Once Osha’s lantern disappeared around the upper bend, the only light left in the lower fault came from the dim green glow beneath Pip’s cracked shell.
Ysabet kept her left hand on the cold limestone wall and stepped down into the ankle-deep trickle at the bottom of the cleft. Her wet trousers clung to her shins, and every fourth step her boot sole grated on loose flint washed down from the collapsed lake shelf. Thirty yards in, the single fissure split into three low stone tubes, each smelling equally of wet iron and old mud, with no boot-marks on the floor to show which way curved back toward the fossil-root shore.
She stopped on a flat gravel bar, reached into the inner pocket of her oilskin satchel—right beside the Stone Shepherd’s bone flute and Oru’s wrapped throat crystal—and drew out the glassfish scale the Unfinished One had shed for them in the nursery hollow.
It was the size of a saucer, clear as pond ice and ribbed down the middle with a hair-thin vein of silver mineral. Ysabet did not expect it to shine or speak; the Mother of No Shape had made no magic compass for them. She knelt, scooped a shallow puddle of cave water onto a level shelf of rock, and floated the curved scale on the surface like a saucer boat.
