Shadow Blizzard

4 The Road To The Doors

The torch hissed and spat furiously. It obviously didn’t like the idea of being carried down into the murky gloom of the world underground.

I stopped twice to look back. The first time was when I’d only walked a hundred and fifty paces along the corridor. I just wanted to take one last look at the sunlight.

A long, long way behind me, I could see a tiny bright rectangle.

The way out.

There it was, left behind now, the world of sunlight, the world of the living, and below my feet lay the world of darkness and the dead. When I looked back for the second time, the light had disappeared and there was nothing but the darkness all around.

My huge black shadow slid along the wall, dancing in time to the flames. After a while pictures and inscriptions in orcic appeared on the walls. At first they were faint and I could barely make them out (despite the constant darkness in this place, the colors used for the paintings and writing had faded very badly), but after I walked another two hundred yards, I could distinguish the images and letters.

I didn’t look very closely at the pictures, and I didn’t understand the writing. I only stopped once, when the torch picked out of the darkness a huge painting of an epic battle between ogres and some other beings, who were the spitting image of the creatures shown on the casket where Balistan Pargaid used to keep the Key.

The creatures—half birds, half bears—were fighting the ogres between the trunks of stylized trees. There was a squiggly inscription below the scene, but what it meant was a total mystery to me.

I walked for quite a long time. The corridor had no branches, and it bit deeper and deeper into the earth. I didn’t know exactly how deep I’d gone, but I took the opportunity to thank Sagot that I wasn’t afraid of underground places.

My steps echoed hollowly off the floor, bounced off the walls, and died away under the high ceiling. The torch started to fade and I had to stop to light a new one. I hadn’t even noticed the time passing. How long had I been tramping along this corridor?

The surprising thing was that it didn’t feel cold in here at all. Dry warm air blew into my face as it rose up toward the way out. I didn’t bother wondering where a breeze could come from at that depth. It could have been ventilation shafts, magic, or something else. Darkness only knew. All I knew was that there was a draft. And the most important thing was that it wasn’t chilly.

The flights of steps began. At first only three or four steps at a time, then they got longer and longer. Corridor, then steps, another hundred yards of corridor and then another stairway. Getting deeper and darker all the time.

I decided to make a halt and stopped. Leaning back against the wall, I arranged the torch so that it wouldn’t go out, stretched out my legs, and took a swallow of water from my flask. I’d tramped all this way and still had not reached the first level yet! I took the piece of drokr out of my bag, unfolded it, and took out the maps of Hrad Spein. I didn’t know exactly where I was at the moment, but soon the corridor would start twisting round into a spiral. Six huge turns leading down into the abyss, toward the first level of the Palaces of Bone. But I had to go on farther than that—to the eighth level. That was where the grave of General Grok was, and the Rainbow Horn was lying on his gravestone.

Long weary days of travel lay ahead before I could reach the eighth level. At least a week, even if I was lucky. A week to reach the eighth level—then how long would it take to get to the forty-eighth? Or even deeper, to where the levels had no names, where no living creatures had set foot for nine thousand years?

The corridor took a twist, and then another. I started winding round and round, getting deeper and deeper all the time.

The light picked another inscription out of the darkness and I stopped dead—it was written in human language.

I moved the torch close to the wall. Just as I’d thought—the letters were dark red. They were written in blood. Someone had patiently traced out just three words in large letters: DON’T GO DOWN! I stood there for a moment, looking at this warning, then walked on a few more paces and came across another two words: GET OUT!

After another eternity of time, after the sixth wide turn of the spiral, it started getting brighter in the corridor. At first I thought it was my eyes playing tricks, but the darkness retreated, giving way to a thick twilight. After another ten paces I was surrounded by a pale gray light that seemed to flow out of the walls. I could see perfectly well, and I had to struggle to stop myself putting the torch out.

The floor under my feet began sloping down even more sharply, until it was like a steep hill. I had to walk very slowly and carefully in order not to miss my step and go slithering down on my backside. The light was still there and, after hesitating for a moment, I tossed the torch away. The hill came to a sudden end, the floor leveled out, the corridor turned a corner, and I saw what I’d already despaired of seeing—the entrance to the first level of the Palaces of Bone.

Well, when I call it an entrance, that’s a slight exaggeration. There was nothing left of it. The stairway connecting the Threshold of Hrad Spein with the first level had collapsed, and the upper part that remained led down into a gaping hole.

I cautiously walked up to the edge of the hole and looked down.

Four steps, and then empty space. The path continued about eight yards away from me and the fragments of the stairway lay in a heap. It was all very strange … Very strange … What lousy skunk could have smashed it like that?

Oh yes, it had been smashed, all right, otherwise why would the surviving steps be so thickly covered in soot and even melted in places? Someone used a spell on the stairway before I got there. And there was no doubt that this someone was Lafresa.

But I couldn’t quite understand the logic. In the first place, how were she and Balistan Pargaid and his men planning to get back out now? And in the second place, it was rather strange, to say the least, for her to think that I wouldn’t be able to get down. No, of course, jumping from that height was a sure way to shatter all your bones into tiny little pieces, but there are other ways of getting down from high spots apart from jumping. For instance, an elfin cobweb rope that sticks to any surface and naturally lifts its owner to any height he wants.

Lafresa was no fool, and she must have known I could get down. That meant things weren’t as simple as they looked and there was a warm welcome in store for me, complete with royal orchestra and heralds. It was better to check a hundred times over that there was no danger before I jumped down the demon’s throat.

I had to lie on the floor and hang over the hole to study the spot where I would land as painstakingly as possible.

Mmm, yes.

A magnificently lit corridor with burning torches on the walls and a heap of stones, splinters, and fine dust on the floor. The torches were no surprise, they’d been blazing away here for thousands of years, and they’d keep burning for at least as long—the shamanic magic wouldn’t let the flames go out.

It was time to reach into my bag and take out a vial of a certain magical substance. I lay down on my stomach again and poured a few drops straight down onto the heap of rubble.

What I saw exceeded my wildest expectations. In fact, to be honest, I was so surprised I almost tumbled over the edge. Because there was a creature sitting on the rubble heap. The beast had been hidden by a spell that made it invisible until I splashed the magical liquid on it.

Anyway, it was sprawling right underneath the hole with its jaws wide open, waiting patiently for supper to drop in. This monster must have been born in the charming but definitely insane head of my friend Lafresa. There couldn’t be any natural beast in the world that consisted of nothing but jaws and row upon row upon row of blinding-white, dagger-sharp teeth! With a bit of an effort, an entire knight on horseback could have been forced down the throat of that hungry monster.

What a devious snake Lafresa was; what a magnificent trap she had set for me! I imagined how astonished I would have been to climb down the rope and find myself in the belly of this ravenous beast. What an inglorious way to go, and at the very first level of the Palaces of Bone!

I felt like shooting a crossbow bolt straight down the monster’s throat, but what I needed for that was a ballista, not a crossbow. An ordinary bolt wouldn’t even touch it. And Kli-Kli’s medallion probably wouldn’t be any use against a nightmare like this.

I furiously felt around on the floor, picked up a fragment of stone a bit larger than my fist, and tossed it right into the middle of those gaping jaws. The trap worked perfectly. When the stone landed, the toothy mouth slammed shut.

Snap!

I hope that gives you indigestion!

The stone wasn’t to the monster’s liking, and it disappeared, with a deafening pop.

What in the name of … A trap that only works once and then isn’t needed again!

But I’m far too suspicious by nature to fall for the sudden disappearance trick. So I used a few more drops of the liquid that revealed any hidden magical traps. Nothing. The jaws really were gone.

Even so, I felt a bit apprehensive as I climbed down the rope. So for my own peace of mind, when there were only two yards left to the floor, I took one hand off the rope, reached into my bag, and dropped a stone I’d brought along. It clattered on the floor, no one was waiting underneath me. I climbed down and mentally ordered the cobweb rope to release its grip, then coiled it up and attached it to my belt.

Time to be moving on.

Now I was in a large empty hall with eight lighted torches. There was an opening in each wall, and it took me a few seconds to get my bearings from the maps. At that depth it was absolutely impossible to tell which way was north and which way was south, but fortunately for me the Hall of Arrival, as it was called in the maps, had a very clear sign for anyone foolish enough to visit the Palaces of Bone. To discover which way was which, you just had to raise your head and look up at the ceiling, on which someone’s skillful hands had marked out a huge arrow to tell the traveler which way was north. And according to the arrow, I had to go through the opening on the far right.

Naturally, the universal law of Harold’s good luck determined that this opening led into the darkest and narrowest corridor. And unlike the other three, which were wider and brighter, this one ran upward instead of down. I stopped at the entrance and listened carefully.

Not a murmur. Not a sound. Just a single torch burning about forty paces ahead of me. Was this really my way? I had to reach into my bag and check the maps again. Yes, it looked right. I cast another wistful look at the more inviting corridors, but there was nothing to be done, I had to trust the map.

The passage to the halls that followed was so narrow that my shoulders touched the walls and I had to walk half-sideways, like a crab. And I felt so frightened by the stories about the reawakened evil of the ogre’s bones that I kept stopping to listen to the silence.

Fortunately for me, the silence remained just that, silence, and I didn’t hear any strange or inexplicable sounds. I walked past the first torch, then a second, and a third. The corridor kept rising gently upward and I started getting more and more worried that I was going the wrong way, even though this was definitely the way shown on the map. As far as I understood things, the eighth level ought to be below the first, not above it. Up there above me was Zagraba, not a complex of the burial chambers. I stopped at the seventh torch and tried to take it out of its bracket. It was a waste of time—the torch was set absolutely solid and it wouldn’t budge.

The slow climb came to an end, the corridor took a sharp right-angled turn and led me out into a small space with two passages branching off it. Here it was as bright as in the first hall, and there was no need to check the map. I remembered which way I had to go.

It took me six hours to reach the stairway leading to the second level. Not so very long, if you think about it. To be quite honest, I must say I wasn’t really very impressed by the first level. It would be a lie to say I was actually disappointed, but the rumors about Hrad Spein seemed to have been seriously exaggerated.

And I was hoping the rest of my journey would be just as tedious and boring. In fact, though, I shouldn’t really have expected anything else on the first level. Not even men had ever buried anyone here; it was more of a general entrance. The levels of the ogres were very far away, and the Doors on the third level protected everything above them against the evil of the depths. The human burial sites started on the second level, and there were some on the third level, too (where the dead had been buried off to the sides of the Doors). And on the sixth level, too, of course, where the bones of the heroic warriors lay. Grok’s grave, down on the eighth level, was something of an exception to the rule.

The entire first level had turned out to be a tangled network of halls, corridors, and rooms. Twice I lost my way, checked the map, and had to retrace my steps, looking for the right passage. Everywhere I found dreary walls of gray basalt with no decorations of any kind, and sometimes the surfaces were crudely worked. Three times I came across stairways leading down into darkness, but I prudently avoided going down them. Who could tell how far they might take me out of my way—and they weren’t shown on the maps, anyway. Four times I stopped to rest. The dreariness and semi-darkness in this place were terribly depressing, my eyes and my head and my legs all ached unmercifully, and when I finally reached the stairway I needed I heaved a sigh of something very much like relief.

The silence of the mute halls weighed heavy on my ears and I felt like howling, just to hear some kind of living sound. Surprisingly enough, even at that depth it wasn’t cold; in fact, if anything it was actually warm. And best of all, there were no drafts, not even a breath of wind, and the flames of the torches burned steadily without trembling and setting the shadows dancing across the walls. At the same time the air in the halls was as fresh and clean as if I was strolling through Zagraba, not wandering through the catacombs. There must have been some magic involved in that, too.

Anyway, the impressions I took away from the first level made up a rather blurred picture. Fortunately for me, the quatrain from the verse riddle hadn’t come true. Which quatrain was that? This one:

If you are artful and brave, bold and quick,

If your step is light and your thought is keen,

You will avoid the tricks that we have set there,

But be wary of earth and water and fire.

So far, Sagot be praised, none of this had happened. And I was hoping that none of the other verses in that stupid little poem from the magicians of the Order would come true, either.

But even though I hadn’t run into anyone, I was still desperately tired. Maybe because, out of old habit, I had stuck close to the walls, running from half-shadow to shadow, trying to avoid the brightly lit spots and stopping every two minutes to listen to the silence. So I was mentally tired as well as physically.

I found a comfortable place for a rest, in the far corner of the hall, where the walls were hung with thick shade. The journey had left me ravenously hungry, and I wolfed down another half biscuit without the slightest hesitation. The magical biscuit was a thin slab no larger than my hand. After eating half of one I felt as full as if I’d dined at a king’s feast and worked my way through a hundred and one different dishes. It was filling all right, but not very tasty. At best its taste could be compared to bread, and at worst to moldy straw. You could eat it, but you couldn’t really enjoy it. Unless, of course, you happened to be a horse.

When I finished chewing the biscuit, I washed it down with water from the flask and settled down for the night. I needed at least a short rest to restore my strength. I set the crossbow down beside me and fell asleep.

I can’t say that I slept like a baby. Hrad Spein isn’t exactly the best place for sweet dreams. I hovered in the boundary zone between sleeping and waking, sometimes sinking deeper into sleep, sometimes rising to the surface. It was a very nervous kind of sleep, and I opened my eyes about six times and grabbed the crossbow, but there was no danger and the hall was as empty as ever, with just the torch twinkling on the far wall.

The sleep did me a world of good. At least, I woke feeling refreshed and—most surprising of all—safe and sound. No one had tried to bite off my leg or my head while I was sleeping, for which I immediately rendered thanks to Sagot.

I paused for a short while at the broad stone stairway that swept down into darkness. I didn’t know what might be hidden down there in the gloom, and I didn’t feel like testing my skin against the sharpness of some ugly monster’s teeth. But no matter how long I stood there, the Rainbow Horn wouldn’t come crawling up to meet me. I sighed, took out a light, gave it a shake to make it flare into life, and put my foot on the first step of the stairway leading to the second level.

It was absolutely pitch black on the stairway, and if not for my cold magical light, it would have taken me at least an hour to get down.

The steps kept going down. They didn’t curl round into a spiral, they didn’t dance about like a drunken viper, they just stretched on and on, leading me deeper and deeper, and the feeble light of my magical lamp barely even reached the ceiling.

Before I reached the second level, I counted 1,244 steps. It will always remain a mystery who built this monstrously long stairway, carving the steps straight into the body of the earth, but in my mind I cursed them roundly, especially when I thought about climbing back up again.

I was surprised by how different the second level was from the first.

In the first place, the ceilings here were all vaulted, not flat. In the second place, the walls didn’t look bare and lifeless. In one hall after another there were images on the walls, and even inscriptions. Some of them were in human language, although the ancient letters were very elaborate. And most of them were signs indicating the way to the various sections, and saying which burial place was where.

In the second place, there were lots of stone gargoyles, one planted almost every hundred paces, in fact. The statues all seemed absolutely different; at least while I walked along, I didn’t see two that were the same. The unknown sculptors had created gargoyles of every possible size and set them in the most incredible poses. Many of the statues were so hideous that just looking at them was enough to set your knees trembling.

Water was running out of one gargoyle’s mouth in a jingling, silvery thread and falling into a shallow chalice that the statue was holding in its hands. I tasted the water gingerly. It didn’t seem to be poisoned, so I took the opportunity to drink my fill and top up my flask.

In the third place, on the second level there were no torches. Fire only flickered in the open palms of the gargoyles or in small cages up under the ceiling. But for the most part there were no flames at all, and the light flowed straight out of the ceiling. In some places it only glowed very faintly, and then the hall was flooded with a dense, obscure twilight.

The reputation of the Palaces of Bone as the most gigantic graveyard in the world was well deserved. In addition to the architecture, pictures on the walls, and gargoyles by the dozen, the Palaces were also the resting place of thousands and thousands who had departed to the light.

There were two sarcophagi waiting to greet me at the very entrance to the second level. Stone boxes with massive lids that were obviously tremendously heavy. Out of simple curiosity I went up to one and read the man’s name and date of death on the plaque. He had been buried more than seven hundred years earlier. I walked on, occasionally stopping at one coffin or another out of curiosity, to learn the name of the departed. But my curiosity was soon exhausted; there were far too many sarcophagi—if I’d read the names of all the dead, I’d have been stuck there for ten years—and I had to keep looking around desperately to make sure, Sagot forbid, that I didn’t turn off into the wrong corridor.

Sometimes the stone boxes were piled up on top of each other, reaching right up to the ceiling, or hidden away in niches in the walls, which started to look like the honeycomb in a bees’ nest. And very often there was a carved likeness of the dead man on the lid of his sarcophagus. More often than that, especially in the halls farther away from the stairway, the dead had been buried in the walls, and the niches closed off, or in the floor, with a gravestone left on the spot as a memento.

I thought there would never be an end to all those halls, corridors, galleries, passages, rooms, and stairways. And everywhere I went I was greeted by the silence of the graveyard, graves beyond count, and gargoyles, who followed the visitor to this place with their sightless stone eyes.

I came across my first body after wandering through the second level for a long time, on my way ignoring several stairways that led down to the third level. (The only way I wanted to get into the third level was through the Doors; that was what I had the Key for, after all. And any detour around the Doors made about as much sense as plunging headfirst into a whirlpool or running naked into a burning house.)

The body was lying on the floor with its arms and legs flung out, and the man must have been dead for a few months at least, because his clothes were well rotted and there was no flesh left on his bones.

To be quite frank, this is exactly the kind of dead body I prefer, because they cause the least trouble. Only I didn’t like the look of his clothes, because they were gray and blue. And any brainless sparrow could have seen that this wasn’t a civilian outfit, but a military uniform. The uniform of a member of the royal guard. The broken sword lying beside the man’s remains also confirmed that he had been a soldier.

The lad could have been a member of the first expedition, the one that had been sent to get the Rainbow Horn in the late winter or early spring. That time no one had returned to the surface, and Alistan Markauz had lost more than forty of his men in the Palaces of Bone. This warrior was one of them. Or perhaps I was mistaken, and the dead man was a member of the second expedition who had found his final resting place in the gloomy depths of these catacombs.

His skull had been crushed thoroughly and I wondered what could have killed him. I leaned down to study the body more closely and my eye was caught by a black bag lying underneath it.

Without any squeamishness (bones are just bones), I moved the skeleton aside and picked the bag up off the floor. The cloth had been turned stiff and dark by blood that had soaked into it. There was a book in the bag but, unfortunately, I couldn’t make out what was written in it—it was almost entirely blotted out by the blood. I tried turning the pages, but they were stuck together, and only a few of them yielded to my insistent efforts. Darkness! It was impossible to read anything, although I could see that the book had been used for writing in the margins.

… a … ch … 6…

fe … int … t … ap …

Mmm, yes, I can’t make out a thing. Maybe it would be easier on the later pages?

As I leafed through the book, I came across one inscription that I could just barely make out.

… arch 28

D ors locke … going to look for a wa rou … Blue l t brings d ath!

Aha! So the expedition had reached the Doors leading into the third level. What was “Blue l t”? Perhaps light?

On the last page there wasn’t a single drop of blood, but the only piece of writing was almost illegible and I had to struggle to make out the scribble. Whoever wrote it seemed to have been in a great hurry.

April 2

The lieutenant is dead, the beast squashed him as flat as a pancake. Siart and Shu have gone to the steps.

Poor fellow.… What was it that crept up out of the depths and crushed his head?

I cast a wary glance round the empty hall and the entrance to the next one. But whatever it was that had killed the poor man, it had gone away a long time ago, so I walked on without making any attempt to hide.

There were no tombs here, just tall square columns set on broad bases. They seemed to go on forever. The ceiling glowed faintly and that made the hall seem obscure and endless. I began sticking close to the columns. Darkness only knew what came over me, but suddenly I didn’t like this place at all. I was about a quarter of the way across it when the trouble started.

The entire hall was suddenly filled with an appalling rasping sound and I froze, taken completely by surprise. After eight seconds of deafening silence, the rasping was repeated and two columns ahead of me, three long, deep scratches appeared in the wall. As if a set of powerful, invisible talons had scraped furrows into the stone. I was dumbfounded and my teeth started chattering. Then a new set of scratches appeared on the next column, and I heard the same terrifying rasping sound.

The piercing noise set all my teeth on edge.

I didn’t waste any time trying to figure out what was happening; I just took off at top speed in the opposite direction. The column behind me exploded in a cloud of grit and splinters. Something struck me a painful blow on the right shoulder and almost knocked me off my feet.

Boo-oom! Boo-oom!

The heavy footsteps and rasping noises were right behind me, but I kept hurtling along as fast as I could and didn’t look back (in the Palaces of Bone, the penalty for excessive curiosity was death). The columns flickered past on the right and the left, but the way out of the hall suddenly seemed an impossible distance away. As ill luck would have it, the cobweb-rope I thought I had attached so securely slipped off my belt and fell to the floor. There was no question of stopping to pick it up—my life was more important to me than all the magical rope in the world.

Whatever it was that was chasing me, it wasn’t going to give up, and another three columns snapped behind me, spraying out crumbs of stone, as if some enraged giant was pummelling them with his fists. But what kind of strength did it take to smash a stone column as thick as a hundred-year-old oak?

I darted into the hall where the dead guardsman was lying, skipped over his body, ran the whole length of the room, and stopped at the far doorway. Whatever the beast might be, the exit from the hall of columns was too narrow for it. The footsteps came closer, but I swear by Sagot that I couldn’t see anyone!

I heard that terrible rasping sound again, and then a large section of the wall beside the entrance to the hall of columns groaned as if it were alive, and collapsed in a heap of rubble.

Boo-oom! Boo-oom!

The invisible monster stepped on the guardsman’s skeleton, reducing it to fine dust, and then came in my direction, with the obvious intention of doing the same to good old Harold.

I believe I actually squealed before I turned and ran without thinking about which way I should turn or worrying about getting lost. I just wanted to save my skin. I could still hear that terrible booming noise and the rumble of collapsing walls behind me. I dashed into a corridor, turned left, then right, then left again.…

Long after the monster’s rumbling faded away in the distance, I was still too frightened to stop running. I only realized I was lost when I didn’t have any more strength left to run.

Cursing the world and everything in it, I sat down on the floor and leaned back against a sarcophagus. Come what may, but Harold wasn’t going to run anymore. The longer I spent dashing through the dim corridors, the less chance there was that I would ever find my way back. The shoulder that had been hit by a fragment of the column was aching painfully. I was obviously going to have a massive bruise there. What I ought to do right now was take a rest, catch my breath, and think about where exactly I was.

What had really happened was that everything had begun just as calmly and innocently as on the first level, and I had committed the unforgivable sin of relaxing too much because I wasn’t expecting any trouble. Apart from losing my way, I’d lost the rope as well. And without the cobweb I couldn’t get back out, because Milady Lafresa had smashed the staircase and there was no way I could get across that eight-meter gap. The odds on croaking in Hrad Spein had suddenly shortened dramatically. There was no point in trying to retrieve the rope—I wasn’t certain I could find the way back and I didn’t really feel like sticking my nose into the Wall Smasher’s lair again.

So, the way back into the sunshine was closed off. I had no doubt at all that there were other ways out of the Palaces of Bone. At the very least, there were four main entrances. The west entrance was somewhere in the middle of Zagraba, but that was hundreds of leagues away. There were another two entrances near spurs of the Mountains of the Dwarves, but after the evil awoke in the burial chambers, the dwarves had blocked off the entrances closest to their kingdom just to be on the safe side. So I could forget about the main entrances. But apart from them, there had to be less-important entrances as well. There had to be, but would I be able to find them?

Wandering aimlessly round the second level and clinging to the elusive shadow of a hope wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I took the maps out of my bag and started poring over them in the dim light. It took me more than half an hour to find an old stairway leading up to the surface from the first level. According to my calculations, provided that the stairway had survived all these thousands of years, to get to it from the Doors I would have to walk two leagues on the second level and five on the first. A long, long way, but it could have been worse.

Well then, after (that is, if) I got the Horn, I would have a chance of getting out of the burial chambers, although I would be a huge distance away from the place where our group was waiting. But I’d still rather be stuck in some unfamiliar stretch of forest than starve to death in these dreary stone halls. (Just who was the rat who first invented the story that it was incredibly beautiful down here?)

The most important problem I had to face now was that I had no idea which part of the second level I was in. In my panic-stricken race against the Wall Smasher, I had completely lost my sense of direction, and now only the maps could help me find the right way to go. I had to find some distinctive and unusual hall, then locate it on the map and take my bearings.

An easy enough little task at first sight, but in practice it turned out to be very far from simple. In this sector all the halls and corridors were very similar. Half-light, graves, and hundreds of gargoyles. The longer I wandered through the stone labyrinth of this vast mausoleum, the more desperate I became.

Hall, corridor, room, intersection, hall, hall, corridor, half-light, and gargoyles. Those cursed monsters with the ghoulish faces affected my nerves far more badly than a hundred goblin jesters high on charm-weed. My legs were aching, I had to take another break and have a bite to eat. I was still somewhere on the level of men, but there wasn’t a single sign or mark anywhere on the walls. I had been staggering around Hrad Spein for a day and a half now, but I still hadn’t reached the Doors. And Lafresa was still on the loose somewhere, with the Master’s servants. It would be highly unpleasant to bump into them just at the wrong moment.

Finally, when I was just about ready to start howling out loud, I came out into a huge hall where all the sarcophaguses were arranged in the form of an immense eight-pointed star. On closer inspection, the hall also proved to be star-shaped, only it had five points.

I had to get the maps out again. I found the star hall fairly quickly—I’d have had to be blind not to spot it. But when I traced the route from there to the Doors I gave a low whistle—I’d really gone a long, long way off track. So now I had a long walk ahead of me. And this route looked far more dangerous than the one the magicians of the Order had marked on the map—there was nothing to show the locations of the traps or any other pleasant surprises that might be in store for me. Everything that I’d been giving such a wide berth could turn up right under my very nose now. There was no point in retracing my steps—I was so far astray that the walk back and the onward journey to the third level would be far longer than the route from here to the Doors. And not for a moment did I forget about the monster that had almost flattened me into the floor. I didn’t want to end up anywhere near those feet again!

I set off, every now and then cursing the damned magicians who had hidden the Rainbow Horn so far down, the builders of the Palaces of Bone who had created this endless maze, monsters that wouldn’t sit still in their corners, and myself, for tying the cobweb rope on my belt so badly.

After walking through forty-three more halls, I ran into a trap, but fortunately it had already been activated. A short section of corridor with a hole where the floor ought to have been. A pit about three yards deep, with sharp steel spikes set thickly across its bottom. And lying on the bottom was a skeleton with spikes sticking up through its ribs like young saplings. The poor fellow had failed to notice the trap and paid with his life.

The problem here was that Harold, unfortunately, was not a flea. Even if I took a good run up, I wouldn’t be able to jump across a gap of more than fifteen yards. The harsh reality was that I would tumble into the pit halfway across.

A dead end.

There was no way around it, I had to get across that pit or waste another day going back and looking for another route to the Doors.

A close study of the gap where the floor had been revealed that there were long, wide slots in the wall that could easily hold the flagstones that had disappeared. Did that mean there was some kind of concealed mechanism and, if it could be activated, the stones would move back into place over the pit, giving me a chance to carry on?

It seemed likely.

After further investigation of the scene I noticed a rectangular block of stone protruding from the ceiling. There was the answer to the riddle. Only it was so far away from me that it might as well have been on the moon, especially if you took into account the fact that the cobweb-rope was irretrievably lost.

But I still had my crossbow. I took aim and pressed the trigger. The bolt struck a spark from the ceiling beside the block and bounced off, falling down into the pit. All right, so we’d have to try a different approach. I lay down on my back so that the projecting section of the ceiling was right above my head and held my weapon with both hands.

Clang!

The block sank back smoothly and silently into the stone, until it was invisible. Something in the wall started humming quietly, and then the slabs of stone slid out of their recesses and started moving very slowly toward each other. I didn’t wait for them to come together and form an uninterrupted surface—it was far too likely that the trap would be rearmed.

I jumped onto the moving slab on the left and hurried across, being careful not to tumble into the pit. I managed to step onto the normal surface before the slabs came together with a dull crump.

After another two halls, there was another corridor with long slits in the walls, only this time they were at the level of my hips. Another nice little surprise, may the darkness take it!

I walked over to a broken sarcophagus. I had no idea who it was that had tried to shatter the lid of the grave, but now the remains could easily be reached. A yellow skull grinned out at me. I picked it up and tossed it onto the floor of the corridor.

Semicircular blades sprang out of the far ends of the slits and flew through the air with a whine until they reached the entrance, then stopped. So that was it. I could easily have been sliced into two Harolds. While the blades were withdrawing into the wall and the trap was being rearmed for the next unwary traveler, I slipped past and hurried on.

So far all the traps had been fairly crude devices, but that only meant that they had been made by human hands. I expected the elves and orcs to be far more inventive in their methods for dispatching undesirable visitors to the sacred Palaces into the light.

Quite a lot of time had gone by, and I felt very tired. This time I chose the site for my nest in the hands of a large, repulsive gargoyle. It cost me quite an effort to scramble up into the stone hands that were folded together to form a cup, but once I was up there, I felt as cozy as if I were nestling in Sagot’s pocket. I ate half a biscuit, took my boots off, laid my head on my bag, and my hand on my loaded crossbow, and slept like a baby.

I don’t know how long I slept—time passes imperceptibly in the catacombs, with no sun and no stars. I had to rely on hunger and fatigue to guide me, and since my fatigue had disappeared without a trace, it seemed quite possible that I’d been asleep for a long time. In any case, there was an urgent rumbling in my stomach, and I had to wolf down another half portion of my magical rations to keep it quiet.

My body was numb from lying on stone for so long, and it was an effort to stand up, stretch, and pull on my boots. It was time to be moving on, there were no more than ten halls left before I reached the Doors.

“Walk, walk, walk, and we still don’t get anywhere! Do you realize we’re lost in all these damned corridors!”

I instinctively ducked down at the unexpected sound of a voice, but no one would have seen me, even standing fully upright. The gargoyle’s cupped hands made a magnificent hiding place.

“And it’s all your fault!” said a second voice.

“My fault?”

“Who was it suddenly needed to take a leak? It’s your fault everyone went on ahead and we couldn’t find them! What a fool I was to stay with you!”

“Don’t panic. Milord Balistan Pargaid doesn’t abandon his men.”

“Sure, he’s been searching real hard for us for the last eight hours,” the second man snorted.

The voices started moving away, and I decided I could jump up, grab the edge of the cup, and pull myself up to take a look. Two soldiers dressed in chain mail and carrying swords were slowly tramping in the direction that I’d just come from.

The poor souls were lost. And serve them right. After another two halls they’d reach the trap that would reduce them to bloody pulp. And I certainly wasn’t going to try to stop them.

So Balistan Pargaid and Lafresa had reached the second level. That was bad news. I just hoped they’d lost plenty of men on the way.

I waited until the two men disappeared into the distant corridor, then jumped down and went on. The route from here was as straight as Parade Street, and I could go as far as the next intersection without worrying about a thing. The two lost sheep who had just tramped past would have activated any traps, and since they were still alive, I could assume that there were no traps on the path ahead. I ran through the next six halls (just in case the lost men might suddenly decide to come back).

In the seventh hall, where the walls were riddled with the black openings of corridors leading in every possible direction, I paused and rummaged through my papers, then stepped into the fourth corridor on the right. It was a little strange, to say the least—seven paces and then a sharp turn to the left, another seven paces and another turn to the left, then to the right, and so on for quite a long way, a kind of crooked-snake toy put together by a drunken child.

I gave thanks to Sagot when I found myself facing a stairway. There were two stone sculptures waiting for me there—those familiar beasts, half bird and half bear. I wondered whose sick mind could have come up with the idea of such ugly monsters. It certainly couldn’t have been a man’s. When the stairway ended I found myself in a hall. A huge hall. And pitch dark, I couldn’t see a thing. I was just about to reach into the bag for my lights when the floor started glowing and a brightly lit path appeared, running out into the distance from under my feet.

More magic, but at least this time it didn’t threaten instant death. The path ran on and on, showing me the way, until it stopped at the far wall, and at that point a bright rectangle blazed up at that. It was so far away that I didn’t realize what it was at first, but when I did … When I did, I gave thanks to Sagot.

It was the Doors.