Gerard cradled the egg among the rocks near the opening and yanked off his pack. He hurriedly started pulling out the coils of rope.
Suddenly, he stopped himself. He couldn’t afford to get it tangled, so he took a deep breath and went about laying the coils out, so that they would hopefully unroll without snagging on anything. Once he began lowering the egg, he didn’t want to have to stop for any reason whatsoever. The sling for the egg was nothing more than a net sack, and once he had it slipped over the prize, he tied the rope to it securely. After that, he took one of the water flasks and drank.
He studied the opening. When he had come up with this part of the plan, he had figured that the egg would be a lot lighter. He had imagined himself lying on his belly with his head, arms, and shoulders hanging out of the opening. He had planned to pay out the rope while watching the egg go down. This egg was far too heavy for that. If he so much as jerked it while it was going down, it would probably yank him out of the cavern mouth. He found that he wouldn’t have been able to get his body into that position anyway. Two big formations, like jagged bottom teeth jutted up from the opening. He decided that he could use them to brace his feet on, and lower the egg from a sitting position. The only problem was that the place between the two rock teeth was rough, and might wear the rope apart as it slid over.
He drained the last of the water from the skin and tossed it to the side. Whatever he was going to do, he had to hurry. He stepped to the edge and looked down. He saw nothing but an endless expanse of green, spreading away from the black, murky water below him. The thought that, if just this tiny bit of rock beneath his feet crumbled he would be falling, made him pull back into the cavern. Never, in all his life, not once in all the hundreds of times he had looked down from the heights, had he felt such a dizzying and disorienting feeling. He knew why he had felt it too. It was because there was nothing there: nothing to cling to, no cliff, or rock face. It was just open air all the way down. No sooner had he mastered that fear, the sunken feeling that he had already taken too much time started to creep into his mind. He had to move. After a few deep breaths, he came up with an idea.
He darted back through the wormhole, covering the rocky, uneven floor with ease now that his hands and arms were free to help him stay balanced, and went to the nearest of the larger skeletons. It had been some monstrous winged thing. Probably a smaller dragon, which had come into this one’s territory, or some other kind of beast he had never heard of. There was no skull, so it was impossible to guess. After a few moments of grunted effort, he had what he wanted: a bone. It was roughly as big around as his forearm, and about as long as his whole leg. It was perfect for what he intended, and he thought, for the first time, that he just might get this thing done and get out of there before the dragon came home.
He got back into position, laid the bone across the base of the two teeth-like rocks, and then situated himself on his butt, with his feet against the teeth. With a grunt of effort, he lifted the egg up and over the gap between them, and let the rope slip a few feet down. The friction heated his hands quickly, but he didn’t let lose his grip. He had to be careful. He needed his hands to make the climb back down, and he couldn’t allow them to get rope-burned. He chided himself for not thinking to bring gloves with him. Greyber had suggested it, but since Gerard didn’t climb with gloves, he’d dismissed the idea. He hadn’t figured that the egg would weigh so much. It was a mistake that he wasn’t about to let himself forget.
The rope ran through Gerard’s hands, out over the rounded middle of the bone he had placed across the teeth, and then it disappeared down towards the marsh below. Where the rope would’ve been dragged, over coarse and abrasive stone, it now slid smoothly over the hard yellowed bone. Only the slightest edge of the rope even touched the rocky cavern’s mouth.
As if trying to pull a spear out of his sternum, Gerard paid out the rope hand over hand. He was tempted to use his boot to clamp the rope against the bone, and let the egg fall at a controlled speed, but he thought better of it. If he failed to stop it, or slow it down, it might splatter into the water below. If that happened he would have to pull the seemingly endless rope back up, and start again with another egg.