the stairs. He reached out and felt along first one side of the room, then the other. His hand struck something metallic that rattled, and he heard a faint gurgling as well. He sheathed his sword carefully, reached up, and felt the object he had discovered.
It was an oil lamp, still partly full, hanging from a hook.
Once he had found the lamp, it was a simple matter to light it. The wick was still in place, but cut off from the reservoir by an airtight metal lid that had to be unscrewed; even after he had worked the lid free and dipped the lower end of the wick into the oil, it remained so dry that it ignited almost immediately, only to flare up and burn mostly away before any of the fuel caught.
The oil had thickened with age, and after the first bright flame died away, the light was low and smoky, scarcely reaching above the remaining stub of the wick. Still, it was adequate for his purpose. He marveled that, even sealed, the oil had not all dried up long ago, and wondered whether the temple might not have been completely abandoned for as long as he had first supposed.
With his sword again naked in his right hand and the lamp slung in his left, he began his careful descent.
The staircase was much longer than Garth had first thought, and after about fifteen feet, the steps changed from the solid and unworn ones that he had expected from the condition of the street outside the temple to shorter, narrower treads worn to a slippery polish, sufficiently ancient and used that the center of each step was an inch or more below the ends. They were almost as difficult to negotiate as the steps at the city gate and made for very slow going.
Garth guessed that this change must indicate that he was below the city proper and entering the legendary crypts. When he finally reached the foot of the staircase, he paused to catch his breath and shine the light around; as he did, he thought he heard sounds above him. He dismissed the idea as absurd. He had just come through the temple and seen it to be completely empty; if he was, indeed, hearing anything from above, it could only be street noise, reflected down to him by some freak of acoustics.
He was in a rectangular room, long and relatively narrow, with side walls that sloped inward at the top and curved over to blend smoothly into the ceiling; the comers of the chamber were also curved. The floor was a curious uneven inlay of several different varieties of stone, and the ceiling was low overhead.
The walls and ceiling were gray, and the floor a maze of dull colors half-hidden by dust. The sound of the monstrous heartbeat, if heartbeat it actually was, was louder than ever.
There was a door in the far end; Garth flashed his lamp around, but could see no other entrance or exit, save for the staircase and the single door.
He strode the length of the chamber and pushed at the door, halfway expecting it to crumble to dust as the one in the upper temple had done. It did not; with a high-pitched creak and a flurry of disturbed dust, it swung open, revealing another chamber.
Garth stepped through, lamp held high. This second chamber was identical with the first, save that the walls and ceiling were a dull red instead of gray.
He had now descended at least thirty feet below street level and moved more or less due west, with only the single jog to the left at the top of the stair, since entering the temple. A rough estimate told him that he had come at least a hundred feet from the front pillars-which meant that he was now in or under the great stone outcroppings, since the temple itself had been no more than sixty feet from front to back.
That was very interesting indeed, he thought. He wondered if he might find his way under the lake, to the ruins on the far side.
He proceeded through the second chamber and into a third, this one walled and ceiled in dead black, the floor again a dust-covered polychrome. The door at the end of this chamber opened onto another staircase leading down; he followed it without hesitation.
It seemed to run on forever. He had been in crypts before, in the Orunian city of Mormoreth, but this stair appeared far longer than any he had previously encountered anywhere.
It was also straight, which might have added to its apparent length; the crypt stairs in Mormoreth had wound slightly back and forth, so that he had never been able to see their full length at one time. Here, though, he found it disconcerting to hold up the lamp and see step after step after step, stretching away into the distance both above and below him, both ends lost in the darkness beyond the reach of his feeble lamplight.
Finally, as the lamp swung forward, he glimpsed the lower end; he increased his speed as much as he dared, for the steps were as treacherous as the lower portion of the first set.
The stair ended in a short corridor, and that in turn led to another stair, this one ascending. Garth wondered whether he would find himself in the midst of the ruins beyond the lake.
He did not; the upward-bound steps ran only a tiny fraction of the distance he had just descended. Almost as soon as he reached the first step, he glimpsed the upper end.
A moment later he emerged into another room, away from the confining stone walls of the stairway, and paused to catch his breath again.
Again, he thought he heard noise behind him, but now it was almost drowned out by the slow beating ahead of him, a sound that had acquired a sinister, menacing note as he drew nearer its source. Something about it made him nervous.
He had not yet given much thought to what the beating might be; he had decided that it was a heartbeat without considering what that might mean. Now, as he stood in a passage that he judged to be several hundred feet below the level of Ur-Dormulk's streets, he wondered what he might find if he went on. Could there be a monster with a heart so great? If so, he would stand no more chance against it than a beetle. A mere mechanical dragon had been capable of killing him; how could he think to face a creature whose heartbeat could be heard half a mile away?
On the other hand, why would such a monster even notice him? He need not worry about being devoured; an overman could scarcely begin to feed the appetite of such a thing, and he could easily retreat into places where a behemoth could not reach him.
The idea of such a creature went against all his instincts, and he decided that it was far more likely that the sound was being artificially produced by some lost remnant of the outlawed cult, for reasons of its own. In any case, he was not about to turn back at this point. He held up the lamp.
He was in another long, narrow, low-ceilinged room, longer than the three on the upper level and walled in gray stone. Again there was a single door at the far end, yet this one was not a simple portal in a post-and-lintel frame, but an elaborate carved construction of several different woods, hung in a red stone arch embellished with golden tracery.
Garth approached cautiously; the ornate door, so different from the others, seemed almost threatening. He paused when he had reached it and put a hand to one of the wooden panels. It vibrated beneath his fingers with the slow, slow beating.
For a third time he thought he heard something behind him, the sound only detectable in the interval between beats, and lost thereafter in the throbbing he had followed for so far. He turned and looked back at the stairs, but saw nothing.
This new portal did not yield to a simple push, but the latch handle still moved freely; he lifted it and shoved the door wide.
Beyond lay a chamber unlike the others; although the walls curved into the ceiling in the same fashion, this room was circular rather than oblong. The walls were black, and the floor here was also black, made up of stones arranged in a spiral leading in toward the room's center.
It was what stood in the center, however, that was most different. A column of horn or ivory projected upward from the floor, yellowed with age but still almost white, tapering from a diameter of eighteen inches or so at the base to about a foot where it was cut off, three feet above the floor, to form a slanting surface. In the center of this tilted top, a single drop of some reddish-black substance was very slowly oozing forth.
A circular trough surrounded this strange column, and Garth saw that there was a trickle of the red-black goo down the side of the column and a shallow pool of it in the trough.
He saw no way in or out of the chamber, save for the single arched door. Garth entered cautiously, lamp and sword both held high.
There was nothing to look at but the column and its curious issue, so he studied that. As he watched, a fat black drop rolled sluggishly from the center of the column's top to the edge, joining the slow trickle. Its
