Ten minutes into the watch, the air in the lower basin grew so hot and spent that Ysabet’s shirt stuck to the bandage around her left ribs.
The borrowed sunbeam was working, but it was small and the fungal shelf was thick as a blacksmith’s anvil. Only the outer hand’s-breadth of the violet mass had shriveled back into a dry, blackened crust; behind it, deeper layers of swollen mold still plugged the throat of the vent. The breath eels, driven back from the lit corner, were heaving harder now. Their pale gill-arches flared wide and shut with a wet, whistling rattle, and two smaller eels near the floor had rolled onto their sides, their ribbon fins twitching in the stagnant pockets of bad air.
Down by the egg beds, Pip lifted its head.
The hot, mineral-heavy draft seeping around the edges of the blockage carried a faint static prickle from the deep geothermal fissures below. Across the bridge of Pip’s nose, the forked white door-mark stood out starkly against its dark hide, and when it parted its sideways jaws to pant, the pale electrical scar across its tongue—left from grounding the storm-crow nest on the high bridge—twitched and hummed.
Through the bond, Ysabet felt a sudden, heavy pressure roll up from underneath Pip’s ribs.
