Chapter 180: The Sump

The edge fell away under him, and the Silver took him down.

It did not drop him. It carried him, the way a river carries a log over a fall, and at first Logan could not tell which way was up.

There was white on every side of him and a long smooth slide of rock against his back.

Then the white closed over his head.

He kept hold of Grimlord’s Blade. He kept his elbows in, as he would have on a steep slope of scree, and he let the Silver have the rest of him.

It was not like falling. It was like being poured. The rock under his back curved and curved again, and the push grew stronger with every bend, until he was moving faster than he could have run.

Billy’s whooping came and went somewhere to his left. Once Terry’s plated shoulder struck his in the white, and then it was gone.

Over his head, seven small flames went with him.

They no longer leaned forward. They leaned back and up, all seven of them, toward a slope he could no longer see. Every bend he went round, they swung to keep pointing at it.

’Up there,’ he thought. ’Every one of them is up there.’

The slide ran out.

He went off the end of it into deep Silver, and it slowed him like a drift of snow until his boots found rock. The white was still over his head.

He stood there and waited for his hands to stop shaking.

Then the sigil on his collar spoke.

"Lord," said Halden. "I am down. The fairy is with me."

"Boss!" That was Billy, a long way off and delighted. "Boss, that was the best thing I have ever done! Can we go back up and do it again?"

"No," said Logan. "Where is everybody?"

They found each other by Tinkerbell’s spark. It came swimming through the white toward Logan, hard and blue, and Halden’s tall shape came with it.

Billy rolled in behind them. Terry came last, slow and heavy, with the dented plate of his chest showing grey at arm’s length.

"Pebble?"

"Here, boss." A red glow swam up out of the white beside him. "I have set it. Right where I landed. Can you feel it?"

Logan could. The cairn sat in his mind as clearly as the place where his feet were. It was the bottom of the Sink, and every piece that came down after him would know the way to it.

[ New area: The Sump ]

He waded until his hand met rock.

It was a wall, smooth and cold, and it rose out of the Silver at a gentle slant. He followed it with his palm until it turned into a slope, and he climbed the slope until his head came up into the air.

He was in a cave.

It was so big that he could not see the far side of it.

The Silver filled the bottom like milk in a bowl, and it glowed, and the glow lit a rough stone ceiling far overhead. In the middle of that ceiling there was a dark round mouth.

The Silver was still pouring out of it in a long white column. It fell without a sound and spread across the pool, and the pool was rising.

Logan climbed higher. The slope ended in a broad shelf of dry rock that ran along the wall of the cave. When his boots came clear of the Silver, his seven candles went out.

He stood on the shelf and looked around him.

At the back of the shelf, cut into the wall, there was a black door with an amber lantern beside it. Logan had known there would be one. Beside the door, a ring of carved stone lay flush with the floor.

Further along the shelf, a stair went down into the rock. It was dry, and it went down out of the light into a darkness that the glow of the Silver did not reach.

Two short, broad figures were sitting at the head of the stair.

Bram got up when he saw who it was. Edda did not.

The dwarf came along the shelf with his hammer hanging from his hand. His split shield was gone. His beard was matted, and his eyes were red at the rims, and he looked Logan over before he spoke.

"You came down," he said.

"I came down."

"Alone?"

"Alone," said Logan. "The rest of them come one ebb at a time. Alice and my mother are next."

Bram looked past him at the white column falling from the roof. He did not ask what Logan had met on the lip, and Logan did not ask him anything either.

"We saw it," Logan said instead. "All of it. From the slope."

"I know." Bram’s jaw worked under the beard. "I looked back. I saw you all standing there."

"She told you to cut it."

"She did." Bram turned the hammer over in his hands. "And I did. Every one of them, at the end. Even hers."

He went back to his daughter without another word. Logan followed him.

Edda sat with her back to the rock and her two knives across her knees. Her eyes were on the Silver, which had nearly reached the shelf.

Logan sat down a little way off. His units stood in a row at the edge of the Silver below them, still knee-deep in it, and none of them made a sound.

"Do you want to see?" Edda asked him without looking round.

"See what?"

She stood up. She walked down the slope until the Silver was over her boots, and two flames woke over her braids in the open air.

One of them leaned toward her father on the shelf. The other leaned down.

It did not point at the Silver. It pointed at the stair beside them, down into the dark where the steps went.

"That is where she is," Edda said. "Wherever that goes, she is somewhere down it. It has been pointing there since we landed."

Logan kept his eyes on the flame. He was thinking of an old man’s two flat flames, which had pointed straight down since Tidemark.

’It gives nothing back,’ Rishin had said on the stair at Tidemark. ’It keeps what it takes.’

He had never said that what it kept was dead.

"We are going down there," Bram said from the shelf.

Edda climbed back onto the dry rock, and her candles went out.

"Not yet," she said.

"No. Not yet." Bram sat down heavily beside her. "We are waiting until it stops pointing anywhere. Or until it moves. Or until I can stand up and walk down that stair without my legs going out from under me."

He looked at Logan.

"You are waiting for your people," he said. "We may as well wait together."

Logan sat down beside them against the rock.

The Silver reached the lip of the shelf and stopped. It lay there full and still, gleaming, from wall to wall of the cave. The column pouring out of the roof thinned to a single white thread and then ended.

"The turn," said Bram. "Now watch."

The flood did not come down. It went up.

The whole pool of Silver began to rise toward the mouth in the roof. It did not pour.

It drew up toward the mouth in one smooth piece, like a sheet being pulled off a bed. As it went the long low hiss began, and the cave floor shook under them.

It climbed up into the mouth of the Sink and was gone.

What it left behind was dark.

Logan had not understood until then how much of the light in that cave was the Silver. Without it, the ceiling disappeared. The far wall disappeared.

There was only a faint amber glow from the lantern beside the black door, the pale blue of the circle in the floor beside it, and Tinkerbell’s hard spark down on the empty stone.

The floor was bare rock, smooth and wet-looking, although it was dry when he touched it. It went down in a long bowl toward a low place in the middle of the cave.

"It comes back at the next ebb," Bram said in the dark. "It goes up at every flood and comes down at every ebb. In between there is this."

"Does anything come with it?"

"Nothing has, yet."

Logan called his units up onto the shelf. They sat along the wall in a row, with Tinkerbell’s light in the middle of them, and Billy rolled himself into a corner and pronounced the Sump the dullest place on the layer.

"It is the safest," said Terry.

"That is what I said," said Billy.

Logan had food. Martha had filled his storage ring before he went up the slope, and she had told him that if he came back thin she would know.

He took it out by the fairy’s light. There was flatbread, and dried pike, and a twist of cloth full of the pale beads from Bide. When he opened the twist, their white glow joined the fairy’s.

He divided it into three shares, one for each ebb he would wait. Then he looked at the two dwarves sitting in the dark, and he broke the first share into three.

Bram stared at the share he was handed.

"We have food," he said.

"Then eat mine first, and keep yours."

Edda took hers without arguing. She ate a bead, slowly, and then she sat with the next one in her fingers and did not eat it.

"She would have said it was too sweet," she said. "She said that about everything on this layer."

"Was it?"

"Yes." Edda put the bead in her mouth. "It always was. She ate them anyway."

Bram laughed. It was a short, broken sound, and he put his hand over his eyes afterward and kept it there.

Logan did not sleep at first.

He sat with his back to the cold wall and looked up at the place in the dark where the Sink opened in the roof.

There was nothing to see. His candles were out, and he could not light them again until the Silver came back down to him.

’One flood,’ he thought. ’Then they step onto the lip. Alice and Mother, on the edge of that thing, with my face on it.’

He wondered what it would say to Alice in his voice. He found that he knew. He knew exactly what it would say, because he would have said the same.

He put his head back against the wall and shut his eyes.

[ Time remaining: 350 days ]

Light woke him.

A white thread was falling out of the dark overhead. As he watched, it thickened into a rope and then into a column.

It struck the bare stone and spread out in a widening, glowing pool.

The ebb had come.

Up there, on the other end of that column, it had come too.

Logan got up. He walked down off the shelf and into the rising Silver until it was up to his knees, and then he stopped.

Seven flames came up over his head.

He did not look at five of them. He looked at the two that leaned up the shaft together, close beside each other, the way two people stand when one of them is holding the other’s hand.

Alice. His mother.

Behind him, he heard Bram come down to the edge of the shelf. The dwarf did not come into the Silver. He stood there on the dry rock, and he waited with Logan, and neither of them took their eyes off the two small flames.