Hellsborough Exposed — underground

Somewhere in the dark at the bottom of the Great Coumes Rift - a fissure in the hills at the Wisewood edge, as if someone took an enormous axe to the landscape - a creature known as the Coumes Rift Worm is said to have lived, a venomtooth with a girth of several hands. Legend has a warrior killing it, having first commissioned spiked armour from the little mesters of the Rivelin valley, and the worm splitting itself on the spikes in close combat. Whether it is truly gone is a matter on which Shad and I have always disagreed.

Murk in the Loxley valley has water's ambitions: it pools where water would pool, moves where water would move, and has saturated the bank approach to Hellsborough Hole so thoroughly that the distinction between river and murk is now a matter of convention rather than measurable fact. Whether this represents decades of hydrological cross-contamination or a decision made by one substance to acquire the properties of another, I have not been able to establish. What I have established is that the approach is watched, the watchers wear long coats, and the murk in the shallows is described in the relevant operational notes as 'not neutral,' which is the most understated thing I have read in three years of fieldwork.

Between Wadsley Common and Beacon Wood there is a bunker from the former industrial era — the kind described as derelict that is better described as occupied by other means. An ash tree has grown through the structure, the artwork on the walls is still visible, and wires thread through the surrounding trees in a pattern almost impossible to distinguish from the branches. Van, on hearing this, said only: Moldenke, no doubt.

Murk behaviour changes character as you descend toward the River Loxley — in the Wisewood it has grain and weight; at the river, it has water's ambitions without water's discipline. It pools where water would pool, saturates the banks the way a slow leak saturates stone: invisibly, completely, with no respect for what was there before it arrived. Ming Shalom's people guard the Hellsborough Hole approach from the south bank. They have a patrol rhythm. Patrol rhythms exist to be found.