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She stopped climbing. It was getting colder as she descended. Amarinda had never liked coming here, had never shrugged off as routine the task of managing the Silver. It was not the danger of the volatile stuff. The Silver was always dangerous whether confined to a vial on her workbench or flowing in threads down the street. Casual contact with Silver was always eventually deadly for everyone. Amarinda knew the dangers of the Silver and chose to work with it anyway. Slowly she began descending again. But she had never liked the confinement of this shaft. Nor the dark. Nor the cold.

She stepped on his hand. Tellator cursed, the language foreign to her ears.Advertisement

‘Wait!’ he commanded her. ‘I’m at the end of the chain. I’m trying to tie the line to the last few links so we can get down the rest of the way. It’s not easy.’

She didn’t respond. She clung to the cold chain in the dark, felt it vibrate with his motions. It swung slightly with their weight. No different from holding tight to a skinny tree, she told herself, and waited.

‘There. I heard the rope hit the bottom when I dropped it. It’s hand over hand from here on down.’

‘If you step down into live Silver …’ She left the thought dangling.

‘I saw debris down there when they fished for the bucket. I’ll stand on it.’

She felt him moving again. He was working harder now and his weight jerked the chain back and forth. Her hands were cramping from their grip on the cold metal and the links bit into her feet. She freed one hand to lift the necklace over her head. Rapskal was too far down for her to hand it to him. She gritted her teeth and then dropped it, letting light fall away from her. ‘Look where you step,’ she warned him, and realized that she was back to it being her and Rapskal doing something foolhardy together. She was still angry at being compelled to be here, but was not sure Rapskal was the one to blame for it.

The jerking continued for some time. Bereft of the jewellery’s shimmer, the blackness closed in on her. She closed her eyes and willed herself to remember that the shaft was not truly that narrow. Deep, yes, very deep. So far from light and moving air. She began to tremble and not with the cold. She hated this. Hated it and feared it. Darkness was a thing to her, not just the absence of light, but a choking thing that could cover her over like a smothering hand.

‘Come down,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll catch you. But be careful.’

She did not want to go down to him, but her hands were losing their strength. She moved down to the end of the chain, and then onto the rope. Her numbed hands slipped, refused her weight, and she slid, shrieking, the rope burning through her hands. He caught her hard and swung her to his side. ‘Open your eyes!’ he demanded of her and only then did she realize they were clenched shut.

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She held tight to him and opened her eyes slowly. He wore the moon necklace now. The light it cast was faint and yet bright in contrast to such utter darkness. She looked away from it, trying to let her eyes adjust.

They stood together in the bottom of the shaft. Looking up, she was startled to see distant pinpricks of light. Stars. The walls of the shaft were almost smooth, the seams of the stonework fine and straight. They stood on rubble of metal and pieces of ancient wood preserved by the cold. ‘Stoop down,’ she requested in a whisper. When he did, he brought the light with him as she bent beside him. Squatting, she touched the long-broken platform beneath their feet. Here was a piece of a gear. ‘This is the part that went up and down in the shaft. It must have broken and fallen a long time ago.’

The necklace moved slightly with his nod. ‘It did,’ he said. ‘In the quake. The last big one.’ There was a clutter of sticks that crunched as she stepped on them. Something gleamed among them. Silver?

He caught his breath as she pushed the sticks aside with her bare hands and then peered more closely. ‘It’s a ring,’ she said. She picked it up and her touch woke it. Elderling-made. A flame-jewel lit with a pale-yellow gleam in a jidzin setting. Jidzin. She knew it for what it was now, Silver trapped in iron. She held it between two fingers, using it as a tiny lamp. ‘All kinds of stuff on the ground down here. But no Silver. Just earth.’ She peered closer. ‘Rapskal, look here, where we can see past the broken platform. The bottom of the shaft is paved with stones! That makes no sense for a well! Think how we lined our drinking-water holes on the way here. We wanted the water to seep up from the bottom and in from the sides. We filtered it, but we didn’t block it. Why would they make a shaft this deep and close it off on all sides from the Silver? It makes no sense.’ pqdm.com