The current slackened where the shale tunnel opened into a wide, low-ceilinged vault, and the pumice raft grated onto a narrow bank of dark gravel and hardened lime-mud.
Above the bank, the ceiling was not solid rock. Great twisted columns of petrified wood—the fossilized roots of a forest that had died long before the upper valley existed—arched across the dark like the ribs of an overturned ship, dripping slow beads of lime-heavy water into the stillness.
Pip tumbled off the bow of the raft onto the gravel and went down on its front knees.
Its shell smelled strongly of hot slate from the electrical surge it had grounded in the chute, and the green clay patch along its old Little Harbor seam was cracked and weeping thin, colorless fluid. Even so, before it lay down, the creature hooked its sideways jaw under the raft’s hemp painter, dragged the heavy mooring stone three feet up into the hardened mud, and wedged it behind a root spur so the backwash could not pull Edris back into the dark water.
Higher up, through a hundred feet of fractured limestone and open air shafts, Ysabet felt the sudden stopping of the spinning motion through the bond.
