Twenty feet below them, the avanc’s skin was raw and seeping. It was like an excavation: a wide, ragged trench at least thirty feet deep and many yards long, curling into the darkness. Its inner walls were a crumbling mess of shattered cells fouled with the residue of that oily pus. Even as they watched, clots of the semiliquid broke away and began to rise, strings of matter stretching and snapping behind them.

In the deepest part of the gash, at its base, the phosphor illuminated a wet flesh-red.

"Jabber and fuck," hissed Johannes. "No wonder it’s been slowed."

Kruach Aum was scribbling madly, and he held up his paper to the lantern light. Is nothing, Johannes read. Think of avanc size. Must be more.

"Look," hissed Chion. "The edges of that cut… they don’t meet the bridle. It’s not the metal that’s caused this." There was a silence at that. "We’re missing something."

The avanc’s lacerated epidermis rose to either side of them as they descended into the trench.

Like explorers in some lost river, they traced the wound toward its source.

The V of split flesh disappeared in sharp perspective before them, but was swallowed by darkness long before any vanishing point. With every heartbeat, a wash of blood welled up around them, blinding them for seconds till it evanesced.

There were small motions below them, and on either side, as scavengers ate at the exposed meat.

The submersible moved slowly in the shadows of this meat ravine. And everyone in the little bubble of metal and air thought and did not say, What did this?

They turned as the split turned, as hard corners of ruined skin reared before them. The Ctenophore swiveled in the water.

"Did you see something move?"

Chion’s face was white.

"There! There! Did you? Did you see it?"

Silence. The stroke of blood. Silence.

Johannes tried to see what Chion saw.

The gulch is widening. They are at the edge of a deep pit. Its base is blood and pus. It stretches out, a hollow scores of yards across. This is the avanc’s wound.

Something moves. Johannes sees it and cries out, and the others answer him.

There is motion in the blood below them.

"Oh dear gods," he whispers, and his voice dies and becomes a thought. Oh gods. Something inevitable and very bad is unfolding.

The Ctenophore rocks, to more screams. Something buffets it.

A part of Johannes’ mind is frozen, and he thinks, We must find it and cure it, find what’s wrong and cure it, cut out what’s bad, cure it, but on top of that, and smothering it, a shock of fear descends as they enter the pit, the heart of the malady.

(It’s been in me since the waves closed over my head.)