Nissikul woke up with a shout, and I quickly followed, reacting to her cry of surprise. I leaped to my feet, snatching up my greathammer with one hand and staring all around our campsite for a target. Was someone here? Had the Dark Ones sent some kind of agent to attack us? I spun and scanned the whole area, taking a step towards the abyss beside our camp and peering down into it, just to be safe. Nothing. There was no immediate danger. I turned to Nissikul and found her staring away into nothing, her black eyes wide. “Nissi? What is it?”

“Your god, Vol. I know where she is.” She turned her head sharply, watching something I couldn’t see, her gaze tracking slowly downward.

“What?”

“I know where she is! Joanna! I can see her!”

By this time, Thukkar was awake, and he clambered unsteadily to his feet, using the nearby ice wall as support. “What’s going on?”

I was already moving, packing my sleeping furs and supplies back into my pack and making sure that the dukkar seal corpse I had field stripped was ready for travel. “Pack your things,” I snapped. “We need to move.” I looked up at Nissikul. “Where is she?”

“Far below,” she groaned. “Going lower, and moving very fast.”

“The Dark Ones,” I growled. “They must have a hold of her. Can we catch her?”

Nissikul shook her head. “No. She must be making some kind of direct path down, like a Stormcaller’s war tunnel.”

“Can you do the same?” Thukkar cut in. “Can’t you just guess which way she’s going and open a passage directly towards her?”

Nissikul closed her eyes and concentrated, saying nothing for a while. “Not possible,” she finally answered, straightening. “Ravanur’s skin is too thick. I could not move that much ice, not without help from at least eight of my brothers or sisters. I don’t know how she’s doing it.”

I looked over the edge of the chasm again. “What about this? Can you tell how far down it goes?”

Once again, my sister closed her eyes and focused. This time, I could see little arcs and bands of light refracting around her fingers, as if she had just dropped a handful of crushed ice over a glowstone. It was strange; I had never seen that before. This time, we had to wait quite a while for her to speak again. When she spoke, her voice was strained. “It goes all the way down.”

“Where?” I asked, frowning. “All the way down to where?”

“All the way down to the stone. This chasm goes down hundreds of spearcasts, and I’m certain that it goes all the way down to the stone flesh of the Great Mother Herself.” She looked back up at me, and I saw naked fear there, reflected in her vast, blank eyes. “Vol- I don’t know if I can go down that far. To walk on the naked skin of Ravanur- that seems like blasphemy.” She clenched her remaining fist and walked over to the edge of the seemingly endless pit, then leaned out over it and looked down into the depths.

I took a long look at Nissi, her missing arm, her battered, bruised body, the hollow, haunted look around her eyes, and in the same look, I took in Thukkar’s battered frame and unsteady stance. They were in bad shape. If there was going to be a fight- and I could feel one coming- they were in no shape to do much besides dying needlessly. “I’ll do it. You just take me as far down as you can go, and then you and Thukkar can make a camp and wait for me. I’ll go get Joanna myself. If someone’s going to offend Palamun, it might as well be me. I’m already dead, after all.”

“Vol-” Nissi began, but I cut her off with a sharp wave of my hand.

“No Nissi, we don’t have much time. We need her. The Erin-Vulur need her, and if we don’t get to her, Palamun only knows what the Dark Ones have planned.” I shouldered my pack and began to check over my weapons. “Come on, we need to go, now.”

Nissikul grimaced, then knelt and touched the ragged stump of her right shoulder to the ice. She spoke a few hard, percussive syllables, and once again I saw the shimmering cloud gather, this time all around the stump of her arm. She straightened up, quickly, like someone drawing back swiftly from a poisonous stinging insect, and when she did, there was a new arm, the twin to her left, attached to her shoulder. It was black as pitch and cold as the darkest heart, and as I watched, black tendrils like veins grew from the black shoulder and branched out into the flesh beneath. She quickly resettled my cloak about her bare shoulders and rewrapped it about her more securely. “Alright. Vol, Thukkar, stand… there.” She pointed at a section of the frozen cliff beside the abyss and gestured for us to move over to it. “And sit down. If you fall off, I will have no way to protect you. You will certainly die.”

“Well,” Thukkar grumbled, hobbling over with the aid of one of my iron short-spears as a cane. “That’s encouraging.” He took his place on the indicated section of the cliff, and I helped him sit, following suit and sitting down myself a moment later.

Nissikul stepped forward, close to us, and raised both of her hands, turning them so that her palms were facing down. She took a deep, cleansing breath, and muttered something almost inaudible.

“What?” I asked.

She grinned. “I hope you’re not afraid of falling.” The ice all around us split, at once, with a collected, echoing crack like the snap of an enormous leather whip. Three perfectly straight, perfectly smooth cuts appeared in the frozen surface, and our chunk of glacial ice began to slide down into the darkness, unrestrained. At the last moment, when I was sure we would pitch forward or backward and be sent tumbling into the abyss, segmented, insectoid legs shaped from Stormcaller witch-ice rose up beneath our falling perch, and they scrabbled at the wall, slowing our pace almost immediately. I watched, fascinated, as the hideous legs scrabbled down the abyss walls, lengthening and shrinking as the tunnels expanded and contracted, all beneath the iron will of Nissikul.

“Hold on Joanna,” I muttered, my hammer gripped tightly in my fists. “We’re coming.”