Easy for you to tell us that , Rudy thought as he followed the dark, cloaked form down the red porphyry stairs that led to the vault. None of us knew Gae. You're the only one likely to see anyone you know .
Afterward, he read the wax tablets he had sketched with the maps of the Nest, registering the various tunnels and caverns he had wandered through, and what he saw surprised him, for he did not remember most of them singly. The greater part of his memories of the Nest he forced down below the levels of consciousness, only to have them surface, like bloated corpses from black waters, in his dreams. The hours he spent below the ground had a surreal quality; in that unending night, time became meaningless. Terror, shock, and disgust further clouded his sense of the passage of hours. He lost even his own sense of self, for he walked hidden in his wreaths of illusion, invisible to all around him.
After they parted in the topmost cavern with an agreement and a common spell to mark the limits of their time, he walked alone, like a ghost haunting a world as alien and incomprehensible as it was revolting and horrifying. It was a world of darkness, of slimy moisture and ever-present, hideous danger, a world whose existence he had never even imagined possible and which would never, he feared, be wholly eradicated from his mind.
The Dark Ones were everywhere. They crowded the walls and ceilings of measureless caverns of darkness, the clicking of their claws on the slick-polished limestone a constant chattering background to his sickness and dread. His wizard's sight showed him the wet gleam of their massed backs and the glitter of the foul fluid that dripped continually from those gelid surfaces. The stink of them, sharp and somehow metallic, clogged his nostrils, and he felt a mounting horror of being discovered and buried alive under those squirming, slithering beings.
That first enormous cavern, where he parted from the other wizards at the foot of the drop-off and the spelled rope, was the worst, for the Dark Ones crawled not only over ceiling and walls but across the floor as well, scurrying like monster roaches through the dry and crumbling brown moss, their long whiplike tails hissing through the withered vegetation and leaving trails of sticky wetness behind. Elsewhere they seemed to travel mostly on the ceilings of the tunnels, crawling among the stalactites and folded veils of stone as cavern succeeded cavern, the drip of their noisome slime tapping viscously on the mossy floors. Never having been subject to the terror and loathing of spiders and snakes, Rudy had not understood that morbid dread of simply being touched by something abominable. He understood it now.
He had thought that custom would acclimate him to their presence in time, so that he could have confidence in the spells that guarded him and walk more easily. But it never did. Nor did it dull the smothering horror of the darkness itself or the unreasonable sensation of the weight of all those miles of earth and stone pressing down upon him. Only those who had never been trapped in the darkness below the ground could compare the mazes of the lightless Keep of Dare with the realms of the Dark. For all its pressing darkness, its weight of enchanted steel and stone, the Keep was finite. But the darkness here was infinite. The weight was the weight of the earth. The crawling horrors populating this place were likewise infinite, as inescapable as this darkness that had never seen light.
Only now did he understand Ingold's warnings and conviction that an invasion of the Nests could never succeed. The tunnels were endless, twisting down and back into the black bowels of the earth, incomprehensible mazes that could swallow a dozen armies. Nauseated despair took him, as he wandered farther and farther in that sightless realm, along with a sense of black hopelessness. He wondered how any army, even with the technology such as Dare of Renweth had had at his disposal, could have made so much as a dent against the numbers and power of the Dark.
But he had been sent to observe. Through the panic, the loathing, and the numbing despair, certain details stood out absurdly clear. Rudy noticed that the Nests were warm, and a flow of warmer air marked the downward-leading tunnels, even where the Dark Ones did not come crawling forth like round-headed, filthy beetles from holes in the putrefying moss. He 'saw that different kinds of moss grew in different places. Heavy carpets of velvet green-black in many places-whole caverns, sometimes-were crumbling to brown and withered dust. In other places, clubbed, knobby growths infested the floors like stumpy, unspeakable forests. Whitish mosses hung like curtains of slimy seaweed down the dripping walls. The herds of the Dark fed greedily upon them all.
The herds of the Dark affected Rudy strangely. He found his loathing of those bandy-legged, bulge-eyed humanoids almost as intense as his horror of the Dark Ones themselves. He had known they were close to human, but had expected creatures like the dooic of the plains-hairy and apelike, trapped Neanderthals. But the creatures that shuffled through the withering beds of moss or squatted to lap at the bottomless pools of onyx waters were smaller, more delicate, and larger of skull; their chittering squeals as they fled, blinking, from any movement in the air sounded horribly analogous to speech.
They were not the only ones chewing bits of moss in their soft little teeth and staring about in the darkness with huge, terror-stricken eyes. In a cavern so vast that his eyes could not reach its end, Rudy found herds of men and women in torn and soiled rags, stumbling about and feeding on moss, muttering endlessly in the dark. They did not move like those miserable zombies whose brains the Dark had devoured, but Rudy wondered how many of them could be called sane. This single chamber seemed to house a dozen good-sized bands, whose members had formerly owned shops, raised families, and promenaded the arcaded streets of the broken town above. Maybe they still had relatives up there, Rudy thought in a puzzled confusion of nausea and loathing; maybe they had husbands, or wives, or children in the Keep of Dare.
He drew back to avoid touching a woman who crawled past him on her hands and knees, seeking the edge of the pool by which he stood. She had long blond hair and had probably once been very beautiful, Rudy thought, looking with numbed dispassion at her emaciated face and bloated, sagging belly. She groped for the water in the darkness and mumbled, "Water fifty-five steps from the wall, water fifty-five steps from the wall," in a dulled, mechanical recitation.
It could have been Aide , Rudy thought, and the idea brought nausea burning up into his throat. Maybe it was a friend of hers. Hadn't Janus said that the Dark carried off large numbers of the defenders from that last battle in the Palace? Rudy shut his eyes, his head swimming suddenly; it could just as easily have been any one of them at the Keep.
But, as Ingold had said, it was not to pity or to rescue that they had come. It was to map, and map Rudy did, marking the immense caverns and the endless bowels of black tunnels crawling with filthy life as he followed the windings of the Nest deeper and deeper into the pressing earth. He found caverns flooded with black, oily water, through which stalactites rose like pillars from a floor of glass. He found cavern after cavern filled with bones-ages old and crumbling to dust or fresh and slithering with hideous rodent and insect life. He found the nurseries, the breeding grounds of the Dark, and the sight brought him as close as he had ever come to fainting in his adult life.