Now up with the sword hand he reached, touching the hilt of the broken sword to the swimming surface of the rock. Across the floor, Marigold approached him, her skirts lifted, the square-sailed vessel nodding atop her head. One of the cats broke out of the darkness, rushed at her madly, then balked at her heft and her withering stare. It seemed that even starvation and generations of inbreeding had not deprived the animal of its most basic instincts of survival.

Robert snorted in amusement, scooted himself against the cap, which was warm but not uncomfortable against his back. The way up the rock face lay ironically at a distance over Marigold's shoulder, the cat-things milling behind her.

Soon they would have the numbers.

Wearily Robert drew up his gauntlets from where they dangled by a rawhide cord at his belt. He put on the iron-studded gloves, wincing painfully as the leather pressed against cut and blister.

I am beyond rescue, he thought. Even if Brandon and Bayard rise to their highest heroics, they cannot possibly get to me in time. And so these gauntlets, which will be better than bare hands when Mariel's cats close in.

He smiled and braced himself, and as the lantern dimmed, he silently prepared himself for Huma's breast.

Above Sir Robert di Caela, things unraveled steadily. His friends looked on as the floor of the chasm milled with white, larval creatures.

"What is going on down there?" Bayard muttered with a rising fury. He had been picking up stones, heavier and heavier, and dropping them upon the flitting pale things below him. Now, winded and clutching at his leg, he leaned against Sir Andrew, his eyesight spangling with pain.

Turning from Bayard and Andrew, Enid looked desperately to her father. He leaned against the well cap, smiling grimly, resolutely, as Marigold approached him and stood beside him bravely, giving but one sidelong glance to the possibly fatal sausages she had come to retrieve. Meanwhile, the white hissing things crawled nearer.

As Enid watched, the air seemed to go white about her, and for a moment, she reeled unsteadily at the edge of the chasm.

It was Raphael who reached her first, but he lacked the weight to pull her back from the ledge. Together, locked by the arms, the two of them hovered over the gray and pooling darkness. An eager chittering rose from the swarming things below them.

And Brandon Rus's strong arm closed about the boy, dragging the two of them to safety.

For a moment, the three of them, Brandon and Raphael, with Enid atop them both, lay in a shivering heap on the solid stone of the ledge. Bayard and Andrew rushed to them, lifting the woman to her feet as Brandon scrambled up.

"Where… Father!" Enid shouted at once, broke from Sir Andrew's grip, and rushed back to the edge of the fissure. For a moment, Raphael, lying on his stomach, looked up and became furious as he saw her totter again, saw all his courage and risk about to amount to nothing.

Then she gained balance, squinted, and looked to the far edge of the cellar.

A light was spreading across Robert's face.

Four days ago, when he had sat half-dozing in the castle infirmary, watching as the servants danced attendance about his son-in-law and the engineers fretted in their oily sobriety, there was something… something…

"For the great well," they had said, "that lies under the castle, subject to strain and pressure through the extraordinary rainy season, is no doubt brimming and bubbling in deep recesses of rock, where only a sudden twist of the earth could unleash a flood through the floors of the towers and leave us awash in our own cistern."

And what, indeed, might this humming crack in the well cap beside him be but deliverance?

Robert laughed as Marigold swatted away one of the cats who hurtled at her and at Sir Robert's knapsack.

Well, then, Sir Robert thought. This might be a chamber of miracles, after all! And mustering his strength, he drove the hilt of his sword solidly against the crack in the casement.

Not even old Sir Andrew had seen its like. Water surged forth into the fissure like a deluge, and before he could even begin to strip off his armor, Sir Robert found himself knee-deep in a warm sulfurous tide from the artesian well.

He caught himself, rose suddenly from idleness, and slipped off Marigold's knapsack and his breastplate.

Around him, white spectral forms scurried into the cracks of the rocks, screeching and yowling. Whatever they had become through the years and the permanent darkness, Mariel's cats were still cat enough to harbor a healthy fear of water.

Now, stripped to a linen tunic, Sir Robert rose with the water, looking once beneath him to see if Marigold was following. The lantern went out as the water reached its shelf, but in his last glimpse of the girl, he saw her neck-deep, straining to remove her knapsack of cosmetics, wedged between two solid rocks.

Robert caught his breath and tried to swim for her, but the light was gone and he could no longer locate her. Instead, his lungs burning and his muscles cramping, he treaded water, floating toward the faint light above him until, as bereft of worldly goods as a man can be without being completely naked, Sir Robert di Caela rose to the surface of the fissure, where Brandon's strong arms reached out and dragged him onto the stone.

"Marigold?" he gasped as the waters continued to rise, reaching the edge of the crevasse and brimming over. Painfully Robert gained his footing and stood beside his friends and family. Enid embraced her bedraggled father, and Bayard lifted high the lantern he was holding, its light fracturing on the surface of the rising water.

Five minutes they waited. Then ten.

Then, in the middle of the newly formed underground lake, a yellow lacquered schooner broke the surface of the water, floating absurdly at a middle distance atop the drowned, mountainous girl, who clutched her bag of cosmetics in a terrible grip that would no doubt last forever.

"The device, sir!" Brandon muttered, his voice uneasy and puzzled.

"What of it?" Bayard asked impatiently, staring across the rocking surface of the pool. The darkness swirled and congealed, permitting no vision.

"The device, sir. It remains unchecked for all this water and commotion."

Slowly, Bayard slid from the young Knight's grip and knelt on the pooling floor of the cavern.

They had lost Marigold and gained in return less time in which to figure out the workings of whatever machinery lay across the fissure in the blackness. Disconsolately, Bayard lifted his eyes and stared into the darkness, hoping to catch a glimpse of the thing he needed to see.

"If it can't be seen, it can't be managed," he murmured.

And below him and above him-indeed on all sides of him and somehow, unexplainably, even within him-a low rumbling rose, as though the whole subterranean world was laughing.