Odalys crossed the Mere like a parcel.
Jory clipped the stretcher to the line by its two lifting loops, in the dark, by feel, with a pulley off her belt and a lot of language, and tied a cord to its tail so we could pay it out from the Ballroom end. The orange sheet had wrapped Odalys to the chin and gone stiff round her, a long bright pod with a face at the top. It floated. It was the only one of us that did.
"Head up," said Odalys.
"It's up."
"It's not. There's water in my ear."
I lifted the tail and the pod came level. She lay in it with her eyes shut and her mouth in a line, and the water slapped the side, and her good hand held on to the rim, white at the knuckles. She had said what she needed. She said nothing else, all across.
The rest of us went hand over hand beneath her, clipped on, strung along the line like washing. Jory first, without a light. Then Hana, with her eyes screwed shut and her mouth going, whispering something her gran had taught her to say over water. Then Ilan, then Corwin with his lamp turned down to a bead. Last, me. I'd done the Mere once already that night and it had not got friendlier.
The Pulpit was awash. Not under, but streaming, a shelf with a skin of water sliding off it and the black lake an arm's length below the lip, and above the shelf the wall, and in the wall, a step up, a darker dark. A slot. A mouth with its lip a hand's height off the rock.
I put my lamp into it. The beam went in four metres and hit rock.
"That's the Letterbox," I said. "I wrote it down as a slot. I wrote 'not pushed.' I'm a very good surveyor."
"Sabine," said Hana. She sounded as if she were being pulled out of something. "Don't."
"It's an hour," said Odalys, from the pod. She'd opened her eyes on the slot. "At the lip. The water's at the sill. That's an hour, before it's a tube full of water. Not more."
"An hour for what?"
"For us to be through it." She turned her head on the stretcher. "Take it off."
The splint was Ilan's, or it had been; it was strapped now from her knee to her toes in a rolled mat and bandage, tight and neat. He cut it away with a knife, kneeling in the wet on the Pulpit, working fast, humming through his teeth. I held the lamp. The foot came out of its wrappings the colour of a candle, swollen round the ankle like bread dough, with the toes pointing a way that toes shouldn't. Odalys looked at it once, and at the roof.
"Right," she said. "Do the rest."
"Odalys, it's going to be agony—"
"It's been agony. Do the rest."
They got her out of the pod and onto her back on the wet rock, head to the slot, with a sling of tape through the loops of her harness and the other end over my shoulder. Jory had gone through already. She'd said, "I've done it blind twice," and gone into the slot on her belly like a woman going into bed, and her boots had gone away from us, and we'd heard her voice come back thin and hollow from the other side. "Clear. It's wet. It's low. Keep your hips flat."
I got down on my front at the sill and put my face in.
I'll tell you what forty centimetres is. It's a shoebox, laid on its side, with you in it. The roof was an inch above my helmet, smooth and slick, and the floor under my chest was a sheet of water skimming a half-inch deep, and I pushed my lamp ahead on my wrist and saw four metres of it, round and shining and exactly my size, as if the mountain had been measuring me in my sleep. The roof pressed on my back.
"You're all right," said Jory's voice, from the far end. "You're through the worst of it by the second metre."
"What's the first metre?"
"The worst."
I went in. The sling bit into me. Behind me, a long way back down a throat of rock, I felt it go taut, and then the weight came on, and Odalys said something short and harsh, and I hauled.
She didn't scream. I'd have understood a scream. She made a sound through her nose and through her teeth, and I could hear her biting down on her glove, and I could hear the stretcher sheet scraping, and the water sliding round her. I hauled again. The tape sawed my collarbone. Behind her, Ilan was pushing at her feet, saying "I've got you, I've got you, it's the swelling, it's only the swelling" in a voice that had gone small, and Odalys said, "Don't touch it, don't touch the ankle," and he moved his hands.
Halfway down, my head began to hurt.
It came up behind the eyes like a thumb. A thick dull pressure, not pain yet, only weight, and my breath came quick and short and my chest was going and I couldn't make it stop. Bad air. We'd had Ilan's flame at his knee in the Junction, shrinking and going blue and dying as if somebody had pinched it, and the flame was down the Flue now and I didn't need it. The air in the slot sat low and stale, and I was lying in the bottom of it with my mouth an inch from the water.
"Bad air," I said. "It pools low." I said it twice, the second time to see if it was true.
"Go on," said Jory, nearer, a lamp-less shape at the end of the tube, a hand reaching. "Sabby. Go on. I've got your arm."
"Say that again."
"I've got your arm."
"Say that again."
"You've said that." She took hold of my wrist. "Come on."
I came out into air that was cold and moving and enormous and I lay on my face in a puddle with my cheek on the stone and breathed it in like soup. The tape was still across me. I hauled on it with the last of my arms, and Odalys came out of the Letterbox head-first with her face the colour of ash and her eyes open, and lay where Jory had put her down, and said, "Water."
Nobody gave her any. She said, "Never mind," and she lay still.
The slot was behind us, a black mouth with the lamp in it, and nothing coming out.
"Ilan?" said Jory.
Nobody answered. I put my head to the slot and shouted. "Ilan!"
"He's behind her. He was behind her. He was pushing—" It was Corwin, from the far end, thin as a thread. "I can't see him. My lamp's, he's in the way of my lamp."
"Ilan, say something."
"Hmm," said the slot.
"Ilan! Come on! Get your face out of the water!"
Nothing. I'd had a week of it. One of us is playing. A symptom. A trick. The doctor had a trick, and he was going to lie in a tube of rock and wait until I begged.
"You absolute—" I was on my belly again before the words had finished. I plunged back into the mouth of it with my lamp banging, and the headache went off in my skull like a flash, and the dark came up round the edges of the beam. I shouted at him. I said things about his mother. He lay half out of the tape's reach with his helmet in the wet, and his hand flat beside it.
His lips were blue.
I took him by the harness. I had hold of the thick webbing at his chest and I pulled with my elbows and my knees, grunting, thick-tongued, my own breath coming in small hard sobs, while the roof scraped the back of my neck and the water ran into my sleeves. He was heavy. He was the heaviest thing in the mountain. I pulled and he came six inches, and I pulled and he came another.
Behind him somebody was pushing. I could feel it come up through the harness, the shove of two hands against his boots. "Sorry," said Corwin, from somewhere in the dark, with his voice cracking. "Sorry, sorry, sorry, I'm pushing, is it helping, sorry—"
"It's helping, you idiot, push—"
My thoughts had begun to slide. I had a clear idea, for a while, that I was in the Pantry and I'd lost my mat. I asked Jory whether anybody had seen it. I think I asked her four or five times. Then there was light that wasn't mine and hands in my hood, hers, Jory's, and I was out, and the cold air was hitting me in the face like a bucket, and Ilan came out of the slot on his back with his mouth open and I heard him drag his first breath in, loud and whooping and raw.
He was sick on Corwin. It's the nicest thing I have ever seen.
"Carbon dioxide," Ilan said. He said it into the stone, with his eyes shut. "That's, ah, that's a text, it's a textbook, you hypoventilate, you can't, you simply can't—"
"Shut up, Doctor," I said. I was crying. I didn't know why. "Shut up, shut up."
Hana was the last one at the lip, and Hana wouldn't go in.
I could see her from the aven foot through the Letterbox, a round pale face in the end of the tube. She'd got one arm in. Her hat was in her teeth. I could hear her through four metres of rock, quite plain.
"I can't."
"Hana," I called.
"It's too little. It's a pipe. It's a, that's a coffin, that's where they put—" She spat the hat. "I can't, I can't."
"It's not long. Jory did it blind."
"Jory's not me." She was backing off it. I could hear her boots going on the Pulpit, in the wet, with the water at her knees. "It's coming up. It's coming up, Sabine, I can feel it, it's at my knees."
It was. Odalys had given us an hour, and we were eating it. The sill had started to shine. A thin skin of water ran over it from the Pulpit side, slid down the slot's throat, and went on past my knees.
"Hana," said Corwin, and cleared his throat. He had gone back in. I hadn't seen him go. He was on the Pulpit side with her, kneeling in the wet with his lamp on the slot, and he spoke in the high careful voice of a man giving a lecture to an empty hall. "Hana, it's, ah, a phreatic tube. That's one that forms full of water, under pressure, in the, in the deep, ages ago. They're, they're always smooth. There are no sharp bits. It's, it's actually the safest sort. Sorry. I'm told it's not a comfort."
"Corwin."
"It's the way water goes when it's in a hurry. It doesn't want to hurt you. It's not got an opinion. I'll be, I'll be right behind you, you'll hear me the whole way, I'll tell you about, I'll tell you about limestone. The, the mineral. Calcium carbonate. Hana, in the Carboniferous this was a, a sea floor—"
"I don't want the Carboniferous."
"No. Sorry. But it, it, it's very old, and nothing's happened to it for a very long time. Go on. Just go on."
She went. She went on her belly with her eyes shut and her hands out in front of her, whimpering through her nose, and Corwin's voice came after her down the tube, thin and steady and mad, a long wandering tale about a sea. Brachiopods. Crinoids. She was coming. She was in the middle. She said, "Is it much more?" and he said, "Two metres. Crinoids," and she said, "What are they?" and he said, "Sea lilies. They were animals. It's a long story, they used to, they had stalks," and her hands came out of the tube into my hands.
I pulled her up onto the stone and she went down on her knees with her face in her hat and stayed there.
Corwin came after her, backwards, with the lamp in his teeth. He lay on the rock beside her. When I put my beam on him he had his eyes shut and was smiling, a trembling, appalled, delighted smile.
"Crinoids," he said, to the roof.
I switched my lamp off. Behind me, down the throat of the Letterbox, the water came over the sill in a flat bright sheet, smooth as glass, and ran in, and filled its mouth.
Dark.
It took a while before anything in it stood out from anything else. I lay with my back against the wall and my wet hands in my lap, and listened. Water, behind us. Water, somewhere above us, a thin chiming trickle, falling a long way. Odalys's breath, short and shallow, close to my left knee. Ilan's, ragged. Hana, whispering something to herself in what sounded like the Lord's Prayer.
And the shape of the place, told me by the air: tall. Very tall. The aven. A chimney in the rock with no top to it that I could find. My own survey, in my own hand, unclimbed. My breath went up it and didn't come back.
"Corwin." I said it low. "How many lamps?"
"Two," said Corwin. "Yours, and mine. Yours is going yellow."
I turned it on and held it in front of my face. It was. A tint round the beam, a brown at the edges, a thinness that hadn't been there at the Pulpit. I turned it off again. Nobody said anything.
Which of them. Ilan, with his explanations and his half a tablet. Corwin, with his frames. Both lying in the dark by my feet, one of them with a hand in this, and the other one's hand in mine a minute ago, pulling. I put the question away. It came back and sat on my chest.
"Sabine," said Jory.
She was somewhere above me. Her voice came down the rock thin and flat, and a stone ticked.
"Where are you?"
"On the rope. I'm going up to him. You've time. Don't let her lie in the wet."
"Jory."
"I've done it blind twice." A scrape. The ring of a krab on a krab. "Wait for the word."
Then nothing.
I put my head back against the stone and shut my eyes, which made no difference, and found that my teeth were chattering, and let them. A long way up, a very long way, thirty metres of dark by my reckoning, which wasn't a reckoning at all, there was a speck. Yellow. Yellow as a fingernail. It hung in the roof of the world, steady, a lamp on a ledge, an old lamp, older than anything we'd carried, and it lit nothing, and I looked at it until my eyes ached.
It flickered.
It went brown. I thought it might be my eyes, and I shut them and opened them, and it was brown, and thin, and there was a long second in which it got smaller. A man said a word above us. One short, low, flat word, with all the weight on the front of it. It came down the aven like a dropped tool, and rang on the stone, and I'd never heard him swear. I would have laughed, if I'd had the air.
The yellow went out.
Black. A black that touched the eyes. Hana's prayer stopped.
Then, from a very long way up, from nowhere, out of the thing that was the whole height of that hole, a rope came down and hit the floor in front of my boots with a soft wet slap, as if someone had thrown it.
And a voice, flat and level and no louder than a man giving the time.
"Stretcher first."