"It makes sense." Magfire crept down a tilted tunnel with six sides. "Our tribe fled this place because of a great disaster three-score years ago. These queer tunnels…"

"The ruins built atop this hill are more than sixty years old!" countered Adira. Her hands and face were lit with her cold blue glow, giving her a ghostly pallor.

"I know that!" snapped Magfire. "The castle dates to shortly after the glaciers receded. It was obviously built on a crater. What I say is, sixty years ago the lord living in the castle must have delved into the ruins and unleashed the ancient horror that drove him from the castle and my people from the forest!"

"Could be," conceded Taurion. "I look forward to putting the question to our tribal historians."

Adira wanted to spit, tired of crotchety forestfolk and their moldy traditions. She stroked a hand along a wall that felt smooth as marble but warm as wood. By matching Johan's observations to the kobolds, the freedom fighters had learned that six-sided tunnels honeycombed the hill deep under the sky-monster's chamber. The kobolds had pointed out one descent, but just in case, Jedit led two kobolds by leashes like war dogs.

The explorers were the pirates Jedit, Adira, Simone, Murdoch, Heath, and Jasmine, and the pine warriors Magfire, Taurion, Kyenou, and three others. The tunnels were a fractured jumble canted at a bizarre angle, as if a large apartment house had been picked up and dumped on end. Skidding and sliding down the tunnels, the adventurers found their leg muscles trembling in protest.

Adira said, "I still don't understand. Do you claim these tunnels once flew through the sky?"

"Fell from the sky," corrected Taurion. "Yes. The crying horror or its eggs were in a sky-ship that sailed through the heavens and wrecked here, same as your sea-ship beached on rocks."

Adira conceded, "Anything is possible. It explains why these passages are so dreadfully canted. 1 thought they'd suffered a groundquake. But why six sided? Who builds a giant honeycomb but giant bees?"

"The crying horror bears features of both animal and plant," said Taurion. "Why not the habits of an insect?"

"The spuzzem!" Adira halted with one black boot braced on the edge of a portal. "Recall how it layers moss on its victims? Perhaps it's some spider webbing! Perhaps it's a giant insect too, let loose from these ruins!"

The thought jolted them, but they pressed on. Time was short.

Jasmine said, "This place reminds me of the stone sarcophagi of the ancients. In northern climes, frost heaves push them upward and out of the soil. Country folk think underground demons seek elbow room."

"That's it," muttered Simone. "Tell us a jolly bedtime story to soothe our nerves. But how could glass crystals survive such a crash?"

Taurion peered everywhere by the light of a torch as they took one fork after another. "Recall how tough the crystals are. Neither tiger claws nor a steel blade could sunder them. So it's possible some are intact."

Adira blinked. "How do we crack them to feed the horror?"

A voice squeaked, "Water."

Everyone looked at the kobold on Jedit's leash. The gray-purple cad looked sheepish. "Sometimes we fetch big golden boxes for Yellow Lady. She shoos us away. She thinks we don't know, but we do. Water makes them break."

"Water." Taurion rubbed his beard, nodding. "Yes. If the sky-ship crashes like a shooting star, anything alive must die. But the crystals can't be shattered, so they'd lie in the ground intact. Forever, unless something intervened. The first rainfall would make the crystals crack, so the horror could grow freely."

"Like cactuses that sit for years inert," said Jasmine, "then flourish on a handful of rain."

"Grow how much?" asked Jedit.

No one knew. In the lead, Taurion came to a triple fork and hesitated. Jedit braced both paws across a tunnel, gave a mighty sniff, and announced, "The spuzzem passed this way not long ago."

"Ohhh!" said half a dozen. Yet with a collective shrug, and no other choice, they passed on.

The tiger crept along comfortably on two feet or all fours as needed. The humans stumbled behind, heads bowed, ankles and calves throbbing from the treacherous tilted footing. Gray-stone tunnels intersected at odd angles, as if the original inhabitants had crawled on every surface like ants. Not every passage was tunnels. They found several six-sided rooms full of nothing identifiable. One room held miles of spun floss like spider webbing. Another sported gadgets like lead water pipes all jumbled and crumbling. One held big empty vats oddly spaced. One held hundreds of cells, each big enough to hold a man. In a few holes they found desiccated husks like cocoons. Every room only confused them further.

"Tar and blisters," muttered Adira. "This building has more holes than a sponge and holds just as little! If we don't find- Ulp!"

Jedit halted so suddenly that Adira trod on his tail. In garish torchlight, the tiger's eyes glowed, and his whiskers twitched. Signaling to wait, the man-beast crept ahead without a sound. Adira and others watched his striped back slither over a threshold where the passage forked and angled down.

In a moment he returned, striped face peeking over the edge, curled claws beckoning.

This room was larger, fifty feet across, but still six-sided, with each wall broken into facets like a fly's eye and several holes leading to more tunnels. More gadgets and junk projected from the walls: crumbling pipes, a stonelike trough big enough to bathe in, a bed of points like stalactites. Yet what took the explorers' breath away were amber crystals that sparkled in torchlight like jewels-thirty or more as big as bushel baskets.

"Right then!" Adira broke the spell. "Everyone fetch a jewel, or crystal, and let's breeze out of-"

"Adira…" Jasmine swayed on her feet. "I… feel…"

The woods mage pitched on her face as if shot by an arrow. In the gaping hole behind her, a ghastly green headless body loomed from darkness.

"The spuzzem!" bleated Magfire. "Kill it!"

Yet the alien monster had already attacked, invisibly and silently. Victims dropped like tenpins. The two kobolds crumpled first. Jedit Ojanen took a flying leap but crashed on his belly, out cold. Heath wavered and crumpled to his knees, pitching his torch away lest he bum himself. Others staggered and succumbed.

Succumbed to what? wondered Adira. Sleep? Fighting panic, she studied the approaching enemy wildly for a clue on how to assault it.

The green beast walked with a stiff up-and-down motion like an upright insect. The limbs were smooth as plant stems. The feet and truncated arms bore backward hooves. A tail with veins like a maple leaf jutted behind. Most alarming, the thing had no head, just a rounded dome atop its moss-green body. Lack of a head made it seem a slimy headless corpse seeking revenge on the living.

Adira Strongheart got fresh worries as the spuzzem's queer backward hooves shot streams of cobweb. Magfire squawled as gunk struck her hair and face. Clawing only tied their hands with gummy strands. Adira dodged but was slapped by a ropy cobweb. Repelled, she swiped at it. The stuff tore easily but stuck like honey. As Adira wrenched glop from her chin, she stumbled, clumsy as a cow, and went to one knee, struggling to keep her torch high.

Panic swelled in her bosom until Adira felt as if she were a sparrow trapped by a hawk. Why clumsy? Struggling with gummy strands by spitting firelight, she misjudged the floor and flopped on her bottom. Weakly she cursed and resisted the urge to cry.

Clumsy. Fearful. Dizzy. Despairing. Why?

Adira's head swam as if drunk. Her brain felt muzzy as the cobwebs in her hair. Part of her wanted to He down and nap. Yet horrid images swirled in her skull. Ghastly visions of desiccated corpses gutted and hung in cocoons from the ceiling. Bodies dried like peat, eyes sunken into black pits, cheeks drawn so tight teeth showed through skin, ribs and breastbones jutting starkly, hair fallen out or reduced to stringy fuzz. Adira saw herself worse than dead, swaddled in a cocoon, unable to move, barely able to breath, knowing she was food stored for the nightmarish Spuzzem. A fiend that attacked with strands of webbing, but something fiercer, a gnawing assault on the mind.