Tap, tap, tap.
She woke, shivering on metal, into dark silence disturbed only by the ceaseless drip. It smelled like . . . nothing. In place of Rasenna’s noisome blend of spice and sweat and blood was a sterile absence: a ghost trace of iron, bitter at the throat. She began to explore the darkness but soon stopped. It was a cold world and greasy to the touch.
She couldn’t much remember recent events except one, and that one was impossible, a poisoned whisper from a bad dream: he could not be dead. She could not have been here long: her jaw still ached where the Doc had punched it, and there was another, fresher, pain at the back of her head. She was still too weak to stand, so she lay back and listened to the drip as the journey from Rasenna came back in fragments . . .
. . . of rocks fallen into the sea, knocked loose by the carriage wheels. She watched their escape with envy through a small vent in her mobile creaking cage.
After the Twelfth left Rasenna, Sofia was sent north in a small convoy—either General Luparelli found prisoners burdensome or this particular prisoner was wanted in the capital. Most of the journey was by narrow winding roads along the coast, avoiding Rasenna and other towns. It was late autumn, and the rolling Etrurian landscape was frozen into austerity. They traveled north until they came to a place with leafless trees covered in thick dust, the land stripped of life by something more permanent than winter. Sickened by it, Sofia concentrated on keeping warm inside.
It was snowing when she caught her first glimpse of Concord. It was really two cities, the new built on the corpse of the old. Sandstone walls and the towers on the periphery were all that remained of the city defeated by Rasenna at Montaperti, and they were left behind as the carriage crossed an immense bridge lined with flags and torches. It was recognizably from the same architectural school as Giovanni’s, but where his had elegant human proportions, this had been built for titans. They approached a wall of steel-blue plates overlapping like fish scales; they rippled open with the crunching chime of a phalanx, an echo of the many legions that had marched through it over the decades.
They were woodsmen once, so Giovanni had told her, and she could see how they had replaced forests with soaring columns capped with steel branching into coiled limbs. Narrow, endless stairs connected the old city of earth and wood to the dark white city of steel and marble. She counted scores of aqueducts, wide as rivers, all flowing from the same source: the mountain that dominated the city center like a decapitated giant, looming black and baleful. Looking irrelevant amid its jagged peaks were the networked towers of the Engineers’ Guild, minute parasites on an indifferent behemoth. From the mountain’s summit there rose up an awful black cathedral, a fell idol looking down on its wretched worshippers without love, without pity, as if it were not the interloper, as if it had always been here and Man himself was the aberration. She had never seen anything like it—but like any Etrurian, she knew its name, for it could only be that tower, more ambitious even than Nimrod’s: this was the Beast itself, the Molè Bernoulliana.
Only the mountain on which it stood rivaled the Molè’s spiraling height. Its smoky-green triple dome was capped by a savagely tapering needle stabbing the sky. Its array of buttresses was festooned with entangled wires: the web of an army of blind spiders toiling away for mad centuries . . .
. . . and here memory became confused as the carriage door opened and a hood was thrown at her. She had been transported somewhere else, this time by boat, then she was led up steps and into a large open space—she could tell that by the way her footsteps sounded. The only voices were hushed—guards conferring, she supposed. Though her hands had been bound together, they were otherwise free, and she’d begun to lift the hood when the blow came from behind.
Then darkness. Then silence . . .
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
And now she was here, wherever here was. She could feel no seams in the rough stone walls, so either the individual bricks were huge or the whole cell had been carved from rock. As her eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, she thought she discerned light coming weakly from one wall. Crawling closer, she found a large metal door with a window that might have been large enough to squeeze through but for the thick iron bar bisecting it. She grabbed the bar and pulled herself up. As she looked out, she sneezed, and it echoed in the space above and below. She cursed the unaccustomed length of her hair—it would never dry in this place. Already it had taken moisture from the air till it could absorb no more, and now it straggled lankly around her neck and down her back.
She thudded her head on the bar.
“Guess not,” she whispered to herself.
Before she could inspect the exterior, her legs gave out. The ground was damp, but she was too exhausted to care. She fell again into darkness . . .
. . . and was woken by an agonized groan of metal. The only machines she had ever heard were those Giovanni had used on the bridge, but they had sounded nothing like this, mountains of rust scraping together like animals in pain, too tired to scream. She lifted herself to the window again, stooping because of the low roof, and peered into the darkness.
Outside, above and below, there was nothing, but in the center of this empty space was a glass column, thick as an old oak, and beyond that an endless curved wall dotted with other cells like hers, hundreds of them, all set in a great spiral in an inverted conical pit. As her eyes grew used to the twilight gloom, she could see the pit was not bottomless, as it had first appeared. It ended about thirty rows below in a dark lake.
She studied the wall across the void, and after a while she realized that the rows of cells were moving—very slowly—and that was most likely the cause of the groaning. That mystery solved, Sofia started to wonder if she was alone, but that question was answered quickly enough when the groaning stopped and the screaming started. Peering across the void, she caught a glimpse of a bearded, skeletal figure dancing around his cell. There were other people too, and they were all running to their cell windows, thrusting out bony arms as if to grasp something. Listening closely, she could make out a variety of dialects, some prayers, some blasphemies, but mostly gibberish.
Strange, she thought. The movement wasn’t terrible, merely disconcerting.
Another noise, like a bee’s hum, came from the lake below, and she saw a light beneath the water, like a long blue-glowing worm, writhing with spastic motion. The volume and pitch of the hum rose till it sounded like swarming wasps, and the screaming correspondingly erupted into frenzy. Sofia could see the occupant of a cell in the row just below hers: his head was bleeding, but still he kept beating at it with his fists.
The light broke the surface like the sparks Giovanni had used to repel buio, but engorged to lightning bolts, and circled the bottom row, then the next row, then the next. Some cells it skipped over, others it briefly illuminated; Sofia could see no discernible pattern to its erratic movements other than that it was moving up the spiral of cells and coming ever closer to her row.
As it got nearer, she could smell burning hair and ozone intermingled.
The light shot though the row below her, skipped the bleeding man’s cell, and stopped at his neighbor’s before shooting on to the next row. Sofia had only a moment to witness his rapturous relief before her cell was flooded with light—
—and pain. There was no heat, yet her body burned, and she clenched her teeth together so she could not scream; she would not give them that satisfaction—
—and it was gone as suddenly as it had come.
For a while there was numbness; then, as heartless as a sunrise, pain returned, this time coming from inside, from the space between her bones, growing until gums and scalp and eyes screamed. . .
Inside her cell there was only the drip, but outside there were two distinct sounds: the ecstasy of those the light had spared and the sobbing of those it had chosen. Before long they merged unintelligibly. Sofia cried because the pain was too real for a nightmare. She was in the belly of the Beast, and Giovanni—there was no hiding from it—had drowned in the Irenicon. She had pinned her foolish wish that he would stay in Rasenna forever to the Madonna. It had been granted.