By the time they reached the cellar, the Foothold Gate was open, Ivar and Alberdina were gone, and the mages were filing through as Jonaton waited impatiently. She formed up behind the last of the mages, without really thinking about it, stepped through and—

—it was darker than a cave. Darker than anything she had ever experienced before. An enormous darkness that stretched to infinity on all sides of her, and she felt as if she was falling, but she knew she wasn’t. And she felt as if she was being stretched in every possible direction. It didn’t hurt, but it didn’t feel good either!

There were things out there. Things she couldn’t see. They couldn’t see her, either, but she got the idea that they knew she was there, somewhere. And they wanted very badly to find her.

She tried to make herself small, but all she succeeded in doing was stretching herself in different directions, some of them impossible. And at the same time she couldn’t actually feel anything of her body, as if she was just some—thing, with no body at all, just a little cloud of Delia, a mist in the darkness, and if she wasn’t careful she’d blow apart, as a breeze blew apart a cloud of fog, and she’d never find herself and those things would breathe her in, or drink her up and—

—and she stepped down hard on moss-covered ground, stumbled over a stick, felt her elbow caught by someone, and was pulled out of the way just as Jonaton stepped through the Gate and it closed behind him. All there was now was a single cube of inscribed sandstone to mark where it had been.

One of the other mages caught Jonaton as he stumbled as she had done. He shook his head hard and made an inarticulate noise.

“That’s a rough one,” the mage said in sympathy.

“Well,” he replied, thickly. “Once we get the real Gates up, it won’t be so bad.”

“Oh, it could be much worse,” Ponu said cheerfully, materializing out of the group and taking him by the shoulder. “Come along, there’s work to be done. Delia, you come too. Ivar and Alberdina need your help making camp.”

But I’ve never camped before, she thought. It didn’t seem to matter, though. She was carried along by the press of bodies, through underbrush and waist-high grass already being trampled flat, over the top of a low hill.

And there it was, stretching out in a bowl of a valley.

Ivar hadn’t lied. The lake was the biggest she had ever seen, practically filling the valley, steel-blue under an extremely early-morning sky, the sun just barely peeking up over the horizon. And at the far distant shore, three narrow rivers. Did they lead into the lake or out of it?

Probably into it. All this water has to come from somewhere.