Half a mile below the rope pitch, the narrow watercourse opened into a cavern so wide that the lantern beams lost the side walls completely.
Warm, salty drops fell from the low vault with a slow, steady patter like late autumn rain through orchard boughs. Wherever the mineral water dripped onto the limestone pillars, crusted lime-stone had grown over centuries into the shapes of unfinished organs and abandoned limbs.
Directly above the path, clusters of pale yellow-white globes hung from ribbed mineral stalks like heavy winter pears, each globe marked with a distinct iris ring and a slit pupil of darker spar. Farther left, broad, half-formed wings of translucent stone arched out from a column, their feather-ribs thinner than parchment where the warm air draft whistled through them. Between the roots of the pillars sat rounded, hollow basins shaped like multi-chambered hearts; every time the underground stream surged through their lower vents, the mineral chambers filled and drained with a soft, wet thump-hiss that sounded uncomfortably like a sleeping barn full of cattle.
Tern stopped in his tracks, lowered his head, and gave a baffled, half-offended whine at a stone wing-joint that dripped warm brine onto his nose.
“My father wrote two pages about this vault,” Osha said, lifting her lantern high enough to catch the gleam of the hanging eye-clusters. “He called it the Hall of Unchosen Limbs. When the Cradle’s water carries dissolved evolutionary patterns down from the upper beds, the ones no living creature takes up eventually…
