4.54: The Way Out

“Max?” Kylie’s voice had a hysterical tinge to it. “Did you pick up a new spell?”

“No, I didn’t pick up – why are you two staring at me?”

I pulled up the camera on my tablet and handed it to him to use as a mirror. He frowned at his own reflection for a few seconds, then calmly handed it back. He stared back at the wall, closing his left eye for a few seconds, then his right. “That… explains some things,” he said, confused. “But this isn’t right. I don’t think this is supposed to happen.”

“Really?” Kylie practically screeched. “You don’t think?”

“Give me your arm,” I demanded, fumbling about my bag until I found my backup, unused runecrafting pen. I slid the razor tip into the centre of his mage mark and drew fresh ichor. Unless he’d lost his old spell within the last hour or two and the ichor hadn’t had time to start drying up yet, he had two spells. That might not be good. Plenty of people did just fine with two spells, of course, but the sooner we got him medical attention, the better.

Besides, I was pretty sure that as soon as he got control of whatever loopy new perspective the one in his eye was giving him (a prophecy, it had to be a prophecy of some kind), he was going to freak out. Max was absolutely the last person on earth who would consider a second spell to be remotely good news.

For now, though, he just looked confused. He frowned at the wall.

“What do you see?” I asked.

“The library,” he explained again. “Well, the notes of the library. Dead water leaves its mark wherever it goes; the library itself will be your problem, but there are whispers all over. The stories are written by the footsteps of the dead living, not dead water, but… hmm.” He squinted at the wall. “I fear that I’ve quite severely miscalculated. This can’t possibly be the plan.”

“The plan?”

“What Destiny wants,” he said, waving an arm dismissively. “It did say to break my soul next, and I thought I’d figured it out, but I don’t think I was supposed to be here after all, because there’s no path forward that way. I’m sorry. You two were right, and I should’ve talked this over with you.”

“Of course you should have,” Kylie said impatiently, “but you can grovel properly when you’re not out of your mind on prophecy-vision, or whatever’s going on. You said there were directions out?”

“The waters went up and down, yes? Down to the lakes and rivers of the buffer layer, down into the Heart to die, up to the well. We follow the path of the water out of the well. It’s fairly simple. This way.” He marched forward. We rushed after him.

There was no way to know if Max was leading us in the right direction. I’d gotten too turned around to follow anything. But he sure looked confident as he led us through passages, occasionally stopping to stare at the wall for a bit and mutter about recalculating. At one point, the tunnel dropped sharply downward, and became submerged by water. Max clicked his tongue. “Sorry about that,” he said. “The paths were made by water and have no concern for how a human travels. We’d drown on this one. We’ll have to take a longer way around.”

So we backtracked. No problem. I was getting tired and my feet were pretty sore, but I’d been through worse than a long hike before. I wasn’t worried until we reached another wet tunnel, and Max swore.

This tunnel wasn’t fully submerged. It just had about ten centimetres of water on the bottom. I could see it rising again in the distance, so I couldn’t understand why Max suddenly looked so worried. It was just a bit of water, right?

“Problem?” Kylie asked.

“Yes.” Max crouched down to dip his hand in the water. He frowned at his fingers, glistening with empowered water over dried blood. “We passed through this passage fifteen minutes ago, before we needed to turn around. It was dry, then. The water in these tunnels is rising.”

“What?” I asked. “How?”

He shrugged. “Do you think that water is a still and motionless thing? There is movement here, a system. This place has tides. I thought this place long abandoned, the messages in the stone old, but I must have misread them.”

“Or the rising water is new,” I suggested.

“While we are here? A bit of a coincidence, no?”

I exchanged a glance with Kylie. She was remembering the same thing that I was; the Lake of Inquisition, with its dry shores, and water that only rose if prey stepped into it. The water probably wasn’t rising coincidentally at the time that we were here. It was probably rising because we were here.

“We will need to hurry,” Max said briskly. “This is not a place that can remake you. The ways out, with a time limit… hmm.” He stared at the wall. “We are… no, we are not trapped, but… hmm.”

“But…?” I prompted.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know the way forward?”

“I know the way forward. I do not know what it is. The path is clear but the route makes no sense. I’m missing something.”

“Do you know where we need to go next?” Kylie asked.

“… Yes. The waters of the past don’t know, but the future does. This way.” he strode into the water.

Kylie looked to me. “So what are the chances, you think, that he actually does know the way out and this isn’t just chasing a delusion?”

I shrugged. “Does it matter? We have no other options. We’re completely lost, and even if we weren’t, we can’t overpower him when he’s like this. We just have to hope that he’s right.”

“And that he doesn’t stay like this,” she muttered as we splashed forward. “If this is just what it’s like to have that new spell of his – ”

“Alania’s his surveyanto. If anyone can teach him to control it, she can. I’m sure we’ll have our old Max back in no time. I just hope he doesn’t freak out and rip his own eye out to get rid of it or something. You know what he’s like with magic.”

“I’m sure he’ll be fine. We just need to get him up that damned well and to Malas.”

We followed Max down a few more twisty corridors, until he stopped at a final fork. Everything about his posture was tense and indecisive. As I came up behind him, I saw why; two passages forked ahead. One dipped down, and quickly became submerged by water. The other rose upward, but off in the distance, I could see a dead end.

“So we have to swim?” I asked.

He shook his head. “You’d think so,” he murmured. “We’re too high. We are definitely too high, but… no, death is that way. Come on.” he turned up the rising passage.

“That’s a dead end,” I called after him.

“The way forward is the way forward,” he called back.

“Max, seriously, there’s no way to – ” Arguing was useless. Kylie and I rushed after him.

It was a dead end. By the time we reached him, he was clawing at the wall again, trying to prise the film of mineral deposits off. I pulled a piton out of my bag and handed it to him to prise with. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“I need to see the library. Stone is older than water.”

“I still have no idea what that means.”

“We’re in the right place,” he grumbled. “We are, but where is the path?”

“How long until the water rises and drowns us?” Kylie asked.

“Oh, it won’t. We’ll be in an air pocket. We’re too close to the surface for the water pressure to create enough air pressure to hurt us; there’d be two or three days worth of air in here, but that’s just a longer death if… ah.” He looked back at us, smiling sadly.

“What?” I asked. “You see the answer?”

He shook his head. “There are things that stone can’t tell us. It’s obvious, though. I just didn’t think.” He rubbed at his eyes. “Okay, I have a plan. You two need to go for help.”

“Um,” I said. “We’re all trapped here.”

He shook his head. “I can get you to the well, and then you need to go for help. It’ll be alright.”

“Okay, how?”

“Can the both of you swim?”

“Yes, but – ”

“Straight ahead, then. You’re basically there.” He pulled something out of his pocket – his spell-draining awl. Held it over his mage mark.

“Max, what exactly are you doing?”

“Doesn’t matter. Promise me you’ll keep swimming. I miscalculated, but you’ll be alright, with Destiny on your side. You’ll have to find the way forward yourselves, I think.”

“Max, what – ?”

“I love you both.” He stabbed the metal spike into his mage mark, and touched the wooden handle to the floor.

Max had been trying to make that awl fully extract a spell for a long time, and he must have succeeded, because the result wasn’t a mere crack in the floor like when we’d accidentally discharged Fionnrath’s Destiny’s power. The floor beneath us crumbled to sand. The walls and roof cracked, too, and I saw a rock pin Max’s leg right before Kylie and I plunged down, through the tunnel floor, into another tunnel.

“Get out of here!” Max called. “Get help!”

I tried to fight my way to the surface, but there was no up, no down… and then a tentacle grabbed me, ready to entangle me, to drag me down to… no, not a tentacle. A rope. A rock climbing line! We were at the bottom of the well!

Hands, Kylie’s hands, grabbed at the line, and together we pulled our way up through the water. It was a lot quicker to move upward through water than air, but my lungs were burning by the time my head broke the surface, about a quarter of the way up the rope. We took a couple of minutes to secure out harnesses properly, and began the long, gruelling task of dragging ourselves up the rope.

We ditched our bags of supplies into the water. No way we were dragging all that weight up.

We were both shivering, gasping messes as we limped into the hospital ward. Malas leapt up from a seat and rushed over, ready to scan us.

“Never mind us!” I gasped. “We have to save Max!”

“Where is – ?”

“He went down a well in Duniyasar and now he’s pinned – ” but Kylie didn’t get to finish her explanation. Malas had alread bolted from the room, yelling about an emergency.

I barely made it to a chair before my legs gave out. Kylie sank into the chair next to me.

“He’ll be fine,” I said.

“Of course he’ll be fine,” she agreed. “He did say that things would be alright, and he seems to be able to see at least some of the future now, so he’d know.”

“Yeah. Exactly.” I pretended that she sounded convincing. I pretended that I felt convinced.

He’d be fine.