'No? Are you sure? We have found others-'
'I am certain. I do not know how, but there is no doubt in my mind.
This was constructed by someone else, Mappo.'
The Trell crouched down and dipped his hand into the water, then snatched it back. 'Gods, that's cold!'
'No obstacle to me,' Icarium said, smiling, the polished lower tusks sliding into view.
'You mean to swim down and examine it? Never mind, the answer is plain. Very well, I shall seek out some level ground, and pitch our camp.'
The Jhag was tugging off his clothes.
Mappo set off along the slope. The gloom was sufficiently relieved by the glowing water that he was able to make certain of each step he took, moving up until his left hand was brushing the cold stone wall.
After fifteen or so paces that hand slipped into a narrow crack, and, upon regaining contact, immediately noted a change of texture and shape in the surface under his blunt fingertips. The Trell halted and began a closer examination along its length.
This stone was basalt, ragged, bulging out until the slope beneath his feet dwindled, then disappeared. Sharp cracks emanated out across the angled floor and into the lake, the black fissures reappearing on the lake's bottom. The basalt was some kind of intrusion, he concluded.
Perhaps the entire crevasse had been created by its arrival.
Mappo retreated until he had room to sit, perched with his back against the rock, eyes on the now rippled surface of the lake. He drew out a reed and began cleaning his teeth as he considered the matter.
He could not imagine a natural process creating such an intrusion.
Contrary as earth pressures were, far beneath the land's surface, there was no colliding escarpment shaping things in this part of the subcontinent.
No, there had been a gate, and the basalt formation had come through it. Catastrophically. From its realm… into solid bedrock on this world.
What was it? But he knew.
A sky keep.
Mappo rose and faced the ravaged basalt once more. And that which Icarium now studies at the bottom of the lake… it came from this. So it follows, does it not, that there must be some sort of portal. A way in. Now he was curious indeed. What secrets lay within? Among the rituals of inculcation the Nameless Ones had intoned in the course of Mappo's vow were tales of the sky keeps, the dread K'Chain Che'Malle fortresses that floated like clouds in the air. An invasion of sorts, according to the Nameless Ones, in the ages before the rise of the First Empire, when the people who would one day found it did little more than wander in small bands – not even tribes, little different, in fact, from mortal Imass. An invasion that, in this region at least, failed. The tales said little of who or what had opposed them. Jaghut, perhaps. Or Forkrul Assail, or the Elder Gods themselves.