Maelstrom by Paul Preuss

strength to return?
    Blake took a long look around the fiery furnace, soot-blackened with the smoke of centuries. His gaze traveled up past the bronze statue, up to the cathedral-high dome filled with oily smoke and flame. All this had not been built to drown would-be initiates miserably, invisibly. If he was to be sacrificed, some more spectacular end must await him. With that line of reasoning, he made up his mind.
When his head was ringing from hyperventilation and his lungs were filled with air, he dived.
    The current pulled him into the drain. He bashed his head painfully where the drain took a sharp turn and leveled off. He grabbed at the sides but found them slick with algae. He couldn’t even use his arms, for the brick tube was too narrow. He thrashed his feet like fins and kept his hands to the sides, streamlining himself as much as he could. In moments he was in utter blackness. His lungs were aching unbearably, but he knew he had long minutes remaining before he really began to get short of oxygen. He put his fingers out to trail along the wall of the drain, hoping to measure his progress.
To his surprise, he was darting through the drain like a dolphin through the sea. He had been unable to feel the swift current that sucked him forward, faster and faster. The water became cooler–
     
–then cold, then painfully cold, almost freezing. His ankles and wrists throbbed with pain. His teeth were so many frozen stones in his aching jaw.
     
His shoulder slammed into the wall as he encountered another turn in the pipe. A rush of bubbles overtook him. Blue light speared down from above.
     
He was expelled into air, only to fall flailing back into cold water.
    He was in another pool, this one icy blue. Slick irregular blue-white walls surrounded him, their tops lost in bright clouds of thickly condensing vapor. The opening of the fountain that had spewed him out was in the form of a great bronze jar, held in the arms of another colossal statue, a naiad carved of marble–enough bigger than the god of fire to drench him thoroughly: La Source.
    Blake was so cold he could not keep still. He sidestroked swiftly around the base of the statue, examining his new prison. There seemed no way out except, possibly, to climb the walls, and the tops of those were invisible. But he knew he must get out of the water before the last of his strength ebbed away.
    He swam to the side and hauled himself out. The walls were wet concrete, shaped and painted to look like the face of a glacier, hardly warmer than the ice they mimicked. But there were ledges and crevices in the concrete, enough to let him climb into the clouds.
    As he started up the cliff he heard a trembling groan and the sound of great engines rhythmically throbbing, slowly at first, then with an increasing tempo. The sound was reminiscent of something, but Blake couldn’t place it. Then he realized that the sound was of an old-fashioned steam engine. The technology of this chamber, the chamber of waters, was a century more advanced than that of the chamber of fire.
At the same moment he recalled that the steam engines were first used as pumps to suck water out of flooded mines . . .
    A rivulet of water ran down the wall beside him. He was perhaps three meters above the surface of the icy pool. He looked up and got a splat of cold water in the face. As he was clinging to the wall with one hand and wiping the water from his eyes with the other, he was drenched with bucketsful of water falling from above. He looked up again, in time to see torrents of white water erupt from the tops of the walls on every side. He barely had time to thrust his fist into a crack and twist it there, to jam himself fast. Then he was deluged. The water was pounding his shoulders, pounding the top of his head, thundering in his brain. All his weight was dependant on his right arm and fist and the bare toes of his left foot, which clung to a tiny ledge. He had to get out of the waterfall or give up