Pattern

'Bloody fool,' Boarci called out after him; but he stayed up on the ridge, as Poldarn had asked him to.

Poldarn scrambled about thirty yards down the slope, but it was soon fairly obvious that there was nothing to be gained by going any further, nothing to be seen that wasn't obvious from the top of the ridge. The heat, on the other hand, was unbearable, and when he tried to turn round and go back, he felt it like a crushing weight on his back. Damn, he thought, and held still, not from choice but because he no longer had the strength to move. If he stayed there, he told himself, he'd die, and how stupid that would be. So he gathered his remaining strength, like wringing water out of a dishcloth, and dragged himself upright. As he stood facing the steel-grey road, he saw a single crow, a scout, sailing overhead. As it passed over the road it hesitated-he could see it struggling, like an ant walking on water. He wanted it to break free, but it couldn't; its strength failed and broke, it spiralled slowly down with its wings beating furiously, and pitched in the exact centre of the road. It stood upright for a single heartbeat, then crumpled like a piece of brass subsiding into the melt, and burst into flames. The little fire flared up and went out, leaving a black smudge.

'You too, then,' Poldarn said to the mountain; but it'd have to do better than that to beat his score. He could feel exactly the same pressure (and he remembered applying it, back in the forge at Haldersness, with the back of the poker) but he refused to acknowledge it. His knees were still weak from crouching in the ditch, but he wasn't in the mood to give in to mere weakness. That's the difference between us, he told himself, and he walked upright back up the slope.

'Well?' Boarci said.

It took Poldarn some time to catch his breath. 'Nothing to see here,' he panted. 'We'd better follow it on down to where it's still hot. I've got an idea, but I'm not sure about it.'

'Fine,' Boarci muttered, 'but for God's sake don't tell them that. You tell them you had a divine revelation and the god of the volcano told you exactly what to do. Otherwise they'll be off down the mountain like a rat down a drain, and you can forget all about them getting closer to the hot end.'

That seemed sensible enough, though Poldarn decided against the divine-revelation story. Instead, he said, 'It's pretty much as I expected, but I need to take a look at it further down, where it hasn't formed the crust. It ought to be perfectly safe so long as we keep our distance.'

Surprisingly he got no arguments from the rest of the party, who managed to keep up the lively pace he was determined to set in spite of the pain in his legs and back. So long as they had the hog's-back ridge between them and the fire-stream it wasn't so bad; it was almost possible to pretend it wasn't there. But when the ridge petered out and glimpses of orange light became visible through the rocks and dips, that particular source of comfort was no longer available; so they changed tack and cut down the side of a steep combe to a plateau roughly level with where Poldarn guessed the stream had reached. Then there was nothing for it but to head back towards the source of the red glow; and at that point the rest of the party stopped and told him they were going home now. 'You don't need us,' one of them said. 'We'll see you back at the house.' Poldarn didn't object; he nodded and said that he'd be as quick as he could, but he'd probably need half a day to get to where he needed to go and back again. They divided up the food and water and went their separate ways, Boarci choosing to return to the house with the others. 'So I won't be tempted to get myself killed for nothing,' he explained graciously. Poldarn nodded his agreement, and said Boarci was probably very wise.

Poldarn came on it quite suddenly, tracing round the edge of a rocky outcrop. It stretched out in front of him like a sea of liquid glass; almost translucent, like a welding heat, but orange instead of white. Here and there on the meniscus were huge boulders, glowing a paler shade of orange, almost yellow round the edges. He found that so long as he kept back a stone's throw or so the heat wasn't too bad, no worse than the forge on a hot day. It was almost like a curtain, a discernible limit dividing bearable from unbearable. Once or twice he ventured through it, but the view wasn't any better on the unbearable side, so he stopped doing that and contented himself with a mid-range view. As he'd speculated earlier, the crust wasn't just the extreme edges of the stream cooling; a fair proportion of it was made up of the debris the stream collected as it went along, dirt and soil and shale that had burnt away and turned into ash. Where the stream had no channel to guide it, he realised, it was the crust that kept it together, preventing it from slopping out over the sides and dissipating its momentum. If he could find a way of breaking through the crust-it'd be like tapping a barrel, or caving in the wall of a dam-and if he could only manage to drain away enough of the stream, so that the material in front of his breach lost momentum and slowed down long enough to cool-It couldn't be stopped, no power on earth could do that, but it could be diverted, persuaded and tricked into pouring away down the other side of the mountain and missing his valley completely. From what he could remember, the contours fell away sharply on the eastern side. It'd have to flood the whole world with molten rock before it could threaten Ciartanstead.

Poldarn breathed in deeply and sighed. Well, he thought, I've got an idea now. Of course, there's no way anybody could actually make it work, but even so it's better than giving up and running away. Presumably.

(And then he thought: it may be a stupid idea, idiotic and far-fetched, but it's an idea nobody in this country could ever have come up with, because their minds don't work that way. They don't have ideas, because they always know what to do, instinctively, like animals. They can't think, they can only do things that have been done thousands of times before. And that's why I'm here. Thank you. It all makes sense now.)

Boarci had waited for him after all. 'I thought you were going back to the house,' Poldarn said, as soon as he saw him.

'Yeah, well.' Boarci shrugged. 'I started off with those other idiots, but going all that way with only them to talk to, I couldn't face it. I'd rather stay up here and get burned to death. It's quicker than dying of boredom and not nearly as painful.'

Poldarn laughed. 'You may have a point,' he said. 'And I may have an idea.'

He explained what he had in mind as they hurried down the slope, bearing away from the fire-stream as fast as they could go. He was expecting Boarci to tell him he was off his head, but to his surprise Boarci thought about it for a while and then said: 'It could work, I guess. But there's a couple of things that need figuring out first. For a start, what're you going to smash through the crust with? You got any idea how thick it is, or how hard the skin is?'

'No,' Poldarn admitted. 'My guess is, it's not as thick as a brick wall, but not far short of that.'

Boarci nodded. 'Well, you're going to need special tools, then. Big hammers and cold chisels aren't going to hack it; you'll need to make up something specially for the job.'

'All right,' Poldarn replied. 'Shouldn't be impossible. Something like a quarryman's drill, basically just a long steel bar you bash in with a hammer and then twist.'

'Fair enough,' Boarci said. 'Next, you'll need to do something about the heat. You're talking about getting right up to the fire. At that distance it'll take all the skin off your face in a heartbeat.'

Poldarn frowned. 'I think I know what we can do about that. What else?'

'Oh, loads of things. For instance, suppose you do manage to break through the crust, what happens then? All the bloody hot stuff's going to come spurting out of the breach, and God help the poor bastard who's standing in the way.'

Poldarn thought about the crow, and the way it had burnt up in the time it took to sneeze. 'All right,' he said, 'but so long as we bear that in mind-We'll have to go in at an angle, I guess, and hope for the best. I didn't say it was going to be easy, I said it might be possible, that's all.'