The way had been leading downhill for hours. They staggered on, Yuli with one hand to the side, one arm raised above his face, so that he did not strike his head against rock, as he had already done on several occasions. He felt Iskador clutching his habit; in his present state of fatigue, the touch was merely an annoyance.
With his mind rambling, he began to believe that the way he breathed controlled the diseased colours he saw. Yet that could not be entirely correct, for a kind of luminosity was creeping into view. He plunged on, ever down, squeezing his swollen lids tight together and then releasing them. Blindness was descending upon him—he was seeing a faint milky light. Looking round, he seemed to see Iskadoes face as in a dream—or a nightmare, rather, for her eyes were staring, her mouth gaping, in the ghostly disc of her face.
At his gaze, her awareness returned. She stopped, clutching at him for support, and Usilk and Scoraw barged into them.
“There’s light ahead,” Yuli said.
“Light! I can see again… .” Usilk grasped Yuli’s shoulders. “You scumbing villain, you have brought us through. We’re safe, we’re free!”
He laughed greatly, and rushed ahead, arms outstretched as if to embrace the source of the light. In joy, the others followed, stumbling down the rough ground through a light that never was before, unless over some unknown northern sea where icebergs swam and clashed.
The way levelled out, the roof withdrew. Pools of water lay at their feet. They splashed through, and the path led up again steeply, until they were reduced to a walk, and the light grew no stronger, though there were now fierce noises all round.
Suddenly, they were at the end of the way, and stood daunted on the lip of a fissure. Light and noise surrounded them.
“Akha’s eyes,” gasped Scoraw, and stuck a fist between his teeth.
The fissure was like a throat, leading down into the belly of the earth. They could look up at the gullet, some way above. From the brink of the gullet, a river burst and plunged down into the fissure. Just below where they stood, the force of the falling water struck rock for the first time. Its energy created the intense drumming they had heard. It then cascaded into depths where it was lost to view. The water was white even where it did not foam, and shot through with livid greens and blues. Although it radiated the dim light in which they rejoiced, the rocks behind it seemed no less bright: they were coated in thick whirls of white and red and yellow.
Long before they had finished gazing upon this spectacle, and looking at the white ghosts of each other, they were drenched by spray.
“This isn’t the way out,” Iskador said. “This is a dead end. Where now, Yuli?”
He pointed calmly to the far end of the ledge on which they stood. “We go by that bridge,” he said.
They made their way carefully towards the bridge. The ground was slimy with ropey green algae. The bridge looked grey and ancient. It had been built of chunks of stone carved from the rock nearby. Its arch curved up, then stopped. They saw that the structure had collapsed, and was no more than a stub of a bridge. Through the milky light, another stub could be seen dimly on the far side of the chasm. There had once been a way across, but no more.
For a while, they stood staring across the gulf, not looking at one another. Iskador was the first to move. Bending, she set her bag down and pulled her bow from it. She tied a thread to an arrow of a kind she had used when Yuli saw her prize-winning performance, a long time ago. Without a word, she placed herself at the edge of the chasm, a foot firm an the edge, and raised the bow. She drew back her arm as she did so, squinting along it almost casually, and let fly.
The arrow seemed to curl through the spray-laden light. It reached its zenith over an outcrop of rock, glanced against the rocky wall above the waterfall, and fell back, its power spent, until it clattered at Iskador’s feet.