In moments they began to make the perilous descent. Gaborn led the way, followed by the wylde, Binnesman, and Iome, with Averan coming last.
The climb proved difficult. For the first hundred yards, Averan merely clung to the rope and lowered herself hand by hand. But all too soon, the rope came to an end.
At this point, she had to abandon it forever, and a sense of dread engulfed her. Each of them had brought some stout rope, and none of them would ever be able to use it again.
“Come on,” Iome urged. She was just below Averan, grunting and struggling for purchase as she made her way down. “If you start to fall, I’ll catch you.”
Averan’s heart raced. She felt powerful with her endowments of brawn, but still found it hard to find her first hand—and footholds. Rushing water had polished the rock over the years, leaving little purchase. The tickle ferns growing everywhere only added to the danger. She couldn’t really look down very well to see where to place her hands and feet, and ended up having to climb down more by a sense of feel than by sight.
Worse than that, the ferns were not trustworthy. If she found a small handhold and was tempted to rely on the ferns, she discovered that the roots sometimes seemed to have dug in enough to give her purchase. But too often the ferns would rip under her weight without notice, and she would be left grasping blindly for something to cling to.
With her short legs and arms, she had a harder time reaching some handholds than the others did.
Binnesman noticed her predicament, and he let Iome climb down past him. He moved up so that he was below Averan. At times when things got scary, he would put a hand up to hold her foot, or offer her reassurance. “Don’t worry,” he’d say. “There’s a good handhold just below you.”
So Averan swallowed her terror and lowered herself, carefully placing each foot, each hand.
A quarter of a mile they descended below the rope, and a quarter more. The tunnel sometimes snaked this way and that, yet every time Averan dared to glance down, the tunnel plunged deeper into the abyss.
It was slow work.
She reached one spot and was about to lower herself another step when Gaborn called out, “Averan, stop. Move to your right, and try to find a way down.”
He was far below her and could not possibly have seen her danger. But he was the Earth King, and he felt it. She did as he said, and dozens of times during the course of the journey he warned others to take similar measures.
More than a mile they climbed, and still Averan could see no end. Her nerves were frayed, and she found herself trembling all over.
Still the ground rumbled distantly, like faraway thunder, at the passage of reavers.
She felt astonished that no one had fallen yet. Even with Gaborn’s help and all of their endowments, it seemed an impossible feat.
Gaborn reached a rocky ledge, the first perch they had found, and called a rest. Averan inched down, met the others. Iome leaned with her back against the rock wall, grimacing with fear. Gaborn squatted next to her, heaving to catch his breath. Binnesman leaned away from the ledge, respectfully, but his wylde walked to the very end of it and peered down.
Their perch jutted out only three or four feet, then the shaft jogged back down. Under normal circumstances, Averan would have been terrified to stand so close to the ledge. But right now it felt like a little bit of paradise. She looked up the shaft, into the infinite blackness.
Once the reavers break through my rock wall, she thought, they will be on our trail in an instant.
Reavers were great climbers. With their huge grasping fore-claws and their four legs, they could scurry up and down stone slopes much faster than a human could. And the shaft from the old river channel was just wide enough to make this an easy climb for one of the monsters.
She imagined reavers up above, and that made her want to hurry all the faster.
“Once the reavers reach the top,” Averan dared say, “all they have to do is throw a rock down this hole, and we’ll all be knocked off the wall and swept to our deaths.”
Binnesman teased, “Once the rock hits you, you won’t have to fear being swept to your death.” He tried to offer a comforting smile, but Averan noticed that no one stayed long on the rocky perch.
Gaborn soon began climbing down, and everyone else followed. Averan’s arms ached from the stress by now, and the skin had been rubbed raw from her fingers. Others were in as bad shape, for they left little smears of blood all along the rock wall. She let her mind go blank, ignored the pain.
The chute dropped another half mile, when suddenly Gaborn called, “Wait where you are. There’s no bottom.”
“What do you mean there’s no bottom?” Iome called.
“I can’t see a bottom,” Gaborn said. “It just—it drops into nothing.”
Averan huddled where she was, clutching some precarious handholds. The tickle ferns waved slowly, brushing like feathers against her wrist.
She tried to peer down, but Binnesman and the green woman blocked her view. There was light all through the shaft, where the opals released their inner fire, but the light ended perhaps a dozen yards below, and Averan could see what Gaborn meant—the shaft suddenly stopped, and below them was what seemed to be an endless drop.
Averan clung to the wall, heart pounding. Sweat streamed down her forehead. The nail of her left pinky felt as if it were about to pull off. She’d abused it tremendously.
She moved her pinky finger minutely, and the nail detached.
She dug her toes tighter into her footholds, and just leaned her head against the stone wall, wanting to cry. Her legs and arms were trembling now, despite her best efforts to keep still.
Do spiders ever get this tired of climbing walls? she wondered. Yes, she realized, they must.
She could hear Gaborn wheezing as he scrambled down farther, closer to the lip of the chasm.
“I think I see water below us,” Gaborn called. “I’m pretty sure of it.”
Averan’s heart pounded in her ears. She sniffed. Yes, she could smell water. She realized now that the scent had been getting stronger for what seemed like hours. The whole cave was moist, and condensation had been dripping from some of the rocks. But she could smell water, a large body of it, rich in sulfur.
Our packs, she thought dully. We threw our packs and our weapons down there. They’ll all be underwater. Gone. Our food.
The realization left her weak, and Averan clung to only one hope: that her staff would float. If she swam around enough, she would find it.
It was a focus point for her magic, and somehow, though she lost everything else, she felt that she could survive so long as she found her staff.
“There’s only one way down,” Gaborn said. “We have to jump. There’s a lake down there. I can see the shore.”
“Wait!” Averan said. “You don’t know what might be living in there!”
But Gaborn didn’t wait. He threw himself from the ledge. Averan listened, counting slowly, until the splash reached her ears.
She reached a count of eighty-nine.
Eighty-nine seconds? she wondered. No, she realized. I have twelve endowments of metabolism. I have to divide that by thirteen. It’s more like seven seconds. How far can a person fall in seven seconds?
She didn’t have any idea. She only knew that it was a long way.
What’s the worst that can live in the lake? she asked herself. She had eaten the brains of several reavers, and from them had learned much about the Underworld. There had been scrabbers in pools up above. They would probably be in the lake—unless there were blindfish down there to eat them.
The Idumean Sea was full of blindfish—great eels thirty feet long that could swallow a child whole, whisker fish as big as a boat. And then there were creatures that weren’t fish, that were just as dangerous, like the floating stomachs—blobs of jellylike substance that would latch onto your flesh and just begin digesting you.