The tunnel slowly got wider and the roof lower from that point on, slowly, so that they didn’t notice it at first, until Thomas saw the light from his glowbottle reflected from the ceiling, now only a few feet above his head. They noticed with some surprise that the tunnel was now well over a hundred feet wide, to judge from how long it took a thrown stone to hit the opposite wall, and that huge boulders, some seven or eight feet wide, littered the now very shallow river, the water splashing over and around them and polishing them to a smooth, shiny finish. Angus examined a small stone he found lying on the path, and declared that it was creslite, a softer rock than the arrastone they’d been passing through up until then.
“This explains the rockfalls,” he added. “Creslite is eroded away faster than arrastone, which is why the tunnel’s so wide here. Hopefully it's just a narrow layer and we’ll be through it soon.”
“How dangerous is it?” asked Shaun.
“Well, rockfalls will be more common here, as you can see from all them.” He indicated the giant boulders in the river, the nearest of which could be seen in the light of the glowbottle. “However, what Douglas said earlier still applies. We’ve just had a rockfall, so there’s not likely to be another like it for a few weeks, at least.”
“You wanted to go back just now. Do you still think we should go back?”
The trog gave a great sigh. “Well, it would be the prudent thing,” he said. “A tunnel like this near one of our cities would be sealed off to prevent foolish explorers from coming to grief there, but if this sword you’re after is as important to the outcome of the war as I’ve heard... When I think o’ my fellow clansmen dying in their hundreds to fight the Shadowarmies, it shames my heart to shy away from such a mundane danger.”
Shaun and Matthew shared a glance. "Yeah," said the older brother. "I wonder how many of the others back Fort Battleaxe are still alive? Yeah, we’ve got to go on.”
The one good thing about being in a layer of softer rock was that there was much less of a slope, the tunnel running almost level for the most part with only the occasional slope here and there and, although this meant that they’d be in the layer of creslite longer, they all welcomed the chance to rest their legs from the seemingly endless flights of steps. Even descending a long flight of steps could be tiring after a while, and Thomas thought with horror that to get back to the surface they’d have to climb them all again. He wasn’t looking forward to it.
It was quieter too, the roar of the waterfalls having been replaced by the gurgling of a rocky stream. It was a pleasant sound that they enjoyed listening to and that lulled them to sleep when they reached a place where the slaver told them they could stop and which the trogs, after examining the ceiling closely, said was safe from rockfalls.
The tunnel continued on at the same level all the next day, dropping only a couple of hundred feet between the point at which they set off for their nineteen hour march and the point at which they stopped again for their next five hour rest. The tunnel twisted and turned so much, moreover, that they estimated that they only covered about ten miles, as the crow flies, during that time. A solid bed of arrastone lay beneath the river, preventing it from eroding downwards by more than about an inch a century, but it was able to erode sideways through the much softer creslite much more quickly, forming great, wide caverns hundreds of yards across containing vast mounds of rubble fallen from the ceiling around which the river flowed in hundreds of tiny rivulets only a few feet across and inches deep.
An enormous variety of cave life inhabited the caverns, thanks to the forests of toadstools that grew on detritus washed down from the surface by the river. They were eaten by legions of slugs, worms and giant cave beetles, and these were, in turn, food for spiders, amphibians and giant blind lizards twenty feet long that waited, absolutely motionless, for days on end for something to go past before pouncing on it with a flash of claws and razor sharp teeth. They also came across the occasional humanoid village, that they avoided, and the occasional giant amoeba, similar to the one that had given them trouble at the very entrance to the caves. None of these creatures troubled them, though. The intelligent ones recognised the slaver as a creature not to be tangled with, while the rest fell either to its mind blasts or the wizards’ magic spells.
The only creature that did cause them some trouble was a colossal velvet worm, almost the size of a dragon, that was immune to the cthillian’s mind blasts and that chased them for half an hour before they finally lost it by entering a side tunnel too small for it to follow. The slaver protected them from enough of the other cave denizens, though, for them to realise how much trouble they’d have been in without it. The World Below was no place for the timid or faint hearted.
After their escape from the velvet worm, they found themselves in a completely different part of the cave system from the one they’d been in before. That didn’t matter, though. The slaver had told them a few days earlier that, if they somehow became separated, all they had to do was find a stream and follow it, and it would eventually take them out of there. All the streams joined up again into a great river at the point at which it finally left the layer of creslite and continued down towards the Darksea.
Despite the earlier rockfalls, however, they had almost forgotten that the ceiling here was unstable until they heard the gut twisting rumble again in the distance. This time, though, it did not die away but grew louder and louder, and the ground shook as huge boulders fell, smashing to pieces in the impact. From just a few feet away came the crunching sound of a grove of giant toadstools being crushed and Thomas felt fine dust and gravel trickling down onto his head. He cast his shield spell in near panic, directing it upwards so that it formed a protective umbrella over his head, just in time as a piece of ceiling the size of an armchair came down on him. The shield spell saved his life, but transmitted enough of the force of the impact to send him sprawling, bruising his shoulder on a rock. He leapt back to his feet as quickly as he could and called the others to join him in the safety of the shield.
Soon, he had his arms around Diana, Shaun and Matthew, hugging them to him as closely as possible so that they could all fit under the shield, while Jerry huddled around his legs. The two trogs stood nearby, staring up at the ceiling and occasionally jumping to one side to dodge a lump of falling rock. Thomas looked around frantically for Lirenna as lumps of rock rained down all around them, but he couldn’t see her anywhere, the light of the glowbottle, hanging around his neck, being almost completely obscured by the two fighters and the cleric. He could only hope that she and the slaver had found a little hole somewhere where they’d be safe. From somewhere came the squeal of some cave animal being crushed and, from another direction, the repeated splashing of rocks falling into a stream.
The rockfall went on and on, and the wizard began to worry that he would run out of magic before it ended, leaving them unprotected and at the mercy of the falling rock as the shield dissipated. Gradually, though, the stony deluge slackened off, so that when the spell did end only a few small stones and bits of gravel were still falling. A stone the size of a hen’s egg hit Jerry on the head, making him cry out in pain, but that was the only injury suffered by any of them and as soon as they were sure it was over they spread out to find Lirenna and the slaver.
There was no reply to their cries and shouts, and Thomas felt his guts tighten as a cold, shivering fear filled his soul. He picked his way over the newly fallen rubble, sweating and trembling with anxiety. Almost afraid to look in case he found her slender, lifeless hand sticking out from beneath a massive boulder. When Jerry shouted that he’d found her, therefore, he almost had a heart attack and ran over as fast as he could, miraculously avoiding tripping over the rubble. “Where is she?” he asked breathlessly.
“In here, with me,” said the telepathic voice of the slaver, as repellent as ever but now sounding like music to his ears.
“Where?” he asked, looking around frantically. “Is she alive?”
“In here,” repeated the cthillian, and Thomas realised it was coming from behind a mound of rubble lying against the wall of the cavern. “We took shelter in a side tunnel, and have been sealed in by the falling rock. She is unharmed, as am I.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll soon dig you out,” said Shaun as he and Matthew grabbed a large boulder and tried to move it. Between them, they managed to lift it a few inches, but were soon forced to give up. It was a lot heavier than it looked.
“Forget it,” said Angus, casting an expert eye over the pile of rubble and scratching at some of the rocks with his great bullet fingernails, testing their hardness. “It’d take a dozen trogs with picks, hammers and shoring equipment to open that up without starting another rockfall. We’ve got no chance.”
“Is there another way out of there?” asked Thomas, almost shaking with fear.
“There was once,” replied the slaver. “There is a dry stream bed in the floor, and the tunnel slopes downwards so that it must have been flowing in our direction, eventually to rejoin the main river. However, it may have been blocked in other places by other rockfalls. We won’t know until we go and look.”
“You mean split up?” asked Matthew in horror. “But what if we can’t find each other again?”
“All these streams and tunnels join up again at the point at which the river leaves this stratum and goes deeper,” replied the cthillian. “It is a great waterfall which you will hear hours before you reach it. Whichever of us arrives there first will wait for the other group.”
“How long do we wait if...” Angus paused and looked around at the others apologetically. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but someone’s got to say it. How long do we wait if you find that you’re trapped in there?”
“That is for you to decide,” replied the slaver. “However, I don’t think there’s any point in waiting more than twenty four hours.”
“Can you give us directions to the Underworld from there?” asked the trog. “Just in case...”
“Angus!” cried Thomas furiously. “They’re going to be there, all right?”
The trog looked up at the young wizard compassionately. “We have to be realistic,” he said softly. “We have to face the possibility that they’re trapped in there. We cannot dig them out, look at the size o’ them boulders. And even if we tried, we might trigger another rockfall, perhaps a worse one. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is. The mission is more important than any individual tragedy.”
“You cannot go on without me,” said the slaver, however. “The world below is too vast and complicated for you to simply follow directions. You would get lost and spend the rest of your life wandering the tunnels and caverns until something killed you. If we do not rejoin you at the waterfall, you must return to the surface.”
Silence fell, none of them knowing what else to say, until the slaver spoke again. “The demi shae wishes me to pass on a message. She says that you are not to worry, and that she will see you again at the waterfall.”
Thomas wiped a tear from his eye. “Now you listen to me, you slimy green blooded monster! You’d better look after her, because if you let anything happen to her, anything at all, if I find you've harmed one hair on her head...”
The others stared at him in horror, and Shaun grabbed him, clapping a hand over his mouth before he could say anything else. “By the Gods, Tom!” he hissed. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Thomas shook himself free and then stood paralysed with horror as his sanity snapped back and he realised what he'd said. He’d threatened the slaver, the creature who had his beloved Lirenna at its mercy and whose temper was as fragile as the cave pool crystal Angus had told them about! What would it do to her as a result of his madness?
“Ambassador Ctharliwun," he said, trembling in cold fear. "I beg you, please forgive my outburst. I don’t know what came over me.”
“I understand,” replied the cthillian. “We have noticed on many occasions that humanoids can temporarily lose their sanity during moments of extreme emotional stress. It is yet another example of your inherent inferiority to us.”
Thomas gasped in relief, tears running down his face, and the others relaxed as well. “Thank you,” he said emotionally. “Please look after her and tell her...” He looked around at the others, suddenly growing embarrassed, and thought the next words without saying them out loud. “Tell her that I love her.”
There was a brief pause, and when the slaver spoke again, he somehow knew that it was speaking only to him, and not to any of the others. “She says to say that she loves you too, and is glad to know of your feelings for her. If you truly wanted what is best for each other, though, you would each wish that the other was not burdened by such an emotional dependency."
When it next spoke, it was speaking to them all again. “We will go now,” it said. “We will, hopefully, meet you at the waterfall.”
That was the last they heard of it, and they shouted in vain at the wall of rubble before being forced to the conclusion that it had gone.
“Not big on goodbyes, is he?” said Matthew. The others ignored him.
“Are you all right, Tom?” asked Diana, putting a gentle hand on the wizard’s arm.
Thomas nodded unhappily, then shook his head. “No, dammit, I’m not!” he said. “It was my idea to bring that monster along! If it does anything to her, if it harms her in any way at all...”
“We all agreed to it,” pointed out the cleric. “Lenny herself agreed, you can’t blame yourself. Besides, this particular creature seems almost decent. Look how many times it’s let you get away with saying things that maybe you shouldn’t have, even now when you actually threatened it.”
Thomas brightened, momentarily more hopeful, but the crushing depression soon got a grip on him again as a new thought struck him. “What if they are trapped in there?” he said. “What if there’s no way out?”
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” replied Shaun. “Angus is right, there’s no way we can clear that tunnel.”
“At least her death will be quick and almost painless,” pointed out Jerry. “There are worse ways to die.”
Thomas nodded, understanding, but Matthew didn’t. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“He means,” said Thomas, “that when Charlie starts to get hungry, he’s only got one source of food.”
It took the young soldier a few moments to understand, but then he finally got it and he gasped, staring at the wall of rubble in new horror.