I ran. Abe ran behind me with the lamp, throwing my shadow ahead along the wet stones, and I was already seeing it, because that's what I do: Jory off the wall, Jory under the water, Jory's hand coming up out of the black with the fingers spread. I said her name twice on the way. I said, hold on, as if she could hear. The voice came again, nearer or only louder, and it was saying a word I couldn't make out until I was nearly on top of it.
"Rotten! Sabby! It's rotten!"
We came out on the sand where the beach had been. Ilan was already there, bare-headed, his lamp swinging in his fist, and Corwin behind him, blowing. Ilan pointed with his whole arm. He didn't speak. He didn't have to.
Out on the Mere, low down, a light.
Thirty metres off, across the black lake, at the foot of the far wall. It was small and white and it didn't swing about the way a lamp does when somebody's hanging on a rope. It sat still at the height of a person's head. Under it the water caught it and held it like a coin in a dish.
"That's Jory," said Ilan. "That's Jory's lamp. She's in the lake. How's she in the lake?"
The Mere had a new smell. Peat, and the cold iron of the open hill, as if the moor itself had come down into the lake while we weren't looking.
"She swam it," said Corwin, in a tiny voice. "Look at the string."
At my feet, at the edge of the stones, a line ran out of the sand and into the water. Thin, white, hard-looking. It was tied round a block as big as a bucket, in a hitch I would have known blind. It went into the Mere at a long shallow slant and I could feel it from where I stood: tight, humming, like a fishing line with something on it.
Not rope. I crouched and ran it through my fingers. Tent cord. Stretcher tape. A boot lace, in a knot. Every scrap of thin line in the camp, tied end to end.
"She took it while we were gone," said Ilan. "I was watching Odalys. I was doing her pulse. She said she was going to look at the rope, and I said fine, and the next thing, I'm doing a pulse and I've got no sister." He heard himself. "I mean, I'm so sorry. I mean I looked round."
"Jory!" I screamed it. "Jory, you daft cow! Get back in here!"
The light moved. It tipped up and then down, a nod, and a long way off a voice came across the water, small and cracked and absolutely level. She'd always had a rigger's voice. It could have been telling me which way round to put a krab.
"I'm not coming back. Listen. I've got the cord across. I've two hangers off my own harness, and the hammer. I'll bolt it up here and rig a line over the top for the rest of you, you go one at a time, you clip in. Do not use the old rope."
"What?"
"The old rope! On the wall! I came along it. I had it in my hand for the last bit. The sheath's gone like wet bread. It's rotten, I'm not putting anyone on that."
"Then don't! Come back!"
"Someone has to!" It broke up in the middle. "Hold the cord! Don't let it—"
Abe swung his lamp along the wall on our right. I'd seen the old rope on Monday from the ledge, green and slack. It was worse by lamplight. It came out of a bolt by the arch and ran off along the side wall with a sag between every hanger, green as pond weed, and where the wall bulged it dipped into the lake and was gone, and came up again further on as if it had only gone for a drink. Six years of wet on it. It looked less like a rope than like something that had grown there.
"Can we use it?" said Corwin.
"Jory says rotten," said Abe. He looked at it a good while. "Jory's never been wrong about a rope."
"She's been wrong about everything else," I said, and nobody even breathed at that, and I wished I'd bitten it off.
I held the cord. It was wet and bitterly cold and it came through my glove into the bones of my hand. It hummed against my fingers like a plucked string. On the far side of the water Jory's lamp stayed where it was, small and patient, a pale ring round her head and shoulders, and I started to cry again.
"I'm coming over," I said. I said it to Abe, and then I shouted it. "I'm coming over!"
"You're not."
"I can swim!"
"You can't swim in cold. You go stiff as a plank, you sank at Malham in July." Her voice went on across the water, level, as if she were telling me which pitch had the loose block. "You hold the cord. When I've got the first hanger in, you tie off and send them over, one at a time. That's your job. Don't you do mine."
"Don't tell me my job!"
"Hold the cord, Sabby."
I held the cord.
"She's going to freeze," Ilan said. "She's chest-deep. She'll be hypothermic in twenty minutes."
"Don't tell me what she's going to do!"
"I'm telling you what happens."
"Both of you," said Abe, very low. He had his lamp tilted at the sand, and the sand was shrinking: the water came up it a stone at a time, with a small wet click each time, like someone laying out dominoes. "Nine hours to the sump. Maybe less. Whatever she's doing over there she's doing it against that."
A cold rose on my face from the water. A moving cold. It lifted the wet hair on my forehead, and from up the sand behind us, from the camp, a voice came down the slope as flat and carrying as a bell. Odalys.
"A hand every quarter hour! Don't be in it!"
Then another voice, higher: Hana's. "What is it? What can you see? Who's out there?"
Nobody answered her.
I'd stood on the Pulpit in 2019 with a tape. It was a shelf four metres long under a tilted roof, with the whole lake lying in front of it like a congregation, and it carried sound. I'd whispered across to Milo from the beach for a bet, and he'd heard every word. I'd put it in the survey, under Remarks, in my bad handwriting. Voices carry. Still water.
The lake stopped slapping at the stones. I don't know how else to put it. It was moving, and then it was only lying there, as if it had been told to listen.
Over the water, on the far wall, five metres above Jory's lamp, from the dark where I'd put the Pulpit on my map six years ago, somebody said my name.
"Sabine."
It was not loud. It crossed the water like a hand put on a table.
I knew it. It had been in my ear in the Pantry, and in the slot of the Wringer with my ankles in its hands. Hoarse, flat, a voice kept in a drawer.
"Teo," I said.
Nobody said a thing. Abe's lamp, behind me, dipped to the ground and came up again. Corwin made a small dry noise like a hinge.
The voice came from above the water. There was no light on the Pulpit. There was a ledge of wet rock, black on black, with a lip, and there was a voice.
"Oh, hiya, Lazarus." My voice shot up high and came out of me like a plate falling.
Corwin breathed in sharply. It fell into the lake and did nothing. Even I heard how it landed.
"Bring me the book."
"What book?"
"Yellow."
"No. No, I'll tell you what, why? Why?"
"Because there were nine."
There was a drip, out in the dark. It was the loudest sound I'd ever heard.
"There were eight," I said. "I had my hands on every one of them, over the stile, and you weren't one. I've got it written down. In pencil. With a ring round it!"
"Nine."
"I'll say eight!"
"That's the book," Teo said. "Bring it."
"He knows about the book." Ilan had gone grey in the lamplight. "All right, she waved it at him in the Pantry. But who's told him she's still got it? Who's told him it matters? Somebody in this party has been talking to him. Somebody's been talking to him for days."
"Not me," said Corwin, at once, high and quick, "I didn't, I haven't, I've never even—"
"I'm not saying you."
"You looked at me."
"Sound over water," said Ilan, quickly. His voice was too high and he put a hand on his own chest, as though to hold it down. "It's an acoustic effect. Water carries and bends, you get it in tunnels, you get it in swimming baths, a voice can seem to come from anywhere, it could be a rock, it could be, there's more than one—"
"Ilan," said Abe. "Hush."
He stepped down to the very edge of the sand. He put his lamp on the ground behind him, so it wouldn't dazzle us and wouldn't dazzle whoever he was talking to, and he held out his hand toward the black. It was the voice for a horse with its leg through a gate.
"Lad," he said. "Whoever you are. That's her sister you've got. I've no quarrel. Send the lass back across, and we'll sit down and sort what's wanted."
The Mere lapped. Nothing else.
"Book," said the dark.
His hand stayed where it was.
"I'm just saying a tired brain will put a face on it," said Ilan, to the air, as if nobody had spoken.
"He's at the Toll." Hana was coming down the sand toward us on her hands and knees with no light at all, with the dark of the Ballroom behind her. Her voice was a sort of wail. "He's drowned, he's drowned at the Toll, I saw his helmet. That's him. That's him come off the water for her."
"Hana, love—"
"Don't."
"It's the system," said Corwin, to nobody. "It's the, the system. It isn't, it isn't a, it can't—"
"It's a man," I said. "It's a living man. Look at Jory!"
Because the white light had moved.
It had turned. I could see that. It had stopped looking at us and was looking up the wall, and there was something in its beam, a rope end, wet and dark, that hung down against the rock into the water beside her. It swung a little. It had come from above.
"Out of the water," said Teo.
"Jory," I said. "Jory, don't."
"Clip on."
"JORY."
She didn't answer me. She had her back to the lake. I saw her lamp tip down to her own hands, working at something at her waist, her chest, and I knew what she was doing; I'd watched her do it a hundred times. She was clipping in. She wasn't being made to. The cord was tight in my fingers. The lake was on her chin. It didn't need anyone to make her.
"You bastard!" I tore the cord round my wrist and went into the lake.
I'd have been in to my neck. I got to my thighs, to my waist, and it was colder than anything, a hard cold that took the breath out of me in one punch and sent it somewhere I didn't have a map of. Pulling on the cord, going hand over hand, with my boots sliding on stones that had been dry sand an hour ago. Something in the lake had hold of my legs. Not hard. A steady pull, to the left, toward the far corner, where the whole Mere drained away through a choke in the rocks under the far wall. I'd drawn that too. A dotted slot, outlet, choked, water only. I could feel it tugging at my boots like a hand with all the time in the world.
The cord sang. Up ahead of me it jerked. Somebody on the far side was hauling it, steady, a pull and a pause and a pull.
"Sabine." Abe had my harness. He'd got both hands in the back of it. I hadn't felt him. "Sabine, stop."
"Let go!"
"Love. No. Not this one. I'll not lose you to the water as well."
"She's over there!"
I kicked back at him. I got him in the thigh, I think, and I heard him grunt. He didn't loosen. I pulled and the cord pulled me and Abe pulled the other way, and I hung between the two of them in the black water with my hands on fire and my teeth going like a typewriter.
"Sabby."
It came from across the lake. It wasn't loud. It was the one voice in the world that could say my name without the middle of it.
"Sabby, don't."
That was all. The lamp swung up the wall.
It went in short jerks. A rope's length, and a stop, and another, going up the rock as a lamp goes up when a person is climbing hard and has someone above her, taking the weight. It lit the wet stone ahead of it, and the stone beside it, and wherever it went there was nothing to see but wall. I watched the place at the edge of her light where a man might be standing. I looked for him till my eyes ran. There was rock, and water running down it, and I'd have sworn on my life nobody was there.
The cord went taut.
It shivered. It sang a note I felt in my teeth. The turn round my wrist burned through my sleeve, and something far along it gave with a flick, a boot lace, the weakest knot in the string. And the whole thin white line came whipping across the lake toward the far wall in a long wet hiss and was gone, all of it, in the dark. I went forward onto my face in the water with a fistful of nothing.
Abe hauled me up.
I fought him. I got my knee under me and he got his arms round my ribs from behind, whole, locked, and I could hear him saying something over and over into the wet at the back of my neck, and it took me a long time to hear it. I've got you. I've got you. I've got you.
Across the lake, high on the wall, six metres above the water and rising, the lamp stopped at the lip of a slot. I knew the slot. I'd put it on a map in 2019 with a dashed line and a question mark. Forty centimetres high. A letterbox. It was a black mouth with a light at the lip of it, and the light went into it, and the mouth took it.
And the Mere was black.
I stood in it until my legs stopped belonging to me. They got me out in the end, Abe and Ilan, and I lay on the stones with my wrist a stripe of raw meat where the cord had gone and my head turned toward the water.
I put my lamp up the far wall, full beam. A shine of wet, a lip, a bit of dark that might have been a slot. No light in it. No rope.
"I'll get her back," said Abe, beside my ear. He was kneeling in the wet with his bruised face and his hand on my back. "I said I'd get us across. I'll get her back, love."
Up the slope Odalys called the water again, short and flat, to anyone who wanted it. Hana was praying to her gran. Ilan was still being sensible, in a high voice, to Corwin, who was nodding at the floor.
"I'll say eight," I said, to the place where the lamp had been.
Nobody answered me.