The squeeze was eight feet long and considerably worse than Mira had made it sound. Arthur went second, on his side, with the rock against his chest and his back and no room to turn his head, and he understood within about four feet why Mira had gone quiet on the other side: not because of what she had seen, but because there is no air in your lungs for talking when the world has narrowed to this. Then it opened. He came out onto a shelf of stone and stood up, and did not immediately understand what he was standing in. It was the sound that told him first.
His boots came down on rock and the noise of it went away from him, and kept going, and came back several seconds later from somewhere enormously far above and to the left, and Arthur stood very still in near-total darkness and listened to his own footstep return to him like something posted. Yseult's light was the size of a fist.
In the passage it had been more than enough. Here it illuminated the shelf they were standing on, the wall behind them, and nothing whatsoever in any other direction, which was in its own way the most frightening thing about it. There was simply nothing for the light to reach.
TLN: How big is this?
MRA: I don't know.
TLN: Guess.
MRA: I'm not going to guess. I've been standing here four minutes and I've dropped two stones and I haven't heard the second one land.
FNN: You WHAT?
MRA: I dropped a stone. It hasn't landed.
FNN: WHERE DID YOU DROP IT?
MRA: Over the edge.
FNN: WHAT EDGE.
Yseult pushed the light. She had said it would last two hours; she spent a substantial fraction of that in about ninety seconds, forcing the glow outward from a fist to a head to something the size of a cartwheel, hanging above her palm and climbing, and her breathing went ragged with the effort of it. The light rose.
It went up thirty feet and found nothing. Sixty, and found nothing. It kept climbing, dimming as it spread, and somewhere past a hundred and fifty feet it finally, faintly, found the underside of a ceiling. And the walls came out of the dark. They were covered in crystal. Not veined. Covered, great scoured seams of it running across the rock in every direction, formations the size of doors and the size of houses, some of them clustered in fans and some standing alone like pillars, and every single one of them caught Yseult's light and gave it back a little changed. Blue and green and a deep amber, layered through each other, the whole vast wall of the chamber lit up in a slow shifting glow that came from nowhere and everywhere at once. Nobody spoke.
Eight people who between them could not manage four consecutive minutes of silence at a dinner table stood on a stone shelf a hundred and forty feet inside a hill and said absolutely nothing for a considerable length of time.
BRR: Essence.
He said it eventually, very quietly.
BRR: That's crystallized essence. All of it.
YSE: I know.
BRR: Yseult, that's... do you understand how long that takes? Essence pools. It settles into places and it sits there and over a very long time it hardens into mineral. That's what those are. That is thousands of years of essence pooling in one room.
YSE: I know what it is.
BRR: I've read about deposits like this. I've never heard of one this size. I don't think anyone has.
FNN: Does anyone else feel strange?
TLN: Yes.
FNN: Right. Good. I thought it was just me.
Arthur felt it too. It was not unpleasant. It was the opposite of unpleasant, which was somehow worse, a low steady warmth sitting behind his sternum, the sense of standing close to something enormous and entirely indifferent to him, and he found he did not want to move very much.
ELS: We should go.
COR: We've been in eleven minutes.
ELS: I know. I still think we should go.
COR: Why?
ELS: I don't know. I want to look at it for the rest of my life and I also want to be outside. Both at once.
Mira had picked up the lantern-glow's edge of light and was following it upward along the wall, tracing the formations, and she had gone very still again.
MRA: Yseult.
YSE: I can't hold it much longer.
MRA: Hold it. Look up.
The webbing was two hundred feet above them. It ran between the crystal formations in vast sagging sheets, strung across the upper third of the chamber, grey and thick and coated in the same slow crystalline dust as everything else, and it had clearly been there a very long time. And in the middle of it, folded into itself, was the spider.
It was, Arthur estimated afterward and never with any confidence, somewhere between fifteen and twenty feet across. It was not moving. He did not finish the word. Whatever it had been going to be, it stopped in his throat.
COR: Nobody move.
TLN: It's asleep.
COR: I said nobody move.
They stood there. Yseult's light shivered, and dimmed, and she made a small sound of effort holding it, and Arthur watched a fine bright dust drift down from the webbing two hundred feet above them, dislodged by nothing at all.
MRA: The stone.
ELS: What?
MRA: The stone I dropped. It never landed.
BRR: Mira, what are you saying.
MRA: I'm saying I don't think it reached the bottom.
She swallowed.
MRA: I'm saying I think it hit something on the way down.
The spider moved. It was not fast, at first. That was what made it awful, a shifting in the webbing far above, a slow methodical rearrangement of a very large number of legs, and the whole sheet of it swaying gently as something enormous unfolded itself out of a sleep it had been in for a considerable time. Then it came down the wall. It came down fast.
FNN: RUN!
COR: NO.
He caught Finn's collar as he turned.
COR: The gap is eight feet long and one person wide and it will take us six minutes to get through it. Nobody is running.
He drew his sword.
COR: We're doing this here.