By the time his line came across the Mere, the water was over the Ballroom floor.
It came as everything of his came, out of the dark with no sound first. A weight on a thread, swinging in low under the roof, and then a wet clap on the rock by Corwin's boots. A stone on a bit of cord. Corwin picked it up and held it away from himself as if it might go off.
"Don't," said Ilan.
"Pull it in," said Hana.
Nobody asked me. I was sitting in water to my waist with my back against the boulder at the Ballroom's edge, the one I'd hidden the book under, and I was shaking so hard my teeth were knocking in my head like dice. I'd been in the Mere to the neck. The drysuit had kept some of it out. My hands were somebody else's, white and wrinkled and not mine to give orders to.
Corwin pulled. The cord came in, wet and quick, and then the cord was fat, and then there was a rope on the end of it, white and blue, going away into black water. He pulled until he had a man's weight of it coiled on the rock. Then he stopped, and stood there, and didn't know what to do with it.
"Give it here," I said.
"Sabine," said Ilan. "If somebody's helping him, and somebody is, then every single thing he sends us—"
"Then it's a rope. Ilan. It's a rope. Look at it."
He looked. He was a doctor and he looked at it like a rash.
I took the end off Corwin and passed it round the boulder twice and tied it off myself, badly, with three half hitches and a prayer. The boulder had held my book through a whole night and it would hold this. I dragged on it. Out in the dark it came up out of the water, dripping, and sang.
"Morning," said Odalys, from the stretcher. She lay wrapped in her orange sheet against the high back wall where the floor still stood out of the wet, and she said it to the roof. "I said morning."
"You did," said Hana.
"It's up another hand since he threw that."
Nobody answered her. She didn't seem to want it.
Abe's rope lay in a wet heap by my foot. I'd hauled it in hand over hand, with the whole lake pulling on the other end, and it had come to me like that, in the end, empty, and I'd not been able to let go of it. I put my boot on it now. I didn't look at the end. I looked at the water, which had a skin of grey light on it from somewhere, and was coming in over the sand towards my feet without any hurry at all.
Hana had stopped crying an hour ago and had started again without noticing. She kept wiping her face with the back of a glove with numbers on it.
I stood up. My legs came with me, late. The book was where it had been since the boulder, in my suit against my breastbone, and it had warmed up there, and it was the only warm thing I had. I put my hand over it.
"I'm going alone," I said.
"You're not," said Hana.
"He said bring the book. He didn't say bring a party." I could hear my own voice going up and I held it down. "Jory's over there. If I don't come back, you've got a rope you can cut."
"Sabine," said Corwin, and cleared his throat. "If you, if you go and it isn't—"
"Hold the end. Don't let anyone touch it who isn't me or my sister."
"Who would touch it?" said Ilan, and nobody said anything, because he knew, and so did I.
I clipped on. Cowstail to the line, the short one, with Jory's knot on its end. I turned my lamp up. The beam went out across the Mere and the Mere took it and gave back nothing.
There's no cold like a rope in water at night. It was slick and thin, eleven millimetres of it, and it burned the palm of my glove going on, then went to ice. The line ran from the boulder up and out, slanting, so I started with my feet in the Mere and finished, I hoped, with them out. Hand over hand. Sliding the cowstail along ahead of me. The water pulled at my boots, patiently, from the left.
It was pulling at the left because the left was the way the water wanted to go. I'd forgotten that. Thirty metres across, the far wall, and under the far wall a choked slot where the whole lake sucked itself through, a drain with a thing in it that couldn't pass. Abe had gone in there. I could hear it from the middle of the line: a long wet gulp, and a pause, and another. It had stopped being a sound I could keep out.
I didn't look down. I looked at the beam. It lit a round of black water, flat as a table, with fat brown bubbles going across it to the left, and behind me, at the far end of my own shoulder, a small orange glow that was Corwin's lamp on the boulder, kept lit and turned low so I'd have something to come home to.
Halfway out the rope gave a jerk, a small hard twitch from the far end, as though somebody had picked it up and put it down again. I stopped dead. I hung there with my heart going and the water at my boots, and I said, aloud, "If you let go of that, I'll haunt you, and I'll be bloody awful at it." Nothing answered. A second twitch, softer. It might have been somebody taking up slack. It might have been the lake.
The line sagged under my weight and my backside went in. Cold shut over me like a door. I made a noise. I said, "Right," to nobody, and then I said, "Oh, you absolute bastard," to the rope, or to the mountain, or to a man on the other end of the rope who'd knotted it well. Then I pulled myself up the slant, and out, and my boots came off the water and hung over it, streaming.
The roar of the sump on the left. The knock of the water on the wall ahead.
A light. Low, orange, the size of a coin, lying on a ledge. It didn't move. It was where a lamp is when someone has put it on its lowest setting and set it down on the rock to make it last.
"Jory!"
"Not so loud," said my sister's voice, quite near, from that small light. "It's a wall. It listens."
The Pulpit was no more than a shelf, three metres long and one deep, with a wall behind it going up into the dark and the water a metre under its lip. I came up onto it on my knees. My hand found cold stone and then a boot, and then I'd got a fistful of her fleece and was holding on as though she'd been pulled out of the sump.
"You stink," said Jory.
"I've been in the Mere."
"You've been in the Mere." She had her arms round my back and her chin on my helmet, and she was holding me so hard that my ribs went. I hit her on the arm. I hit her again, not hard. "What was that for?"
"For swimming. For Pim, for the rope, for—" Words ran out. I hit her again. "For not looking at me for four days."
"Sabby." She'd gone all breath. "You're wet through."
"I know I'm wet."
She had her lamp at her knee. It lit her from below, her face thin and drawn and bruised on one cheekbone, her fleece torn at the shoulder, clay in the roots of her hair. She was in one piece. Nobody had tied her. Nobody was holding her. There was a roaring lake at her heels and thirty metres of rope, and she sat on the Pulpit as though the whole mountain had her by the collar.
"Has he hurt you?"
"He's had me rig." She said it quick, to the stone. "A haul. In the aven, up the back of the slot. Thirty metres of pulley and a lot of bad language. It goes, Sab."
"What goes?"
"The aven. I did it by his lamp. It goes up."
"It doesn't," I said. "I surveyed it. It says unclimbed. It says it right on my—"
"Book," said a voice.
It was just there. Beyond Jory's glow, at the end of the shelf, where the roof came down to meet the rock: the hoarse flat voice I'd heard on my ear in the Pantry and nowhere since but in other people's mouths and in my sleep. I had my lamp on Jory. I turned my head and the beam went with it and found wall, wet, black, running.
"Don't put it on me," said Teo.
I took it off. It wasn't an order, only a fact, put down like a tool, and my head moved before I'd decided anything.
"Where's Abe?" I said.
Silence. The sump gulped.
"You said you didn't touch it. You said it. 'I didn't touch it.' Where is he, then? Because he's in there. He's under here. You're sitting on top of him." My voice had gone, and I dragged it back. "I'll kill you for him. I'll do it afterwards. I thought I should say."
Nothing. A shift of boots on stone.
"Rope's mine," said Teo. "Book."
I'd imagined this part a lot. I'd imagined it in the Ballroom, with the book under the boulder and the names written up my own sleeve in Hana's wax, and my own sister's lamp going up into the Letterbox. I'd had a plan. I'd said no, I'd said not for a rope. I'd said it's all I've got that says I'm not mad.
I unzipped my suit. The book came out warm and damp, yellow, its corners soft. A good book. I'd never liked it. I held it out into the dark over Jory's head and my arm shook, and I made it stop.
A hand came out of nothing and took it.
Scabbed across the knuckle, black with old clay. The one that had bled into the flapjack. It took the book out of mine without touching a finger, and went away again, and behind the dark there was a small scratching sound, and a click.
A flame came up. A little blue-and-yellow tongue, the size of a thumbnail, held close to the chest of somebody I couldn't see past it. It touched the book. It touched the cover and nothing happened.
"It doesn't burn," I said, and a laugh came up out of me, high and horrible. "It doesn't burn. It's waterproof! They said it'd survive anything! I should write to them. I should write to the makers—"
"Sabby."
"—nobody mentioned fire."
"Sabby, shut up."
The flame held. It licked the edge. The cover softened and drew itself in, as a lip does, and the edge blackened and curled, and the smell came across the Pulpit: hot plastic, a stink like a chip-pan, a burnt kettle, the whole slow ruin of something made not to go. The pages shrank. I watched them. It was my own handwriting, going small. The eight names went the size of a stamp and then the size of a pea. A wobbly ring.
And the cover caught.
It went up all at once with a little soft whump, a sheet of yellow flame the width of a hand, and the Pulpit came out of the dark.
A wall running with water. Jory's bruised face. My own wet boots. And a man holding it, a metre from my knee, with his head bent over the thing in his hand, so I got the underside of him: a jaw gone dark with four days of beard, a mouth shut flat, a cheekbone, the hollow beneath it, an eye with the fire in it. The narrow grey face from the Pantry. Greyer. Closer. It wasn't looking at me. It was looking at the book, with the tired patience of a man at the end of a shift, putting out his last cigarette.
Then the flame fell in on itself. The lighter coughed, sparked twice, and ran out of gas in his hand, and the black came back so hard I felt it in my eyes.
Something small and hot and ruined went past my face and into the water. A hiss.
"That's him," said Jory, very quietly. "That's the lad from the Pantry."
"I know who it is."
"I've not seen his face since the Toll. I've had a voice and a rope." She was breathing in short pieces. "I thought—"
"Don't."
"I thought it might be—"
"Don't, Jory."
The stink hung there. Under my glove the rock was slick and my suit was empty at the chest, where the book had been, and I could feel the exact shape of the place.
"Bring them across," said Teo. "All of them."
"Where to?"
"There's a way up. It's rigged."
"Up where? Up there? That's the Letterbox." I said it to the dark, in the direction of the roof. "That's a slot forty centimetres high. There's an aven behind it that nobody's climbed in the history of the world. I know. I wrote it down."
"Climbed," said Teo.
That was all. A scrape of boot, a long breath, and then the sound of him going up the wall above us, steady, hand over hand, with something heavy clanking at his belt. A pebble came down and plopped. The sound went away and up, and up, and the sump gulped under the Pulpit, and nobody said a word.
Jory had her hand on my sleeve.
"Lamp's going," she said. She held it up. The glow had gone from orange to the colour of a dying coal. "I've had it on for you. Come on. Come on, Sabby, before it's got nothing left."
She went first. She had to; her lamp was the one on the way out, and she didn't want to waste mine. She clipped on with her gloves, in the dark, by feel, without looking, and I did the same behind her, and we went down the slant with the Mere going by beneath us, black and loud.
Halfway she stopped. The rope jerked in my fists.
"I told Abe to leave you home," she said.
I hung there, on one cowstail and two hands.
"There. Happy?"
"No."
"Me neither."
The lamp went. Not with a flicker; it simply stopped, the way a held breath stops, and the Mere went to nothing in front of me, and her back went with it. I was holding a rope in the dark with my sister somewhere on it. I turned my own lamp up as far as it would go, and it showed me her shoulders, and her helmet, and the dead lamp on it, and the water going by.
"Go on," I said. "I've got you."
"You have not got me."
"Go on, Jory."
We went on. The rope took us in, the slant came up the other way, and then my boots found rock, and I was in the Ballroom, in water to my thighs now, and the light I'd come home to was a single small round lamp on a boulder, with the water standing round it and four faces over it, white, strange and turned towards me.
Hana had her hat in her hands. She held it against her stomach, wringing it, and she did not look at the dark we had come out of. She looked at me.
"Well?" she said.
"He's got a lighter," I said. "He's got a bad hand, and four days of beard, and a lighter."
Nobody moved. Ilan had opened his mouth, and shut it again, and opened it.
"Well, that's, that's actually better," he said. "Medically. It's better. A man is a, a thing with a pulse and a metabolism, you can reason with a man, you can, there's a, hunger—" He ran down. "Whose lighter?"
"What?"
"He had a lighter. Mine's in the Flue. Whose is it?" He looked at Corwin, and then, quickly, at the rest of us, one face and the next. "I'm only asking."
"Mine's a torch," said Corwin, to the water. "I don't smoke."
"Nobody's asking you," I said, and I wasn't sure it was true.
Odalys said, from the stretcher, "It's at my hips."
The water, she meant. We all looked. It was.
"So he never drowned," said Hana.
"No."
"He's a man."
"He's a man, Hana."
She turned the hat over once. She went on turning it.
"I gave him the first mug," she said.