Or for themselves, should they try to get back out. But it was obvious that this cave was another of those that Pluto had salted about the Land to make going from place to place easier, and that they would be emerging somewhere else.
This mere activity—the going in deeper, clambering up and down the cave’s convolutions, helping one another through tight places—had a calming effect on Querc as the scene of that horror fell away behind them.
The descent became treacherous, and Corvus grew cautious, then irritable, then impossibly annoying as he insisted that all be careful of their footing. Echoes from ahead of them—which was to say, below them—suggested that this narrow shaft was about to open up into something much larger. Light—not from Mab—began to gleam from smooth, damp cavern walls. Prim knew what to expect, and soon saw it.
The shaft broadened suddenly into a vast cavity whose floor was chaos. The shape of the space was something like a melon poised on end. They had angled down into a location that was neither high up in the dome of its ceiling nor down low in its wall but somewhere in between. The reason for Corvus’s irritability became clear; anyone who lost their footing during the descent of the shaft would have gained speed falling down it and been projected out helplessly into the cavity, then fallen down into the lake of chaos. But by making a controlled descent, the party was able to stop on a bit of a ledge that some Lithoplast—perhaps Pluto himself—had sculpted at the outlet of the tunnel. It could not accommodate all of them. Corvus, Prim, Querc, and Mard spread out along it while Edda, Lyne, Fern, and Burr remained backed up in the tunnel, shifting about to peer over one another’s shoulders. Mab soared free, exulting in the vastness of the space, her light illuminating diverse veins and layers in the rock. To watch her was intoxicating but dangerous; Prim had to avert her eyes when she sensed she might lose her balance.
Mab settled into a looping flight pattern, remaining more or less on a level about halfway between them and the surface of the chaos below. The surface was not of uniform brightness but dappled, and the dapples came and went. Sometimes they were big and slow, as if something huge was trying to shoulder its way up out of the deep, and other times they flickered so rapidly that by the time the eye had darted to them they had vanished. Over and over Prim had the maddening sense that she was just on the verge of making something out for what it was, as when a name is on the tip of your tongue or a sneeze pent up in your nose. Mab seemed to be looking at the same. Perhaps she had some faculty Prim lacked of collecting the scattered fragments of imagery into a definite vision.
Something shifted in the chaos. Mab whipped round in a tight circle and then shot vertically up to their level, blazing bright enough to illuminate the walls of the whole cavern. “Now! Follow me!” she cried, then wheeled about so she was head down, and dove.
Corvus put his shoulder into Prim, who fell into Querc, who fell into Mard, who with his bad arm had no way of stopping. They all fell off the ledge and tumbled helplessly into chaos.
Somewhere in it, down became up and they began to fall slower and slower instead of faster and faster. Snow, mottled with patches of rock, was skimming below them. Prim put out her hands defensively. The surface came up to meet her. She skidded, then plunged into deep snow that brought her to a stop without breaking anything. When she tried to stand up, she sank to midthigh.
A bright moon was out. A brighter light banked past her, then went back the way they’d come from. Prim watched Mab descend toward a river of chaos that ran through a gorge a short distance beneath them. The sprite hunted back and forth along it for a minute, then plunged back in.
Not far away Prim could hear the uncouth gagging noises that she had come to associate with Corvus’s changing back into his bird form. There was no better place to be a bird. They were very high up in mountains. Half the sky was clear. The other half was stone. Below them chaos filled the lower reaches of a deep straight-sided canyon. Its opposite bank was a sheer cliff topped with a glacier. Beyond that the land dropped away into dark forest.
Her brain put it all together from maps. The cliff on the opposite, or north, side of the canyon was the Precipice. The plateau atop it was the domain where the Shifting Path threaded among hidden crevasses across territory patrolled by Lightning Bears.
They had simply skipped over, or tunneled through, that whole portion of the journey. They would not need to cross the Chasm; they had just put it behind them. They had reached—they were standing on—the Knot. The Fastness must have been nearby.
Four dark forms hurtled up out of the Chasm and tumbled and skidded through the snow around her. Edda took longer to stop than the others, carving a deep gouge in the snow and finally coming to a stop a bow-shot higher up the slope. She was laughing. Her laughter was music, bells, and birdsong. She got to her feet. Looking a little beyond Edda, higher up the slope, Prim perceived that the snow became patchier and soon petered out altogether, giving way to bare rock. Which stood to reason since it was more and more sheltered by the overhanging brow of stone that blotted out half the sky: a place Prim had heard about but never seen depicted on any map, since it could not be. Instead, bards tried analogies: thick ropes knotted together or folds in heavy blankets, except bigger, and made of mountains.
They climbed. It was slow going and exceptionally hard work. That might have been a blessing in disguise since it was very cold indeed, and only the most strenuous effort was going to keep them warm. For a while it seemed like her wading and staggering in the deep powder was making no difference at all, but finally she got to a place where it improved noticeably with each step, and soon after that she joined several of the others who were huddled together for warmth on bare rocky ground. They were all tending to look in the same direction: back the way they had come and down the slope. So once Prim got up there and made sure of her footing, she turned around and looked at what they were looking at.
Seeing what mattered took a moment because it was a graceful and slender thing in a world of slabs and chasms, silver and sharp in snow-reflected moonlight.
“The Broken Bridge!” she exclaimed. “I never thought I would actually see it!”
The place where it was anchored to the opposite wall of the canyon was plain to see. A heavy buttress gripped the rim of the precipice. One foot of an arch was jammed against the canyon wall below. That and the bridge’s deck reached only part of the way across the Chasm before they were terminated by a little tower, arching over a gate to nowhere. Reaching toward it on this side would be its twin. Prim could complete the bridge in her imagination and get an idea of where it must have connected on this side. But the folds and convolutions of the Knot got in the way, so they couldn’t see their end of it. It would be a couple of miles from here.
They began to walk in that direction. Or so it seemed at the beginning. But Corvus wanted them to go in ways that did not make obvious sense to ground-pounders. Everyone in this party understood that the usual rules of getting from one place to another would be worse than useless in the Knot. The fact that they were, on the whole, getting deeper in, where the wind left them alone and the air was less frigid, helped.
So they arrived at the Cube.
It stood in a little side fold of the mountain, sheltered from weather. You’d have to have known it was there in order to find it. Which raised the question of how Corvus had known that the Cube was here.
There was no question whatsoever as to what the Cube ought to be called. You could not conceivably call it anything else. In height, breadth, and depth it was about twice Burr’s arm span. It was made of adamant, a substance of which most of them had seen more than a lifetime’s worth in the fault. But it was something of a novelty to Burr, who ran a hand across one face of it and down one of its vertical edges. Then he drew back with a curse and showed them a bloody fingertip. The Cube’s edge was so crisp it had cut him.