“You've read about it?”
“Amarya.”
He hardly ever used my name, so the fact that he did made me watch him more closely.
“You knew what to look for.” I turned to face him properly. In the faint light, his face was unreadable, his eyes giving nothing away.
He looked back at me for a long moment. Then he looked at the column.
“We should go back up,” he said. “We don’t need the others to see this.”
He turned and walked back toward the tunnel entrance.
I stood alone in the vast, dark chamber, the pulse moving through the column and through my chest at the same time. I understood with absolute clarity that whatever Nicco had just decided not to say, he had left it unsaid for a reason.
And that reason was not for my protection.
I turned and followed him back into the dark.
Chapter 24
We came back upfrom the tunnel in silence.
Nobody asked what we'd seen, which I thought was odd. Maybe it was because Nicco said nothing, and people had learned — through a process of trial and error that had mostly cost them — that asking questions wasn't going to improve the situation.
I said nothing because I was still trying to make sense of what I'd felt down there, and I didn't have the words that I was willing to say out loud to anyone.
Not yet. Maybe not ever.
The basin had not been quiet in our absence.
I'd expected quiet. Instead, the basin had its own sounds, and after the stillness of the trek north, they felt almost aggressive.
The waterspouts erupted without warning or pattern. One moment, the snow on the basin floor was undisturbed. The next, a column of steaming water shot fifteen or twenty feet upward into the gray sky, hung there for a breath, then fell back in a curtain of warm droplets that froze on contact with the surrounding cold air. The result was a fine mist that drifted across the basin floor in slow, rolling banks, catching the flatlight and making the gemstone seams in the rock faces glitter briefly before the mist passed on.
It was almost beautiful.
It was also immediately and obviously dangerous.
Sergeant Gralen had sent two soldiers into the basin ahead of the main group to begin what they termed "cataloging." I watched from the edge as the first waterspout caught the nearer soldier full in the chest. The blast of warm water knocked him sideways, and he went down on one knee in the snow, drenched and already beginning to steam in the cold air.
The second soldier had the presence of mind to step back. The spout subsided. The first man got to his feet with the expression of someone trying very hard to pretend we hadn’t all watched him get knocked on his ass.
“Move in pairs,” Marson said. “One watches, one works. You see the snow shift, you move.”
It was a reasonable instruction. The problem was that the warning signs were subtle. A slight depression in the snow's surface, a faint tremor underfoot, and a change in the basin's sound that I felt more than heard.
The soldiers were learning to read them, but learning had a cost.
By the time the group had spread along the rock faces to begin their work, four of them had been caught. None seriously, the water was warm, not scalding, and the volumes were manageable unless you were directly beneath the spout's peak. But wet clothes in Crystallese were a problem that compounded quickly, and I watched Marson make the calculation in real time, assessing how long he had before the cold began to harm men who were already damp.
“How long do they last?” he asked me.
I looked at the nearest active spout, the column of water rising and falling in that slow, rhythmic pattern. “I don't know,” I said honestly. “I've never seen them before.”
He didn't look pleased with that answer. I couldn't help that.
“Maybe ask Larana. She told me what they were.”
