Ayan was true to his word, and the digging continued to be leisurely. Even Veyoc got puffed fairly quickly compared to Wirrin. She didn’t mind, though, she was still in no hurry.

They had to pause most of the next morning to cut some saplings for supports to keep the walls of the emerging tunnel from flooding in on the excavation. The tunnel face was just starting to get taller than the three of them, but Ayan and Veyoc were optimistic that they wouldn’t be digging so very much further.

Wirrin, of course, knew better.

That day they dug from lunch till dusk, pushing the tunnel face another three metres across the clearing. They were just past half way, a tunnel more like a trench reaching about eight metres, about three metres deep. It didn’t feel like much progress for how sore Wirrin’s arms were.

As Veyoc cooked, Ayan lit a lantern and held it above the tunnel for several moments. ‘I think we need to dig steeper,’ he said, to no one in particular. ‘While I don’t know precisely where the ruins are, we’ve found the middle of the clearing with no evidence of it.’

‘I don’t know much about wetlands,’ Wirrin admitted, coming to stand beside Ayan. ‘But if it’s a Gods’ War ruin, it will have been sinking for five hundred years, no?’

‘You said you’d found some ruins in your time, Wirrin,’ Ayan said. ‘Were they so deep?’

‘I found them in the mountains,’ Wirrin said. ‘They had sunk some, but mostly been worn away by the snow. The ground is much harder in the mountains.’

Ayan nodded. ‘I could not say how deep it may have sunk. But it would slow and then stop, not sink constantly for five hundred years.’

‘Not to mention this space is not so soft,’ Veyoc called over.

‘In the mountains, ruins get buried more by landslides than time,’ Wirrin mused, wandering over to one of the stones. ‘Would this have been washed away, or have sunk?’

Ayan licked his lips and scrunched his face. ‘I expect it would have sunk much more than washed away.’

Wirrin walked back over to the end of the tunnel. ‘Well, I suggest we change direction,’ she said, pointing back to the stone. ‘Curve around to that stone and see if it’s above anything, or attached to anything.’

Ayan nodded a few times. ‘You’re quite clever, Wirrin,’ he said. ‘I think that is quite a good notion. Veyoc?’

Veyoc nodded. ‘Any plan is better than no plan.’

They talked a little into the dark evening, mostly Wirrin and Veyoc listening to Ayan speculate about swamps and the rate at which things might sink. Of course it would be different if there were a floor, he pointed out, then went quiet.

The next morning started with making the existing slope steeper. Then they started to curve toward the wall Wirrin knew was about five metres underground. They hadn’t quite reached it by the time they stopped for lunch, but it seemed to Wirrin that they’d made much more progress than they had the previous day.

It was mid-afternoon when they reached the remains of the wall. Ayan produced a trowel to carefully excavate the stones as Wirrin and Veyoc dug the ramp to follow the curve of the wall.

‘Come and look,’ Ayan said, maybe half an hour later.

Wirrin and Veyoc were sitting in the grass above, taking a break and watching Ayan’s excavation efforts.

‘It looks to me like water,’ Ayan said, once Wirrin and Veyoc had joined him. He was tracing faint divots in the wall that could have been carvings or could have been simply erosion.

If Wirrin assumed that the etchings in the wall were deliberate carvings, she could just about see what Ayan meant. Split between quite rounded bricks was something of a roiling, wavy pattern of parallel lines.

‘That makes sense,’ Veyoc said, then tensed up his whole body as if he’d realised that he shouldn’t finish that thought in front of Wirrin.

‘I suppose it does,’ Wirrin mused. ‘If it’s a carving and not just water damage, it doesn’t look like the ocean. It could be rivers, or streams, or the like. The sort of thing I imagine the old Tovant would have carved.’

Veyoc unclenched and nodded a little too quickly. ‘Which is what we were hoping to find,’ he said, voice strained.

‘Expecting to find, I should say,’ Ayan said, much more relaxed. ‘I’ve read that people used to frequent this area, before the War.’

Wirrin nodded along. ‘It’s the same in the mountains around Sovet van Sellanen. Most of the smaller villages were abandoned during the War, a lot of them disappeared under the snow or the odd avalanche.’

Veyoc nodded too much again.

Ayan considered the wall a few moments longer. ‘Do you two need more rest, or shall we continue digging?’

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They kept on digging for about another hour before stopping early to go out into the wetland and cut more saplings and branches for bracing. They had quite the pile when they stopped for the night.

Late the next afternoon, Wirrin and Ayan were digging, and Veyoc was shovelling, when they reached the half-broken remains of an old arch. They were nearly ten metres deep, by now, and the slope had reached nearly twenty-five metres from where they’d started it.

They’d cut stairs into the side of the slope in a couple of places to make the shovelling easier. The ground was still too soft to dig an actual tunnel and shovelling was getting more and more difficult the deeper the ramp got.

‘Wirrin, look at this,’ Ayan said, crouching by the protruding stones. ‘I think you’ll agree this is certainly carving, not simply wear.’

Wirrin smiled to herself. The idea that this academic ruin hunter wanted to prove that they’d found something interesting was quite funny. Dutifully, she crouched beside Ayan and examined the stone.

Ayan was certainly right. Despite time and water and mud, carvings were still clear on the slightly curved, mostly round stone. The stone itself was about half a metre tall and about the same across and carving was evident all around it.

Wirrin twisted her whole body to try to follow the images, though they were quite difficult to make out. They looked somewhere between barren trees and rotting animals. Much less straight-forward than the carvings on Mkaer’s mountain had been. Images of decay were blended together and, even smoothed by centuries of submersion, still formed a deathly tableau.

‘You’re quite right, Ayan,’ Wirrin said. ‘Not to mention very impressive carving.’

Veyoc squeezed himself in to take a look. Wirrin got up to give him some space and kept up the digging until she’d found the other side of the arch, which was a stone taller.

The higher stone was carved similarly to the wall: wavy, parallel lines. But the carvings were more intricate, here, and it seemed clear from worn plants and what might have been animals that the top line was water and the bottom was soil. The stone under that was nearly identical to its partner on the other side of the arch.

‘Oh, amazing.’ Ayan came over to look at the stones Wirrin had uncovered. ‘And that would mean…’ He looked back up the ramp to the edge of where they’d excavated part of the wall.

‘We don’t have the people for it, Ayan,’ Veyoc said. ‘Let us find the floor and come back with more people.’

‘Not that I object,’ Wirrin said. ‘But why find the floor first and not go and fetch more diggers now?’

Ayan and Veyoc looked at one another for a moment.

‘If someone else were to find it before we return,’ Ayan hurried to say. ‘I doubt we would have enough evidence for an official claim without a more complete record of what’s here.’

‘The alternative is digging out one of the walls completely,’ Veyoc added, smoothly. ‘Which would be quite a struggle with only the three of us.’

Wirrin nodded along. ‘Ah, that makes sense,’ she said. ‘Though I doubt anyone will find it in the next two weeks.’

Ayan held up a finger. ‘It’s not a risk I wish to take,’ he said, at a normal pace. ‘It’s not like the outpost you mentioned, where most of it was already above ground to be recorded.’

‘Quite right,’ Wirrin said. ‘I’ll mention that I would be quite happy to mind the place for you, if you did want to go back to Esbolva for more diggers. But I’m just as happy to keep digging right now.’

Ayan put a hand on Wirrin’s shoulder. ‘I do appreciate that, Wirrin,’ he said. ‘But you recall what I said about our cousin Heran? He would want just as much proof.’

‘Oh.’ Wirrin nodded several times and put a hand over Ayan’s. ‘Of course. I hadn’t thought of that. Well, might as well keep digging, in that case.’

Ayan smiled wide. ‘We do appreciate all this help, Wirrin,’ he said. ‘At the very least, we’ll make sure Heran pays you for all this work, if you don’t want official recognition.’

Wirrin smiled back. ‘I’ll keep saying it, Ayan. I’m curious and I’m not busy.’

‘At the very least, we’ll treat you to a nice meal when we all get back to Esbolva,’ Veyoc said. ‘Something to show our appreciation.’

Wirrin clapped the hand on her shoulder and hefted one of the spades. ‘That’s an offer I’ll gladly accept.’

They all got back to digging, chattering happily about what sort of meal they would share when they got back to Esbolva. Wirrin was starting to genuinely wonder if these two knew how to awaken Naertral when they eventually unearthed the statue.

Mid-morning, a day later, they reached the next stretch of wall. A stone nearly hit Ayan as it fell from the dirt above and they all stopped digging. They had to cut yet more braces and props to wedge the wall upright, so that removing the dirt in front of it didn’t bring it crashing down.

The second stretch of wall as about as tall as the first, except that they were just about fifteen metres deep now, and the wall protruded some eleven metres from the ramp, rather than only about one and a half.

From what little they had seen of the first wall, this second one seemed to have at least a very similar design. Near the top were roiling, waving, parallel lines. Ayan seemed to have been right that they represented water, as below the waterline were fish and snakes and eels and crocodiles, all in various states of decomposition, but with lines around them as if they were still in motion.

The stones, which Wirrin expected had once been basically square, were nearly round after the centuries of erosion, and any mortar that had once held the wall together was long gone.

It took the rest of the day and part of the next morning to finish uncovering the wall and bracing it enough that no more stones fell. Another stone had almost fallen on Ayan in the late afternoon.

The rest of the next day was taken up with digging through the start of the ramp that had gone through the middle of the curved space. They replaced it with stairs, but dealing with all the cascading dirt and having to go up and down to move the supports took far longer than digging that metre and a half should have done.

All of them could feel it, from the moment they got up in the morning. This would be the last day of digging. The excavation site was a bit of a mess after the previous day, but there was nothing in their way for the next half of the circumference.

And besides, Wirrin could feel they were barely more than three metres from the floor beneath. She wondered if she would miss this digging, this spending time with strangers in the wetlands, the way she still occasionally thought of the siblings and her month and a half with them in the mountains.

They got to it with gusto. The stairs they’d dug out of the ramp yesterday made shovelling much easier than it had been for at least three days. The dirt cascaded in controlled waves from the face of the ramp.

It was such good progress that they almost resisted stopping for lunch as noon rolled overhead. But all three of them were panting and sweating in the humid cold. Ayan’s arms were visibly shaking.

As Wirrin lay in the grass, taking deep breaths and staring up at the clouds that thankfully hadn’t rained on them this whole week, Mkaer’s rumbling started up. It grew and grew in the back of her head.

‘Think how fast you could have done this,’ Mkaer rumbled. ‘If you’d simply used my power.’

Wirrin sighed. ‘You didn’t want me to die,’ she thought. ‘I’m not dead.’