"Oh ... nothing."
"Come on."
For a while he wouldn't say anything, but she kept at him.
"All right. Damn it, I don't know how I can laugh. It isn't funny. A lot of our friends are dead. But back there ... back when we were pinned down..."
"Yeah?"
"Well, you couldn't see this because you were out of it. You know." He hurried on, wishing he'd never started now that he remembered how much she probably wanted to forget that time. "Anyway, Cirocco told us all to pee. Well, hell, I had to. I pulled my pants open and ... you know, got it out ... and let go. Spreading it around, you understand, so it'd do the most good ... and suddenly I thought, Take that, you lousy sand wraiths!" Robin laughed herself to the ragged edge of hysteria. Chris laughed with her but eventually began to worry. It hadn't been that funny, had it?
They had walked a thousand steps before they saw the first glow-bird clinging to the ceiling. It was their first realization that the tunnel had widened around them. The creature was at least twenty meters above, possibly more, and its orange light touched walls that were thirty meters apart. Chris turned and looked for reflections of moisture behind them but found nothing.
In a little while they passed beneath another glowbird, then five in a group. They blazed like torches after so many hours of darkness.
"I wonder what they find to eat down here?" Chris said.
"There must be something. I would think it would take a lot of energy to glow constantly like that."
"Gaby said it was a catalytic reaction," Chris recalled. "But still, they must eat. Maybe we could eat what they eat."
"We're going to need something sooner or later."
Chris was thinking of the supplies still in Valiha's saddlebag. That thought led to Valiha herself. He was beginning to worry about her. By now the glowbirds were plentiful, illuminating a tunnel that stretched far ahead of them. He could see 500 meters ahead, and there was no sign of the Titanide.
"I just thought of something," Robin said.
"What's that?"
"Are you sure this tunnel goes east?"
"What are you-" He stopped walking. "You know as well as I do that..." That what? The stairs had corkscrewed downward for five kilometers. Early in the descent Robin had pointed out that orientation would be critical when they arrived at the bottom. Accordingly, they had performed laborious calculations to discover the rate of curvature of the spiral stairs. When they knew how many steps it took to complete one revolution, once again to be headed in the same direction, orientation became a matter of counting steps. They had determined that they were at the south side of the chamber when they emerged in Tethys, so west would be to the left and east to the right.
Yet their figures had always contained uncertainty. The fact that their calculations might be off by a few steps was not relevant, but not knowing their precise starting point was. They had entered the surface building from the west. But the confusion surrounding their flight and the destruction of the gremlin-built structure made it impossible to know how many steps Valiha had covered before coming to rest. And when things had quieted down, the top part of the stairs had been clogged in rubble.
"You don't think she ran through half a revolution, do you?" he said at last.
"I don't think so. But she might have. If she did, this tunnel leads to Phoebe, not Thea."
Chris wished he could put it out of his mind. Their situation was so precarious; it depended on so many factors beyond his control. It was possible that even if they reached Thea-who Cirocco had said was a friendly region-she would not be kindly disposed to three invaders of her realm.
"We'll face that problem when we come to it," he said.
Robin laughed. "Don't give me that. If Phoebe is at the other end of this tunnel, what we'll do is sit down and starve to death."
"Don't be such a pessimist. We'd die of thirst long before that."
The tunnel began gradually to widen, to look less like an artificial passageway and more like a natural cave. Though there were more of the glowbirds, their light was correspondingly less effective in the larger space. Chris saw branch tunnels to the north and south, but they both felt it made better sense to continue in the direction they hoped was east.
"Valiha must have still been panicked when she came through here," Robin said. "I presume she would have kept going straight. If she'd started to think again, I'd expect her to come back for us, or wait, before she started exploring the side tunnels."
"I agree. But I didn't expect her to come this far. And I keep remembering she's got all our food and water. I could sure use a drink."
The cave floor had become irregular. They found themselves going up and down gentle slopes that reminded Chris of the sand dunes they had traversed on the surface of Tethys. The roof was by then so distant that the glowbirds clinging to it looked like stars turned orange by atmospheric haze. Little detail could be discerned above, and only the general shapes of things on the ground. When they heard running water, they approached it cautiously until the stream betrayed itself by coppery reflections. Chris dipped a finger in it, ready to wipe it dry if it proved to be acid. When he was not burned, he raised some to his lips. It had a faintly carbonated taste. They removed their shoes and waded, found that it was only ten meters across and never more than half a meter deep.
Beyond the stream the ground changed character again. They could see jagged spires rising around them. Once Chris fell over a two-meter drop. For an eternal second he did not know if the fall might be his last moments of life, until he hit on his hands and knees, cursing loudly more from relief than anger. He had a few bruises to add to his cuts and scrapes but was otherwise uninjured. His increased caution after the scare paid off quickly. Reacting more from instinct than any sure knowledge, he found himself reaching out to stop Robin. When they moved forward more carefully, they saw she had been no more than a meter from a precipice that tumbled down thirty or forty meters.
"Thanks," Robin said quietly. He nodded, distracted by a glow to his left. He was having no luck making it out when he heard the sound. Someone was singing.
They moved toward the light. As they did, detail emerged from the endless shades of gray and black. Shapeless blurs became rocks, dark traceries like the webs of spiders turned into emaciated vines and shrubs. And the light could be seen to flicker like a candle. It was not a candle, but the lamp Valiha had been carrying in her saddlebag when she took flight. In one last clearing of perceptions he could see one of the shapes near the light was Valiha herself. She was on her side, lying on the far slope of the small canyon twenty meters from the bottom. He called out to her.
"Chris? Robin?" she shouted back. "It is you! I've found you!" He thought it an odd thing to say but did not dispute her. He and Robin picked their way down the slope on their side, then climbed to her position. It seemed a strange place to rest. Another twenty meters, and she would have been on level ground. He had suspected something was wrong, and now he was sure of it. There was something about her that reminded him, with a flash of fear, of Psaltery lying in his blood-soaked dying ground.
When they reached her, the light of the lamp showed her face smeared with dried blood. She sniffed loudly and drew her hand across her upper lip.
"I'm afraid I've broken my nose," she said.
Chris had to look away. Her nose was broken, and so were both her front legs.
36 Carry On
Robin sat quietly twenty meters from Chris and Valiha and listened to him shouting at the Titanide. Valiha had suggested, shortly after he determined just how bad her injuries were, that they might as well put her out of her misery. Chris had exploded.