“I’m afraid not.”
Hadrian sat up. His clothes were wet. Around him droplets fell, cascading down the walls. Looking across the shaft, he could see a clear division between a bright level of ice and snow and a much darker level of damp stone. “It’s warmer,” he said.
“We need to keep going,” Royce told them. “The light is fading. Anyone want to do this holding a torch?”
“Try and find thicker ledges,” Alric told Wyatt.
“I find what I find.”
The lower they went, the darker it became, regardless of the daylight, which, to Hadrian’s dismay, was fading quickly. They dropped down four more ledges. Their efficiency grew with repetition, but their progress was being hampered by the failing light. The walls were black, while overhead the opening had changed from a brilliant gray to a sickly yellow, with one side dipping into a rosy purple as the sun began to set.
Arista was on the rope, climbing down, when he heard her scream. Hadrian’s heart skipped. He was holding the rope-had it wrapped around his waist-when he felt her weight jerk him.
“Arista!” he shouted.
“I’m all right,” she called up.
“Did you slip?” Alric yelled from farther below.
“I–I put my hand on a bat,” she said.
“Everyone quiet,” Royce ordered.
Hadrian could hear it too, a faint squeaking, but on a massive droning scale. That was followed by a hum, a vibration that bounced within the shaft until it grew to a thunder. The air moved with a mysterious wind, swirling and gusting.
“What’s going on?” Arista called out, her voice hard to hear behind the growing roar.
“Hang on!” Hadrian shouted back.
They felt a rushing movement, like an eruption that issued from below, as the world filled with the fluttering of endless wings and high-pitched squeals. Hadrian braced himself, holding tight to the rope, as Arista screamed once more and the shaft filled with a cloud of bats that swirled with the force of a cyclone.
With his head down, Hadrian clutched the rope, wrapping it tight around his forearm. Mauvin and Royce grabbed hold of him. Arista was not going anywhere.
In less than a minute the hurricane of bats passed by.
“Lower me down!” Arista called. “Before something else happens.”
He felt her touch down, and as he reeled up the harness, Hadrian looked up. The small patch of mauve sky was filled with a dark swirling line. A cloud of bats snaked like the tail of a serpent, twisting, looping, circling. Like a magic plume of smoke, they were mesmerizing to watch. Hadrian guessed there had to be millions.
Looking back down, he noticed there was a light below, a bright light that filled the shaft, revealing the glistening walls.
“What’s going on down there?” he called.
“I’m tired of not being able to see,” Arista yelled back.
“She’s got her robe glowing,” Alric said uncomfortably.
When Hadrian got down, he saw the princess perched on an outcropping of rock. Her legs dangled over the edge, scissoring in the air, her robe glowing white. Whenever she moved, the shadows shifted. Everyone stole repeated glances, as if it might be impolite to stare. Gaunt had no such reservation as he gaped, openly horrified.
On they went, following the same order, all of them doing their job with a rhythm. They traveled in silence except for the necessary calls of “down” and “clear.” It took five more descents before he heard Wyatt call up, “Stop! I’m at the bottom!”
“You’re still on the rope,” Hadrian shouted back, confused. “You haven’t touched down yet? You need more slack?”
“ No! No slack! I would prefer not to touch down.”
“River?” Arista asked.
“Nope, but it’s moving.”
“What is?”
“Can’t really tell. It’s too dark down here. Give me a minute to find a place to land.”
In time, they all descended to an island of rock that jutted up from the floor of the cavern. Even with Arista beside him, it was too dark for Hadrian to see clearly what lay around them. All he knew was that they stood on an island within a sea of dark movement. He smelled a foul odor and heard a soft chattering coming from the floor. The smell was very much like an old chicken coop. “What is it, Royce?”
“I really think you need to see this for yourself,” Royce replied. “Arista, can you turn that thing up?”
Before he finished his sentence, Esrahaddon’s robe increased in brilliance, a phosphorous light illuminating the entire base of the shaft. What they saw left them speechless. They were not actually at the bottom. They stood on the tip of an up-thrusted rock, tall enough to breach the surface of a monolithic pile of bat droppings. The cone- shaped mound of guano stood easily three hundred feet high. Every inch of it moved, as across its surface scurried hundreds of thousands of cockroaches.
“By Mar!” Mauvin exclaimed.
“That’s disgusting,” Alric said.
There was more there than cockroaches. Hadrian spotted something white and spidery darting across the surface-a crab, and there was not just one, but hundreds all scuttling along. There was a faint squeal lower down and he saw a rat. The rodent was scrambling to escape the pile as a horde of beetles swarmed it. The rat toppled and was pulled onto its back, where it floundered, struggling in the soft guano. It squealed again. Its feet, tail, and head quivered and thrashed above the surface as an endless mob of beetles pulled it down, until only the trembling, hairless tail was visible, and then it too vanished.
“ ‘Crawling, crawling, crawling. They eat everything,’ ” Myron quoted.
“Anyone want to try walking across that?” Royce asked.
Wyatt replied with an uncomfortable laugh, then said, “No, seriously, how do we get down?”
“What if we jump and run real fast?” Mauvin offered.
This idea garnered several grimaces.
“What if it’s not solid? Can you imagine it being so soft that you went under, like water?” Magnus muttered.
“You’re thinking something,” Hadrian said to Royce. “You saw this from above. You wouldn’t have come down if you didn’t have some kind of plan.”
He shook his head. “Not me, but I was hoping she would.” He gestured at Arista.
All eyes turned to the princess and she returned the looks with an expression of surprise and self-doubt.
“You need to provide us with a path or something,” Royce told her. “Some means of getting down the slope of this pile. There’s an opening over there, a crack in the wall-see it?” He pointed. “It will be tight, but I think we can get through. Of course, we’ll have to crawl, possibly even dig our way out. So really, anything you can do to distract the meat-eating beetles would be nice.”
She nodded and sighed. “I really don’t have a lot of experience at this.”
“You do what you can,” Hadrian told her.
“The only other alternative is Mauvin’s idea-we run for it and hope to get out before we’re completely eaten.”
Arista made a face and nodded again. “Everyone should stand behind me. I don’t know exactly what will happen.”
“What’s she gonna do?” Gaunt asked. “What’s going on?”
“Just do as she says,” Royce told him.
The princess took a position on the edge of the rock and faced the mound. The rest gathered behind her, shifting their feet so as not to fall. Arista stood with her arms at her sides, rotating her palms out toward the mound, and slowly, softly, she began to hum. Then the light of her robe went out.
Darkness swallowed them.
Their only reference point was the tiny circle of starlit sky that lingered overhead, and in the absence of sight,
