‘No,’ I said. ‘The glow is too yellow and the mist is only steam flowing out that catches the light.’

‘Then what is the light, if not tainted matter?’ Swallow asked.

‘A colony of taint-devouring creatures,’ I said, certain of it. ‘The mountains are full of a strain of them that lives in hot water, unlike the ones in the Land, which prefer damp, cool walls.’

‘Do you speak of the little glowing creatures that the teknoguilder Jak gifted to the Earthtemple?’ Ahmedri asked.

‘I have seen them, too, in drowned Newrome,’ Analivia said.

I described the great colony of the creatures I had seen in the rift when I had first entered the high mountains, and the glowing pool in the wolves’ valley. Finally I told them my theory of the creatures adapting to different conditions and spreading through the waterways that riddle the eastern side of the Blacklands Range to do their silent humble work cleaning the water and land of taint.

‘It is my belief that they originated here, and that the ones in the Land came from them. I think they are the reason the mountains are less tainted than we were given to believe, and why we have found so much water that is untainted.’

‘Work you call it, as if these insects have the will to clean the world of taint, even as your Jak would have them do,’ Ahmedri said, but thoughtfully.

I shrugged. ‘It almost seems that way to me, and yet it is surely only that the creatures live and by their living, serve the earth.’

‘And the heat?’ Swallow asked, gesturing at the steam.

‘Rain and meltwater flow down the mountains to feed the streams but there are hot springs above Obernewtyn that rise from regions of great heat and movement deep inside the earth, too. The pool in the wolf valley must have arisen from that source and I think the spring inside this cave does the same.’

‘But how did the taint-devouring creatures get into the springwater?’ Analivia asked.

‘Either they exist in deep caverns through which the water flows, or rain washed them down from the heights,’ I said. ‘My feeling is the latter.’

‘And that is the light,’ Analivia said.

‘Perhaps Jak is right and these creatures truly are the key to cleaning the world of taint,’ Dameon said, intrigued.

‘If only they were not so very small,’ Analivia said. ‘As it is, it will take them aeons.’

‘If Elspeth is right, they have already been doing what they do for hundreds of years,’ Swallow pointed out. ‘That is why we have been able to come this far without harm. It is our good fortune that the remnants of the Beforetimers’ roads cut through the same territory as the insects inhabit.’

‘Let’s see what is inside the cave,’ I said.