A grunt cut off the gibberish when Dan’s boot slammed into the prick’s chest. The kick lifted the sorcerer off his feet and sent him sailing over the cliff. Arms spinning frantically, he flew into the gorge and plummeted, screaming into the green maw.

  Far below, the man’s screams cut off abruptly.

  Turning, Dan saw that his girls had made short work of the acolytes, who both lay dead on the ground.

  The naked girl twisted, whimpering, one arm held by Ula, the other by Nadia.

  “You’re okay now,” Holly said. “You’re safe. The acolytes can’t hurt you.”

  Ula and Nadia released the girl. She backpedaled away from them, wild-eyed, obviously still lost to the panic of having nearly been sacrificed.

  “Whoa,” Dan said, placing a hand on her back and stopping her. “Careful. You almost fell over the cliff. You’re all right now. We saved you.”

  The girl turned toward him with a smile. For a split second, he’d thought that she had come to her senses. Then he really saw the smile.

  The smile was both condescending and eager. And the eyes above it were completely, unutterably insane.

  “You can’t stop the living darkness!” she screeched. “Mother!”

  “Hey!” Dan shouted, reaching for her, but he was too late.

  The girl jumped from the cliff and disappeared into the mists, cackling madly until the thing below snapped its jaws, ending all laughter and noise, save for the rending of meat and snapping of bone.

  “What the fuck?” he breathed. “She was so scared. Why would she do that?”

  “I’m guessing that her being completely fucking insane had something to do with it,” Nadia said.

  Ula laughed. She might not have understood Nadia’s words, but the situation obviously hit the warrior woman right in the funny bone.

  Surprisingly, Dan felt a grin creeping onto his own face. Sure, a young girl had just died here—two, actually, along with three other people—and that was bad. But on the other hand, she had undoubtedly been, as Nadia had put it, completely fucking insane… and an acolyte to boot. Ultimately she was better as a punch line than a person.

  “Among the other acolytes, she had been terrified,” Holly said, “but we ‘heathens’ apparently snapped her out of her terror and gave her a second chance at glory.”

  “Whatever they’re feeding down there,” Dan said, “sounds kind of, oh, I don’t know… really fucking huge?”

  “I tried to tell you guys,” Nadia said. “But you insisted on helping the elves.”

  “Save it,” Holly said. “You can get your I-told-you-so’s if we survive this.”

  “I’m thinking there might be a better place to enter the crevasse than from this feeding platform,” Dan said.

  They moved down the rift perhaps a quarter of a mile and prepared to rappel.

  Dan ran the rope around the base of a tree and tossed both ends over the cliff. Facing the tree, he wrapped both ropes behind his back. Then he stepped over them, bunched the ropes together, pulled them back through his legs, and brought them around his right side.

  Backing up to the cliff, he set his heels on the edge.

  Nadia was already in place. A minute later, Holly and Ula were also ready.

  Dan leaned back against the ropes, letting his ass hang out over the void.

  Everything felt good… except, of course, for the fact that he was rappelling into the misty lair of something that devoured humans like a great white shark gobbling seals.

  32

  The Descent

  When everyone was rigged up, Dan stepped off the cliff. He wasn’t afraid of heights, but that first step made his stomach lurch.

  He leaned back into his makeshift harness and worked the rope as he walked down the face of the sheer cliff, hating the sound of the debris falling away below him.

  Maybe they had moved far enough from the feeding zone that the monster wouldn’t notice. Maybe the thing had shitty hearing. Maybe it was full.

  Or maybe you’re going to rappel straight into its mouth, he thought.

  But a minute later, they all came to rest on a ledge of stone perhaps fifty feet down the face of the cliff. The bedrock had split apart jaggedly here, leaving a shelf of rock that formed a ledge several inches in width. Holding the rope, Dan crouched and patted the cliff beneath the path. It felt solid.

  He imagined Willis sitting at the table back in their apartment, rolling percentile dice.

  “Everyone ready?” he whispered.

  The girls nodded, untangling themselves from their homemade harnesses.

  From here, they would have to follow the ledge and hope they found an entrance to the catacombs before the monster found them. Stepping away from the rope, inches from the void made Dan’s stomach lurch again.

  Then Nadia was beside him.

  “I’m stepping around you,” she said.

  “What? No.” The ledge was only six or eight inches wide. Beyond that, the chasm dropped away for Crom only knew how far.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m the best climber.” And then, not waiting for his permission, she was moving around him, pressing her body into his. “Don’t let me fall, husband.”

  Dan tensed, holding still as she slid past him. There was nothing to hold onto, nothing to grip if she started to fall.

  Nadia’s lips brushed across his as she passed. Then she was on the other side, whispering laughter.

  “You’re crazy,” he breathed, and followed her into the green mist.

  They moved slowly along the ledge, inching toward the monster—and hopefully an entrance to the catacombs.

  Just keep tiptoeing along, sneak past the thing, and slip into the caves.

  At points, the lip of stone widened or grew narrower.

  Nadia stopped. “We’re losing our path,” she whispered. Beneath their feet, the ledge had narrowed to perhaps four inches.

  “What do we do, turn around?”

  “We could try rappelling lower,” Holly suggested.

  “I’m going to keep going,” Nadia said. She inched slowly along the narrowing lip of stone and disappeared around the corner. Dan held his breath, praying to Crom that she wouldn’t fall.

  Nadia’s voice called back, a whisper in the mist. “Come on. Be careful going around the corner. You have about an inch. And there’s one section where you have to step over a gap. Just a couple of feet. Then it gets wider again.”

  Great, Dan thought, and relayed Nadia’s message to Holly, who translated for Ula.

  Dan pressed his back against the raw stone and shimmied along the tiny ledge, heart hammering in his chest, very much aware of the pebbles falling away—and even more aware of the fact that he never heard these pebbles hit bottom.

  Shuffling around the corner, he had to arch his back to navigate around a bulge in the cliff, balancing with only the edge of one foot and the heel of the other. Then he came to the gap in the ledge.

  Nadia waited on the other side, a few feet back from the broken section. “Just hop across,” she said, “and grab onto me.”

  Dan nodded and forced himself to take a deep breath. He looked down at the broken ledge. A straight drop into mist and almost certain death.

  So be it, he thought, and hopped across the void. He landed it, no problem. Nadia gave his arm a squeeze and pulled him over so that Holly could jump across.

  Holly landed with all the ease and grace of a cat. When Ula jumped, however, a bit of the ledge crumbled away, and for a growling half-second, she wobbled on the brink.

  Holly grabbed her, Dan grabbed Holly, Nadia grabbed Dan, and thank Crom, they held on.

  A short distance later, the stone lip widened into a broad shelf.

  Dan unsheathed his sword. “I’m in front again,” he said, slipping past Nadia, who rolled her eyes but didn’t protest. Each of them had their strengths.

  Despite the much wider walkway, Dan stayed close to the cliff. The extra space was nice, but he didn’t trust it. The girls didn’t, either, apparently. They followed single file, staying just as close to the stone wall as he was.

  The path started angling downward. Visibility was completely dependent upon the luminescent fog, which roiled out of the depths like smoke from an inferno. The air was colder, and the chasm was full of a strange, unpleasant smell, somehow chemical and animal all at the same time. The smells of shit and decaying flesh joined the mix, making Dan feel like gagging.

  He rounded a corner, and the path opened onto a wide stone platform, easily ten feet across. The mists thinned, swirling like fog in a breeze. Some kind of draft was pulling the mist toward Dan’s right.

  Dan spotted a scattering of small stones glowing green upon rocky ground. Then the mists swirled, breaking apart for a second, and Dan saw what the glowing stones really were.

  The crystal rod, he realized with a jolt of apprehension. The one the spellcaster pointed at me. It lay shattered on the ground at Dan’s feet, the larger shards catching and reflecting light from the surrounding fog.

  But that meant that they had reached—

  A drop of warm water splattered off his cheek. He wiped his face, held out his hand, and saw a crimson smear on his fingers.

  Looking up, he saw the face of the dead sorcerer staring down at him with a shocked expression on his green-tinged face.

  Dan jerked backward with surprise.

  The man’s broken body hung from a jagged horn of stone jutting out overhead, and his empty eyes stared down from no more than two feet above Dan’s head.

  A lightning bolt of dread sizzled through Dan. They were standing directly below the spot where the acolytes had been feeding the monster.

  Crom.

  They were standing in the monster’s feeding zone.

  Nadia and Ula glanced warily toward the void. Dan didn’t have to ask what they were feeling. The monster was somewhere out there, perhaps just below this ledge, waiting for its next meal.

  Holly’s eyes followed the drifting mist, and a smile crept onto her beautiful face. She pointed.

  Dan looked in that direction. A second later, the swirling mist afforded him a glimpse of a yawning black mouth in the stone face of the cliff.

  An opening into the catacombs!

  They had done it. They had made it.

  Then Dan was falling, his legs pitching him sideways, away from the rift, his body reacting before his mind even understood that something was happening.

  A wall of darkness roared up out of the lower depths of the chasm and closed around the dead sorcerer with a loud snap.

  One second, the acolyte was hanging there, staring out from dead eyes and dripping blood on passersby like some kind of undead practical joker. The next he was completely gone, vanished into the pillar of living darkness that had rushed up out of the mists and which reared back now, a column of pure darkness towering thirty feet overhead like a gigantic serpent.

  “Run!” Dan shouted and thrust his sword into the otherworldly monster. His weapon plunged into the beast, but slowed quickly as the flesh closed around it, gripping the blade like hardpacked clay.

  The beast roared, shaking the chasm. Debris rained down.

  Dan yanked hard, trying to pull his sword free.

  Running past, the girls shouted for him to follow, but he couldn’t let the thing have his sword.

  Bellowing a war cry, Dan hauled back mightily, ripping the sword free and stumbling away from the roaring beast. He turned his stumble into a run—and not a second too soon, as the pillar of blackness slammed down, smashing into the ground where Dan had been standing only a second before.

  The ground shook beneath Dan’s feet. Ahead of him, the girls disappeared into the cave.

  Behind him the beast blasted an insane, warbling screech, and Dan could hear the monster rushing after him, hear its massive body racing across the ground.

  He hurtled into the cave at a full sprint. The beast smashed into the cliff behind him, too big to follow them inside. The cave shook with impact. A section of cliff-side stone shattered and crashed down at the mouth of the cave, closing it off from the chasm and, thankfully, keeping the roaring monster outside.

  “That was close,” Dan panted.

  He could hear the girls breathing but could see nothing in the absolute darkness of the cave.

  Then he heard a tick and a scrape, and a fountain of sparks sprayed in the darkness. Seconds later, a torch huffed to life in Nadia’s hand, bringing the passageway into view.

  They were standing in a corridor of raw stone, wide enough for two of them to pass side by side and just tall enough that Dan could stand straight without banging his head. He pulled out a torch of his own and lit it against Nadia’s.

  “I really hope there’s another way out of here,” Nadia said. “Even if rocks weren’t blocking this passage, it would be nice to find one that wasn’t guarded by the biggest monster in whole universe.”

  Holly unrolled the map her mother had drawn and held it close to the light. “I’m not sure yet exactly where we are. Maybe here,” she said, jabbing the center of the map. “We’re close,” she said and tapped The Pool of Dreams.

  Behind them, the pile of stones blocking the mouth of the cave shifted. Rocks tumbled down, clattering onto the floor of the cave, as a small opening appeared at the top of the cave in.

  The small opening widened seconds later as a tentacle of living darkness shoved through the gap and swung back and forth, busting apart the pile and shoving rocks aside.

  “Oh shit!” Dan shouted. “It can change shapes. It’s coming after us!”

  33

  Run!

  They charged deeper into the catacombs. Not knowing what nasty surprises might be waiting for them, Dan took the lead, his torch fluttering as he ran. They rounded a corner, and the passageway angled downward, taking them deeper into the earth.

  Far behind them, the beast roared, sounding triumphant.

  Oh Hades, Dan thought. How fast could the thing move?

  The passageway intersected another. Dan charged straight across, not wanting to slow down even enough to change directions, but Holly called after him. “This way!”

  He whirled and chased after the girls as they plunged down the other passageway.

  A rumbling filled the passageway. Holding the torch aloft, Dan lurched to a stop. Terror punched him in the chest.

  A wall of pure darkness was rushing toward him. It filled the entire passageway, from side to side and floor to ceiling, like a raging flood of carnivorous tar.

  Dan chased after the girls. They must have run around a bend in the passage, because he could no longer see their torch.

  His own fluttering torch bobbed up and down, filling the passage with crazy, flashing strobes that only intensified the nightmarish moment. In the uncertain light, he stumbled over a stone and slammed into the wall but kept to his feet and sprinted on.

  “Dan!” Holly’s voice called.

  Rounding a bend, he saw their torch and heard their garbled screams far ahead. He couldn’t make out the words, partly because he was breathing so hard and partly because the passage behind him filled with a loud roaring, like the blast of a train rushing along subway rails, filling the tunnel.

  Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the wall of darkness rushing around the bend. It gave another deafening blast and hurtled toward him.

  Please, Crom, please!

  Dan sprinted as fast as he could, pumping his powerful arms and legs, huffing air, straining forward, his boots pounding off the stony ground as he raced toward the girls. Closer, closer now, closer, and he could see them shouting and gesturing, see them but no longer hear them as their voices were drowned out by the great beast thundering along behind him, shaking the passageway as it drew nearer and nearer. Debris rained down on Dan, and dust filled the subterranean corridor.

  He watched the girls leap to the side, disappearing one after another. First Holly, then Nadia, and finally Ula, her yellow eyes huge, waving for him to follow, fear and desperation obvious on her face.

  At the last second, she too ducked aside, and Dan followed, diving into an adjacent passageway. The stony ground skinned his elbows and knees, but he was so full of adrenaline that he didn’t even feel the pain. Behind him, the monster roared past.

  Ula grunted at him, offering her hand.

  They had to keep moving, had to get out of here. Soon enough, the monster would follow.

  He grabbed Ula’s hand, and she hauled him to his feet. They sprinted out of a much smaller corridor, which curved, wrapping round and round as it corkscrewed down into the earth.

  Far behind them, the beast roared.

  It would change forms again, he knew. No matter where they ran, no matter how small of a corridor they found, the beast would follow after. Even if they squeezed into a passage so small that they had to crawl, the thing would elongate and stretch, flowing after them until it gobbled them up, one by one, eating their flesh and bones and absorbing their life force, making it bigger and stronger.

  The passage opened into a large cavern, and he saw Nadia’s torch fifty feet ahead.

  Nadia and Holly were hurrying across a forest of giant mushrooms, weaving between white stalks thicker than telephone poles. The air was humid here, the ground carpeted in soft moss.

  “This way!” Holly called. “We’re almost there!”

  “Go ahead,” Dan said. “We’ll catch up with you.”

  He pointed his torch close to the cave wall, studying the rocks.

  There.

  He started to set his torch down, but Ula took it from him. He nodded at her then squatted down beside the massive stone. It had to weigh five hundred pounds.

  Dan reached under the stone. Growling, he used his legs and back and powered up. Straining, he lugged the big rock over and dropped it in front of the entrance to the corridor they’d just run out of.

  It wasn’t enough.

  They needed to block the passageway. Using rocks, even big ones like the one he’d just lifted, would take too long.

 

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