We ail agreed that it was so. And so we would go forth into the city, dressed in our mail and tattered tunics, looking for all the world like vagabonds come to sell our swords, as the knights' captain had suggested.
Our final preparations having been completed, Ymiru heaved a few great boulders over the cut into the mountain that Maram had made so that any passersby might not notice it. And then, standing inside the cave with the bodies of the men we had slain, we lit the torches. Their acrid, oily smoke filled the black cavity around us. Their flickering yellow flames gave enough light to show the cave's curving roof and black walls – and the tunnel at its far end: black and rectangular and opening like a gate into hell.
Holding a torch in one hand and my father's shield in the other, I led the way into it.
Ymiru, whose people had once bored this channel through hard rock, was little help here. He had told us all that he knew about this secret passage: that it wound its way beneath Argattha's first level long since abandoned by Morjin and the city's other denizens. Ymiru thought that the tunnel might give out in the old throne room or onto stairs leading to it. It must give out somewhere on the first level, he said. And from there, we could make our way up to the second level where people lived, and so up to the higher levels until we came to Morjin's new throne room on the seventh and highest level of the city.
In the dark tunnel, it was cold and close. Although it had been cut high enough for Ymiru to walk without stooping – barely – it was so narrow that we had to walk in single file. I moved forward slowly, not knowing what my torch would show in the curving, black passage ahead of me. Its walls, of greasy-looking basalt, seemed to press upon me from either side and crush the breath from my chest. The air was stale and smelled bad, having pocketed here for perhaps a thousand years. In its cloying moistness were the scents of decay, suffering and death.
Ymiru paced along just behind me, awkward in his new boots. Maram kept dose to him, followed by Master Juwain, Liljana, Atara and finally Kane. Their dread of this dark place was like a scent of its own that I could no more avoid than the torches' oily smoke. I smelled Maram s nervous sweat and the rancidness of the kalvaas in his mustache and beard. Atara was fighting hard to keep her spirit from being crushed away in the chilling gloom. And I sensed some dark thing eating at Kane's insides that dwelled even deeper than his hate.
We marched on for perhaps an eighth of a mile, stepping over broken boulders and the occasional crack through the tunnel's floor. The rock here, I thought, seemed to hold shrieks and screams ages old. Moisture clung to the tunnel's walls as if blood had been sweated and tortured from them. The slick foor ran with a trickle of water and other liquids that must have seeped down from the levels of the city above us. In places it pooled inches deep: a foul-smelling effluvia of metallic sludges, rotting garbage and human waste. As Ymiru slogged along, he admitted that he was very glad for his boot – as were we all.
We came to a place where the tunnd divided. Each fork, the right and the left, looked equally ominous. I turned to Ymim and asked, 'Do both these lead to the old throne room.'
'I don't know,' he told me, shaking his head. He patted the pack on his back, where he had stowed his father's map. 'I wish the living clay showed earth forms so small as these.'
I called for Atara to come up, and he pressed himself flat against the tunnel's wall to allow her room to squeeze by. She stood next to me at the fork in the tunnel, looking right and looking left.
'Which way, Atara?' I asked her 'Can you see our way through?'
She brought out her scryer's crystal and held it before her. And then without hesitation, she said, 'Right.'
As we resumed our journey through the dark, I wondered if she had simply chosen this direction at random to reassure us. Soon we came to a sudden rent through the tunnel's rock it split the ceiling and the walls, and ran through the floor deep into the earth. I almost tripped into this black chasm. Maram suggested sounding its depths with a dropped stone, but quickly thought the better of such recklessness. As the chasm was some yards across, I needed a running jump to clear it, as did Ymiru and Maram. And Master Juwain needed more than this. When it came his turn to make the leap, he fell a little short and only Maram, grabbing onto Master Juwain's arm, kept him from falling back into the blackness.
'Thank you,' Master luwain told him, his cheeks puffing from exer tion. With Maram, he stood at the chasm's edge, not daring to look back at it.
'You'er welcome, sir,' Maram said. 'Don't worry – I wouldn't let you die.'
His smile told me that he was very proud to have saved Master Juwain's life, as Ymiru had saved his.
When the others had each crossed the chasm and we stood safely on the other side, we set out again. We walked as quietly as we could though the stifling darkness. We came to other branchings in the tunnel and other cracks through it. One of these was so wide that it had been spanned by a narrow stone bridge. This arch seemed so worn and old that I feared it might crumble at the first footfall. And yet it bore me up and then Ymiru's considerably greater weight. After Maram had crossed over it, too, he stood holding his hand out as if to feel the air.
'It's warm,' he said. 'Ah, it's almost hot.'
I crowded back close to him, letting this upwelling of hot air blow across my face.
In its searing jets, I thought I heard the sound of beating iron, cracking whips and men crying out in pain.
'What lies beneath here?' I asked Ymiru.
'Only the mines, I think-'
'And how many levels are there to these?'
'To the mines there be no levels,' he said. He told us that the mines beneath Argattha had been tunneled like the twistings of a man's bowels, leading far down into the earth.
'But how far, then?'
'I don't know, Val,' he said. 'There be seven levels to the city, and each of them five hundred feet thick. It be said that the mines ran twice as deep as all the levels were high, together. And that was more than two thousand years ago.'
How far, I wondered? How far had Morjin come toward finding the dark currents in the earth that he sought and freeing the Lord of Death known as Angra Mainyu?
'Come, Val,' Ymiru said as we stood at the edge of this pit. He rested his gloved hand on my shoulder.. 'Do not look down – look up. We've still far to go.'
I nodded my head, and then waited for the others to cross the bridge, too. And then I led off again, thrusting the blazing torch ahead of me as I pushed forward deeper into Argattha.
After a while, the foul smell began to work at me and bum like a poison in my blood; the distant drip of water beat at my head like a relentless hammer. In places, air shafts broke through the tunnel's floor or ceiling. But these brought no relief against the oppressive darkness, only more bad smells, muffled cries and the slow slip of muck and mire working its way down into the earth. Although my torch gave little enough light, it was enough to warn away the rats that jumped out of the darkness in their panic to flee from us. Some of these were nearly as big as cats; their glowing red eyes were like hot coals as they scurried along with their claws scraping against rock – and more than once across my boots. The rapaciousness of these trapped, maddened creatures made me shudder. I wondered what they had here for food, but I did not really want to know.
The tunnel wound mostly toward the south, across more chasms, into the middle of the mountain. After about a mile, we came to another forking where the tunnel curved off toward the right and the left as if cut along the lines of a perfect circle. I was reluctant to go forward in either direction. Even Atara, when she came forward, seemed unable to decide which way to go.
'I don't know,' she said to me at last, shaking her head. 'You choose.'
'Very well, then,' I said. 'We'll go right.'
And so we did. But after a hundred yards, we came to another node and another choice of directions. Again, I led toward the right and we moved off, circling that way.
And so it went, the nodes coming one after another, the tunnel turning sharply west and then north, and then curving back south again. Thrice we came to dead ends and had to retrace our steps. We circled east for a way before the tunnel bent yet again, taking us back toward the north, the opposite of the way that we needed to go. Soon it became apparent that we had entered a labyrinth – and that we were lost within it.
'This is too much,' Maram said as we gathered in the space of one of the nodes. A hungry rat bolder than many, lunged at him, trying to bite a chunk out of his leg. He kicked it squealing away from him and muttered, 'Ah, this is like hell.'
