‘Too dangerous,’ their driver insisted.

Too dangerous...

But it's Calnut down there... where I have to go....

‘Too dangerous,’ their driver insisted. So they rode Kiri-kee and Orchy with their mother leading on foot, while Kyre led the three pullers. The trail was well built, with stone reinforcements and cut-out cliff overhangs in places. Even so, wreckage of three, possibly four, wagons could be seen littering the canyon floor far below. ‘Surprising how far they splatter, isn’t it?’ Jovial Jocki called to them, ‘So look where you’re going or you’ll join them.’

Once they were below the rim and actually inside it, the canyon was another world. Within minins, the cliff faces were crowding over them like a dozen Keephomes on top of each other. The hairpin bends were the stuff of terror-tales. The forids pulling the little wagon almost trotted round in tight about-turns, but Kyre looked over the edge once too often, and felt his head spin, and his stomach rise, thereafter keeping back from the dizzying drop to the lake below, and his full attention on his footing. Emma-Lina was nervous, but kept hold of everything very tightly and closed her eyes. The two boys loved it. ‘Let go of the tethers, mutte; we can go ahead.’

‘I haven’t gone to all this trouble bringing you up just to throw you off a cliff,’ she wailed back, and clung to Orchy’s tail.

As they descended, the feeling of being in a well increased, winding round sticking-out bits ‘called promontories’, Emma-Lina said. And squeezing under rock roofs, ‘known as overhangs,’ she informed them. All the time, the solid rock cliff-face was barely a hand away on one side, and the mighty drop an ell or so on the other side. Kyre was mightily pleased not to be driving.

 The descent to the canyon floor was unthinkably high until the last few minins when they rounded one promontory, and the almost flat trail directly ahead led towards the dam across the lake.

Arriving thankfully at the bottom at long last, they parted from Jovial Jocki and his pair of nerveless pullers. Looking round while they regained their stomachs and hitched Canter to the shafts. ‘I wouldn’t have dreamed it was like this,’ Kyre talked with the boys. ‘A hidden corner of Pangu’s Creation. So much broader than it seemed from up there; must be nearly a dozen chains wide, right across the fields and the lake to the town.’

‘You don’t believe in Pangu, the Creator.’

‘I got to believe in something. It’s her today.’

‘Him. He’s the brightest star in the evening sky.’

‘Another brightly interfering little light, I suppose?’

Taking the reins for the first time, Kyre clucked Canter toward the roadway across the dam. The cluster of spires that formed the little town of Calnut grew ahead of them.

A drop in the canyon, from "Lor of Tyre"

From Calnut to Borg Henge, it's Kyre, the Sheen and the Kerdil Horde....