My little light struggled to keep the gloom at bay, illuminating the bridge for seven paces ahead and seven paces behind. But there wasn’t enough light, and I felt like a little bug stuck in a demon’s pocket. The bridge had a very slight incline, and I gradually moved lower and lower.
Far, far ahead of me a series of dense white flashes flared up in rapid succession. From where I was they looked like the blinking of a white-hot grain of sand. But that was quite enough to make me stop and put both hands round the magical light to make quite sure that it wouldn’t be seen.
Another sequence of whitish sparks—they were more than a thousand yards away. I gazed into the gloom for three long, weary minutes, but no more flashes came. Whatever Lafresa had been up to over there (I was certain this was one of her tricks), it was all over now.
I sat down with my legs crossed and waited for another ten minutes just to be on the safe side. A perfectly reasonable precaution—I didn’t want the Master’s servants to suspect anything; let them think I was still stuck on the other side of the Doors.
After that I wasn’t at all afraid the men would see the light—the distance between me and Balistan Pargaid’s brigade was too great, and my little light and Lafresa’s magical flashes, were like a glowing ember and a forest fire.
After walking for about twenty minutes, I started hearing a low, regular drone. The kind of sound that alarmed bees make in their hive, or water makes when it falls from a great height. The straight bridge, which held up so mysteriously under the pressure of time, sloped down almost imperceptibly, so that now I was about three hundred yards lower than the Doors. And the longer I walked, the louder the obscure drone became.
The droning gradually became a rumble, the rumbling became a bellow, and the bellowing became a roar. The air was filled with a feeling of freshness and fine droplets of water that I could hardly see. Now I knew what was there up ahead.
A waterfall. Just then I didn’t have the time or the desire to figure out how it could have got there. It started getting noticeably brighter. Walls appeared out of the phantasmagorical darkness, glowing faintly with a dead, pale green light. They came together somewhere way up high where the uneven ceiling sparkled.
The roaring became indescribable and the walls moved in, until they were only forty yards away from the bridge. The moisture hanging in the air settled on my clothes like dew and chilled my skin. I thought the rumbling of the falling water would split my head in half. The bridge became wet, and the stone glittered in the light of my little magical lamp. Thank Sagot it wasn’t slippery, or I would have gone tumbling into the abyss at the first careless step.
Another two hundred yards, and there they were—a waterfall on the right and a waterfall on the left. Huge heads, thirty yards high, appeared on the walls. They were grotesque, half bird and half bear, their beak-mouths were wide open, and the torrents of water were roaring out of them. The black water, barely visible in the pale green light of the cave, roared and raged and it went hurtling downward.
Sagot! As I walked past the waterfalls roaring like a hundred thousand demons of the abyss, I was afraid I would go deaf forever (I forgot all about the earplugs I’d brought along) or that the torrent of water would sweep me away. I felt as if I could reach out my hand and touch one of them. And those familiar half bird, half bear heads looked as if they could strike a stranger down, or at least give him such a scare that he wet his pants. But my pants were already wet anyway, like all the rest of my clothes.
The waterfalls of the underground river were behind me now, their roar was fading away. The walls parted again and their pale green light died, inviting the gloom back in.
Darkness take me, but I was monstrously tired, and I settled down right there on the bridge for a bite to eat. I had to take my soaking clothes off and wring them out, too—I was shivering and shuddering after my involuntary bath in the spray of the waterfalls. After I’d got my outfit into more or less decent condition, I turned to the needs of my stomach and took out a soaking biscuit. My light blinked one last time and went out. I swore and lit up a new one. How long had I been staggering across this bridge? By my calculations, almost three days had passed since I first entered Hrad Spein, and I was still only somewhere between the second and third levels.
After a short rest I had to start moving again. By this stage the bridge was no longer straight; it had twisted into a spiral, increasing the speed of my descent. After what seemed like an eternity the walls moved in again, the bridge took a final turn, and there before me was the way out, or rather, the way in to the third level.
A hall.
I can’t even find the words to describe what the light showed me. I only had to give the right command, and the circle of light expanded to forty paces (then I could see everything really well, but the life of the magical lantern was shortened by several hours). Nothing I’d seen in Hrad Spein so far could compare with the first hall of the third level.
I was entering the level of the elves and the orcs, which had been created without any involvement by men. Cracked stones, basalt and granite, all the crude statues and coffins of roughly dressed stone had been left behind above me, and here … Here the scene before me was one of absolutely astounding, incomparable beauty.
The color scheme of the hall was black and bright scarlet. A very beautiful combination if you looked closely. Black walls with red veins and flecks, elegant black semi-arches with red ornamentation that looked like orcic letters, a ceiling where the red lines and strokes merged to form the image of a huge cobweb. A floor laid with matte black slabs, with the same red veins as on the ceiling, with a fine seam of red between each slab. The light of my little lamp set the hall sparkling and gave the place a truly magical, fairy-tale appearance.
Now I really was in the Palaces—once they were famous throughout all Siala, and even gnomes and dwarves came to Hrad Spein to gaze at the beauty of the burial halls. But those times are long gone now, together with the Age of Achievements.
Hrad Spein became unsafe, the road to it was abandoned, and those who decided to come here were few and far between. But elves and orcs, dwarves and gnomes, men and goblins—they all remember what lies hidden beneath the green crowns of the Forests of Zagraba, they all tell their grandsons legends, fables, and myths about the former magnificence of the underground palaces. After the evil of the bones of the ogres and others unknown awoke on the lower levels, the place was left deserted and dead.
For some reason the third level was pitch dark. There was none of the magic of glowing walls that I’d become used to, and if not for my lights I would have had to grope my way along. My steps could hardly be heard, but I made myself walk carefully and reduced the power of the light to its normal level. No point in shining like the sun—Balistan Pargaid’s lads could be somewhere nearby.
The black-and-red hall was followed by another just like it, from which three openings led into another three exactly like the first. And from each of those there were openings to another three. And so on to infinity. The maze was as complex as anything on the upper levels. In every space one or another small part of this frozen black-and- scarlet beauty was picked out by the light of my little lamp and then disappeared again, shrouding itself in the night. A frozen column here, an elegant arch there.
How many halls had I seen in all these hours? If I hadn’t had the papers from the abandoned Tower of the Order, I would have lost my way long ago in the cunningly contorted labyrinths. Probably that was what had happened to the servants of the Master, who were now an hour and a half ahead of me. If not for Lafresa, I would have written all the lads off as candidates for the darkness. But the blue-eyed woman had some kind of inner instinct, and even without a map she was able to find the right way through the labyrinth of the Palaces of Bone.
Every hall on the third level was an immense tomb. The latest burial sites of the elves and the orcs were on this level. Tombs first appeared here in the final years of the Dead Truce, which both races had observed for many thousands of years—but everything comes to an end. Blood was spilled, and the truce collapsed. The elves erected the Doors, shutting the orcs (and themselves) out from the easy route to the graves of their ancestors.
Unlike men, the older races didn’t put up memorial gravestones, they simply built the dead (or their ashes) into the walls, and the structures of the graves were not visible, so anyone who didn’t know would never have guessed that the bones of orcs and elves who had died hundreds or even thousands of years ago lay behind a skillful piece of molding or a picture or a column.
The third level, and then the fourth.
And all of this in absolute pitch blackness. I had been in Hrad Spein for six days. I ate, slept, and went on my way. Walking through halls, corridors, and galleries. Ever onward and downward, deeper and deeper.… Not a single
