Poldarn opened his eyes again. Yes, he thought, that's all very well, but we didn't tramp all the way up here just to bask in the poetic symmetry of it all. Very reluctantly, he crawled back and examined the view a third time.
When he'd suggested the expedition, back at Haldersness, he'd had some idea of coming up with some scheme for dealing with the problem, stopping the volcano or making it harmless. Now that he'd had a chance to look at the thing, it was obvious that anything like that was out of the question, it was simply too big and too fierce; it'd be doomed to failure, like arm-wrestling with a god. They couldn't put the fire out with buckets of water, or fill in the chimney with earth and bury it, or even tap it like a beer barrel and draw the molten rock off through a spigot in some harmless direction. The problem was insoluble, he couldn't think of a way of dealing with it because there wasn't one.
'Well?' someone said behind him. Poldarn stayed where he was. 'Take a look for yourself,' he replied. They got down on their hands and knees next to him and crept forward. 'Watch it,' he added, 'it's a bit warm once you get your head out over the edge.'
They did as they were told, and after they'd gazed at it for as long as they could bear they dragged themselves back, just as he'd done, and sat still and quiet for a while.
'Might as well have stayed home,' Raffen said eventually. 'I can't see there's anything we can do about that.'
'No,' Poldarn replied, 'there isn't, unless we get on a ship and go back to the Empire. But that's assuming it's any better there. For all I know, every mountain north of Torcea's gone like this one has, and in a few weeks' time the whole Empire'll be gone, the world will have melted away and we'll all be dead. No way of knowing, really.'
They weren't particularly impressed with that statement-understandably, given the effort it had cost them to get there. 'We can't just go back and tell them they're all going to be killed but not to worry about it,' Rook grumbled. 'They'd think we've all gone crazy or something. Come on, you said all we have to do is figure out how it works and we can stop it.'
Poldarn pulled himself together, sighing. 'All right,' he said. 'Seems to me there's got to be an enormously hot fire right down there in the roots of the mountain, big and hot enough to melt rock, like a lime kiln. Once it's done that, I guess all the smoke and fumes get bottled up deep inside until eventually they burst out and punch a hole right through the top of the mountain. The cinders and ash that got all over everything must be molten rock that ended up being spat out high into the air, where it cooled off and came down everywhere like snow. Anyway,' he added, 'that's the way I see it. Anybody got a better explanation?'
'Sounds reasonable enough to me,' said Barn, wiping grit out of his eyes with his knuckles. 'So how does that help us?'
'It doesn't.' Poldarn shook his head. His cheeks and forehead were stinging horribly. 'I was wrong. There isn't a thing we can do about it. Let's go home, I'm sick to death of this place.'
Barn frowned. 'What about when it rains?' he asked. 'Surely if it rains hard enough, that ought to put it out.'
Poldarn couldn't be bothered to reply, so it was up to Boarci to explain. 'It's too hot,' he said. 'The rain wouldn't get anywhere near the bottom of the chimney before it turned to steam. You remember all those fluffy white clouds the last time, once the rain started?'
Barn nodded. 'That's right,' he said. 'Not that it matters, we can't make it rain anyhow. But so what? As long as it stays down there it won't be doing us any harm.'
Poldarn looked up. 'Depends,' he said. 'What we don't know is how big the fire is or what's causing it. My guess is that it's the same fire as heats the water for the hot springs-in which case it's been going for thirty-odd years to my certain knowledge, and quite possibly a few thousand years before that.'
'Fine,' Barn replied. 'Like you said, it's been going on for centuries and never done anybody any harm till now' He paused, then went on, 'I'm sure you're right about fumes getting trapped under the mountain and finally blowing out-I guess that must be what happened, and that's where all the ash and stuff came from. But now there's this huge great vent, like runners and risers when you're casting, so won't the fumes just rise up out of there and get blown away into the air, all nice and harmless?' He shrugged. 'All right, so it's very big and impressive, but I don't see what harm it's going to do us. I'm guessing that this new breakout is where another pocket of the fumes and steam and stuff must've built up, and it blasted a hole into the side of the mountain so it could get out. I don't know, maybe there's a whole load of them just getting ready to go pop, but doesn't it stand to reason that it must've used up most of its bottled-up fumes and shit by now? In which case, we may get a few more sprinklings of the cinders, but nothing too bad, just like this time around.' He shrugged. 'Come on, you're a blacksmith, you know what furnaces are like, and casting hot metal. If your sand's wet or you've got a blocked vent, it blows up and you get the whole lot in your face. If you've done your vents right and cooked your mould, there's nothing to it. Same here, I reckon.'
Poldarn thought about that for a while. 'I suppose so,' he said. 'I hadn't thought of it like that.'
'Makes sense to me,' Raffen put in. 'In which case, there's nothing to worry about and we can go home. I don't know about you, but this place gives me the creeps. I say we get back down the mountain and go do some work instead of roasting ourselves alive.'
'Fine,' Poldarn said. 'Let's do that, then.'
Getting back down the mountain was much quicker than getting up it, though not noticeably easier. Egil and Boarci led the way, both of them obviously keen to get away from there as soon as possible. Poldarn lagged behind. He found the place just as oppressive as the others did, but he felt sure there was something he'd overlooked, though he hadn't got the faintest idea what it might be. It wasn't just a vague feeling that he'd been there before-well, he knew that, he'd been there with Halder, and something about that visit had impressed him so much that the memory of it had forced its way to the surface of his mind (like the fire bottled up in the mountain). As he scrambled and skittered down the slopes of the chimney he found himself going over that memory in his mind, trying to winnow some degree of significance out of it; but the more he searched the more elusive the scene became, to the point where he was hard put to it to distinguish between actual recollections and appropriate-seeming details he'd made up to flesh it out and colour it. He could feel himself rewriting the scene, putting in words and inflections that would make some sort of sense of it all, justifying his belief that there was some secret or clue back up there on the rim of the crater-and wouldn't that be nice, he thought, if I could go back and mould the past into the shape I want it to be, if I could press a new pattern into the sand and then tap the molten rock and cast a whole new world; like a god, almost, bringing the old world to an end and creating a new one, he thought again. There was a fine notion, for sure; that the world which the god in the cart had come to destroy and replace wasn't the present but the past, a simple job of heating out the memory.