The Mortar Throne: Down The Root Roads

The first step down cost him his footing on the third.

Cael Brannick caught himself against the carved wall, palm scraping rough-cut stone, and tasted copper where he bit the inside of his cheek. The chisel shard sat heavy in his belt loop, a crude blade wrapped in leather strips he'd torn from his own sleeve. Maren's talisman pressed against his sternum beneath his shirt, a warmth that pulsed in time with something deeper than his own heartbeat. He did not look back up the shaft. There was nothing above him now except the memory of the apprentice hall's burned rafters and the smell of binding-stone dust.

The Root Roads spiraled beneath the Vael Spire in a corkscrew that the old foremen had never recorded on any working plan. His father had mentioned them once, late, after three cups of bitterroot tea, his voice carrying the particular slurring of a man who wanted to forget what he'd poured into the lower rings of the Mortar Throne. "Below the keystone," his father had said, "the stone breathes." Cael had been twelve. He had not understood. He understood now.

He set his hand against the tunnel wall to steady himself, and the capillaries of compressed stone beneath the surface throbbed with a slow bioluminescence, the color of deep moss under a winter moon. Each pulse ran downward through the spiral, a heartbeat measured in hours instead of seconds. The walls sweated a thin film of mineral water that smelled of wet clay and something older, something green and patient. Cael moved his fingers and the pulse moved with him, as though the tunnel sensed his palm and wanted to be polite.

"Keep your weight on the outer edge," he muttered to himself. His father's voice, or what he remembered of it. The instruction was useless. The outer edge was slick with condensation, and the inner edge dropped away into a darkness that his lantern could not find the bottom of. He had taken the lantern against Theron's advice, and Theron had been right, as Theron usually was. The flame guttered in the damp air, sending shadows skating across the curved ceiling.

Theron Ash had been waiting at the base of the apprentice stair when Cael came down, his face unreadable beneath the brim of a low felt hat, a salvaged garrison coat across his shoulders. They had not spoken for more than a minute. Theron did not waste syllables, and what he did say came out flattened, like coins dropped on stone.

"You don't go alone."

"I have to."

"You don't come back up."

"I know."

Theron had looked at the chisel shard wrapped at Cael's belt, then at the place on Cael's chest where the talisman made the fabric tent slightly. He had not asked what the talisman was. He had not asked how Cael intended to find Maren Fell in the binding matrix, or what he intended to do with her once he found her. He had handed Cael a coil of thin rope, a fire-steel, and a twist of dried meat wrapped in oiled paper, and then he had stepped back into the shadow of the stairwell and said nothing else.

That had been an hour ago. The stair ended. The Root Roads began.

Cael counted his steps because counting was the only way to keep the silence from pressing on his eardrums. The air tasted different here than it had in the upper Spire, colder and more alive, the kind of cold that settled in the joints of the fingers and reminded the body that it was built for sun. Each breath came back with a faint sweetness, not floral, not quite mineral, something that suggested sap and old roots and the green throat of a forest at night. He had read about such forests. He had never walked in one.

Forty-three steps. Forty-four. The spiral tightened. He unhooked the lantern from his belt and held it low, and the light found writing on the tunnel wall, characters incised into the stone in a script he did not recognize. They glowed faintly in response to his approach, the same moss-light as the capillaries, but brighter, as though his presence stirred the ink.

A sound reached him from below, not a voice, not a footfall, something between a hum and a long exhalation. It was too low to be a word and too shaped to be wind. Cael stopped. The chisel shard bit at his hip through the leather. The talisman against his chest beat once, harder than the rhythm of the walls, as if answering.

He kept going.

The tunnel opened without warning into a chamber the size of the apprentice refectory, the ceiling vaulting upward into darkness that the lantern could not penetrate. Pillars of raw stone rose from the floor at irregular intervals, each one veined with the same bioluminescent capillaries, and between the pillars the ground dropped away into a second spiral, this one cored out of a black root thicker than any tree Cael had ever seen, the surface of it ridged and soft-looking, threaded with veins of pale green that pulsed in sequence around the chamber's perimeter.

Cael set his hand on the nearest pillar. The pulse was faster here. The talisman answered, and for a moment the two rhythms overlapped, and he felt the difference between them like the difference between two voices singing the same note in different octaves. The pillar was warm. The air was cold. His hand stayed where it was.

He was twenty-two years old. He was an apprentice mason-caster whose master had been crushed under a ceiling beam three days ago while shouting at him to run. He was the son of a foreman who had died of a coughing sickness the winter before, halfway through a binding seam that no one else in the Spire could finish. He was carrying a dead woman's talisman against his heart and a piece of broken chisel at his hip, and he was going deeper into the ground because a voice he had heard only twice, once in life and once after, had told him that the answer to what was happening to the Mortar Throne was not above the keystone.

It was below it.

The second spiral was wider than the first, and its steps were not cut. They had grown. Cael tested the first one with his boot and felt the surface yield slightly under his weight before firming up, the root accommodating him the way old wood accommodates a familiar chair. He took the second step. The third. The lantern light fell on something at the edge of his vision and he raised it.

A name, carved into the root in the same script as the tunnel wall, but larger, the strokes deeper, and at the center of each character a small bead of light that did not pulse so much as breathe. Cael crouched and read it, and the reading took longer than it should have, because each character resolved only when he stopped trying to translate and simply looked.

Maren Fell.

His throat closed. He had not expected to find her name in stone. He had not expected to find her name at all.

He set the lantern down and pressed his palm flat against the carving, and the talisman against his chest flared warm enough to feel through his shirt, and the chamber answered with a single long note that rose from the root beneath his feet and passed upward through his bones and out through the top of his skull. The sound was not music. It was a recognition. The root knew the name. The root knew the hand that had pressed the chisel to make it.

Cael stayed where he was, his hand on the stone, his head bowed, and breathed in the sweet cold air, and listened.

Somewhere far below him, something that was not quite a voice, and not quite the tunnel, and not quite the woman he had come to find, said a single word that he could not quite hear and could not quite repeat.

He stayed still, and he listened harder, and the spiral went on down into the dark.

He stayed longer than he meant to.

When he finally lifted his hand from the stone, his palm was cold and the talisman against his chest had settled back to its usual low warmth, and the chamber was quiet again in the way that deep places are quiet: a quiet that has weight, that presses gently on the eardrums, that asks you to listen harder than you want to. Cael picked up the lantern and started down the spiral.

The slope steepened. The root's surface changed under his boots, from the polished dark of the upper road to something rougher, pitted, and in places threaded with veins of a pale mineral that caught the lantern light and threw it back in tiny scattered points, like a sky of frozen stars laid flat underfoot. The air grew colder and damper, and a smell entered it that he had never smelled before in a tunnel: loam, but sharper, almost mineral, with an undertone of something sweet and a little sick, like fruit left too long in a cellar.

He counted steps because counting helped. Eighty. Ninety. One hundred and twelve, and the tunnel opened.

Not opened as in widened. Opened as in the root ceased to be a tunnel and became a vault, a space so broad the lantern could not find the far wall, and the ceiling rose beyond the reach of the light until it was simply a darkness above. The floor of the vault was not floor at all but a lattice of roots woven together and set with the same pale mineral, and where the roots crossed one another there were hollows, and in the hollows there were lamps: small glass bowls set on stone brackets, each one burning with a steady blue-white flame that gave no smoke and no heat Cael could feel.

The Stoneborn lived here.

He saw the first one before he understood what he was seeing. A figure sat cross-legged at the base of a pillar of woven root, hunched forward over a small work-stone, and at first he took it for a man in a heavy coat, because the shape was right: shoulders, back of the head, the curve of a forearm laid across a knee. Then the figure turned, and the lantern light found the face, and Cael's breath caught.

The skin was stone. Not skin that had turned to stone, but stone that had remembered it had once been skin: a gray-brown surface, veined and cracked in patterns that followed the lines a face ought to have, brow, cheek, jaw, but carved deep and dry and faintly translucent at the thin places, so that when the figure moved its head, something inside shifted and gave off a dim amber glow. The eyes were the strangest part. They were not stone. They were wet, dark, and entirely human, set into a mask of mineral, and they looked at Cael with a patience that did not belong to anything alive.

"Hold there," the figure said. The voice was human too. Gravelly, low, careful. "Hold where the light finds you."

Cael held. His hand was on the lantern and the other hand was at his belt, where the chisel hung, and he was aware that neither of those things would help him if the hollows behind him decided to fill with more of these shapes.

"You have the smell of the upper works on you." The figure rose, slowly, unfolding from the work-stone the way a stone wall might unfold if it remembered how. It was a little shorter than Cael, and broader, and one of its arms ended at the elbow, the stump worn smooth and dark like the handle of a tool used for years. "Mason-dust. Fresh-cut keystone. And under that, the binding-rot. You have come down through the chafing."

It said chafing the way a man might say cancer. The word landed in the vault and did not echo.

"My name is Theron Ash," the figure said. "I am what is left of the elder of this colony. You are welcome to stand in our light, mason, but you are not welcome to speak until I know what you have come to ask."

Cael swallowed. His throat was dry and the sweet-sick smell of the place was stronger now that he was still.

"I am Cael Brannick," he said. "I am an apprentice of the Vael Spire. I have come down to find what the root-mind has become, and whether any of the binders who fell are still..."

He trailed off. The word still did not fit any of the shapes in the vault.

Theron Ash regarded him. The amber glow at the thin places in his face shifted and steadied.

"You have come down," the elder said, "to do a young man's errand in a place that has eaten older men than you for breakfast."

Around the vault, other shapes had turned. Cael could feel their eyes on him, dozens of them, glinting in the dark beyond the lamp brackets. The colony was larger than he had thought. The hollows went on, row after row, and in each one there was a figure, or the suggestion of a figure, or the sound of a figure breathing in the slow mineral rhythm of stone that has not forgotten breath.

"Walk with me," Theron said. "Leave the lantern. The lamps will guide you. The lamps have been burning since before the Spire knew it had a foundation."

Cael left the lantern on a bracket at the tunnel mouth and followed. The elder moved without sound, his one arm swinging slightly at his side, the stump held close to his ribs, and his bare mineral feet set down on the root-lattice with the sureness of a man who had walked this path a thousand times in the dark.

"You have the talisman," Theron said, without turning. "I can hear it from here. A small hot sound, like a coal in a woolen pocket."

"Yes."

"And you have come alone."

"Yes."

Theron stopped at the edge of one of the hollows and looked down into it. Cael looked with him. In the hollow, two Stoneborn sat facing one another across a low stone that had been hollowed into a bowl, and in the bowl there was water, and in the water there was a light that moved of its own accord, slow and searching, like a hand feeling its way along a wall in the dark.

"We were masons," Theron said. "Most of us. Carvers, dusters, rope-runners, the small hands that feed the big ones. We came down here in the second year of the binding, when the keystone dust began to thicken in the air of the upper terraces and the Guild told us the work was safe. We worked the lower rings. We carved the roots that had grown into the masonry and pried them out, because the roots were eating the keystone, and the keystone was eating the dust, and the dust was eating us. We did not know then that the root-mind was older than the Spire. We did not know that what we were prying out was a finger of a hand we could not see."

He moved on. Cael followed. The pale mineral under their feet pulsed faintly as they passed, in time with something Cael could not hear.

"By the third year, the dust had begun its work in us. By the fifth, we were no longer fit for the upper terraces. The Guild gave us the choice of the waste-yard or the deep roads, and we chose the deep roads, because we had learned to love the root, and the root had learned to love us back, and love, mason, is the thing the upper works do not know how to make."

Theron stopped again and faced him. The amber glow in his face was brighter now, and Cael could see that the glow came from somewhere inside the chest, behind the sternum, a slow furnace that had once been a heart.

"You ask about the root-mind," Theron said. "I will tell you, because no one has asked in a long time, and because the asking was always the only thing that made the answer bearable. Listen, and do not try to weigh what I say against what you were taught, because what you were taught is a child of the upper works, and the upper works are children of the Spire, and the Spire is a chafing band wrapped around a sleeping god."

The word god landed in Cael's chest like a struck bell.

"Not a god as your priests would mean it," Theron said, as if he had heard the bell. "Not a maker. Not a chooser. A god as a root is a god: something so large and so slow that what it does to the things that live in it can only be called holy by the things that survive. The root-mind is not awake. It is not sleeping in the way you sleep. It is sleeping in the way a mountain sleeps, with its weight on every living thing for miles around, and we are the mites in its fur, and the Spire is a chafing band that has rubbed the skin raw, and the binding that your binders wove into the lower rings was a knot tied in the beard of something that does not know it has a beard."

He lifted his one hand and held it out, palm up, and in the palm a small flower grew, white-petaled, rooted in nothing, trembling faintly in the still air of the vault.

"The root-mind is dreaming," Theron said. "It dreams the way the deep stones dream, in long slow pictures, and we are permitted to sit in its dream because we learned to breathe its air before we breathed any other. If you wake it, mason, if you tie one more knot in its beard, if you send one more binder down to sing the Spire's binding into its sleep, it will not be angry. It will not be vengeful. It will simply close its hand, and everything that has ever been built on its fingers will be ground to flour."

He closed his hand, and the flower was gone, and his fingers were empty, and the air where the flower had been smelled faintly of rain.

Cael stood in the lamp-lit vault, with the colony's eyes on him from the hollows, and the talisman warm against his chest, and the word god turning in him like a key in a lock that did not want to turn.

"Then what," he said, and his voice was smaller than he meant it to be, "is the binding that fell? If the root-mind was only sleeping, why did the binding fall?"

Theron Ash looked at him for a long time.

"Because," the elder said, "the root-mind turned over in its sleep."

ael stood in the lamp-lit vault for a long time after Theron stopped speaking. The colony's eyes watched from the hollows, patient as the stone, and the talisman pressed against his chest with the slow, steady weight of something that had been waiting longer than he had been alive. He thought about the mortar his father had mixed in the lower rings, the way his father's hands had moved in the bucket, the way the lime had stung the cuts between his fingers when he'd been small enough to stand in the mixing trough. He thought about the binding his binders had woven, the songs they had sung, the knots they had tied in the beard of something that did not know it had a beard. He thought about Maren Fell, who had been researching when the Throne fell, who had been somewhere in the lower rings when the root-mind turned over, and whose body had never been found among the rubble because there had been no rubble. There had only been the soft, breathing absence where the Spire used to be.

"What happened to the binders," Cael said. His voice was steadier now. "The ones who went down to sing the binding into the root-mind's sleep. What happened to them?"

Theron Ash did not answer for a long moment. The lamp flame guttered in some breath Cael could not feel, and the shadows of the hollows shifted, and the smell of rain that had lingered since the elder closed his hand around the flower faded until there was only the mineral scent of the vault and the faint, sweet rot of the colonies.

"They are still singing," Theron said. "Some of them. The ones who went deep enough that the singing became part of the stone. You can hear them if you put your ear to the right root. They are not in pain. They are not trapped. They are simply continuing, because no one has ever told them to stop."

Cael closed his eyes. He could feel the silver seam at his wrist begin to warm, the way it had warmed in the upper tunnels when he first descended into the root-terraces. He had told himself then that it was the friction of the climb, the blood moving faster in his veins, the body doing what bodies do when they are pushed past their limits. He knew now that it was not any of those things. The seam was a thread the root-mind had laid into him years ago, when his father had first brought him down into the lower rings to learn the casting, and the thread had been sleeping in his skin the way the root-mind slept in the stone, and it was waking now because he was close.

"I have to go down," Cael said. He opened his eyes. "I have to find the place where she went."

Theron Ash looked at him with the patient, unsurprised expression of someone who had been waiting for a young man to say exactly this, and who understood that the waiting was the only gift he could offer.

"Then go," the elder said. "But go with the knowing. Do not tie knots in the beard. Do not sing the Spire's binding into its sleep. Walk softly. Breathe its air. And when you find what you find, bring it back here, and we will decide together what to do with it."

Cael nodded. He turned from the vault, and the colony's eyes followed him, and the lamps burned low as he passed, and the talisman at his chest pulsed once, a single slow beat, like the heart of something that had been waiting for him to make this choice.

He took the eastern stair first, the one he had climbed with the child from the upper terraces, and then he took the branch he had not taken, the one that sloped downward past the tier where the lantern moss thinned and the air grew warmer and the sound of dripping became the sound of something larger moving somewhere far below. The stone under his boots was slick with condensation that smelled of iron and old water, and the roots that crossed the ceiling grew thicker here, and their surfaces were no longer rough but smooth, polished by the passage of things that had traveled along them for a very long time.

He walked for what felt like hours, though he had no way to measure time in the deep tunnels. The whisper of the root-mind grew louder, not in volume but in clarity, the way a voice becomes clearer as you move closer to the person speaking. He could make out words now, or the shapes of words, fragments that dissolved when he tried to hold them. Something about the patience of stone. Something about the weight of roots. Something about the smallness of hands, and the largeness of what hands were asked to carry.

The silver seam at his wrist was pulsing in time with the whisper, a slow rhythm that rose through his forearm and into his shoulder and down into his chest, where it met the talisman's pulse, and the two rhythms braided together until he could not tell which was the stone's heartbeat and which was his own.

He came at last to a place where the tunnel opened into a vault much larger than the one above, and the ceiling was lost in darkness, and the floor was carpeted with roots so thick they looked like the backs of sleeping animals. The air here was warm and wet and smelled of growth, of the green push of things that had been growing for a very long time without anyone to watch them. The whisper was almost a voice now, and the voice was almost a word, and the word was almost something he could have said aloud if he had known how.

In the center of the vault, half-buried in the carpet of roots, he saw them.

Boots. A pair of them, laced with cords of fresh mortar that had not yet fully set, the lime still pale against the dark leather. They were small boots, sized for a woman, and they were placed neatly side by side as if the woman who had worn them had stepped out of them only for a moment and intended to step back in. The mortar in the laces was Cael's father's mortar. He would have known it anywhere. The sand was from the quarry below the second ring, and the lime was slaked in the old way, and the water was drawn from the cistern that his father had built when Cael was nine years old. His father had taught Maren Fell the mix. He had taught her because she had asked, and because she had listened in a way that made the teaching feel like it mattered.

Cael knelt beside the boots. He did not touch them. The silver seam at his wrist was pulsing fast now, almost frantic, and the talisman at his chest was hot, and the whisper of the root-mind was a single sustained note, like a bell struck once and never allowed to fade.

He looked up from the boots, and he saw that the roots behind them climbed the far wall of the vault and disappeared through a fissure in the stone that led upward, not downward. The fissure was narrow, barely wide enough for a person to pass, and the stone around its edges was worn smooth by use. The roots that climbed into it were bent in the direction of the climb, as if they had been stepped on, or leaned upon, or followed by something that had chosen to go up rather than down.

Maren had gone up. Out of the deep tunnels, out of the root-terraces, out of the place where the root-mind dreamed its long slow pictures. She had gone up into the wild lands beyond Vael's walls, the places the Garrison had never mapped, the places the binders had never sung to, the places where the stone gave way to soil and the soil gave way to the open air and the sky.

Cael sat back on his heels. He looked at the boots, and at the fresh mortar in the laces, and at the fissure that led up into the wild. He thought about his father's mix in the cords, and about Maren lacing her boots with it because she had no other way to mark where she had been, and about the root-mind turning over in its sleep and finding her there, and about what the root-mind had decided to do with her.

The whisper was steady now. The silver seam was steady. The talisman was steady. Everything in the vault was in rhythm, and the rhythm was patient, and the patience was the kind that does not hurry because it does not need to.

Cael reached out and lifted one of the boots from the carpet of roots. It was lighter than he expected. He turned it in his hands, and saw that the sole was worn nearly through, and that the fresh mortar in the laces was not just mortar. Mixed into it, in a pattern he recognized from his father's notebooks, was a single strand of silver thread, the kind that was spun in the lower rings when the binders wove the Spire's binding into the stone. She had taken a piece of the binding with her. She had laced it into her boots. She had walked out into the wild with a thread of the Spire's old song tied to her feet, and the root-mind had let her go.

He tucked the boot inside his shirt, against his ribs, next to the talisman. He stood. The fissure waited above him, and the roots bent toward it, and the warm wet air of the vault moved past him in a slow exhale that smelled of growth and of distance and of something that was not quite hope but lived in the same country.

He began to climb.