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