They turned a corner, and the wan daylight was lost behind them. The pallid gleam of the staff flashed glassily and green in the eyes of the horses, and the surrounding silence whispered with the fears of the men. Looking up at the black ceiling overhead, Rudy saw that it had been carved with long, chiselling strokes upward from below. The steps were straight but disturbingly irregular as to height and width, as they would be, to have been carved out by those who had no feet. Cool, damp air wafted upward to touch his face and bore on it a death reek, the stench of ancient corruption. He shuddered, taking what comfort he could in the living smells of men and horses around him and in the warmth of the crowding bodies and the whispers and occasional soft nickerings that broke the deadly silence of underground. Once or twice he heard the scritching of rodent claws on the walls nearby and caught a glimpse of lean, wary scavenger rats slipping like furtive shadows into the fissures in the dark walls.
Whatever lay below, it was dead, dead and rotten, the stink of it laid by the cold. Yet it seemed that they descended for hours. The stairs curved and doubled back, and the only light was the faint foxfire glow that fell on the shoulders of the old man before him. Rudy's legs ached, then burned, while his mind and senses strained to catch some sound, some movement in the darkness below. But there was nothing - only the faint fetor of decay.
Just as Rudy felt that his legs couldn't stand anymore of this, Ingold said, 'Stop!' He halted so abruptly that Rudy almost ran
into him. With hardly a rustle of his fur clothing, Hoofprint of the Wind slipped forward from among his troops to join them. Rudy tried to take another step to see what lay in the darkness beyond, but Ingold put his arm across the passage to block him.
'What is it?'
Silently the wizard gestured with his staff out over the void.
There were no steps beyond the one on which they stood -only darkness, heightless, widthless, and bottomless. Without the glow of Ingold's staff to guide them, they would have simply walked off the edge unseeingly. In that Stygian pit, Rudy could hear the slip and skitter of movement, the scavenger rats' thin pecking squeaks; he could smell the last sickening whiffs of old and distant putrefaction. Then Ingold held his staff out over the darkness, and the glare of it slowly increased until it burned with the diamond-hard, white light of a magnesium flare. It was the first light to penetrate that gloom since the forming of the world, and it did so slowly, touching the lines of floor and arch and pillar shyly, like a hesitant lover, unwillingly delimiting water and stone from night.
Rudy had meant to sound facetious, but awe conquered him, and his voice was barely a whisper. 'Holy hellfires, Batman,' he breathed, and Ingold raised a bristling eyebrow at him.
'These hellfires, as you say, are holy indeed,' the wizard replied quietly. 'For you look upon what only I have seen and lived to speak of. This is the domain of the Dark Ones beneath the earth.'
Twenty feet below them, the cavern floor began, sloping downward to roll away in miniature hills into darkness that the light of the staff could not fathom. The cave itself was hundreds of feet in height and perhaps twice that in breadth, and its opposite end was lost in impenetrable shadows. Dark, narrow entrances could be discerned among the pillars of limestone foresting the grotto, leading to yet other caverns. Vast stalactites hung like the pendent vaults of a flamboyant gothic ceiling, and these gleamed oddly in the steady white light, as if they had
been polished smooth. The floor beneath was covered in a deep carpet of withered, brownish moss, broken in places by black sheets of water whose still surface threw back the light like polished onyx. So complete was the silence that lay upon the eon-haunted cavern that the vast, twisted vaults picked up the breathing of the tiny group of invaders, who huddled like beggars on the threshold of the abandoned realms of their foe.
'Look.' Hoofprint of the Wind pointed. Something moved down there - scavenger rats slipping, beady-eyed, along the marges of a pool whose waters were like obsidian. Barely discernible among, the brown, shrivelled mosses of the cave floor, bones could be seen, gleaming palely in the white blaze of the witchlight. It was hard to tell because of the fluted pillars of the stalagmites, but there seemed to be a lot of them. 'This is perhaps their graveyard, their place to leave the bones of those they take?'
'Nonsense,' Ingold said, and raised his head to gaze off into the limitless distance of the cave. 'There are far too few of them, for one thing. If this were the regular place to deposit the bones of their herds, in all the years the Dark have kept their wretched flocks in this cavern, the floor would be dozens of feet thick with them. And besides, you see there ' He pointed toward the ceiling, all eyes following the movement of the light. 'See how pitted and shiny the stalactites are? The claws of the Dark rubbed them smooth. And see how deep that pathway is, up into that hole in the roof? It must have been one of their main thoroughfares. They would never live in the same place as corpses. No animal would.'
'You mean they just lived up there?' Rudy whispered. 'Like bats on the ceiling? I thought you said they were intelligent, that they had a civilization.'
'And so they did,'Ingold said. 'Of a kind. But I believe it to be a civilization of the mind, a civilization with virtually no outward expression at all. It is one to which our minds cannot penetrate; and even if they could, we could not comprehend it, any more than a sheep or a pig could comprehend a love poem
or money or the concept of honour.'
Rudy nodded, his eyes travelling slowly over those dark and gleaming walls. 'You got a point there. I could name you a couple of people who'd have a rough time with two out of three.' Beside him, he heard Ingold chuckle.
While they were speaking, Rudy became aware of the cold. It flowed down the stairway behind him, deepening and intensifying until he found himself shivering in his heavy buffalo-fur coat. Even the weather-hardened Raiders huddled together for warmth; their breath steamed in the diamond brilliance of Ingold's light. From the twisting tunnel of the endless stair behind them, Rudy heard the moaning of far-off winds, a thin keening shriek whose wildness chilled his heart. He knew they'd been descending for a long time - God only knew how deep in the earth they were. Yet the intensity of the ice storm penetrated even there. He could see the ice condensing from the moisture of their breath to frost the polished walls.
His teeth chattered as he spoke. 'So why are the bones there? Can we go see?' It crossed his mind that deeper in the caverns they might have a better chance against the unearthly cold.
Ingold pointed his staff downward at the drop. Rudy saw almost at once that it would be impossible to take the horses down the sheer fall. He wondered if the dooic, or whomever the Dark lured to their Nests, broke their ankles going over that edge.
The wizards glanced back over his shoulder at the chief of the Raiders. 'Have you ropes?' he asked.
The panther eyes under the chieftain's long, curling brows darkened. 'My friend, it is not a good thing,' Hoofprint said quietly. 'Down there are the dead. The whole cavern stinks of them. You can smell the wind that rises from the tunnels below. Better it is that you remain here with us to wait out the storm.'
Ingold turned away restlessly, as if he would pace the narrow
step. His feet touched the very edge of the chasm. 'Why are they dead?' he asked. 'How did they die?'
The chieftain sniffed, as at the question of a fool. 'You stand in the caverns of the Eaters in the Night and ask how men came to die in this place? Stay among us, Walker in the Dark. To know that the Eaters slay men is no new thing.'