Margrit nodded stiffly, then looked around again. “This is your memory?”
“All of ours. You’re in the heart of our people.”
“Why don’t I see anyone else, then? People who are important to you, anyway?”
An image bloomed behind her eyes, drawn there as though it came from within her: her takeaway box, all white and red and faint angles. Then white granite grew up over its sides, sealing it off in flawless stone. The pictures faded and Margrit pursed her lips, looking down. “Oh.”
“Any other questions?”
“Yes.” Margrit lifted her eyes again. “What do I do?”
Biali shrugged his massive shoulders. “Just follow the memories, lawyer. They’ll take you where they want you to go.”
“One more question. Why are you letting me in?”
Biali shrugged again, turned away, his form fading faster than distance could take him away. “I told you once. You’re not bad, for what you are.”
Then he was gone, leaving Margrit alone on the mountainside.
She began to open her hand, then suddenly clenched her fist around the chess piece instead. If what Eldred and Biali had said was true, she might find her way to whatever bit of wisdom she was meant to bring back without looking at the piece. She knew from feel that it wasn’t one of the winged harpies, nor one of the hunched gargoyles: it was too tall for that, and too narrow. It might have been almost any of the others, though not, she thought, one of the yeti; it didn’t seem squat enough. If she needed its guidance later she would look at it, but for the moment she tightened her fingers and studied the mountains.
Openness and height spread out, reminding her that she hadn’t gone for a run in days. The leather and boots she wore were completely inappropriate for exercise, but Margrit glanced down at herself with a grin. Memories and dreams weren’t exactly the same thing, but they were kin to one another. If the gargoyles could shape the whole of their memories into a mountain range, she could certainly dress herself in running gear for the duration of her stay there.
A moment later she went bounding down the mountainside, feet light in her running shoes, hair flying into her face as she bounced from one smooth rock face to another. Stone turned to trees to dart around, long strides eating up the ground, and trees became meadow as Margrit stretched and laughed and ran more freely than she’d done in weeks.
She came upon the river with no warning, and with even less thought dove into it, gasping with shock both at her choice and the cold as a current swept her downstream. It pulled her deeper than she thought a river should go, the surface growing darker and farther away even as she struggled to reach it again. Panic seemed curiously missing as her lungs began to ache, as if a part of her mind disbelieved what was happening, and refused to accept she needed air within memory’s confines.
A shape came out of the water, lithe and quick and swimming against the current as though it hardly existed. Human hands caught her, a humanoid face coming close to hers. Masculine, she thought, though with peculiarly large, double-lidded eyes that blinked rapidly at her in the gloom. Not so dark she couldn’t see, though after a few seconds she began to think the creature who’d caught her glowed with his own bioluminescence, a waft of electric blue in the dark.
He lifted his hands to her face, drawing her closer still, then tipped his head and, without invitation, covered her mouth with his own. Margrit squeaked a protest in the back of her throat, so surprised she could do nothing else before agony ripped over her.
Memory seared her, changing her concept of herself from a human creature to something born of the sea. When she dragged in a breath, cold water flooded her ribs and throat, and when she gawked at herself in horror, it was to discover tremendous gills lining her torso. Her vision had cleared, leaving her able to see that her rescuer did glow, and that his hair was the same electric color as the aura he gave off. Like her changed self-perception, he too had gilled ribs, and now that she could see more clearly, fluttering gills at his throat, as well. His eyes were enormous, and his hands less human than she’d believed, with webbing between the fingers.
A grin split her face so widely it hurt as she backed up to look at the rest of him. Despite the gills, he looked mammalian in form: the heavy, brilliantly colored tail had no scales, only soft-looking hide like a whale’s, and horizontal fins at the end, more like a dolphin than a fish.
A trill of laughter escaped her throat and she tried for words, uncertain if she could make them underwater. “I get mermaid memories? Really? That’s so cool.”
“I am only your guide.” The mermaid—merman—siryn, Margrit settled on, remembering the Old Races’ name for the undersea peoples, and feeling absurd using merman, which seemed even more made-up than mermaid. The siryn’s voice was musical, catching Margrit by the heart and tugging her whether she wanted to follow or not.
Alarm spiked through her, abrupt recollection of the siryns’ reputation. Margrit backpedaled, only realizing as she did so that she, too, wore a mermaid’s tail, hers of rich coppery brown, like an impossibly vibrant shade of her own cafe-latte skin. “You’re not going to drag me off and drown me, are you?”
A few powerful strokes of her benefactor’s flukes sent him around her in quick, irritated circles. “Would I have given you the memory of how to breathe and swim beneath the water if I intended to drown you? I am your guide, not your doom.” Even in pique he sounded like rainfall on crystal, voice shimmering with beautiful offerings. Challenge laid down, he flicked his tail a few times and surged away, leaving Margrit to follow or not, as she saw fit.
A mixture of wanting to apologize and sheer delight at the scenario sent her after him, her hair clouding around her when she caught up. Like the tail she’d been granted, it was more brilliant in color than she was accustomed to, though not as unearthly as her guide’s. “How are you giving me the memory? Can siryns do that, too?”
“No. This all takes place within the gargoyle histories. I utilize their ability to share memory in order to make you more comfortable. You could traverse this realm in your own form, if you so wished.”
“In other words, this is all happening in my mind.” Margrit drew another deep breath, feeling water flood her ribs, and smiled against the coldness. “Guess I might as well enjoy it. Where are we going?”
“Where does your heart tell you we are going?”
“To the heart of the world,” Margrit said promptly, then coughed on her own pomposity. “I don’t know why I said that.”
Laughter washed through the siryn’s voice, high notes on a piano rendered into something impossibly pure. “Because your heart told you to. Now, hush. We will not want to speak as the pressures grow stronger. The depths are not comfortable, even for our kind, and we need what air we can steal from the cold, black water.”
It wasn’t until she didn’t find it that Margrit realized she had truly expected to see Atlantis when her blue-haired guide finally drew to a halt, closer to the dark ocean floor than Margrit had ever imagined being. Instead of the fabled city, though, there was merely a rent in the earth, so broad and deep that both heat and light rose from it even in the icy depths. A primitive impulse to run—or swim—as fast as she could, as far as she could, set Margrit’s heartbeat racing until she felt dizzy from it. This was not a place humans were meant to be, and the sensation that a price would be paid for intruding weighed on her as heavily as the ocean pressure did. Hell had much in common with this stretch of barren undersea land. Even the juxtaposition of hot and cold promised to punish the wicked with one form of misery, then another.