The sappers flung down their ladders, and the hollow booming rang like a cannon shot, the echoes dying slowly amid the mazes of stone. The vanguard hesitated, looking about into that horrible, alien realm. On the brink of the ladder, Ingold paused, the vagrant winds stirring at the heavy folds of his mantle, his sword glinting like lightning in his hand. Then Eldor strode forward, and his footfalls sounded, each as distinct as the tap of an iron bell, upon the separate rungs. The cynical amusement in his eyes as he gazed about him filled Rudy with chill terror.
Yet Rudy followed, as they all followed, stumbling in the crumbly mosses of the cavern floor. Against the darkness that seemed to crowd so thickly around them, Ingold's sword gleamed as he pointed the way toward the tunnels he and Rudy had taken in their earlier exploration of the Nest. The smell there was intolerable, fetid and sweet. Powder from the decaying mosses clogged Rudy's nostrils. In the open cavern, the magelight did not penetrate the darkness of the ceiling, but it threw horrible leaping shadows of the warriors among the knobbled pillars and across the inky pits of the floor.
In the descending tunnel, Rudy felt the awareness of the Dark, stronger and stronger, like a thin sound sawing its way through his skull. In the cavern beyond, it was worse. Blind, squeaking things fled before the light, their chittering echoing down the tunnels. In spite of the coolness of the air, Rudy's face was wet with sweat; he could see more sweat gleaming on the faces of the Guards packed so closely around him. As he stumbled over the soft wetness of the floor, he could feel and taste the malice of the Dark, pressing on him like the millions of tons of earth and rock above his head.
Ingold stopped in the black mouth of the next tunnel, swinging around as if startled by some noise or movement. At first Rudy thought that the old man's foxfire sword had begun to burn brighter. Then he realized that the soft, white magelight around them was dimming.
Alwir looked up into the shadows of the cavern ceiling. "Can we use the flame throwers?"
"Not unless we wish to risk cutting ourselves off from the lower Nests," the wizard whispered. In the fading glare, Rudy noted how pale he looked and how the sweat glittered on his face. "We have some three miles of tunnel to cover from here."
All about him, Rudy could hear the fearful murmuring of the Guards. Swords flashed in the graying light as the column moved into defense formation. He put out his strength into the light-spell but felt it sapped, drawn by what he knew to be magic, yet was incapable of comprehending enough to fight. As the light waned, he could see that some of the mosses were palely phosphorescent- more of Gil's nitrogen compounds , he thought-and moreover, there was a kind of a smell in the air, bitter and metallic, that he had never smelled before, overpowering in the enclosed spaces of the caves.
Eldor barked a hoarse command. The column moved on again, down a half mile or so of tunnel where the air seemed clearer, though the light continued to weaken. By the glow of Ingold's sword, the King's face looked harsh and terrible, a thin little smile playing about his lips.
He knows what's coming , Rudy thought, shivering with the effort of maintaining even a feeble glow. He knows ...
Then blackness slammed down over them all like the fall of night. Screaming burst along the tunnel, the echoes drumming into Rudy's ears. All his strength was put into the light, yet darkness covered him; he heard the sudden, roaring buzz that the Dark Ones made when they flew underground and he felt the hissing slash of a sword that just missed his ear. He flung himself against the rock wall, the acid in the moss stinging his bare hands, and spread a cloaking-spell over himself.
Winds howled by him; something hot and wet splattered his face. Then up ahead, white light burst into being again around Ingold and the Guards; the colors of tunic and mail, of human skin and stripped, bloody bones, were shocking in the refulgent glare. But he himself was still in darkness. Dimly, he could see struggling forms, swords, faces, and the sinewy, drifting glide of dark shapes. He tried to call light and found he hadn't the strength for both spells.
He bent and pulled the gory sword from the handbones of a corpse at his feet. Then, in a single instant of time, he slashed at the Dark One nearest him, dropped the cloaking-spell, and threw everything he had into a burst of searing, white light that exploded with radiance into the blackness.
All around him there was shrieking, buzzing, clawing wind. The light that encircled Rudy grew and flickered, the Dark Ones vanishing before it, leaving the tunnel a shambles of bodies and bones half-sunk in trampled, unspeakable filth. Then darkness surged down on them again, and he struck at the things that came for him in it, the thin, black slime from their slashed bodies splattering his hands. The effort of fighting the counterspells against the magelight exhausted him; it was all he could do to defend himself. If he had not had his back to the wall and been ringed by the Guards, he knew he could never have stood a chance.
Eldor's harsh voice cut the chaos of noise like acid; the column moved forward, struggling against that inky tide. From the darkness, a spined cable as big around as his wrist caught Rudy's sword arm and dragged him upward toward the darkness that hid the roof of the tunnel with a force that all but dislocated his arm. He felt his feet leave the floor and glimpsed a slobbering black maw in the midst of swirling illusion...
He must have screamed, for his throat hurt from it as the Icefalcon pulled him to his feet from the trampled muck of the tunnel floor where he'd fallen. The whiplike tail was already disintegrating away from his arm, its cut end still pulsing faintly where the Raider's sword had sheared it. He felt weak with shock, sickened at the hideous strength of the thing that had seized him.
The Icefalcon dragged him along with the moving column until he could find his feet. As the Raider let go, he said, "Don't let that happen again. You're the only light source this part of the column has."
Even as the Icefalcon spoke, Rudy could feel the counter-spells slacking and the light growing stronger. As the Dark swirled away in clouds of illusion, he could see that an immense cave stretched before them, the slimy mosses of its walls and floor glittering faintly in the reflected witchlight and in the wan phosphorescence that seemed, in places, to emanate from the mosses themselves. The light grew as Eldor, Ingold, and the advance guard sprang down the slippery slope to the cavern floor, leading the straggling column that was like a long and tortuous snake. The darkness above them seemed to be alive with the chittering buzz of the Dark, dripping with their stench, yet Rudy felt their spells growing more and more distant. He hastened his steps, trying to catch up with the wizard and the King.
He had almost done so when a faint, hollow booming noise echoed through the cave, like a distant explosion, muffled by the twisting of the tunnels. The ground jarred beneath his feet, and all around him rose an outcry of doubt and terror. Men stopped, looking about into the inky vastness, as if to see the source of the sound, though Rudy could tell it was some distance off; others cried out that they must turn back and were cursed by those who said that the only hope lay forward. Ahead of them, Rudy could see the faint glimmer that was Ingold's sword as the old man scrambled up a rockfall to the mouth of the next tunnel. He heard Eldor's commands rapped out to those around him. And there was something wrong...
That smell , Rudy thought. Stronger now. much stronger ... He looked around him, seeking a source, but he saw nothing-only the emptiness of the high-ceilinged cavern, the magelight stretching to its farthest ends. Where the hell are the Dark ?
The ground shook again, farther off, and Rudy decided that whatever the hell the smell was, he didn't like it. There was movement in the air, not the directionless swirling of the Dark Ones, but a kind of steady draft, although, now that he looked, he could see no other entrances into the cavern except the one that was still disgorging troops and the black hole where the Guards stood grouped around their commanders. On the cavern floor, confusion was spreading- Rudy could see already how badly the column was straying. Most of 'em must still be back in the tunnel , he thought as he ran for the knot of Guards. Hell of a place to get off .