capable of serious exploration. Look at your companions. Raphael is a boy. My husband has been waylaid by natural disaster and has a leg that rough terrain will ruinate.
'Of the three remaining, you are all marvelous gentlemen, with over two hundred years of experience among you. Those years, though, will become heavier as the climbs grow steep and the tunnels long. But I am not here to discourage anyone from a little jaunt, in which you can eat things that are bad for you and get your armor dirty.'
Bayard looked at Brandon in amused consternation. It Kerned they had forgotten all provisions.
'Indeed,' Enid continued, 'something
Enid seated herself firmly at the foot of the steps, smiled glamorously at the assembled Knights and retainers, and announced: 'So, my dear. And so, my father. And so to all of you. I shall go.'
Marigold and Raphael smiled in unison.
'… and all of us will abide with you through the duration.'
The older men gasped at the effrontery. The younger men remained silent, and soon the cellar was altogether quiet, the faint sound of water dripping somewhere along the far wall, and the shuffling sound of Sir Robert's feet as slowly he moved back into the light to join the rest of the party.
Bayard began to laugh.
'Begging your pardon, sir?' Brandon inquired nervously, jostling the big Knight draped over his shoulder.
'Did you know, Sir Robert, that I married your daughter for her temperament?' Bayard asked finally.
'What a surprise,' Sir Robert replied brusquely, folding his arms.
'Eight is a lucky number, my dear,' Bayard said, 'and the three of you will expand our number, and, it is hoped, our luck. And you are entitled, by inheritance and, more importantly, by simple fairness, to know what has befallen your estate. I shall expect you, however, to follow my orders implicitly.'
Beside her husband now, Enid crouched, staring intently down the long tunnel behind the collapsed wall.
Gileandos alone was interested in going inside. He took the lantern from Sir Andrew's hand and stepped slowly through the fissure. Suddenly he stopped short, for deep in the tangled darkness ahead of them, something rumbled deeply.
'What might that be?' Bayard asked, his voice sinking to a natural hush, as a trained soldier's will at a distant sight of the enemy's lines.
Gileandos scrambled from the passageway and crouched behind the Knights, trembling.
The others shook from their revery and listened down the musty, root-clotted corridor.
'Can't hear a damn thing,' Andrew declared, which surprised nobody. The old man's growing deafness became more famous the longer he stayed at Castle di Caela.
'A door opening above us?' Brandon asked, but all of them knew that was wishful thinking. Sir Robert shook his head.
'It's coming from beneath the far tower. No cellar or dungeon in those parts.'
'Hand me that lantern, Gileandos,' Sir Andrew insisted, stepping boldly into the fissure. 'All you can light from there is the hem of our cloaks. And take courage, man! For at its worst, it is no doubt the product of nothing more than the altogether natural workings of the elements.'
Gileandos rose slowly, timidly. He was obviously not consoled by science.
Without another word, Andrew, Robert, and Bayard drew their swords. Gileandos raised the lantern, and the procession into the black roots of Castle di Caela began.
The world beneath Castle di Caela was wet and hollow.
At least, so it seemed to the Lady Enid as she walked behind her husband, who was propped on the stout right shoulder of Sir Brandon Rus, who plodded dutifully ahead, clutching a lantern in his left hand.
Hollow, and also confusing. It was a world in which one could become quickly and forever lost. The network of tunnels branched and doubled back on themselves, as elaborate as an anthill or a hive. For that was what came to mind — some kind of lair or warren. It was not the kind of tunnelry born of the seepage of water, the shifting of earth. There was something more intentional in all of this, more designed, as if it had been burrowed by something menacing.
Except that there was no dreadful smell, no hot stink of terror or panic or lust or simple sleep or stirring or hunger. The smell of the tunnels was the smell of something remote and unearthly.
If nothing had a smell, Enid thought, it would smell like this.
Bayard wished he had not given in, Enid knew. He wished he had put down some masculine boot and sent his wife back up the cellar stairs to light and safety. His father-in-law would have supported him. Indeed, none of the Knights would have stood against his decision.
But he chose to be fair, chose faith in Lady Enid's resources, in the simple rules of justice and reason, in the Measure and Oath the way he had always read them.
Now she was in for the duration, for any danger. Because of this, the poor man was worried to distraction.
The lantern dipped in Brandon's hand, and quickly the Knights recovered their fragile, shared balance. Enid and Raphael and Marigold followed, their cloaks wrapped tightly against the cool still air and intrusive damp.
Behind them, the other three straggled and splashed through roots and rubble and tilting shadow. Already the shallow breathing and the grunting and the occasional brilliant oath leapt like sparks out of the shadows.
All at once, the party came to a juncture where the tunnel branched. Without hesitation, they took the left branch, which sloped downward past two small eddies of water circling beneath where they had stood but a moment before. Behind them, the old men followed laboriously. Now the tunnel circled back on itself and back yet again, descending in a tight spiral, its earthen walls giving way, surprisingly, to walls of hewn stone as Bayard and Brandon led the party deeper below the castle.
Sir Robert swore he knew nothing of this lower masonry.
'It's before my time,' he declared. 'Before the castle itself, unless I am mistaken.'
Bayard reached across Brandon, took up the lantern, and raised it high, until its light tumbled onto the crumbled bricks.
Strange letters were scrawled across their surface.
'The spidery hand of magic,' Gileandos whispered reverently, and Sir Andrew rolled his eyes.
'Gileandos, you say that every time you find something you can't read.'
Bayard looked more closely at the writing. 'Plainsman, I'd wager by the shape of the letters. Other than that, I'm lost.'
For a moment, the party collected itself before the wall in question. Each of the Knights squinted, mumbled, and conceded he could not read it either. Gileandos crouched behind his companions, his mind far from magic, listening no doubt for animals and geysers and rockslides. The other lantern, his responsibility, flickered and dimmed because his constant, nervous tumblings with its mechanism had retracted the wick.
'Look!' Gileandos exclaimed, holding the sputtering lantern aloft. 'We are faced with a shortage of air down here!' The Knights looked at one another curiously.
'The time has come for hard decisions,' Gileandos babbled on, pointing frantically to the faint glow in the lantern globe as some kind of mad evidence. 'One of us will have to… give his life so the others can breathe.' He glanced into each puzzled face around him, looking, no doubt, for a volunteer.
'Gileandos, are you having trouble breathing?' Sir Andrew asked coldly.
'Quick, sir. There's little time remaining, if my calculations-'
'Damn your calculations! I asked you a simple question, man. Are you having trouble breathing?'
Gileandos coughed, stammered, then shook his head.
'Then I would suggest we hold off on slaughtering our ranks. Meanwhile, you might see to extending the wick in that contraption we've been foolish enough to put you in charge of.'
Shamefaced, Gileandos slinked into a corner, leaving his companions in an orange half-light, framed by gloom
