第16章 Into the Deep Shadow

The well was older than anything Maya had ever touched. It stood at the bottom of the foundations, in a chamber that the blue academy light never reached, a circle of worked stone half buried in the floor, its rim worn smooth by hands that had gripped it before the school was a school, before the Curators were a Council, before anyone had thought to give the dark a name. Seraphina lit the oil lamp, and its light fell into the well, and there was no bottom. "We go down in single file," Seraphina said. "The well does not care how we descend, but it will not let us fall. It is a door, not a pit. It will set us down where the Deep Shadow is thinnest, and from there we walk." Maya went first. She did not know why she went first. Her hands found the rim, and then there was stone beneath her feet that had not been there a moment before, and she was walking down a stair that wound around a shaft of darkness, and the lamp in Seraphina's hand threw her shadow ahead of her, long and wrong, and it seemed to her that her shadow was leading her, that it knew this stair, that it had climbed it before, in another body, in another time. The air changed. It grew thick and cold and tasted of iron and rain. The stair ended, and they stood in a place that was not a place. The Deep Shadow was a drowned world. There was no sky above them, or rather there was a sky, and it was below them, a dark plain of shadow-stuff that stretched in every direction, and above them hung a ceiling of darkness that moved slowly, like water seen from underneath. Maya looked down and saw her own reflection in the ground, except that her reflection did not look up at her. It looked at something behind her. "Don't watch it too long," Cassian said. "It notices." They walked. The ground under their feet was soft, like a carpet of memory, and every step raised small clouds of shadow that hung in the air and whispered. Maya heard her name in the whispers. She heard her father's voice, and her mother's, and sounds she had forgotten she remembered, the click of a car door, the low murmur of a lullaby, a laugh that had followed her into every room she had ever entered. "Time does not run straight here," Seraphina said. "The past is not behind us. It is around us. Do not answer anything you hear. Do not follow anything that calls your name. The Remembered use your own memory as bait, and what they catch they keep." "The Remembered?" Talia's voice was small. "Echoes of things the Hollow devoured," Seraphina said. "People, mostly, in the early years, when the first Curators were careless. They are not the people they were. They are hunger wearing a shape, and the shape is always someone you loved." They walked for a time that Maya could not measure. The ground rose and fell. They passed things that might have been trees, might have been pillars, might have been something else entirely, and Maya kept her eyes on the ground and her shadow at her heels, and she did not answer the whispers. It was Cassian who was caught. He was walking beside her, and then he was not, and Maya turned and saw him standing still, his face gone slack, his eyes fixed on something in the dark that she could not see. His lips were moving. "Cassian." Maya's voice was sharp. "Cassian, come back." He did not come back. He took a step toward the dark, and then another, and Maya saw what he was walking toward, a figure standing in the shadow-stuff, a man with Cassian's eyes and a scar that matched his own, an older man, tired, careful, the kind of man who never made a careless move in his life. "Father," Cassian said. His voice was the voice of a child. "Cassian, it's not him." Maya moved in front of him, between him and the figure, and the figure did not look at her. It looked past her, at Cassian, with a father's patient love. "Your father is dead. You told me. He was careful, and they killed him for it. This is not him. This is what it ate." "I know." Cassian's voice cracked. "I know it's not him. I just. I never got to say. I never got to tell him he was right." He was shaking. "He wrote to me, before he died. He said he was sorry. He said he had been wrong about everything, and that the only thing he had ever done right was love my mother and me. And I never answered him. I was angry. And then he was dead, and I couldn't." The figure reached out a hand. It was not a kind hand, not really. Maya could see the wrongness in it now, the way the fingers were too long, the way the shadow-stuff that made it kept shifting, kept trying to remember the shape of a hand and failing. "Don't take his hand," Maya said. "Please, Cassian. He would not want you to take it." Cassian looked at the hand. He looked at Maya. His face was wet, and it was the most honest thing she had ever seen on it. "You're right," he said. "He wouldn't." He turned away. The figure behind him held out its hand a moment longer, patient as a tide, and then it lost its shape and dissolved back into the shadow-stuff, and the whisper that had been calling Cassian's name went quiet. They walked on. Maya did not let Cassian walk at the edge anymore. She put Talia between them and Seraphina at the front, and she watched the ground and did not answer the whispers, and after a while the ground began to rise, and the shadow-stuff grew thin, and ahead of them, in the dark, there was a light. It was not a friendly light. It was the color of a candle seen through a keyhole, and it did not flicker. It hung in the air at the height of a tall man, and as they came closer Maya saw what it was. A door. It was made of woven shadow, strands of darkness braided together as carefully as a basket, and it hung in the air of the Deep Shadow with nothing holding it up, and it glowed faintly, the way a thing glows when it has been given everything a person had to give. It was the most beautiful and the most terrible thing Maya had ever seen, because she knew, before Seraphina said it, what it was. "The seal," Seraphina said. "Your mother's Working." "It's a door," Maya whispered. "It is a door," Seraphina agreed. "And it is her. It has been her for ten years. It will open for her blood, and for no one else's." Maya walked up to it. She could feel it, the way you can feel a person standing behind you, the way you can feel a heartbeat through a wall. She raised her hand, and her shadow rose with it, and the door leaned toward her like a living thing recognizing its own. She pressed her palm to the woven shadow. The door opened. "No," Seraphina said, but the door was already opening, and Maya was already stepping through, and behind her the door was already closing, and she heard Cassian shout her name, and then she heard nothing at all. She was through. She was home. ---