If I have to come back myself with a book of matches , he promised himself, hefting the gleaming weight of his flame thrower in his hand, I will see that place burned out .
He rested at last in a rock crevice, his sweating face cooled by the rising drift of air. He had marked the wall, tracing upon it with his fingertip a silvery rune that only he could see. The thought of going forward, further into that endless domain of darkness and smothering horror, was almost more than he could bear. He was weary, but he felt no hunger. After the nurseries, he doubted he would ever be hungry again.
Time had no meaning in the realms of the Dark, so it was with a sense of surprise that he glanced at the back of his hand and saw that the red rune Hlal, which Ingold had drawn there before they parted, had darkened almost to black.
Time sure goes fast when you're having fun , he told himself cynically and got to his feet. Decaying moss crumbled to brittle dust where he put his hand against the wall, filtering into the air to choke him. He holstered his flame thrower, wiped his filthy hand on the skirts of his filthy coat, and prepared himself for the long, ugly journey to the surface.
Wind struck him, chill and sudden. It poured down over him from the tunnel above-the swirling, directionless breath of the Dark. Deep in the cavern he had just left, he heard the thud-thud-thud of running feet and a man's hoarse, labored gasp. Making for here , Rudy thought, glancing up from the narrow rock slit where he was hidden toward the tunnel, then back at the cavern again. Winds were flowing from that direction, too, pursuing the man who ran toward him in the darkness.
Fantastic , Rudy thought, and debated which way to flee, for he had no intention of being trapped between the Dark and their prey. But before he could move, the winds rushed over him like a torrent of water, rasping in the dry moss all around him. The running man blundered with arms outstretched through the entrance of the crevice and fell, stumbling almost into Rudy's arms.
The Dark were instants behind. They poured down the top end of the tunnel as the runner and Rudy fell in a blundering tangle of arms and legs. Rudy was cursing, and the fugitive was gasping in surprise and despair. Rudy twisted himself free as the swarming plasmoid bodies descended on them both, soft coils of tentacles unfurling like dripping snakes.
Wyatt Earp himself couldn't have cleared leather faster.
The flame thrower belched light and fire, streamers of chrome-yellow flame pouring from its thick barrel, unbearably brilliant in the eternity of the underground dark. The fire flowed up over those slick backs in a licking torrent of searing gold.
By the first blast of the light, Rudy had a confused glimpse of the fugitive's face, an emaciated skull between hanks of grayed, dirty hair. Then the man screamed, covering his eyes that had not seen light since the fall of Gae, and the Dark were on them again.
But the fire was spreading among them; they blundered into one another like a flock of Hindenburgs in the confined space of the tunnel. Conflicting winds swept up from below, and Rudy whirled, bracing his feet on the slippery floor and firing downward, the noise of the flame a smothering roar. At the same instant, the spiny cable of a lashing tail grabbed at him from above, and he fired as he turned, the leaping column of silken heat brushing the withered moss of the cavern mouth beyond.
It went up like torched paper. Rudy blinked and flinched away in shock as the fires spread, rushing back into the empty cave below with a velocity that was horrifying. Stalactites, columns, twisting alabaster veils, and clumped masses of crystals leaped into ruddy visibility, their colors dazzling-bronze, rose, and cream-all smeared with the ruddy dye of the flame. He had a confused vision of Dark Ones falling in writhing clouds from the unseen ceiling, twisting about in agony at the brightness, splattering acid as they fell and were consumed by the greedy roar of the flame.
Then he fled, all hope of concealment shattered, and felt the winds of the Dark swirling on his back.
He was plunged again into darkness as he hit the wider tunnel beyond, staggering in the noisome muck of the steep floor. His traced, invisible runes beckoned; he turned, and the flame thrower spewed fire at the Dark Ones in his wake. The massed blackness erupted into flames, twisting and thrashing as they blazed, sparks sizzling in the wet, black mosses of the floor. Channeled by the tunnel walls, the winds raged around him, and he ran blindly from mark to mark, turning every now and then to fire at his pursuers or to clear the path before him. Where the sparks fell on the patches of brown and withered moss that blotched the walls like mildew, they exploded into violent flame.
Blind, white semihumans fled shrieking through the fire, covering huge, rudimentary eyes against the light. Men and women in rags ran past him, screaming in terror and confusion. Walls and ceiling were bursting into flame all around him, and he remembered with sudden horror that the last cavern before the one that contained stair and rope was covered in the brown, dried moss. The knowledge was like an electrified spur. It would take only a single spark to set the whole thing off, and if he were halfway across it at the time...
The upper caverns were a choked confusion of smoke, darkness, and half-lights. He stumbled where the ground was slippery and fought against the screaming humans and almost-humans who blundered against him, grabbing at his arm, shrieking unintelligible words. Columns of smoke burned his eyes, thrashed by the winds of the Dark. Rats streamed around his feet, fleeing the inferno below.
In the last cavern, there was nothing but a wild storming of darkness. Rudy could feel the power of the Dark Ones already reaching out, damping the flames as they damped light. He felt the immense might and will that throbbed in the swirling air. Brown moss and old bones crunched under his feet. The light of the fire streamed up from the tunnels behind him, touched the limestone lace with sulfurous glory, and outlined the billows of the smoke. Black, shining bodies poured through the passage that led upward, a torrent of dripping slime and gaping mouths. They streamed like a river toward the fire in the passageway, putting out their power to quench it, to damp it. Rudy flung himself up the rockslide toward the next tunnel just as one of the hapless herd-creatures, burning and shrieking as it ran, fled blindly into the cavern, stumbled, and fell into the crumbling moss.
It seemed to Rudy, shielding his smoke-filled eyes, that the monstrous cavern, which could have swallowed the entire Keep and still had room to spare, was engulfed not so much by spreading flame as by a single explosion, so rapidly did the moss go up. He gasped at the sudden vacuum of oxygen, his head turning light and giddy. For a moment he feared he would pass out and fall backward down the rocks into the roaring hell of the fire. As he ran on, staggering, he felt the flesh of his right cheek blistered and the backs of his hands scorched by the tremendous heat. It seemed to him as if all the Dark Ones in the Nest were streaming past him over his head, putting out their magic to kill the flames, while he fled beneath them, seeking the magic rope, with the weight of his flame thrower dragging at his blistered hand.
Then he was falling, and consciousness left him.
He came to slowly, and in the dark.
He tasted rock and water and smelled slime and stone. Both his hands were empty.
With a cry of despair he sat up, and a strong hand pushed him down again.
Something wet and shockingly cold smeared his burned cheek.
"Sit still," Ingold's voice said, not unkindly. "I believe you've caused quite enough trouble for one evening."
Slowly, his dark-sight came into focus.
They were in a small stone room like a vault. Its single entrance looked out onto a tiny garden close where half a dozen apricot trees huddled like crones in a train station, heads down against the bitter cold. Above the stink of acid and the gritty taste of dust and powdered moss in his nostrils, Rudy could smell old snow mixed with dirt and the chill scent of bad weather to come. Just visible, outlined in darkness against the door, Kara of Ippit was making additional notes on one of her tablets, her halberd leaning against the wall at her side. The unscarred profile of her face was turned toward him, and Rudy decided that, if a man were in love with her, and didn't mind cheekbones that made him think of an outcrop of granite on a desert hillside, she'd be almost pretty to him. Rudy's pronged staff, which he had somehow kept hold of during the chaos in the Nest, was propped up nearby, its points glinting dully in what wan light managed to leak from the overcast darkness of the night sky. In a corner of the little chamber, Kta was curled up asleep, like the rag-bound mummy of an Inca child.