They set out at eight on the fifth morning, all eight of them, because Odell Crane's grain had been delayed until Friday and there was nothing to be done about it.
ODL: Go and look at the caves. You've earned a day.
BRR: We could do the drying loft.
ODL: The drying loft can wait a day.
BRR: The drying loft has waited since spring.
ODL: Then it's had practice.
The path went up past the high pasture and then stopped being a path. Rufus had described it as not hard if you're not stupid about it, which turned out to be an accurate assessment delivered by a man who had walked it for sixty years. For eight academy students it was an hour of steadily increasing gradient across ground that offered no particular assistance. The village shrank behind them by degrees.
MRA: You can see the whole of it.
They stopped at a shoulder of the hill and looked back, and Beckwith sat below them in its narrow green valley, forty-odd buildings along one road with a mill at the fast end of the beck and smoke going up from perhaps a dozen chimneys.
ELS: It's tiny.
ART: It didn't feel tiny from inside it.
ELS: No. That's the strange part.
FNN: How much further is this?
BRR: Rufus said follow the beck to where it comes out of the rock.
FNN: And how far is that?
BRR: He didn't say.
FNN: He didn't SAY?
BRR: He said it wasn't hard.
FNN: Briar, that man is eighty years old and sits in a stream for a living. His assessment of what is hard cannot be trusted.
The beck came out of the rock forty minutes later. It emerged from a low dark opening at the base of a limestone face, running out across a shelf of stone before dropping into the channel that would carry it down through the pasture and eventually past Rufus Hale's feet, and Corin stopped in front of it and looked at the opening with visible reservation.
COR: That's the cave?
TLN: That's a cave.
COR: It's two feet high.
TLN: It's a cave that's two feet high.
FNN: I'm not going in there.
YSE: Nobody's going in there. The water comes out of it. Rufus said there's a path.
There was a path. It went up and left along the limestone face, and after a few minutes' scramble it brought them out onto a wider shelf where three openings sat in the rock within about a hundred feet of each other. The first one was a hole. It went back perhaps eleven feet, ended in a wall, and contained nothing whatsoever except a considerable amount of sheep dung.
FNN: This is it?
BRR: Rufus said two of them were just holes.
FNN: Yes, and I assumed he was being modest. I assumed "just a hole" meant a modest but interesting cave. This is a HOLE, Briar. This is a hole with sheep in it.
MRA: There aren't any sheep in it.
FNN: There WERE sheep in it. Extensively. Recently.
ELS: We've climbed for an hour and a half.
FNN: I'M AWARE.
The second one was worse. It went back nine feet, sloped upward rather than down, and was consequently drier, which meant the sheep had preferred it.
FNN: I want to go home.
TLN: To the inn?
FNN: To Corvane. I want to go home to Corvane and never speak of this day again.
YSE: There's a third one.
FNN: There's a third HOLE.
YSE: Rufus said the third one goes back a fair way.
FNN: Rufus said a great many things. Rufus said this wasn't hard. Rufus has an unreliable relationship with description.
The third opening was set slightly apart from the others, further along the shelf and higher, and it was, they saw as they came up to it, an entirely different proposition. It was tall enough to walk into upright.
The air coming out of it was cold, noticeably, immediately cold, a steady draught spilling out across the warm stone of the shelf, and it went back into the dark in a way that did not appear to end. Nobody said anything for a moment.
ELS: Oh.
ART: That's not a hole.
BRR: That's genuinely not a hole.
Finn had gone quiet, which was in itself remarkable, and was standing at the opening looking into it with an expression that had lost all of its earlier outrage.
FNN: How far back does that go?
BRR: He said a fair way.
FNN: What does a fair way mean from a man who thinks that climb wasn't hard?
BRR: I don't know.
FNN: I don't like that answer.
Yseult stepped up to the opening and held out one hand, palm up. The light came slowly. She had to work at it, Arthur watched her frown, and adjust, and the first attempt guttered out entirely, and then something caught and held, a steady pale glow gathering above her palm about the size of a fist. She lifted it experimentally. It stayed.
YSE: That'll last about two hours. Possibly less if I have to do anything else with it.
COR: Two hours going in, or two hours total?
YSE: Total.
COR: Then we turn back at forty minutes regardless of what we've found.
TLN: Forty?
COR: Forty. It takes as long to come out as it does to go in, and I would like a margin, because I do not want to be the person who explains to Instructor Whitfield why eight of his students are sitting in a hillside in the dark.
ELS: That's remarkably sensible.
COR: I'm frequently sensible. Nobody ever notices because I'm also unpleasant about it.
They went in. The draught got colder about twenty feet back, and the sound of the group changed, footsteps arriving flatter, voices arriving closer, the particular acoustic compression of a space with a ceiling that could be reached. Arthur went second, behind Yseult and her light, with the others strung out behind him. Twenty feet became fifty. Fifty became a hundred, the passage turning gently left and dropping slightly, the walls close enough on both sides to touch without extending an arm fully.
FNN: I want everyone to know that I am extremely uncomfortable.
BRR: We know.
FNN: I want it noted repeatedly and at intervals.
BRR: It will be. You'll ensure it.
The passage narrowed. It happened gradually and then all at once, the walls closing to something under three feet across and the ceiling dropping to shoulder height, and Yseult stopped and held the light forward and the group compressed into a queue behind her.
YSE: It keeps going.
COR: How narrow?
YSE: Narrower than this.
MRA: Let me.
She went past them one at a time in the confined space, which took some doing, and took the light from Yseult's hand and went forward into the gap while the rest of them stood in the passage and listened. The light went with her. The dark closed in behind it, and eight people stood in a limestone passage a hundred and forty feet inside a hill with no light at all, and Finn's breathing became audible.
FNN: Mira?
MRA: I'm here.
FNN: How far are you?
MRA: About fifteen feet.
FNN: That's very far.
MRA: It's fifteen feet, Finn.
Her voice came back oddly, arriving from a different direction than it should have. Then it stopped arriving at all for a moment.
FNN: Mira... MIRA.
MRA: I'm here. Sorry. I'm here.
Her voice had changed.
MRA: You need to come through.
COR: Is it passable?
MRA: It's passable. It's tight for about eight feet and then it opens.
TLN: Opens into what?
There was a pause.
MRA: I don't have a word for it.