Bee did not know how long the second leg of the voyage lasted, only that it ended with a change in the hum beneath her - a shift downward in pitch, a slowing, and then a stillness so complete she thought for one disoriented moment that the vessel had simply died beneath her. It had been less smooth than the first part several days ago.
They brought her up not into daylight this time but into a strange arrested dusk, the Erebus riding at anchor in water so calm it barely showed a ripple, and moored alongside her, close enough that Bee's breath caught outright before she mastered her face, a shape she recognized at once, with the sick lurch of a puzzle piece falling suddenly and horribly into place, as the vessel from which she had been lifted two nights before.
It surfaced like something alive. That was the only way she could frame it to herself, watching from the Erebus's rail as the long dark hull rose from beneath the water with scarcely a ripple to announce it - no smoke, no steam, no thrash of paddle or propeller she could see, simply a smooth iron shape breaching the surface as unhurriedly as a whale coming up to breathe, water sheeting off curved plates that showed, in the failing light, the same seamless riveted construction she'd felt but never seen in her hours of captivity below. It was perhaps eighty feet in length, she judged, low and lean, with a single small conning tower amidships and, along its flank, a name worked into the metal in letters she could just make out before the light failed entirely: 'LEVIATHAN.'
'Of course,' she thought, with the particular grim humor that came to her only in the presence of true disaster. 'Of course they'd name it something from Scripture. Men who build such things always do.'
They transferred her across a narrow gangplank rigged between the two vessels, in a way they must have while she was unconscious before, Rath carried behind her. He was wake now, she saw with a jolt of relief so sharp it startled her, his eyes open though glassy, his hands still moving with restless, purposeless precision at his sides, as though even half-conscious he could not stop building fortresses that weren't there. He did not look at her. He did not, she suspected, know where he was at all.
The hatch that swallowed them this time was better lit than the last, a single dim electric bulb burning somewhere within, and Bee understood, descending into that faint yellow glow, precisely how far beyond her previous imagining these people's resources extended. Electric light, aboard a vessel that dove beneath the sea. She had read three chemistry journals to tatters trying to keep abreast of what was possible in the world, and she had never once read of anything like this.
The dive itself she felt more than saw - a long, smooth, downward tilt, the hum rising around her, pressure building faintly and unpleasantly in her ears until she swallowed hard against it and it eased. They travelled, by her count of her own held breaths, for perhaps twenty minutes, the vessel moving with a slow deliberate care that suggested a narrow space navigated rather than open water crossed. Twice she felt the whole hull correct course sharply, as though threading something, and once heard, unmistakably, the scrape of rock against iron, close enough to raise the hair on her arms.
Then, all at once, light.
Not the dim electric bulb of the compartment — real light, spilling in through some aperture she couldn't yet see, gold and warm and utterly wrong for a vessel that had spent the last twenty minutes buried beneath the sea. The Leviathan surfaced again, gently this time, and Bee, half-carried up through the conning tower into open air, stopped breathing entirely for the length of several long seconds.
They were inside a mountain.
She understood this fact before she understood anything else about it - the scale first, an impression of vastness that her mind struggled genuinely to accommodate, a ceiling lost in shadow so high above the black water that it might have been sky itself were it not for the unmistakable curve of worked stone catching lamplight at its furthest edges. Electric lamps, dozens of them, strung along carved ledges and iron brackets, threw a warm gold light across a lagoon of impossibly still black water, and around that lagoon, cut directly into living rock, rose tiers of worked stone. Openings, she realized with a fresh cold jolt, that were doorways, cells, chambers, an entire settlement hollowed from the belly of some volcanic formation and lit as brightly and as confidently as any drawing room in London.
And it was, she understood with the particular clean shock of recognition arriving a half-second before comprehension, 'familiar.'
She had seen rock like this before, the black glassy sheen of it, the particular columnar fracture along the walls, the specific mineral smell of sulfur and old fire that even four months at Ravenholm had not entirely scrubbed from her memory. She had seen it during her worst years, the ones she did not examine too closely, moving stolen goods along a coast she'd come to know better than she ever wished to - a coast of drowned volcanoes and smugglers' caves stretching west from the mouth of the Channel toward a peninsula whose name she now suppressed with real physical effort, refusing even to let it form fully in her own mind, because a thought half-formed could not, she reasoned, be read from her face by anyone watching.
'The Lizard.' Somewhere near the Lizard, or she was no chemist at all.
She let none of it show. She composed her features into the same dull wondering awe that any frightened, uneducated attendant might reasonably wear upon being brought into the hollow heart of a mountain by armed men, and she filed the knowledge away with the same careful discipline she gave her chemistry, wrapped in oilcloth and hidden beneath a floorboard of the mind, because a woman who knew where she was, in a place like this, was a woman with something worth killing to keep silent.
"Welcome," said Spade's voice behind her, not unkindly, "to somewhere you'll not be leaving in a hurry."
Bee looked up at the impossible golden ceiling of stone, and said nothing at all.