biz went down into the water and the water came alive. Swarms of small sharp-toothed fish thrashed toward him, and a second swarm came out from behind the shelves once the fighting started. Flint asked them what they wanted and got an answer: we are hungry, we must feed, blood. Randy, who had the most of it, took the worst — bitten twice, badly the second time, his calves streaming into the water and the fish frenzying at the taste. He refused, repeatedly and emphatically, to be healed, bound his own legs badly, and cut through both swarms himself. Flint declined to put much effort into killing them. They were only hungry.

A third plaque turned up on the wall.

All the readings are logged here in sequence. The chest holds the bound copies of my diaries and the master ledger. The shelves hold working notes, partial calculations, and the failed lines of inquiry I kept for posterity. The chest is sealed against the seawater. The shelves are not, and you will find most of them ruined. I made my peace with that long ago. Do not store electrum near the lower shelves. Weave bleed corrupts the metal within a season. Brass and gold are unaffected.

Biz opened the chest. Inside was a leather-bound book of about a hundred and twenty pages, wrapped in oiled leather inside sealskin, kept waterproof with evident care. Most of it was technical — measurements, sketches of conduits and lattice geometry, columns of figures in a hand that tightened and loosened across the years. Five entries were not.

The first was written in the first winter of the work. The cave was everything the old survey had promised; the geometry concentrated the weave to a degree its author had read of nowhere else; the brass-bearing rock, the rear chamber resonance and the tidal isolation together made the place a single magnificent instrument. I have left a chamber untouched in the back. I do not know why. I will think about why later. And, at the top: Maladora, I caught myself writing your name and I think I'm going to leave it. Let this book be the place I talk to you when there is no one else to talk to.

The second came in the fourth year, written within a quarter hour of confirming that the throttle worked, and still trembling. A supply boat came monthly; the captain had begun bringing small comforts unprompted — tea, a wool blanket, once a small carved bird. I think he believes I am dying out here. He's wrong. I've never been more alive.

The third came in the eleventh year, after more than a year of silence. Nineteen distinct resonance intervals catalogued. He had stopped climbing to the clifftop to watch for the boat; the captain still came and left the supplies at the gate, and they had not spoken in three years. Of Maladora: the conservatorium would never have released her, and she was never the one to defy them. And our father was always going to need someone to look after him. I made the choice that was easier for me. She made the harder one. I see that now in a way I did not see it before.

The fourth, in the seventeenth year, he set down plainly so that he would read it later and know he had been clear-eyed. He had begun to feel watched — in the lattice chamber especially, but also in the corridor, and most unsettlingly at the throttle. The cave had been sealed since he came. Nothing had entered or left it but himself. He had walked the perimeter and read the wards. The mind craves company, and when none is given, it manufactures presence. This is what is happening to me. I am sure of it.

The last entry carried no year.

I notice today that I have been talking to M for years. Not aloud — I am not so far gone — but in my head while I work. Sometimes I imagine her standing in the back chamber, the one I left for her, watching me at the bench. She has aged at the same rate I have. Her hair is the colour mine is now. She does not speak. She only listens. I think she has been there a long time. I am not ashamed of this. It is the kindest thing I have done for myself in a long time.

The work is mostly finished. The plaques are set. The throttle holds. The lattice runs as I designed it to run. Any scholar with a working knowledge of the weave could pick up where I left off. I have written for whoever comes. I will not be one of them. I am tired. I am going to stop now.

To whoever finds this: do not move the throttle. The cave was unsafe before me. The cave will be unsafe after me. My work is not worth what would happen here if the throttle were taken from its cradle. Stay clear of this place. Send no one in my name.

Maladora, wherever you are, whether you are still living, whether you ever existed in the way that I have remembered you — I have loved you all these years.

Theodora.

Off the library, down a narrow half-flooded passage, they found a grotto about fifteen feet across, the walls patched with algae pulsing a soft blue-green, tide pools on the floor turning slowly one way and the other, brimming with translucent shrimp and tiny crustaceans and eyeless eight-armed things like starfish. It was a beautiful room. Flint, studying the life in it, concluded that none of it should be touched — that the moss in particular would put out an arm and strangle whatever came near it. Biz, going over the pools, spotted something glinting and lifted out an intact silver bracelet set with a small green stone. Engraved inside: To T from M, always.

Beyond the library they took a long supply corridor, eighty feet of shelving holding shattered glassware, salt-eaten copper tools and the rusted frames of equipment racks, and did not stop to search any of it. The floor sloped down. The water was at their heels.

The corridor past it was narrower, six feet across and sixty long, both walls lined with thin brass channels resonating at a low pitch and glowing violet at intervals. Walking it, Aelion's shadow detached from him, drifted, and reattached. So did Randy's. Biz and Flint both heard a woman's voice say I told you not to come. And Worm found that he simply could not cast his minor illusion any more; something else came out instead, and he did not know how he knew it.

Randy, of all of them, found the plaque that explained it.

Brass concentrates the local current. The channels in the walls are tuned to draw the ambient weave into a single readable line. This is what makes the further chambers legible. Walk steadily through. Do not linger. Mild dispersion effects are expected — warmth, warm metal, the occasional auditory artifact, brief perceptual oddities. These are harmless and pass within minutes. If you feel a sustained pull on your concentration, step out of the corridor and rest in the records chamber. Do not push through. The brass requires no maintenance. It will outlast both of us. T.

Aelion took out the lens in that corridor, and the compass in it pulled him toward the door at the far end.

That door gave onto a circular chamber thirty feet across with a stone basin in the floor and a column rising to the ceiling, three brass arms reaching off it toward the room's three doorways — one arm down, plugging the way Aelion's lens was pointing. A wave glyph was cut into the column at eye height. Biz read the mechanism: float triggers under the hinges, so that the arms open and seal doors as the tide reaches certain heights, of a piece with the broken flaps at the cave mouth. Worm examined the face of the lowered plug and found scratch marks in the brass. They were bestial.

Randy climbed the column and put everything he had into the trigger. The arm slammed open — and, as it did, the other arm came down and sealed the doorway with the scratches on it.

Then the water surged. It had been at their ankles. It came up to their knees. They went through into the room beyond.