The Devil's breath

16

!Koga had known fear in his young life. There was the time a lion challenged the hunters for the gemsbok they had brought down and he was suddenly faced with the snarling fury of a hungry lioness. He’d been so frightened that he screamed and shouted and threw stones at her, until she wilted under the hail of sharp rocks. That day had earned him respect from the other men. But it was not the fear of the lioness that had driven itself into his heart, it was the dying gemsbok. He had returned to the buck, the size of a small horse, and readied his knife. The hunter’s poison had taken a long time to work, but now its central nervous system was paralyzed and it lay helpless.!Koga knelt next to its head and thanked the gemsbok for allowing itself to fall victim to the skills of the hunters. He touched its soft muzzle with his hand. But he hesitated. The gemsbok’s brown eyes gazed at him in a moment of unspoken affinity.!Koga, transfixed, let the knife fall to the ground. The eyes held him until the last heartbeat. And then, as the life receded from those eyes,!Koga sensed the long and lonely journey that would one day be his own death. That was what frightened him. Not death, but the journey afterwards. And that same fear had touched his heart when Max had asked that he leave him alone for a while.

Max was in the pilot’s seat. The monster that was the Devil’s Breath lay somewhere ahead, and he had to find the route, but something other than the desperation of finding his father gripped Max. He didn’t know what was going to happen. Gently, his voice barely above a whisper, he told!Koga to pull down the camouflage netting and wait by the tall grass, a final rational thought to keep the plane hidden.!Koga could not imagine what his friend would see or where the shapeshifter of his mind would take him, but it was an unknown land and!Koga was convinced, like any hunter, that every wilderness harbored its own ferocious animals. Max’s eyes began to look like those of the dying animal that!Koga remembered so well. Afraid that his friend’s journey might capture his own soul and take him into the unknown, he moved away quietly.

Whatever happened when Max experienced this supernatural energy, he did not understand it. BaKoko, the shapeshifter, had released this ability within him, but Max thought, incongruously, that it was like learning to ride a motorbike. There was a power which was scary and exhilarating and, if not controlled properly, could kill. And there was no one to tell him how to control these immense feelings. When a shapeshifter gained sufficient experience and the energy was harnessed, the actual physical shape would change. The thought of being able to become another creature was far removed from his own sense of practicality-a load of tosh, was what he would have said-until he’d had that first experience. And now he was being drawn into that power again.

Max felt he was sitting inside his own body looking out. And when!Koga teased the camouflage net across the nose of the plane, being careful that the web did not snag the propeller, everything closed down for Max. No sound, no sight; all that remained was what now seemed to be the dim light at the mouth of a cave.!Koga settled the dead branches back across the netting, deepening shade settled on the plane and arrows of light pinioned Max in the darkness of the cockpit.

He waited in silence, trying to focus his mind into a place that lay as still and as remote as a pool of water. His head nodded forward, tiredness enfolding him, a sleeplike surrender easing him away.

A shuddering wrench made him gasp. Jolted, he felt as if he’d been snatched and thrown by a mighty hand. An ice-hot force seared up his spine. It was worse than he had feared. A huge rush of energy powered him through the sky, and then he hovered silently in the air. He was higher than a skyscraper, and part of him felt quivering terror, as if he hung over the edge of such a high building. His whole body shook. His cry of alarm shrieked across the sky; shadows moved on the ground and his eyes zoomed in to where a low circular mist hugged the ground. He looked over his shoulder, which was covered in overlapping layers of dense brown and gray feathers. A long way away-beyond the horizon, scrubland and low trees nestled alongside the scar that was the elephant track-was the tiny figure of his friend.

“!KOGA!” he yelled, but the cry that came from the back of his throat was not a sound he recognized. He gasped; he was unable to hover. He was a bird all right, but this time he was no hawk or eagle or whichever raptor form he had taken before; now he was a dove, swooping through the air and beginning to panic; a roller-coaster ride without anything to hang on to. But he saw the direction he had to take on the ground. Beyond the elephant grass, through the small forest and across the broken plain, small plateaus rose and dipped and animal paths gave a sense of direction for a few kilometers. Beyond the ravines and increasing tangles of scrubland lay a ragged-edged black hole, punched into the earth’s surface. The shape of its snarling face would not be visible from the ground; only a pilot or a bird would see how the land had been scrunched and twisted from a meteor’s impact, millions of years ago. The shattered remnants of rock formed eyebrow scars, and the slab of stone below, a broken nose. The gaping, broken-toothed chasm exhaled a sour mist that fed the vegetation. It was the entrance to hell and the place most feared by the Bushmen.

The place held his attention, but when he looked beyond the smashed earth he saw the distant glint of water. A river, like a fat Gaboon viper, settled lazily; reeds and sandbanks where creatures lay, unmoving. Crocodiles. Big ones. He was learning to see things now, his head twisting, giving himself different viewpoints, and the most obvious formation of rocks now made itself clear. Square blocks formed a structure, figures moved, dust rose from a moving vehicle. It was a fort. Skeleton Rock.

Max tried to turn; somehow he had to get back to!Koga, but flying was not easily mastered. He fluttered helplessly, as if caught in a storm, and his panic sent shock waves through the air. Another cry filled the desert sky; cruel and piercing, it instinctively terrified him. A dark shape circled high above him, the ragged edges of its wings dipping and controlling its flight. A memory flashed into his mind-baboons shrieking with fear at the shadow of a martial eagle. Now one had sighted him as its prey. Wings folded, it plummeted through the sky in perfect attack mode. Moments later, ripping talons would make short, vicious work of him. Max tried to escape; he could see the tiny figure of!Koga squatting in a tree’s shade, hundreds of meters below him.!KOGA! But of course the boy heard nothing. Ripping talons slashed, a feather’s breadth from Max’s face, but no sooner had the eagle missed its attack than it pulled off an incredible midair maneuver and struck again. Its heel talon stabbed backwards, cutting into feather and down.

Max was falling. The stomach-churning ride was now an out-of-control tumble. But how many times had he been told he was a natural sportsman? What Max could see, Max could do. Show him the position to take on a white-water kayak, demonstrate the body angle for a downhill off-piste ski run, and Max could hold that picture in his head, and his muscle memory repeated it. Eagles went bullet-shaped in their attack dive; so too could Max. Concentration forced his panic further back into his consciousness. He felt everything change. A subtle shift of control, a tightening of his arms-or were they wings? — against his sides; the velocity buffeting his face, the ground swooping upwards and then, like air brakes, the arm-tearing tension to slow the descent and glide into the trees. Not enough control! Branches and twigs like long-thorned fingers snatched at him.

And then blackness.

He awoke in the back of the cockpit.

Max hauled his aching body out of the plane and stood for a moment in the warm shade. He scooped a handful of earth and put it to his nose; the earthy smell of Africa gave him a reassuring sense of being grounded.

!Koga waited nervously at the edge of the track, a look of relief on his face when Max pushed through the trees.!Koga touched the slash across Max’s shoulders, as long as a hand’s length. It was superficial but it stung. “I think I fell backwards in the cockpit,” Max answered the questioning look. The truth frightened him as much as the experience; if he was mentally able to take on the form of an animal, then it was fairly certain that he could be attacked and injured or killed.

Maybe it was all in his imagination. Maybe that cut did come from falling inside the plane. At least that was one way of fooling himself.

They jogged steadily for a couple of hours, the layout of the ground imprinting itself like a three-dimensional image in Max’s mind. As the sun rose higher and the heat became intolerable, they rested in the lee of a rock overhang. Max spread the maps out. The crease marks on his own map were frayed; his father’s Ordnance Survey map was more serviceable. The hydrology chart was what interested him now. By comparing his father’s two maps and his own aerial memory view of the Devil’s Breath, he realized that one of the blue veins formed an underground circuit from the gaping hole and traveled directly under Skeleton Rock. He wasn’t sure about the hair-thin line that looped off, but it seemed the river system could also be a feed from, or was a result of, this underground water system. Max mentally chastised himself. What an idiot. He had literally had a bird’s-eye view of the fort. He could have seen everything he needed to know. The river and those crocodiles acted as a natural defense, but he could have flown into the fort itself. He could have observed everything. They had to be bringing in supplies. Were they using the river for drinking water? If they were, was there a filtration plant? If so, where did they generate electricity to run it? Answers to these questions might have given him a way into Skeleton Rock.

Everything had brought him to this place, there was no doubt in Max’s mind that this was where he would find more evidence of his father’s whereabouts. But the memory of that last flight gave him the jitters. His hands trembled at the memory: the eagle’s penetrating eyes, the talons that clawed at his face and neck. He could almost feel them closing on his chest, piercing heart and lungs, and then in those last agonizing moments of life the beak would rip him apart. It was a horror scenario. Truth was, the reason he hadn’t looked more closely at the fort was because he had been so scared.

There was a part of him, the adventurous bit, that thrilled at the idea of being able to take on another animal’s form, but the reality of plunging into that half-world was another matter. For a start, it wasn’t something he could just do whenever he wanted-it wasn’t like taking a coat on or off, it appeared to depend on circumstances and necessity. His emotions seemed to be part of the trigger that allowed him to do it. It was something that he just couldn’t analyze.

!Koga watched him, reached out and touched his trembling hands.

“Sorry, mate, must have had too much sun,” Max said in response.

“What is it we must do?” asked!Koga.

“Well, getting the SAS would be a good idea, failing that the cavalry, but if they’ve got another gig planned it’s down to you and me, and the me part of the equation might be going a bit loopy. And going off your head out here isn’t going to help anyone, is it?”

!Koga waited until something Max said made sense. Max traced their journey on his dad’s map. “We’ve come from here, I think, and we’re going there, I hope. Thing is,!Koga, I’ve got to get into the fort. Do you know about the fort?”

!Koga shook his head.

“What about Shaka Chang? Ever heard of him?”

“No. I do not know this name. But here”-he touched the back of his hand on the map where Max had indicated-“is this the place where the monster lives? Below the ground? The bad place?”

Max had tried to hide his own fear, but he could see that!Koga was getting frightened now as well. He summoned a smile for his friend.

“One good thing about being frightened is it makes you careful.”

“I would rather not be frightened,”!Koga said.

It was nightfall before they reached some high ground, a raised plateau of a hundred square meters or so. As the earth’s rim turned from crimson to gold and finally to a deep blue, darkness followed quickly, eager to exert its dominance and beauty over the harshness of day. Max lay on his back, the Milky Way so close it was almost touching his face. Of all those stars and planets, universes and worlds, he was lying here, caught up in something he could barely understand. But when the lights of the fort flickered into life a kilometer or so away, one question had been answered. They had power. So there was a generator somewhere. And there was no sign of solar panels, so there had to be a source. The river was too placid. What else could create that energy? Diesel generators might do it, but that was a huge place to illuminate and there was no familiar hum of engines.

When he awoke, the moon had shifted high into the sky and first light was already warming the air.!Koga was already awake, squatting, elbows on knees, as he gazed out towards the black pit in the distance. Max did a face wash with his hands, rubbing vigorously, forcing himself into a more alert state. “You should have woken me,” he said.

!Koga smiled and said, “The day will always be here.

There is no need to run all the time. The day will wait. Where do we go? To the fort?”

“Not yet,” Max told him, and turned away, fearful that if he told!Koga what he had figured out, the boy would refuse to accompany him. And right now Max felt that he needed a friend close to him.

An hour later the smell of fetid vegetation around the rim of the Devil’s Breath confirmed they were within a hundred meters of the gigantic sinkhole. Even though they could not yet see its depths, it appeared ready to swallow anything foolish enough to venture too close. Max felt the soggy seaweedlike goo. This place had to be a geyser of some kind, and they usually erupted on a regular basis. The question was: when? It had not happened during the previous hours when they had slept, but that damp grass and moss had not dried the previous day, so it had to blow at least twice during daylight hours.

He wished he had paid more attention to his maths and science classes at school. The subjects seemed so unengaging as he sat gazing across the Devon moorland, dreaming of other things than dry mathematical formulae. His dad often despaired at Max’s poor grades and Max always promised to try harder. Maths helped one to understand natural patterns and structures, his dad had explained to him. Understand maths and science, and you can figure out most things, such as language, music and culture. And erupting geysers, Max thought. Well, he’d rather be shown something than have it explained. That was why he liked going on field trips with his dad; he showed him how things worked. Besides, at school he had Sayid to help him out of tight spots when it came to cramming for exams. He had a half-decent brain, but he was lazy. There were far too many other things to do; school lessons simply got in the way. Well, now he could do with a bit of maths and geology to help figure out how often this monstrous hole was going to erupt, because his life might depend on it. And maybe this time the practical experience was not going to be much fun.

“Wait here,” he said to!Koga. “I’m going closer.”

“That is a foolish thing to do.”!Koga muttered something under his breath which Max did not understand, and the boy gripped his arm tightly, stopping him from going further.

“I have to see as much as I can before it gets any lighter. There’s not a lot of cover here-and look at those rock pools, animals will come and drink. Let’s take a look and find somewhere to hide,” Max assured him.

“We should not be here,”!Koga insisted. “I have a bad feeling, Max. This is not something you understand.”

“I don’t understand a ton of stuff, but I’ve got to have a look. Stay here,” he repeated.

He pulled free from!Koga’s grip and threaded his way through the low boulders. His feet squelched in the moist earth, and the closer he got, the more he realized that the hole was bigger than he had imagined. Ragged projections stuck out from the sheer rock face, giving the impression of rows of long teeth lining the throat of the crater. It was still too dim to see the depth of the hole, but shadows dropped into total blackness. He heard a movement behind him. His heart walloped against his ribs, then calmed a little when he saw it was!Koga. “Do me a favor,!Koga, when you sneak up on me, give me some warning, will you? I nearly jumped out of my skin!”

“You will need more than skin when the monster sucks you into its belly.”

“If you’re that scared, why didn’t you stay back there?”

“Because I am supposed to protect you.”

Max felt humbled. The boy had overcome his terror to honor his obligation; the least Max could do was put on a brave face and keep his own fear under control. He smiled. “It’s not a monster, I promise,!Koga. It’s just a geyser. Pressure builds up and blows water from an underground river, and my guess is, it’s the source of power for the fort. It’s called hydroelectric. Just like the huge dam they’ve built in the mountains.”

!Koga had that blank look which Max recognized as his own when Mr. Lewis the maths teacher tried to explain something beyond his comprehension. But before he could explain his own limited understanding of hydroelectric power, the ground began to shudder. It happened so quickly, the boys could not move. They reached out to steady themselves because now the vibration took away the strength in their legs. And with the jarring shudder came a growl, churning deep within the bottomless pit. Max steadied!Koga as they pushed their backs against one of the boulders to stop themselves from falling. A sucking, gurgling hiss of vapor spewed from the hole, drenching everything within fifty meters, its plume at least twenty meters high. The gossamer mist settled like dew and then, with the retreating water pressure, the plume plunged back downwards, belching air and noise as it receded. The explosion had lasted less than thirty seconds, but the power that drove up from beneath the ground rattled nerves as well as bones.

The suddenness of the eruption and the silence that quickly followed left them both mute. It took a moment for their ears to stop ringing. Max pulled a piece of something slimy off!Koga’s head, a ragged piece of weed, and presented it to him.

“A present from the monster,” he said, but!Koga was not smiling. Instead he was retreating slowly backwards, never taking his eyes from the crater.

“!Koga, it’s OK. I promise. It can’t harm us.”

!Koga stopped and shook his head. “We must leave this place now. That was a warning. We are not welcome here. It is a bad sign, it is as my father told me. A bad place.”

Max knew he could not argue with a belief so rooted in nature spirits. He would never deride such strong feelings. His experiences so far had taught him that the Bushmen’s secrets and their understanding of the natural world were far beyond anything he had ever come across. He deferred to his friend and nodded towards their resting place that overlooked the void.

“Come on, let’s get back up there.” He turned away but felt the light touch of!Koga’s hand.

“Wait. You are planning something.”

Max nodded. There was never going to be a good time to tell!Koga his plan. It might as well be now. The same dread of frightening his friend away still lingered. “I think my father could be in that fort. If he isn’t, then the people in there may know what happened to him. I reckon at the very least there have to be some clues.”

He gazed across the landscape. In an hour the sun would scorch and they would be hard pressed to find shelter, not so much from the heat as from anyone seeing them move across the ground.

“Max, if your father is in that place, how can we get inside? The men in there might be the same men who attacked us. They searched for us and we escaped, now you want to knock on their door. Are we giving up?”

“No, we’re going inside. There’s a secret passage that should lead straight into the fort. At least, I think there is. Come on, I’ll show you.”

He turned towards the hole, hoping!Koga would follow. When he reached the chasm’s edge he held back a couple of meters, nervous of the drop despite the firm footing the embedded rock provided. He turned.!Koga was walking forward nervously, as wary as an animal seeking to drink at a dangerous water hole. But he kept walking until he joined Max. They steadied each other and falteringly shuffled to the edge. It was a bottomless shaft, and saw-toothed sheets of rock clung to the sides.

A fetid, quivering air breathed malevolence on them. The sibilant whisper of the unseen water beckoned them closer. Edge forward, see what lies below, see how far it is to fall. Max seemed mesmerized by its lure and stepped to the very edge, his gaze locked firmly on the black, unblinking eye far below, where the light ended and the totally unknown began. It had to be more than four hundred meters deep. That volume of water, under pressure, could blow a double-decker bus to the moon. So what was stopping all that power? How come the water never burst above the surface in any great quantity? The whole area should have been a wetland.

So intense was Max’s concentration that!Koga thought he was about to step into the abyss. He whispered Max’s name. Max turned and faced him. “Follow me. I think I know what we have to do,” he said grimly.

Both boys now squatted at the other side of the crater, watching the rays shine down into the hole. Even if anyone in the fort was on lookout-and there was no reason to suppose they were-there would be little chance of being spotted. Not at that distance, and not with the glare of the sun directly in the watcher’s eyes. Max pointed. About sixty meters down was another hole which looked like the entrance to a cave, almost unnoticeable. It was no more than five meters across and as high again. Around it were about a dozen smaller holes, each no more than a meter wide, punched into the rock face. “I think that’s the underground passage,” Max said, pointing to the cavelike entrance.

“You cannot know that. You cannot be certain.”

“No, but look at this.” Max opened the hydrology chart. The thin, almost inconsequential line that wriggled across the plan from the Devil’s Breath to the fort could be nothing but the conduit they were now looking at. At least that’s what Max told himself. “I reckon the water gushes up, and it’s so powerful it forces itself into that hole-that’s like a channel, and I bet it’d be strong enough to power a turbine or something closer to the fort.”

!Koga looked doubtful.

Max scratched his head, his fingernails scraping away some of the caked dirt in his scalp. “At least I think that’s how it works. Something to do with ventricular power, whatever that is. I should have paid more attention in science class.”

“And those other holes?”

“Er … yeah. Not sure. Probably some kind of natural venting system. Y’see, I think it’s so powerful that when the water surges, it wallops down that big hole and either blows back pressure through the smaller ones, or …” Stuck again. What else? He looked at!Koga, who now, for the first time, smiled.

“You don’t know.”

“Not a hundred percent. I reckon it has something to do with releasing pressure from the main surge.” He hesitated and said almost to himself, “My dad would know.”

They sat quietly for some time.

Max finally spoke. “It doesn’t seem as though this thing is going to erupt again. Next one’s probably at the end of the day. Yeah, that makes sense, maybe. Twice a day. Morning and night.” It sounded as though he was trying to convince himself.

“We go? Down there?”

Max shook his head. He had already made his decision. “I’m going. On my own.”

!Koga stood up quickly. “No! I am not afraid!”

“No one said you were. I know I am, but I’ve been scared more times these last couple of weeks than I’ve ever been, so I can probably manage it once more.”

“I will not let you go alone. My place is with you.”

“But I can’t risk us both getting hurt or captured-not now,!Koga, not after all this bloody effort.”

!Koga went quiet and shook his head slowly. He would be held responsible if Max did not survive.

“You cannot stop me from following you, Max. You will not know I am there. I will be the hunter tracking your shadow.”

Max touched his shoulder. “!Koga, you will always be with me. I’ll carry your friendship with me. But I need you to do something else.” Max took out his father’s Ordnance Survey map. “You remember the place where the earth bleeds? And the marks my father made on his map. You know this is where Bushmen died. And all those other marks, in different places, these are places my father found. This is what he was going to report. Now, this isn’t enough evidence, I know that, but it’s all we have right now. My father had been in all these places because of this….” He showed the hydrology map. “He found what was killing your people. And maybe there’s a lot more we don’t know about. And I know he must have other evidence hidden somewhere, real evidence, something really concrete that can’t be disputed, but I have to find him first and you have to go.” He gazed down at the vertical drop. “I reckon I can free-climb down to that entrance, then in a few hours I’ll be under the fort.!Koga, don’t give me a hard time on this, I need you to take Dad’s map to the police.”

“Police?”

“You said there was a police post, a few days from here. Get to them, don’t give them the map, give them this.” Max undid his watch strap. The old stainless-steel chronograph was his dad’s when he’d climbed Everest, twenty years ago, and he’d given it to Max for his twelfth birthday when he enrolled at Dartmoor High. Engraved on the back plate were the words To Max. Nothing is impossible. Love, Dad.

He fastened the watch around!Koga’s wrist. “Give the cops this watch, it’ll prove you’ve been with me. Tell them you know where the son of the missing white man is. But don’t tell them where I am. You have to get them to contact Kallie van Reenen. Give her the map. You tell her what we’ve discovered. She’ll know what to do. You have to do this,!Koga-to save us all.”

Max was well aware that this was almost a replay of what his father had done with!Koga’s father. He had sent the Bushman on a mission to van Reenen’s farm, knowing that he had to get his field notes out while he went on searching. Fate had twisted events like a noose around a sack-Max,!Koga and Kallie van Reenen: drawn together, trapped in the same danger.

But Max felt strong. He was getting closer to his father now-he knew it-and that would drive him on. “I’ll make a start when the sun shifts a bit, that’ll give me some shade down there. I reckon it’s going to be a bit of a climb.” A bit? It was going to take everything he had, by the look of it. He would have to choose his route with all his skill.

They agreed that!Koga would wait until nightfall, then he could travel faster, with virtually no chance of detection. But the night was not the time Bushmen felt comfortable. Their lives centered around the fire. This was where they cooked and ate, danced and told stories of great hunts and of gods who were animals and stars that were lovers. The warmth and comfort of the fire was as much a part of their life as the sun rising and the moon taking it away. Alone,!Koga would have to travel across predators’ natural habitats. Memory maps were all he had to guide him, but the night sky would show him the way, and moonlight would warn him of shadows that moved. He would do this thing so that Max Gordon, the boy from the ancient cave drawings, could help save his people.

And because the white boy was his friend.

Max began his descent a couple of hours later, as!Koga sat nestled in the low boulders around the rim. He could watch Max’s progress from there, and when he finally crawled into the cave he would return to the low plateau where they had slept the previous night. There was shade there and he would rest, before beginning his own journey into darkness.

Max was already twenty meters down, his right hand jammed into a narrow crevice above his head as he tried to find a toehold below. His weight stretched ligaments and tendons in his shoulder, but he reached out with his left hand, clawed his fingers against the uneven surface and shifted his body slightly. A sliver of rock took his weight as he swung precariously half a meter to his left; his fingers slipped as his right hand came free and the sudden, sickening drop churned his stomach as he plunged down.

“Max!”!Koga couldn’t help crying out.

Max had scraped his knees and the inside of his arm when he fell, but the drop was barely the distance from his ankle to his knee-it just felt a lot more scary than it was. Without looking back, he managed a reassuring shout to!Koga. “OK! I’m all right!”

Controlling his breathing, he muttered encouragement to himself. “It’s fine. It happens. Nothing to worry about. Just a little slip. Nothing to get het up about. Clumsy sod.”

As often happens on a climb-or, in this case, a descent-a rhythm developed, and now Max found a steady pace. The rock face was kind to him for the next ten meters as he gripped, swung, twisted and wedged his way down. The scrapes and cuts were stinging, but adrenaline pushed the pain to the back of his mind. Now he was feeling good, he could see his way down; spurs of rock as wicked as razor blades shafted downwards, but their edges were sufficiently ragged to allow purchase. And behind each sheet of rock, the moss and lichen offered a small comfort zone for his back and shoulders as he wedged himself in to support the next downwards movement. A wet sheen covered everything, reminding him of home. Clambering down quarry walls in Devon or practicing for the bigger climbs in Scotland usually meant the rock surfaces were wet, but when he did that, he reminded himself, he was attached to a safety line. A lifeline is really important when you’re climbing in a rock-strewn quarry. Nothing too serious to worry about here then, he kidded himself. If he fell, he’d only fall a few hundred meters into the water, though that’d be like landing on a concrete floor. The shock of falling that far would probably kill him anyway. Don’t think about it. Just imagine the lifeline is attached; that was the best thing. There, he’d already made another five meters and hadn’t even thought about it.

Time condensed into seconds, that was what his attention span demanded-attention focused on every centimeter of the way-but a small voice in his head told him that he must have been on the rock face for an hour, probably more. The sun had shifted and was almost overhead now, and he still had another thirty meters to go. He jammed his hand into a letter-box slit in the rock and rested. With his free hand he wiped the sweat and grime from his eyes.

The bow and arrows were proving difficult, getting in the way when he tried to wedge his back into the crevices. He swore. He should have left them with!Koga. No matter. Another hour-tops-at this rate, and he’d be able to swing into that entrance. But now he was stuck. He couldn’t turn from his back to his front, allowing a swing across the rock to grab another hold. The bow, jutting above his shoulder, was snagging. He had to get rid of it. His wrist burned as the skin was forced to tolerate more torsion with him twisting around so that he faced the rock wall. His cheekbone pressed hard against the stone; he gulped air, his free arm reached over his shoulder, grabbed the slender bow and eased it, like a contortionist, over his head and shoulder.

A small triumph, and much as he cherished the handmade weapon, he reached out into space to let it drop. As his weight shifted slightly, the crevice that held his hand crumbled. Loose, wet, shinglelike stone gave way and he fell.

He had barely time to shout. Reflexes shot into high gear and a zillion mental calculations made his arm shoot out to slam his hand, which held the bow, against the rocks. The bow string hooked over a rock and stopped his fall.

He hung, suspended from the wall, crunching his back against the boulders. Pain shafted through him and for a moment he thought he was going to fall again. The sinew on the bow flexed and the shaft bent, the supple wild raisin wood allowing a lot of give. He had to trust that the bow would hold his weight for a few more seconds. Grabbing it with both hands, he pulled himself in to the rock face. He’d definitely pulled a muscle, or maybe even bruised or cracked a rib; the pain knifed into him and took his breath away. Hanging on as best he could, he gave one last pull on the bow to help gain a foothold, and as the bow finally yielded and snapped, he managed to hold on. He could feel his nerve slipping away as quickly as the bow falling into the silent void. He clung desperately, eyes tightly shut, willing himself to carry on. No flippant humor now; no kidding with the terrified voice in his mind. This felt like the end of the world and he was frozen. Rigid.

The fall had taken him to within ten meters of the tunnel entrance. A battle raged in his head, demanding that he think. He must have dropped about five meters, no, probably more, but he had suffered no serious injuries-plenty of pain, but he was alive. Hold on. Almost there. Take encouragement and keep going. Keep your eyes open. Open them!

Someone was calling, a distant whisper that his ears refused to hear. Concentrate on the voice. Listen to the voice. The voice. Whose?!Koga’s. His dimming consciousness was like a dark cloud settling over him. If he blacked out now, he was finished. He was in shadow, and cool air momentarily helped keep him awake. What was!Koga shouting? Why was he stamping the ground so hard?

!Koga, he shouted, but no sound came out of his mouth.

!Koga, who had watched him fall almost out of sight into the black shadows, screamed his name. A slow-motion acrobat act showed Max twisting and turning, grabbing for support, falling further and further, whipping an arm out, the bow string catching, the sudden jolt, the snap of the bow, and Max hugging his grazed and bleeding body to the rock face. But!Koga’s screams went unheard. And it was not Max’s struggle to stay conscious that was the cause, it was the quaking tremble of the ground and the roar of air coming up from the devil’s lair.

!Koga peered over the edge, down into the face of evil. A malignant stench and the first spray of water and vapor barreled upwards, concealing the huge tide of water charging behind it.

The mist billowed towards him; a few more seconds and the fog would envelop Max and the water would swallow him. Panic blinded!Koga to his own danger. His friend was hurt; in a moment he would die, and he couldn’t help him. He screamed Max’s name, but his cry was swallowed up in the roar from below; the cloud was almost on him.

In horror he saw Max’s hands slip off the wet rock, saw him tumble backwards into space, arms wide, spread-eagled, looking up, straight into!Koga’s eyes.

And then Max vanished into the storm below.