His stacks of wood were dwindling. Thorinn kept the fire going as charily as possible, and watched the river. On the following morning it was halfway up the slope; farther down he could see trees standing up out of it like marooned people. By now, surely, the water must be in the middle stories of the towers. For the first time he began to doubt what he was doing. Would the invisible watchers really let the wingpeople's farms be flooded, their buildings swept away? He banked the fire again and went to bed, but it was long before he was asleep.
In the morning he awoke knowing that something had happened. He listened: the roar of the cataract had changed its note. He tumbled out and peered upward. Was the stream thinner, or was it his imagination?
In a moment he was sure. A last white plume came majestically down the wall; above it he could see the dripping black hole in the stone.
Thorinn's instinct was for haste, but he made himself take the time to build up the fire again, then to assemble all his belongings into one compact bundle to be strapped on his back. He had decided against trying to inflate the bladder here and use it to reach the exit; in the first place, it would take too long, and second, he might drift up out of reach of the wall. Instead, he had brought with him a pot of pitch and two of the wingmen's brushes. Hanging the pot from his belt, he dipped one of the brushes now, slapped it against the stone, and pulled himself upward. As the sluggish weight of his bundle was drawn into motion, his task became easier; he tugged one brush free, dipped the other, and slapped it against the stone above his head.
He angled toward the hole in the wall as he went; he could see the interior now, still glistening with moisture, and a few thready streams of water that fell over the lip to join the drifting raindrops. The ground dropped away below him, blurred by rain. Here was the hole above him; he hauled himself up, grasped the lip and pulled himself over.
He sat up, gasping and triumphant. He was in a slanting tunnel twenty ells high, with rounded walls worn smooth by water.
12
How Thorinn battled flying engines in their cavern, and solved a riddle wrongly.
Down the middle of the passage ran a steady trickle of water where a torrent had run before. The darkness was broken only by his light-box and the silence by the murmur of water. He scanned the ceiling eagerly as he went, but it was unbroken, league after league. His good leg grew tired, and he stopped to rest and massage it. He drank from the little stream; like the river below, it had the taste of the stone in it. Then he went on. It seemed to him that the day must be almost over, below in the cavern. How long would his fire burn, and how long after that would the water begin to recede?
An engine had brought him into the cavern through the water, but he was no fish; if the water flowed here again before he found some exit, he must drown.
The bulk of his belongings, light as it was, strained at his shoulders with each leap, like a hand pulling him insistently back. At first, indeed, he had thought it was the geas, but it seemed that the voice in his head understood that there was no way to go down from the cavern, and it was silent. If only he could inflate the bladder, it would be easier to get up this steep tunnel, but he dared not pause long enough to do so, and even if he did, the bladder would hide the exit from him and he might never see it.
Presently the stream diminished but became more agitated—great slow swells were traveling down the tunnel at his feet, and up ahead he could see that the swells were higher and sharper. Now he could hear the melancholy sound of falling water, and now he could see it: thin sheets dropping from the ceiling far overhead, striking the tunnel floor and rebounding in slow fantastic shapes. The opening above appeared to be circular and as wide as the tunnel itself, but it was hard to tell because the air was full of streamers and floating droplets of water.
The water dripped like syrup from the opening above, fell and struck with dreamlike slowness, splattered the walls, ran down black and glistening. Thorinn leaped through, landed beyond where the tunnel was almost dry. Ahead, the tunnel continued at the same slope for another fifty ells and then curved majestically upward. Thorinn peered up, shielding the" light-box with his hand: the tunnel, now a shaft, was straight, smooth-walled and dry, as far upward as he could see.
Thorinn unwrapped his bundle and spread it out on the stone floor. He uncovered his pitch pot and brushes, tied the light-box to his arm, took the end of the cord attached to the top of the bladder, and leaped upward. Clinging by a tarry brush, he pulled the limp bladder toward him until he thought it was high enough, then dipped a section of the cord in the pot and secured it to the wall. He leaped down again, and found that the bladder was still too low: the neck of it was almost touching the basket. He measured the slack with his arm, then went up again, hauled up more cord, and secured it as before. Now the bladder was hanging properly at the bend of the tunnel where it turned upward and became a shaft. Thorinn loaded all his possessions into the space between the firepit and the wall of the basket, kindled a fire, added bits of wood, then larger pieces. The smoke rose through the open neck of the bladder; slowly it began to fill.
At first the bladder hung straight; then as it fattened, the tether on the wall above forced it to tilt outward more and more. Presently the neck of the bladder was no longer directly above the fire; much smoke was being lost. Thorinn leaned against the basket, forced it upward on the slope, but now the basket tilted, and it was all he could do to hold it level so that the fire should not spill out and ignite the basket. As he stood there, leaning with all his strength against the basket and craning his neck to see how the bladder was filling, a sudden clatter came from the tunnel below him. He turned, losing his hold on the basket, and saw with horror a great silvery sheet of water descending into the tunnel. The clatter became a roar; waves nearly as tall as the ceiling began to surge toward him; he was drenched by flying droplets where he stood. Desperately Thorinn turned and lifted the basket again. Water was leaping and frothing around his ankles, and still the roar of the cataract swelled until he was half deafened. There was a faint tug at the basket, and the neck of the bladder above him tilted back a little; the bladder was rising.
Another tug, and the basket rose half a span, but when he tried to put his weight on it, down it swung again. The water was lapping at his knees. Up went the basket, another span or so. Thorinn's only thought was to shield the fire with his body.
Up it went again, Thorinn clinging to it; he raised his legs, and still the basket hung level. It crept upward once more, and this time went on rising. The water fell away below.
Thorinn clambered carefully into the basket, on the side across from his heaped possessions, and watched the smooth shaft move by. When the end of the cord came into view, he climbed the rigging of the bladder until he could catch the loop in his hand and tug it free of the wall. He climbed higher, almost to the widest part of the bladder, and thrust against the wall with his feet until the bladder reluctantly drifted away an ell or so; then he clambered back down into the basket, feeling weak and spent. The walls of the shaft moved steadily and slowly past him. Below, the bottom was lost in darkness, and there was nothing but darkness above.
Lulled by the silence, Thorinn almost failed to notice when the movement of the walls slowed down. Hurriedly he built up the fire. The bladder hesitated, then bobbed upward, and its steady rise resumed. In this dark shaft under the earth he had no sense of motion at all; it seemed rather that the shaft itself was in movement while he hung like a beetle on a string. The walls were smooth, gray, and featureless; there was nothing to mark off one place from another, and he began to feel that something had gone wrong with time; he could not tell how long he had been in the shaft.