A rustle of tightened resolve scattered along the crevice. “And not before time,” gasped Cabledarm or Latebirth. “Stone and Sea! Am I not a Giant? Aye, and also a fool. I had credited myself with greater hardiness.”

“Fool indeed,” someone else responded hoarsely. “Have you numbered the days during which we have run for Longwrath’s life, or for our own? Truly, it appears that we have persisted in this exertion for an age of the Earth.”

Hang on, Linden told herself as if she were trying to encourage a cowed child. Hang on.

Somewhere above her, the light of Liand’s Sunstone vanished.

“It is a cavern”—the Ardent’s voice was a frayed groan—“immense, damp, and cluttered. I discern naught else.”

“Aye,” Kindwind answered, struggling for breath. “Immense. Damp. Cluttered. A pool, long stagnant.” She may have said more; but her voice was cut off as she left the crevice.

Linden writhed against the intrusion of spiders, the intimacy of centipedes. She Who Must Not Be Named rose like floodwaters.

“Linden Giantfriend is beset!” Frostheart Grueburn announced between fervid gulps of air. “I descry no ill, yet she suffers.”

“Mayhap,” suggested Stave stolidly, “it is an effect of the bane. I also perceive no bodily hurt, though her distress is plain. It is my thought that the strengths which have enabled her to exceed us time and again are also a weakness. Her discernment exposes her to the bane’s evil.”

Linden tightened her grip on herself. Involuntarily she tried to twist away from heinous things that scurried and nipped. Stave was mistaken. She had never exceeded her companions. She was weak because she was wrong. She belonged among the bane’s excruciated fodder. Each spider and insect and worm was an accusation. Good cannot be accomplished by evil means. She felt like carrion because she had committed Desecrations.

Ahead of her, Coldspray lurched out of the crevice, taking the krill’s argence with her. A moment later, Grueburn reached the opening of the walls; stumbled through it.

A sudden impression of imponderable space spread out around Linden. Stagnation seemed to clog her way as though Grueburn had carried her into a quagmire. And at every distance, water dripped and splashed and ran, an immeasurable multitude of droplets and trickling so extensive that it sounded like rain within the mountain. In Grueburn’s arms, Linden entered a drizzle devoid of boundaries. Simple reflex caused her to fling her fire upward.

The cavern was indeed immense. To Linden’s abused sight, it looked large enough to contain all of Revelstone, although surely it was not. The company’s lights reached the ceiling dimly, but failed to find the far wall: she had no way to gauge the scale of the cavity. However, her immediate vicinity resembled a shallow basin tipped slightly to one side, so that the lowest point of the curve lay somewhat to her left. There eons of dripping water had gathered into a pool so old and unrelieved that it no longer held any possibility of life. Across the millennia, the water had gone beyond mere brackish-ness to a toxic mineral concentration.