me, spraying out crumbs of stone, as if some enraged giant was pummelling them with his fists. But what kind of strength did it take to smash a stone column as thick as a hundred-year-old oak?
I darted into the hall where the dead guardsman was lying, skipped over his body, ran the whole length of the room, and stopped at the far doorway. Whatever the beast might be, the exit from the hall of columns was too narrow for it. The footsteps came closer, but I swear by Sagot that I couldn’t see anyone!
I heard that terrible rasping sound again, and then a large section of the wall beside the entrance to the hall of columns groaned as if it were alive, and collapsed in a heap of rubble.
The invisible monster stepped on the guardsman’s skeleton, reducing it to fine dust, and then came in my direction, with the obvious intention of doing the same to good old Harold.
I believe I actually squealed before I turned and ran without thinking about which way I should turn or worrying about getting lost. I just wanted to save my skin. I could still hear that terrible booming noise and the rumble of collapsing walls behind me. I dashed into a corridor, turned left, then right, then left again.…
Long after the monster’s rumbling faded away in the distance, I was still too frightened to stop running. I only realized I was lost when I didn’t have any more strength left to run.
Cursing the world and everything in it, I sat down on the floor and leaned back against a sarcophagus. Come what may, but Harold wasn’t going to run anymore. The longer I spent dashing through the dim corridors, the less chance there was that I would ever find my way back. The shoulder that had been hit by a fragment of the column was aching painfully. I was obviously going to have a massive bruise there. What I ought to do right now was take a rest, catch my breath, and think about where exactly I was.
What had really happened was that everything had begun just as calmly and innocently as on the first level, and I had committed the unforgivable sin of relaxing too much because I wasn’t expecting any trouble. Apart from losing my way, I’d lost the rope as well. And without the cobweb I couldn’t get back out, because Milady Lafresa had smashed the staircase and there was no way I could get across that eight-meter gap. The odds on croaking in Hrad Spein had suddenly shortened dramatically. There was no point in trying to retrieve the rope—I wasn’t certain I could find the way back and I didn’t really feel like sticking my nose into the Wall Smasher’s lair again.
So, the way back into the sunshine was closed off. I had no doubt at all that there were other ways out of the Palaces of Bone. At the very least, there were four main entrances. The west entrance was somewhere in the middle of Zagraba, but that was hundreds of leagues away. There were another two entrances near spurs of the Mountains of the Dwarves, but after the evil awoke in the burial chambers, the dwarves had blocked off the entrances closest to their kingdom just to be on the safe side. So I could forget about the main entrances. But apart from them, there had to be less-important entrances as well. There had to be, but would I be able to find them?
Wandering aimlessly round the second level and clinging to the elusive shadow of a hope wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I took the maps out of my bag and started poring over them in the dim light. It took me more than half an hour to find an old stairway leading up to the surface from the first level. According to my calculations, provided that the stairway had survived all these thousands of years, to get to it from the Doors I would have to walk two leagues on the second level and five on the first. A long, long way, but it could have been worse.
Well then, after (that is,
The most important problem I had to face now was that I had no idea which part of the second level I was in. In my panic-stricken race against the Wall Smasher, I had completely lost my sense of direction, and now only the maps could help me find the right way to go. I had to find some distinctive and unusual hall, then locate it on the map and take my bearings.
An easy enough little task at first sight, but in practice it turned out to be very far from simple. In this sector all the halls and corridors were very similar. Half-light, graves, and hundreds of gargoyles. The longer I wandered through the stone labyrinth of this vast mausoleum, the more desperate I became.
Hall, corridor, room, intersection, hall, hall, corridor, half-light, and gargoyles. Those cursed monsters with the ghoulish faces affected my nerves far more badly than a hundred goblin jesters high on charm-weed. My legs were aching, I had to take another break and have a bite to eat. I was still somewhere on the level of men, but there wasn’t a single sign or mark anywhere on the walls. I had been staggering around Hrad Spein for a day and a half now, but I still hadn’t reached the Doors. And Lafresa was still on the loose somewhere, with the Master’s servants. It would be highly unpleasant to bump into them just at the wrong moment.
Finally, when I was just about ready to start howling out loud, I came out into a huge hall where all the sarcophaguses were arranged in the form of an immense eight-pointed star. On closer inspection, the hall also proved to be star-shaped, only it had five points.
I had to get the maps out again. I found the star hall fairly quickly—I’d have had to be blind not to spot it. But when I traced the route from there to the Doors I gave a low whistle—I’d really gone a long, long way off track. So now I had a long walk ahead of me. And this route looked far more dangerous than the one the magicians of the Order had marked on the map—there was nothing to show the locations of the traps or any other pleasant surprises that might be in store for me. Everything that I’d been giving such a wide berth could turn up right under my very nose now. There was no point in retracing my steps—I was so far astray that the walk back and the onward journey to the third level would be far longer than the route from here to the Doors. And not for a moment did I forget about the monster that had almost flattened me into the floor. I didn’t want to end up anywhere near those feet again!
I set off, every now and then cursing the damned magicians who had hidden the Rainbow Horn so far down, the builders of the Palaces of Bone who had created this endless maze, monsters that wouldn’t sit still in their corners, and myself, for tying the cobweb rope on my belt so badly.
After walking through forty-three more halls, I ran into a trap, but fortunately it had already been activated. A short section of corridor with a hole where the floor ought to have been. A pit about three yards deep, with sharp steel spikes set thickly across its bottom. And lying on the bottom was a skeleton with spikes sticking up through its ribs like young saplings. The poor fellow had failed to notice the trap and paid with his life.
The problem here was that Harold, unfortunately, was not a flea. Even if I took a good run up, I wouldn’t be able to jump across a gap of more than fifteen yards. The harsh reality was that I would tumble into the pit halfway across.
A dead end.
There was no way around it, I had to get across that pit or waste another day going back and looking for another route to the Doors.
A close study of the gap where the floor had been revealed that there were long, wide slots in the wall that could easily hold the flagstones that had disappeared. Did that mean there was some kind of concealed mechanism and, if it could be activated, the stones would move back into place over the pit, giving me a chance to carry on?
It seemed likely.
After further investigation of the scene I noticed a rectangular block of stone protruding from the ceiling. There was the answer to the riddle. Only it was so far away from me that it might as well have been on the moon, especially if you took into account the fact that the cobweb-rope was irretrievably lost.
But I still had my crossbow. I took aim and pressed the trigger. The bolt struck a spark from the ceiling beside the block and bounced off, falling down into the pit. All right, so we’d have to try a different approach. I lay down on my back so that the projecting section of the ceiling was right above my head and held my weapon with both hands.
The block sank back smoothly and silently into the stone, until it was invisible. Something in the wall started humming quietly, and then the slabs of stone slid out of their recesses and started moving very slowly toward each other. I didn’t wait for them to come together and form an uninterrupted surface—it was far too likely that the trap would be rearmed.
