He felt a flood of relief, rising on a tide of determina shy;tion. She had brought him this far-he would do the rest. Grimly he grasped his sword, starting cautiously through the underground darkness, allowing the clean wash of light from his gemstone to highlight every chis shy;eled stalagmite, every slime-coated rock and mirrorlike pool.
Ariakas moved with the innate caution of the veteran warrior-but he was a warrior on the attack, unafraid to commit himself to a dangerous course. He advanced through the tunnel until he reached a narrow fissure, where erosion had created a steeply sloping channel down and to the left. Without hesitation he turned from the main corridor into this narrow crack, sliding between closely pressed walls of stone, ignoring the knowledge that every step took him farther away from sunlight and fresh air.
Rock pressed close overhead. The ravine formed a long tunnel running downward for a hundred feet. Halfway down it, Ariakas slipped on some sand and slid his battering way along. He almost spilled out the end of the niche before yawning blackness warned him of peril. His hands reached out to the walls on either side, and with his boots already extending from the gaping end of the passage, he arrested his slide.
Carefully he reversed his position, leaning his head outward and allowing the gemstone to illuminate his surroundings. He saw that the ravine terminated on the precipitous side of a vast, lightless cavern. A few pebbles tumbled outward as he shifted his grip, and he heard them bounce and rattle for a long time. Immediately below him, a crack in the wall extended straight down, creating a narrow shaft in the subterranean cliff. He thought that, just maybe, he could descend that chute without tumbling free. The rocky sides were close enough together for him to brace his arms, and numer shy;ous boulders seemed to be wedged in its base. These would serve as footholds-presuming, of course, they were wedged securely enough not to break free in a rockslide.
Nevertheless, the compulsion to descend, to move deeper into the realm of rock and fundament, left him no room for alternatives. The winding crack behind led nowhere but up, and Ariakas had no interest in time-consuming detours.
Instead, he reversed his position again, and lowered his feet out of the crack, keeping a grip with his hands until he could kick downward and stand upon one of those wedged boulders. He lowered his body and began to step carefully downward, his hands firmly braced against either side of this narrow chute.
When he looked out into the cavern, his tiny light was swallowed by an apparently infinite expanse of dark shy;ness. His footstep knocked a rock free. The stone struck somewhere close below with a sharp crack. The echo of the sound did not reach him for several seconds. Then, however, the sound was repeated for a thrumming minute or two, ricocheting back and forth through a vast and resonant space.
Abruptly the rocks beneath his feet slipped away in a clattering cascade, and Ariakas smashed onto his back, skidding madly down the chute. His hands clawed for support, finding only blunt rock. Each foot kicked at the rocks below, but these merely tumbled free and joined the landslide.
Ariakas twisted this way and that, grasping for any shy;thing to stop this uncontrolled plunge. A sharp rock jabbed him in the knee, but he managed to grab it as he slid downward. Then another large stone smashed him in the face, drawing blood from his nose and breaking the desperate grip of his fingers.
The sounds of the rockslide grew to a crescendo around him, and Ariakas sensed that the chute grew steeper. For one sickening moment he tumbled into space, free, scrambling to remain upright. Then he smashed with stunning force into a solid surface. Some shy;thing flat partially supported him, but he felt himself slipping aside. For a second he teetered at the brink of a precipice. Rocks crashed past him, smashing his hands as he tried to grab something, anything. His feet kicked free, followed by his torso, and then his fingers found a crack. Wedging them inward with bone-crushing force, Ariakas at last arrested his fall, though most of his body remained suspended in black, yawning space.
Gasping for breath, the man tried to blink the dust from his eyes. He kicked a foot upward to the side, catch shy;ing his boot on the lip he clung to by his fingertips. Then, with extreme effort, he scrambled upward to sit on a nar shy;row shelf of rock. His helmet had remained strapped to his head, and now he flashed the gem light around.
Ariakas quickly realized that he was in a very dire predicament. The ledge was narrow-perhaps three feet wide-and only a dozen paces long. Below it, the subter shy;ranean cliff plunged away, a sheer descent into darkness, while an equally precipitous wall loomed overhead. Even the chute he had descended became, in the last approach to this ledge, a plummeting chimney that offered no route for climbing back up.
In discouragement, Ariakas turned his light outward, where it was swallowed in the vastness of dark, subter shy;ranean space. He saw nothing beyond this bare cliff, a narrow perch that might let him walk a few steps in either direction. In frustration he kicked at the loose rocks on the ledges, sending them plunging into the depths, listening with awe as the sounds of their fall reached him a long time later.
Suddenly the bedrock shuddered, and the air resounded with a loud crack. The ledge shook, and Aria-kas fell to his side, madly scrambling for a handhold. Perched on the edge again, he stared downward-then blinked in surprise.
There was light down there! A great distance away, something huge seethed and glowed, casting out a dim but steadily growing illumination. The brightness was an ember-red in color, though it seemed to be filtered through some kind of haze.
Quickly he clapped his hand over the glowing gem, completely screening the light-and he could still see. In fact, with the gem light covered, he could clearly discern the somber, crimson glow, rising from the depths below. It was as though he stared into a deep well, at the bottom of which smoldered a smoky fire. Thick vapors obscured the air, writhing back and forth, disturbed by currents and updrafts. Within the dense cloud there flamed an unmistakable suggestion of great heat-heat like the Lavaflow River of Sanction, or even the molten hearts of the Lords of Doom.
In the illumination of that hellish fire, as his eyes grad shy;ually became accustomed to the vast darkness, Ariakas looked across the cavern. He felt a sense of wonder that rapidly grew into awe. He might have been sitting on the slope of some immense mountain, looking at sister peaks around the range, for all the immensity of the setting- except that these were peaks that leaned inward, coming together far above in a vast dome of rock-a false sky overhead.
Vast, rough surfaces of stone were outlined in the red shy;dish glow, underlit like great, drooping faces gathering around a dim and dying fire. The massive scope of this place made Ariakas feel like a tiny bug, an insignificant insect on the wall of a great castle.
Only after several minutes of awestruck gawking did he realize that something obstructed his view across the expanse. He saw that, midway between himself and the opposite wall of the cylindrical cavern, a shadowy grid structure seemed to float in the air.
His eyes adjusted further, and he saw long, spidery beams, extending outward from the cavern walls to reach the skeletonlike shape.
For a long time Ariakas studied the form, and gradu shy;ally he discerned that it was a cage. Something huge, impossibly vast, lay within that cage, trapped by iron bars that ringed it on all sides, above and below as well.
Then, with a great stretching of wings and tail, the thing moved. It raised a long neck, uncurled huge, talon-studded claws … and Ariakas knew beyond doubt that a dragon had returned to Krynn.
Chapter 24