Mark stared up towards the cavern’s ceiling, invisible beyond the stafflight, and said sarcastically, ‘Oh, yes, this is much better.’
Steven chuckled. ‘We do need a bit more light don’t we?’ He raised the staff, closed his eyes and motioned; the flame doubled then tripled in size and intensity until the cavern was dimly lit from end to end. He opened his eyes and grinned.
‘Your wish is my command, amigo,’ he said, clapping Mark on the shoulder. Around the Capina Fair, the walls of the canyon dropped straight down into the water. It looked horribly forbidding: as if no place were safe for travellers, but especially not this place. Far above, a crooked stone ceiling loomed over them impassively. Following the river’s current to the far end of the cave, Steven could see that the ceiling dropped down towards the water’s surface. There was a low, narrow passageway, through which the water disappeared into the dark reaches of the canyon wall. They would have to duck, or maybe even kneel if Capina was going to take them further into the cavern.
‘Well, there doesn’t seem to be anyplace to put ashore in here, so let’s go back outside,’ Mark suggested.
Brynne shook her head. ‘No. Let’s push ahead. The current isn’t bad, and we can always pole our way out if we need to.’
Mark felt the blood drain from his face; he was glad it was too dark for Brynne to see how frightened he was. He hated enclosed spaces. ‘It probably just narrows down to nothing back there. It’ll be a complete waste of time.’
‘So then we’ll pole our way out,’ she replied. ‘Steven? Garec? What do you think?’
‘Let’s go ahead,’ Garec agreed, ‘what can it hurt? And if we find someplace to go ashore, we’ll have shelter for the night.’ His voice cracked as he spoke and he realised his trepidation was now evident. He cursed to himself and began untying the rope securing his bow and quivers.
‘What’s wrong?’ Brynne asked. ‘There’s nothing here to harm us. We haven’t seen a thing all day.’
‘True,’ Garec replied, ‘but you didn’t get to meet the last charming inhabitant of this miserable waterway.’
Steven laughed; it bounced from the walls in a quickly moving echo that filled the cavern from top to bottom. ‘Ready?’
‘Fine,’ Mark agreed, drawing the battle-axe from his belt.
The current quickened as they entered the narrow passage at the rear of the cavern, and Brynne realised she had spoken too soon. There was no way they would be able to pole their way back out. Looking over at Steven, she searched his face for signs of insecurity. He looked calm and confident, and she relaxed a little. The staff-wielding foreigner would find some way to propel them back against the current if necessary.
The rock faces closed down around them until the pathway was little more than two raft-lengths across. They didn’t have to kneel down, but periodically Mark and Garec were forced to duck beneath a particularly low drop in the stone ceiling. Steven’s flame, now unable to float above the raft, moved out ahead to light the roughly hewn tunnel. Despite the luminance and warmth accompanying the fireball, a cold darkness settled about them and no one spoke as they wound their way deeper and deeper into the cavern.
Finally Garec broke the silence. His face was formless in the murky firelight as he said quietly, ‘That’s it. I can’t reach the bottom any longer.’
‘Neither can I.’ Steven stretched low over the side of the Capina Fair, but he still failed to find solid ground. ‘Use the poles against the walls to keep us midstream. The current here is strong but deep. We won’t need to worry about unexpected rapids.’
‘Where are we going?’ Mark asked. ‘Unless this pops out in an Orindale tavern, we’re going to have to get back out to the river tomorrow. How much further should we let this carry us?’
‘A bit further, that’s all,’ Steven suggested. ‘If we can’t find someplace soon to tie her off and dry things out, we’ll head back.’
The tunnel wound its way in lazy curves back and forth and ever deeper into the gloom. The crisply moving current suggested their passageway stretched onwards, perhaps to the other side of the cliff, but Mark feared the ceiling would drop down suddenly, leaving this branch of the river to continue its flow underground. He wasn’t looking forward to feeling the overhead stone close down upon them, or having the walls of their already cosy tunnel narrowing to trap the Capina Fair between ponderous granite bookends for ever. He imagined them being slowly swallowed by a great stone god so beset by the general lassitude of the ages that it would not even realise it had eaten them whole, raft and all. Garec had placed his pole beside him on the deck and now held his bow loosely in one hand. Mark wasn’t sure what Garec planned to shoot, but he wouldn’t deny it was comforting to know he was armed and at the ready.
Mark had never been one for nostalgia. He sometimes found it a bit worrying that important events, even entire years in his past, somehow collapsed down to just a few moments in his memory. Months of preparation had gone into the state swimming championships, which was probably the most anticipated event in his life thus far. He swam brilliantly, winning three events and shattering two school records – but now, ten years on, the memory of that time had been reduced to just a few glimpses. He could see his coach shouting at him from above the water; he could feel the cold winter air on his still-damp hair as he waited for his ride home. And, most often, he could remember a few seconds of underwater confusion while he reached for the finish wall, looked around and felt the elation well up. Four months of work and anticipation, the greatest single moment of his youth, represented by ten or twelve seconds of colour, sound and feeling.
But thinking back over the time he and Steven had been in Eldarn, he thought that perhaps things here were different. There was almost nothing that he could not recall in vivid detaiclass="underline" the feel of the stones as they rubbed against his knuckles at Riverend, the smell of lodge pines burning above him as he slowly faded to sleep in the falling snow, the touch of Brynne’s body against his as they lay together in the forest cabin, each having thought the other dead: these and a thousand other incidents, he could still feel them, whole, in his memory. Right now, he was dreading the recollection he would carry of this cavern: he was pretty sure he would have to swim back out of this tunnel, and he knew he no longer had the strength.
Soon they were forced to kneel. ‘Turn us around, Steven,’ Mark commanded. ‘This is getting too tight.’ The passageway closed further, and the raft bumped between stone walls as it pressed ever forward.
‘All right,’ Steven agreed. ‘I hoped we might find something, but you’re right. We should go back.’ He was reaching for the staff when his eye caught the faint glimmer of something up ahead. ‘What’s that?’
‘Where?’ Garec was down onto all fours now, trying to avoid striking his head on the granite ceiling. Mark and Brynne soon joined him.
‘There, out beyond the stafflight. Something flickered, like another light.’
‘Steven,’ Mark interrupted, ‘we’re running out of room here.’
Steven was about to lie flat on the Capina Fair’ s deck when he heard Garec shout, ‘Ah, demonpiss!’
‘What happened?’
‘The ceiling, Steven, I hit my head on the ceiling-’ Garec shut up as the stafflight suddenly went out and they were plunged into a cruel and forbidding darkness, depthless, blacker than any of them could have imagined. The space ahead had grown too narrow for Steven’s fireball and it had extinguished itself in the river.