Mount Selk

Mount Selk rose out of the Ashlands like the prow of a ship.

They saw it on the third day after leaving the salt people... a single, steep, dark peak, standing alone above the endless rolling plain, much higher than any of the low, worn hills around it. Its lower slopes were grey and bare, scored with old gullies. Its upper slopes were dark with a strange, stunted forest of twisted pines, the first living trees Teo had seen since the Fens. And on its very summit, catching the late afternoon sun so that it glowed like a coal...

A dome.

It was white. Or it had been white, once. Even from a day's walk away, Teo could see that. A great, smooth, perfect half-sphere, perched on the very top of the mountain like an egg in a nest, gleaming against the deep blue sky. And around it, smaller shapes. Lower domes. Square buildings. A long, thin tower, like a needle.

Teo stood on the plain at the foot of the last low ridge and looked up at it, and felt something go very quiet inside him.

'Forty years,' he thought. 'Hesk carried that map for forty years. He never saw it. He never will.'

He took out his board and sighted along it at the Pole Star that night, out of habit. Forty-one degrees, and a little. He had been checking every night since the salt people's camp. It had not changed.

They began to climb the next morning.

There was a road. A Maker road, narrow and steep, cut into the side of the mountain in long, zigzagging switchbacks, like the road from the Sump up to the Shelf. Much of it had fallen away down the slopes. Some of it was buried under rockslides, or choked with the twisted pines, whose roots had cracked the grey stone into a thousand pieces. But it was there, and it went up, and they followed it.

It took them all day.

Bram walked most of it. His leg was healing well — the wound was clean now, and closing, and pink at the edges instead of red — but he limped badly, and leaned heavily on his barge pole, and by the afternoon he was grey with exhaustion and would not admit it. Turnip carried the packs and complained bitterly at every switchback. Mira walked in front, with the steel bar over her shoulder. She had refused to leave it behind. "It's the only thing we own," she had said, "that's ever done exactly what it was supposed to."

They reached the summit at sunset.

The road ended in a wide, flat space of cracked stone, scoured clean by the wind, on the very top of the mountain. And there, in the red light of the dying sun, the Observatory stood before them.

It was larger than it had looked from below. Much larger. The great white dome rose up from the summit like a small hill in its own right, fifty paces across, perhaps more, its curved surface streaked grey and brown with six hundred years of weather. A long, narrow slit ran up its side from bottom to top, like the eye of a cat, and Teo saw that the slit was open, just a crack, as if someone inside had once been looking out at the sky and had never closed it.

Around it stood the smaller buildings. Four lesser domes, two of them collapsed. Low, square houses of grey stone with flat roofs and empty windows. The needle-tower, which turned out up close to be a tall mast of dark metal, festooned with strange rusted dishes and rods. And, scattered across the stone between them, glinting faintly in the dying light, great flat panels of dark glass, set at an angle, like the windows of a fallen city laid out to face the sun.

There were no bones here. That was the first thing Teo noticed. No bones, no skulls, no small sad heaps of rags at the bottom of staircases.

The second thing he noticed was the silence.

In Glass Bones, the wind had moaned through the empty windows without ceasing. Here, on the top of the world, there was no wind at all. Only a deep, vast, ringing stillness, as if the mountain itself were holding its breath.

"...It's beautiful," Mira whispered.

Teo did not answer. He was looking at the base of the great dome.

There was a door there.

Not a doorway. Not a hole in the wall, like the empty arches of the Mercy House or the shattered fronts of the towers in Glass Bones. A door. A great, square, solid door, set deep into the base of the mountain itself where the white wall of the dome met the bare rock, framed in dark metal. It was taller than Bram and twice as wide. It was made of the same grey metal as Hesk's door in the cellar on Brine Lane, the metal that did not rust. And in its centre, there was a wheel. A great iron wheel, as wide as Teo's outstretched arms, with spokes like the wheel of a ship.

Above the door, letters were cut into the stone. Teo walked up to them slowly and read them aloud.

SELK REGIONAL ARCHIVE. KNOWLEDGE IS HELD IN TRUST FOR ALL.

Below that, smaller:

TO OPEN: TURN WHEEL COUNTERCLOCKWISE.

Teo stood there for a long moment.

'...Counterclockwise. What's a clock?'

He took hold of the iron wheel with both hands, and turned it to the left.

It did not move.

He braced his feet and pulled with all his strength. Nothing. He turned it the other way, just in case. Nothing. Mira joined him, and then Bram, limping, setting his huge hands on the spokes. The three of them heaved together until the veins stood out on their necks.

The wheel did not turn a hair.

Teo stepped back, panting, and looked at it.

"Sefa said," Mira murmured beside him, "that there was a door that would not open."

"I know."

"And that behind it, her great-great-grandmother heard a voice."

"I know."

Teo looked at the door, and the wheel, and the long steel bar on Mira's shoulder.

Then he smiled.

"A place to stand," he said. "And a lever long enough."

They slid the steel bar between two of the spokes of the wheel, so that it stuck out to the left, long and dark. Then Teo and Mira and Bram took hold of the far end of it together and leaned on it with all their weight, pushing it toward the ground. The bar was twice as long as the wheel was wide. Which meant that every pound of force they pushed with became two pounds at the spokes.

There was a long, deep, grinding groan from somewhere inside the door. A shower of rust and dust fell from the frame.

And the wheel moved.

An inch. Then another. Then, with a sudden lurch that nearly threw Teo off his feet, a whole quarter turn. They pulled the bar out, slid it between the next two spokes, and leaned on it again. Another quarter. Another. The groaning grew louder, then smoother, then faded into a long, low, metallic sigh, and the wheel began to spin more easily, until Teo could turn it with his hands alone.

On the twelfth full turn, there was a deep, heavy thud from inside the door, like an enormous bolt sliding back.

And the door swung slowly outward, on hinges that had not moved in six hundred years, with a sound like a breath being let out.

Beyond it, there was darkness. And cool, dry air, flowing out against Teo's face. It smelled of dust and stone and something else, something faintly sharp and familiar.

It smelled like the inside of an old book.

Teo lit their last lamp with trembling hands and lifted it, and stepped through the door, and Mira and Bram came after him.

They were in a corridor. Smooth grey walls. A smooth grey floor, very slightly sloping downward, into the mountain. The lamplight did not reach the end of it. It was utterly silent, and utterly still, and utterly clean... no dust, no sand, no leaves, no bones. As if someone had swept it yesterday.

They walked down it for perhaps fifty paces.

And then, from somewhere ahead of them in the darkness, a voice spoke.

It was a woman's voice. Calm, clear, and a little tired. It spoke in the language of the Leaves... the old language of the Makers, which Teo had learned to read and had never once in his life heard spoken aloud... and it seemed to come from the walls themselves, from everywhere and nowhere at once.

"Hello," said the voice. "If you can hear this, the door has been opened, and you have found the archive. My name is Ruth Anand. I was the last keeper here. I recorded this message a long time ago, for you, whoever you are."

Mira had grabbed Teo's arm so hard that it hurt. Bram had gone completely still.

"Please don't be afraid," said Ruth Anand. "Everything in here was left for you. Come in. Take your time. And when you're ready... start with the book on the table by the second door. The red one. I wrote it for people who would be arriving with nothing."

There was a soft click.

And then, one by one, all along the corridor, small yellow lights began to flicker on in the ceiling, as dim and warm as candles, stretching away down the slope into the heart of the mountain.