Pim made the corner in four minutes. I watched him do it the whole way, a lamp going slowly along a wall in a roar, one bolt at a time, stop and lean and click and shuffle. At the flat place he turned and put his lamp back at us and lifted both arms over his head, a winner at the line.
"Corner!" It was a thread of a shout. "It's good!"
"Don't get cocky!" I yelled back.
"I'm always cocky!" A tiny laugh, a long way off, going to bits in the roar. "Tell Hana it's a doddle! Tell her it's a stroll!"
"Tell her yourself," Jory muttered, and put her thumb on the line to feel it hum.
"Hana," said Jory, beside me. "You're next. Clip in at the anchor and wait for my hand."
I'd clipped in already. Abe had said to, while you wait, and Jory had been looking. Both my lanyards ran from my harness to the rock spike at the buttress, to her knot, two short blue tethers going tight when I leaned. I leaned. They held.
Hana went to the start of the ledge with her bag on her back and her mouth set. She stood at the water's edge. Behind me, Abe was handing the stretcher bag up the queue to Ilan, who had it on his back like a roll of carpet and was apologising to the people it hit. Corwin was doing something to the strap of his camera. At the back, against the rock, in the dark, there was a white helmet that wasn't doing anything.
Hana put out a hand for Jory's.
Odalys was kneeling at the start of the ledge with her lamp on the pebbles she'd set at the water's edge. The pebbles had gone. Not one after another. All three, between one look and the next.
The wind hit me in the face.
It wasn't the wind we'd had all day. That had leaned. This shoved. It came down the Toll from the shaft end in one hard cold slab, with a smell on it of wet leaves and iron, and it knocked my head back and went through my hair, and Hana's lamp went out. Corwin's went out. Mine flickered and held.
"What was that?" said Hana, into the sudden dark.
"Off it." Odalys. Not loud. "Hana. Off the ledge."
"I've not—"
"Off!"
She'd never screamed in front of any of us. It split the roar like a plate. She lunged, the white of her lamp swinging across the wall, and her hand shot out and took Hana by the strap of her pack and hauled her backwards by it, bodily, off the stones and against the buttress. Hana let out a yell. And over her shoulder, in the beam, Odalys's boot went out from under her on the wet.
I heard her ankle.
I'd heard bone go before, once, when I was a student and a lad fell off a quarry face. It makes a sound like a green stick. She went down on her side on the shelf with a grunt that was mostly breath. She didn't scream. I'd have screamed. Her lamp hit the rock with a crack and lit its own bright last second and was gone.
"Odalys!"
"Don't," she said, from the floor, through her teeth. "Look at the water."
Then the sound came.
I've tried to say it. A train in a tunnel is what everyone says, and it isn't far off, but it leaves out the part where it's in your feet. It came up through the stone into my knees, into my teeth. It came from the far end, from the shaft, a rising flat thunder with a note in the bottom of it like something enormous clearing its throat. The beam of my lamp ran down the ledge and the water on the ledge was already moving differently, quicker, sliding, and at the far edge of the light a brown wall stood up.
It wasn't a wave. A wave has a front you can look at. This was the whole stream standing on its hind legs. It came round the corner of the rock at the shaft end and down the Toll at the speed of a car, filling the passage from the floor to the height of a man's chest, lumpy with froth, with whole logs in it, and the light of my lamp went into it and didn't come back.
"Pim!" I screamed. "Pim! Get—"
He was at the corner. He was twenty metres off with his lamp on us and his mouth open, and he looked up the Toll, and he saw it. His arm went round the bolt. He tucked in his chin.
"SAB—"
It hit him.
I watched. I want that known. It was lit by his own lamp and by mine, and it took about as long as a blink. The brown wall went over the corner and over him. His lamp went under and glowed there, yellow, in the water, like a lit window. For a moment there was only the glow. Then he came up with his arm still round the bolt and his face out of it, spitting and wild, and the line went tight as a bowstring along the whole wall, and he's got it, I was saying, he's got it, it's holding, it's—
The hanger came out of the rock.
The hanger flashed in my lamp, a silver tongue, spinning. There's a bolt every four metres, put there by careful people for a day like this, and a bolt will hold a car, and one of them came out of the wall like a tooth. Pim's cowstail was clipped to it. He went with it.
He came down the Toll at me.
He came past the ledge in the middle of the stream in the roar, rolling, with the grey bag on his back dragging him over like an anchor, his helmet bouncing, his lamp still lit under the surface. The wall of water hit the buttress and heaved up over the stones where we stood and took me round the waist. It was cold enough to stop the heart. It knocked Hana back onto the rock and went on over Odalys and swung my feet clean off the floor.
My lanyards went tight. I was hanging off Jory's knot in the stream, in the dark, with the whole mountain shouldering me against the buttress, and Pim came spinning at me down the middle of it.
I don't remember choosing. My legs went and my arm went out, the way it does, and then I was in the water to the neck on the end of my lanyards and his strap was in my hand.
It was the strap of the bag. I had it by the thick, wet, nylon loop at the top, and he was on the end of it, his face turned up to mine in the beam of his own lamp, brown, streaming, his eyes wide and white and mad. His mouth was moving. I couldn't hear a word of it, and I've asked my ears since, and they won't say. His hand came up and found my wrist.
"Hold on," I said. "I've got you, Pim, I've got—"
The bag filled. It was full of water and full of the stream, and it dragged at him like a hand, and the stream took his legs out from under him and swung them under the overhang of the buttress. I felt him go through my arm. I felt all of him go, the weight of a man and a bag and a river, at once, on the end of my arm, and my fingers opened.
They didn't open on purpose. They just did.
His hand slid down my wrist. It was warm. It slid to my fingers and was gone.
His lamp went under the rock with him, yellow, a long way down in the brown, and shrank, and shrank, like a coin sinking in a well, and then the buttress had it, and the water over where it had been was smooth and black.
Then I went under.
The cold came into my mouth and my nose and my ears and my head. A stone hit me in the ribs. The lanyards, going tight, jerked me upright and slammed me into the wall, and I got my nose out, and the water took it back again, and I was in the middle of the stream with two straps on my belt and a roaring where the world had been. Somebody had hold of the back of my harness. A fist, hard, in the webbing. It dragged me up and out, backwards, over the lip of the ledge, bumping, and dropped me on the stones on my back with my lamp going crazy.
"You stupid bloody—" said Jory. "You stupid, stupid—"
She was soaked to the skin and spitting. She had one fist in my harness and the other clipped to her own, and her face was a foot above mine, red and wet and furious. She was shaking me by the front of the suit, hard, with my head bumping on the rock.
"Don't you ever. Don't you ever—"
"Pim." I coughed up half the river. "Pim, he's—"
"I know where he is."
"Pim!"
"I know."
I tried to get up. I tried to go back to the edge, and my legs wouldn't, and I went down on my hands in the wet, with the river coming out of my nose, and Jory put her boot on my harness and held me there.
"Stay," she said.
She let go of me. She sat back on her heels with her hands hanging, and she looked at them.
The roar had changed. I didn't notice at first. It went on, but it had gone down a gear, from a scream to a snarl. The water round my boots was at my knees where it had been at my chest, and falling. I rolled over onto my hands. The ledge wasn't there. Where the shelf had been, where Pim had stood with his arms up, there was only a brown pour going past me, knee-high, muddy and flat and quick, with the line of thin bright rope trailing out along it from the spike, jerking, and going away downstream into the dark.
The Toll was gone. The stream had it. Beyond the water, in the beam of my lamp, there was no far end, no corner, no shaft. Brown, to the dark. That had been our way out. It was a river now.
"Light," said Ilan, somewhere. "Put a light on."
Lamps came on one by one. Ilan, on his knees with the stretcher bag in his lap and blood on his lip. Corwin, flat against the buttress with his camera clutched to his chest and his mouth open, and then, quietly, sick on his own boots, and sorry to them. Abe at the back with his hand at his throat. Hana, huddled in the angle of the rock where Odalys had thrown her, her hat pushed back, her hair plastered flat, hugging her knees, with her eyes shut and her lips going, the same prayer she'd said in the Duck.
Odalys lay where she'd fallen, at the foot of the rock, on her side, with her left leg stuck out wrong. Her face was grey in the lamplight. She'd put the back of her hand against her teeth.
"Ankle," she said. "Left. It's gone. I heard it."
"Don't move it," said Ilan, scrabbling across the stones.
"I wasn't going to." She took her hand from her mouth. There was a mark on it. "Somebody put a lamp where I can see my own foot."
Ilan's beam went down. I looked, and then I didn't.
"Pim," said Abe.
His voice had gone all to pieces in the middle. He'd got up on one knee, big and dripping, and he was looking along the water toward the shaft end, as if it would hand him back.
"Pim," he said again, louder, not to us, and the sound went out across the brown, where the ledge had been, and nothing came back from it.
He went in.
He did it as he'd have gone into a pen after a ewe, without a word, wading out over the stones in his big boots with his hands out in front of him, to the knee, to the thigh, toward where the corner had been. Jory had him by the belt before the water was at his waist. Ilan had his sleeve. He didn't fight them. He stood there between the two of them with the stream pushing at his legs and his face turned to the dark, and his mouth went on making the name.
"Abe," said Odalys.
She hadn't lifted her head. She said it flat to the roof, through her teeth.
"It's under the buttress. It goes under the rock there, all of it, and it doesn't come out for a long way. There's nothing to go in after."
He stood a moment longer. Then he let them turn him round.
Jory went back to the spike. The thin bright line was still tied to it in her finish, and it ran out from the knot into the brown, quivering, stripped out of its krabs and dragging downstream. She took hold of it with both gloves, a body's length out from the knot. She hauled, once, and it came in a few metres, and then the stream took it back, and the line went hard as a bar between her fists and the spike, and parted. It went at the lip of the ledge, where it ran over the edge of the rock, with a crack I heard over the roar. Then there was nothing holding it but her. It ran out through her fists faster than she could shut them, sixty metres of it, and went away round the buttress with the rest of the water, and she held on until the end of it snapped through her palms and was gone. She stood looking at the knot on the spike. It was still tied, with a frayed stub the length of my arm hanging off it. It was tied to nothing.
Nobody moved. In the beam of Ilan's lamp the stream went by, quick and flat and low and steady, as if it hadn't done a thing. The batteries had been in that bag. Every spare, the whole trip's worth. I was ashamed of thinking it, and then I thought it again.
"The batteries," said Corwin, in a small voice, to nobody. "They were—"
"Not now," said Ilan.
A voice cracked behind me. It was Hana, high and thin.
"Teo!"
She was on her knees at the edge of the water with her arm out. The beam of her lamp had come on, and was pointing at the stream.
"Teo! It's Teo, it's his helmet!"
I looked.
It was a white helmet. It sat on the brown a body's length out from the buttress, riding the surge, a scuffed white shell with no sticker on it, and as I looked it turned once on its own axis, lazily, as if it had been asked to show us all sides. Then it slid in under the buttress, in the place where Pim had gone, and was gone.
"Where is he?" Hana screamed. "Where's Teo? He was at the back!"
"Teo!" Corwin shouted. His voice squeaked. "He was right behind me. Right behind. I didn't—"
Every lamp went to the back of the queue. They swung together, in a ring, across the rock where he'd been standing against the wall. It was bare. Wet stone, a puddle, a bootprint. The dark behind it was where it had always been.
Nobody had seen him go.
"That's seven," said Abe. He said it to nobody, in a dead voice, on his knees in the water, with his hand flat on his chest. "Seven. We've seven."
I'd have said I was deaf. I wasn't. I could hear the stream going by me, and the roof dripping, and Odalys's breath going in and out of her in short wet hisses. She lay with her eyes shut and her jaw locked, and when she spoke it was to the floor, and so low I hardly caught it.
"That's the first one."
"What?" said Abe.
"That's the front." Her eyes didn't open. "The first wave. It'll drop for a bit. Then the rest. It's three hours early."
The roar below us dropped another step. It sat in the passage like a lorry idling.
I was still on my hands and knees. My ribs hurt. I couldn't feel my fingers. And something went through me that I hadn't asked for: a quick loosening in the chest, like a drink of cold water going down. My shoulders came down from round my ears. He'd gone into the water with Pim. Everything I could see said so, and the back of my neck stopped being cold.
I looked up, and Hana's lamp was on my face.
She'd turned on her knees. Her eyes were red and huge in the glare, and her hat pushed back, and her wet grey hair was stuck to her forehead in strings. She wasn't shouting. She wasn't crying. She was looking at me, steadily, at whatever was in my face, the way she'd look into a pan.
"You wanted him gone," she said.