At first, it looked as if the stone simply came apart, as if it could always be detached, and Ayae had never realized.
Later, she would remember the silence that accompanied it. It did not last long: it was as if the noise of the splitting stone was a heartbeat behind the act, as if the two were distinctly different events. Later, when she was at the edge of sleep, when she was still, the silence would return to her. It would be heavy, pregnant with meaning, and Ayae would jerk awake, as if the mountain was but moments from collapsing on her.
‘It must be quite the strain to hold a mountain,’ Irue said, his voice distorted by the sound of falling earth above him. ‘Especially a collapsing one.’
‘The effort is not insubstantial.’ Eidan’s voice revealed nothing of the strain, but Ayae could see the black scars on his left hand twisted like cords around his fist, as if he had something gripped tightly. ‘Did your god show you this, as well?’
‘No, she did not. Neither did Ger.’ A low laugh escaped him, but there was no humour in it. ‘But you should follow the cave. It will take you out. The passage we came down will boil with dirt soon. You can’t go back the way we came. Ger’s bones have shattered. He is nothing. At the end of his chains is a river. If you are lucky, it will see you out before your strength falters.’
‘And what of you?’ Jae’le asked calmly.
‘I have done enough, I think.’
‘You—’ Ayae stopped suddenly. The stone above her shuddered, as if a new weight had just settled upon it. ‘You will die,’ she said.
‘I do not think so.’ Debris was falling through the cracks and he met her gaze with a bitter clarity. ‘You’d best go, before the river is blocked.’
She turned to Tinh Tu. ‘No,’ the old woman said, before Ayae could speak. ‘I could not make him come with us. Believe me on this.’
Irue flapped his hands at them, much like a farmer might do with chickens he wanted to round up for the night. ‘Go, go.’ He scraped a spot on the floor with his foot to clean it, as if the thick streams of dirt falling around him were nothing. After a third motion, he sat down and closed his eyes, as if he was preparing to meditate. Perhaps he was, but Ayae wanted to go over to him, to grab him, to force him forwards, but when she took a step towards him, Jae’le’s hand stopped her. ‘Leave him,’ he said. ‘He will only fight you.’
‘We cannot stay,’ Eidan said, a faint strain sounding in his voice. ‘It is not just this part of the mountain that collapses, but all of it.’
Although she went with them, Ayae turned to glance back at the old man three, four times, always with doubt, and always with regret, until the darkness closed around him. By then, the stone above her and the others had begun to shudder anew and the roof had fallen lower. After one last look over her shoulder, Ayae pushed the old man from her thoughts, and ducked her head beneath the stone. Ahead, Jae’le was hunched over in the tunnel. A short while later, the last of the smouldering torches was passed, but rather than the dark enveloping them, a faint phosphorescent light began to shine from the stone above them. The light was not the pale blue of before, but a mix of orange and red. Ayae thought that Eidan was responsible, but on closer inspection, she saw that the light was created by worms, by hundreds of glowing creatures that had crawled through the breaks in the stone. Jae’le’s doing, she realized, with a pang of sympathy for the creatures who would surely die once the mountain fell.
‘No,’ she said suddenly, her voice stopping not just herself, but the others as well. Ahead, the stone dropped again and, to enter the tunnel, they would be forced to crawl. ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘The river is not that way. It’s to the right. If you listen you can hear it.’
In front of her, Jae’le nodded, but if he could hear the rushing water as she could, he did not say. He turned to the right, and after a handful of steps, lowered himself to crawl through the barest opening of a slowly disappearing passage.
Dirt rained within it. In places, Ayae found it hard to breathe; the density of the falling earth was choking her. She found herself getting closer to the ground, as well, the stone above her scraping along her back as it came closer and closer to collapsing the passage completely. Her sword began to tangle regularly in her legs and, after she passed Jae’le’s own abandoned sword, she awkwardly pulled her own out, scabbard and all, and left it in the dirt.
Behind her, Eidan grunted. Ayae twisted around to see Tinh Tu sliding around him, her staff still in her grasp. She leant close to him, and Ayae, with a startling panic, thought that she was checking his breath, for his scarred face was pressed into the ground, but a moment later, he took hold of her staff. The action had a mechanical quality about it, as if it was order, and as Tinh Tu crawled past him, her staff dragged in the dirt after her, with Eidan holding onto it.
Soon, Ayae was on her stomach, squeezing through the stone, drawn on by the sound of the river. The phosphorescence had faded and could barely be seen through the dirt, but always there was a path made by Jae’le to follow. Behind her, she could hear Tinh Tu moving loudly, and every time Ayae glanced behind, she found the woman’s face set in a determined grimace, one hand locked on her staff and the man she called her brother unceremoniously dragged behind her.
Soon, the sound of the river became deafening, bringing with it the smell of water, and the speed by which the four moved increased with their desperation to reach it.
Yet, when they did, Ayae’s heart sank.
Jae’le’s bugs gathered around the dirty break in the ground that opened above the water, but what they revealed was not a way to freedom, but a rushing, mud-filled torrent. It was so fast and so awful that Ayae felt despair gather in her stomach. The normal river had been a dangerous enough prospect, but there was no way to ride safely what she was looking at. No way any of them could expect to drop into that and be taken to safely.
‘You will have to navigate it for us,’ Jae’le whispered, as if he could read her mind. ‘You will have to keep us together.’
She shook her head.
‘You can. You must.’ He offered her a smile she could barely see. ‘We have no choice.’
Tinh Tu pulled Eidan up to the hole. The latter looked to be unconscious, yet his hand was still firmly wrapped around the staff, and the dirt on his face was streaked with sweat, his beard matted with both. Silently, Tinh Tu angled him to the hole, getting him, Ayae thought, ready – but ready for what? For her to tell them that yes, she could get them through that? She made fire. She could turn her skin to stone. She had never done anything with water, probably couldn’t do anything. Even if she could, she could certainly do nothing with what lay below them. But Tinh Tu was not waiting: she glanced at Ayae and revealed dirty, hard, determined eyes, and then she pushed Eidan through the break. He hit the rushing stream awkwardly, but without so much as a heartbeat between them, Tinh Tu leapt after him. Jae’le followed and Ayae, with no thought whatsoever for her concerns, for all her doubts, threw herself after them.
She hit the rushing violent river of mud a moment before the stone she had been on broke after her. Around her, everything went black. She felt a force, a massive, smothering force, and she panicked. She tried to kick and twist and claw to reach a surface, but there was no surface, there was no place she could rise to, no place she could take a breath. Involuntarily, she tried to do so in the river, but couldn’t, couldn’t because the force of it was trying to break her spine, to snap her, and she had no strength to draw in air. Mud pushed into her mouth, into her eyes. She felt herself being flattened. Her fingers curled in on her palms and she felt a hardness in them, a stiffness that was not all the force of the river.
Ayae hit a stone, or a stone hit Ayae. She could not tell, but the impact jolted her, turned her over, sent her into a tumble. A wordless scream burst out of her mouth and she grabbed frantically at the muddy water, trying to right herself, trying trying trying for breath trying for grip trying trying feeling her lungs burn trying trying until she could. Until the currents around her felt real, felt as if it had lines she could hold onto it. She could see it, even without seeing, her eyes caked with mud, flooded with the debris she was in, her lungs burning burning. But the currents ran. They ran like lines and she could see ahead of them, and she could see the stones and the heavy debris that ran through them. She could turn, push herself out of the way. Her awareness grew with each second. She saw Jae’le, trying his best to ride the wash, who relaxed into the nudge that directed him into the current she was riding down the river, the current that took her past him, to Tinh Tu and her tangle of robes and the determined grip she had on her staff, the staff that led to the barely conscious form of Eidan. The torrent twisted and rolled and she grabbed the pair of them and pulled them into the stream she rode, even as her chest burned, empty, hollow, burning wanting wanting wanting but not able to receive and her consciousness began to slip in and out and she began to turn began to lose herself but no no she had to hold to the line had to had to but she hurt she hurt she—
She took a shuddering, desperate breath as she and the others were spat out of the Mountain of Ger.
Water, dirt, mud, air, all of it felt real to Ayae, real enough to grab, but none of it was what she wanted to hold. Her dirt-caked eyes opened to see the empty afternoon sky and the black line of the horizon rising as the lake beneath her came into focus, as the hard water waited for the four of them to smash across it unless she could grab the sky, could find the pockets and draughts she had been able to find when she fell out of the Keep fighting Fo and Bau. If she could but just find them, hook into them, she could guide not just her, but Jae’le, Tinh Tu and Eidan to the ground, to a place of safety away from the horror of a mountain that was crumbling into itself.
The shallow edge of the Black Lake was not the most comfortable of grounds, but it did, in the end, provide a place to land.