The shaft broadened suddenly into a vast cavity whose floor was chaos. The shape of the space was something like a melon poised on end. They had angled down into a location that was neither high up in the dome of its ceiling nor down low in its wall but somewhere in between. The reason for Corvus’s irritability became clear; anyone who lost their footing during the descent of the shaft would have gained speed falling down it and been projected out helplessly into the cavity, then fallen down into the lake of chaos. But by making a controlled descent, the party was able to stop on a bit of a ledge that some Lithoplast—perhaps Pluto himself—had sculpted at the outlet of the tunnel. It could not accommodate all of them. Corvus, Prim, Querc, and Mard spread out along it while Edda, Lyne, Fern, and Burr remained backed up in the tunnel, shifting about to peer over one another’s shoulders. Mab soared free, exulting in the vastness of the space, her light illuminating diverse veins and layers in the rock. To watch her was intoxicating but dangerous; Prim had to avert her eyes when she sensed she might lose her balance.

Mab settled into a looping flight pattern, remaining more or less on a level about halfway between them and the surface of the chaos below. The surface was not of uniform brightness but dappled, and the dapples came and went. Sometimes they were big and slow, as if something huge was trying to shoulder its way up out of the deep, and other times they flickered so rapidly that by the time the eye had darted to them they had vanished. Over and over Prim had the maddening sense that she was just on the verge of making something out for what it was, as when a name is on the tip of your tongue or a sneeze pent up in your nose. Mab seemed to be looking at the same. Perhaps she had some faculty Prim lacked of collecting the scattered fragments of imagery into a definite vision.

Something shifted in the chaos. Mab whipped round in a tight circle and then shot vertically up to their level, blazing bright enough to illuminate the walls of the whole cavern. “Now! Follow me!” she cried, then wheeled about so she was head down, and dove.

Corvus put his shoulder into Prim, who fell into Querc, who fell into Mard, who with his bad arm had no way of stopping. They all fell off the ledge and tumbled helplessly into chaos.

Somewhere in it, down became up and they began to fall slower and slower instead of faster and faster. Snow, mottled with patches of rock, was skimming below them. Prim put out her hands defensively. The surface came up to meet her. She skidded, then plunged into deep snow that brought her to a stop without breaking anything. When she tried to stand up, she sank to midthigh.