He talked as he went. That was Abe. He talked the way you talk to a horse on a ford, low and even, with a lot of nothing in it, and the lake carried it back to us a few words at a time.
"Soft, this bit. Soft as a pillow. There, now. Hanger. I've the hanger. Clipping on."
His lamp went out along the wall, bobbing, a small yellow smear on the black, and under it his head, and under that the long dark shape of him in the water. The rope ran from his hand back toward us, a thin line of green coming up out of the Mere and going down again, hump and dip, hump and dip. We stood on the last block with our lamps on his road. Nobody had said to put them out. Nobody was saving anything now.
Hana had hold of my sleeve. I hadn't felt her take it. She stood with her other hand pressed flat on her mouth and her eyes on the yellow light, and she wasn't praying now, she was only breathing through her fingers, in and out, like somebody blowing on a coal. Behind us Ilan stood with his dead lamp in his fist, because he couldn't think what else to do with it.
"Ten yards," said Corwin, to nobody. He said it very quietly. "Twelve. He's, ah, he's more than a third."
"Is it holding?" said Hana.
"It's holding," I said.
Leave it. It sat in me like a swallowed stone. Why would you say that? Why say it, if you wanted us on it? And if you didn't, why say it at all? I turned it round and round and couldn't make it come out either way, and Abe went on talking to the water.
I'd got my cowstail clipped to the rope's end by the bolt, to have something in my hands, and I could feel him through it. Not much. A small live tension, and a hum, and every so often a tiny tremor as he shifted his weight. I stood with the cord of it across my palm, and didn't breathe through my nose.
"Odalys," said Ilan. He hadn't turned round. "How long?"
"Ten minutes," she said. From the slope, level. "It's coming. I can feel it on my face. It'll go all at once."
"What will?"
"The air."
I'd felt it myself, a minute ago. A kind of pressure at the front of the head, as if somebody behind the mountain had put a hand over a mouth. My ears had gone tight. Our lamp beams wavered a little, all together, out over the water. The wind meant water.
"Halfway," Abe called. His voice had gone small and warm and perfectly cheerful. "Lip's coming up. Aye, that's the bump. Like a sheep's back, this. Going over."
The rope came out of the lake in front of him in a long taut slant and went up over the hump of rock where the wall bulged, a stone shoulder with a flake on its crest, and down again into the water on the far side. It was the one bit of the old line that stood clear of the Mere. It shone in the lamp. A wet green band across the stone, six years old.
He took both hands off the water and put them on the rope.
Everything I know about it I know from that moment: his boots coming up, the heavy shoulders, his chest going out over the rock as he took the lip. His cowstail ran up the line ahead of him. His lamp swung round to light the wall, and it lit the green rope and the flake and the water running off, and it lit his own big hand in its glove, closing.
The rope made a sound.
It was not a loud sound. It was a soft, dull cough, like a sheet of paper torn once, and I knew it before I knew I'd known it, low in my stomach. The line went slack. It dropped across the rock, simply dropped, in a long green curl, and all down its length from end to end the whole thing sagged into the lake. His lamp went up. For a second it pointed at the roof. Then it swung over and went down.
"Abe!"
I don't know whose voice. It might have been mine.
He went in with a flat, enormous splash, all of him at once, and the light went with him, under the water, still lit, a yellow smear with a tail of bubbles. It came up. His head came up beside it, black and streaming, and his arm flailed, and he got a breath and a cough, and I could see his face in his own light, wide open, surprised.
The lake had him. It didn't pull as water pulls in a river; there was no rush. It simply leaned, the way the Mere had been leaning on my boots for days, to the left, along the wall, toward the far corner where the whole lake went out through the rocks. And everything on it leaned the same way. Foam. Bubbles. Abe.
I went.
I clipped my other cowstail on beside the first, and the next thing I knew I was in the lake up to my waist, up to my chest, the cold shutting my breath off in one punch, and going out along the green line hand over hand with both clips sliding ahead of me. Behind me someone was screaming my name. Somebody got hold of my harness and I kicked back and the hold let go. It was the second time that day I'd kicked someone for keeping me out of a lake. The rope was heavy and limp in my hands. It was only a string of wet weight, trailing out sideways across the lake in a long loose curve, pulled by the current, and I went along it with my feet off the bottom and the lake at my chin.
His light was ahead. It was a lamp going along a wall under a surface. I could see it through the water. He'd gone under again and the glow went with him, a small gold shape in a black pool, moving left.
"Abe!"
I got to the end of the rope.
It ended. Both clips ran off the tail, one small click and then another, and nothing held me to anything now but the wet end of it in my left fist, the only thing in the whole lake that was mine, and the suit keeping my chin out, with my feet kicking at nothing and my right arm out in front of me.
He came up four feet from my fingers.
His face was in his own lamp, grey and streaming. He had his mouth open and he'd got a breath, and he looked at me. He looked at me with that terrible kindness he'd had for six years, the face you pull to a child who's fallen off a wall: all right, all right, it's nothing.
"Don't you come after me, love," said Abe.
It was his ordinary voice. It wasn't even raised.
I stretched. I stretched with my arm out of its socket and my fingers open, and he came along the wall in the lean of the water, arm's length, a hand, a finger's length, and my glove touched his. I'd swear to it. The rubber of one glove against another. His fingers closed. They closed on mine for as long as it takes to say a word, and they were big and warm and heavy, farmer's fingers, and they slid, as wet things slide, off the end of my hand.
His lamp went along the foot of the wall.
It went away from me, low and yellow under the surface, getting smaller. It lit the rock as it passed, a round pale window in the black, and in it was a hand, open, drifting. Then the glow turned a corner I couldn't see, in the foot of the wall, in the place where the drain was. There was a long, low, wet gulp. A pull in the air.
It went out.
There was nothing there. The Mere was the Mere. A few big slow bubbles came up, and broke, and the surface smoothed over and lay flat on top of him as if nothing in its whole length had ever happened.
I hung there in the water by that one fist, with the suit holding me up, and listened.
I don't know how long. I know nobody said anything. I know I held a ragged green rope-end in my left fist and my right was still stretched out in the dark with the fingers apart, and I could feel exactly the place on my glove where he had touched it. Behind me, far away, on a shore I'd come off as if I'd been fired out of it, Hana was making a sound I'd never heard from a human being. Ilan was saying no, no, no, no, in a thin voice, on the one note.
Then the air went.
It came from behind. It came out of the Ballroom and past me and across the lake, one hard cold shove as if the whole mountain had been holding its breath for two days and had let it go in a single huff. My ears cracked. My lamp stuttered on my helmet and the beam went flat and wavering across the water. The Mere between me and the far wall shuddered from end to end in one ripple. And under me the Mere jumped.
I felt it come. It was no wave. It rose around me in a single heave, as a chest does, a hand's height of black water that came up the wall and the slope and the shore and did not come down again. My chin went under. I came up spitting. Behind me on the stones somebody shouted something about the sump, about the sump, and the wind went on, and on, screaming across the lake over my head with a noise like a train in a tunnel, ten seconds, fifteen, a long dragging roar that was not a wind but the whole inside of the hill being squeezed.
Then it stopped. It stopped as it had come, all at once. My ears popped. My lamp steadied.
And the Mere lay in front of me, higher, flatter, and very quiet.
"That's fifty-one hours," Odalys called across the Ballroom. "That's it shut. Midnight. That's the sump."
My lamp swung with me as I turned in the water, and for one second it showed me the whole of it. The Mere, black and bigger than it had ever been, with no shore. The Ballroom wall going up out of it, wet and enormous. The far wall, and the Pulpit, a shelf two metres above the lake now with the water lipping up toward it, and nobody on it that my beam could find. A hill with its mouth shut, and us in it.
I stopped swimming. I don't think I meant anything by it. My legs went on their own, and I hung in the water on the end of the rope with the lake leaning on me, and then my hands began to haul. Hand over hand, the wet rope coming in over my shoulder, the whole lake dragging on the far end, and me going back along it the way I'd come, on my back, with the roof going by overhead in my lamp, grey and wet. I didn't let go of the end. It was the only thing in my hand.
Somebody got me under the arms in the shallows and dragged me up onto the stones. The lake came over my legs and I lay in it. Ilan was on his knees beside me with his hands on my chest, shouting something. I tried to get up and go back in. He sat on my legs, a doctor's whole weight, and said the same four words over and over until I stopped. No, no, no, no. Then I turned my head. My lamp had gone over on its side, and its light lay across the stones and across the rope in my fist, and I saw the end of it for the first time.
It was green. A thick green rope, hairy with six years of wet, and the end of it was clean.
Clean, I mean, in the lamp. A flat, neat, level end, as if somebody had laid it across a stone and brought a blade down once. The fibres cut off square. No fraying. No tail. My thumb went across it to wipe off the mud, and under the clean bit it was furred and soft, and I took my thumb away.
"Somebody cut it," I said.
Nobody answered me. Hana was on the stones with her head on her knees. Corwin was standing in the water with his arms hanging, his lamp lit, looking at the lake. He had lost his hat somewhere. He was crying quietly and steadily with his mouth shut, as a child does at a funeral. Ilan had stopped shouting. He sat back on his heels. His hands went on moving a little on his thighs, over and over, as if they were looking for a patient.
"Somebody cut it, it was cut, look at it, it's—"
"Sabine," said Ilan.
"It's cut! It's clean!"
"It's a rope that's been in a lake for six years," said Ilan. He said it like reading out a label. His voice had no air in it. "It wore through. It, that's what they do, it's friction, it'll have, he's, he was, he'd weight—" He stopped, and put his hand over his mouth, and took it away. "Don't. Don't do that now."
"Somebody cut it."
"Who?" said Corwin.
He said it in a small clear voice, with the tears running down. It was a real question. "He said to mind the end. I was minding it. It's still, look, it's still tied."
"He did the names every night," said Hana, to her knees. "I never once told him I liked it."
I stood up. I don't know how. My knees came up under me and held. The water was at my shins on the stones and the floor behind me was dark and wet and shining as far as the camp, where the lowest blocks had gone and the sand was a sheet of lake. The blast had shoved the water onto the Ballroom's floor. I could feel it in the soles of my boots, cold, and lying still.
I walked down to the edge. I held the rope-end up in the beam of my lamp, high, so it would show to the far wall, and I screamed.
"You cut it!"
The Mere took it and gave it back. It, it, it.
"You said leave it! You said it! You sat up there in your hole and you listened to us argue and you knew, you knew what it'd do, you cut it, you cut his rope, you bastard, you cut it so I'd, so I'd have to, so I'd—" I ran out of air. I dragged it back. "He had a farm. He had horses. He did the roll-call on the first night because his dad did it with sheep—"
Silence. It was so deep I could hear a drip fall from my own elbow.
"I didn't touch it," said Teo.
It came across the water as it had always come. Flat, hoarse, level, unhurried. It wasn't loud. It could have been said across a table.
"Liar!" I said.
Nothing.
I held up the end. The clean end, in my lamp.
"Liar!"
The dark above the water breathed. A man's breath, a long way off, steady in, steady out. Nothing in the whole mountain moved except the lake, and the lake was moving toward me up the stones.
"Bring the book," he said. "The water's coming up your side now."