"We'd better not." Kurda smirked. "By the smell of you, you'd have trouble finding an apple at the bottom of a barrel of cider!"

The guards laughed and made mock threats not to let us back in. One of the more sober guards asked if we wanted torches, but Seba said we'd be OK — the walls were coated with glowing moss where we were going.

Kurda got his mapmaking equipment out when we reached tunnels where he'd never been before. It was just a sheet of gridded paper and a pencil. He paused every so often to add a tiny piece of line to the page, signifying the length of tunnel we'd traversed.

"Is that all there is to mapmaking?" I asked. "It looks easy."

"Tunnels aren't difficult to map," he agreed. "It's different if you're trying to map open land or a stretch of seacoast."

"Don't listen to him," Gavner said. "Even tunnels are difficult. I tried it once and made a mess of it. You have to work to scale and make sure you mark the length exactly right. If you're off by even the tiniest fraction, it throws the rest of the map off."

"It's just a skill," Kurda said. "You'd pick it up quickly if you gave it a try."

"No, thanks," Gavner said. "I have no intention of spending my spare time trapped down a maze of tunnels, trying to map them out. I don't know what the appeal is."

"It's fascinating," Kurda said. "It gives you a dearer understanding of your environment, not to mention a great sense of achievement when you're finished. Apart from which, there's the practical aspect."

"Practical aspect!" Gavner snorted. "Nobody uses your maps except you!"

"Not so," Kurda corrected him. "Nobody's interested in helping me make maps, but plenty make use of them. Did you know we'll be building a new Hall, lower than any of the other levels, over the next few years?"

"A Hall of storage." Gavner nodded.

"That's being constructed out of a cave I discovered, which will connect to the rest of the Halls via a tunnel nobody knew about until I went snooping Around."

"There are also the breach points," Seba noted.

"What are those?" I asked.

"Tunnels which open into the Halls," Seba explained. "There are many ways into the Halls besides the main gates of entry. Kurda has unearthed many of these and brought them to our attention, so that we might seal them off against attack."

"Who'd attack you up here?" I frowned.

"He's referring to animal attacks," Kurda said. "Stray wolves, rats, and bats often crept in by breach points and went foraging for food. They were getting to be a nuisance. My maps helped put an end to most of their advances."

"OK." Gavner smiled. "I was wrong — your maps do serve a purpose. You still wouldn't get me down here helping you make them though."

We proceeded in silence for a while. The tunnels were narrow and the roofs were low-hanging, so it was hard going for the grown vampires. They enjoyed a few minutes of relief when the tunnels opened up briefly, but then they constricted again, and it was back to crouching and shuffling along. It was dark too. We had just enough light to see by, but there wasn't enough for Kurda to make maps. He dug out a candle and started to light it, but Seba stopped him.

"No candles," the quartermaster said.

"But I can't see," Kurda complained.

"I am sorry, but you will have to do the best you can."

Kurda grumbled, bent his head low over the sheet of paper so his nose was almost touching it, and drew carefully as we progressed, stumbling often because he wasn't watching where he was going.

Finally, after crawling through an especially small tunnel, we found ourselves in a moderately large cave that was coated from floor to ceiling with spiderwebs. "Quiet now," Seba whispered as we stood. "We do not want to disturb the residents."

The «residents" were spiders. Thousands — possibly hundreds of thousands — of them. They filled the cave, dangling from the ceiling, hanging on cobwebs, scuttling across the floor. They were like the spider I'd spotted when I first arrived at Vampire Mountain, hairy and yellow. None was quite as large as Madam Octa, but they were bigger than most ordinary spiders.

A number of the spiders scurried toward us. Seba dropped cautiously to one knee and whistled. The spiders hesitated, then returned to their corners. "Those were sentries," Seba said. "They would have defended the others if we had come to cause trouble."

"How?" I asked. "I thought they weren't poisonous."

"Singly, they are harmless," Seba explained. "But if they attack in groups, they can be dangerous. Death is unlikely — for a human, maybe, but not a vampire — but certainly severe discomfort occurs, possibly even partial paralysis."

"I see why you wouldn't allow any candles," Kurda said. "One stray spark and this place would go up like dry paper."

"Precisely." Seba wandered into the center of the cave. The rest of us followed slowly. Madam Octa had crept forward to the bars of her cage and was making a careful study of the spiders. "They have been here for thousands of years," Seba whispered, reaching up and letting some of the spiders crawl over his hands and up his arms. "We call them Ba'Halen's spiders, after the vampire who — if the legends are to be believed — first brought them here. No human knows of their existence."

I took no notice as the spiders crept up my legs — I was used to handling Madam Octa, and before her I'd studied spiders as a hobby — but Gavner and Kurda looked uneasy. "Are you sure they won't bite?" Gavner asked.

"I would be surprised if they did," Seba said. "They are gentle and usually only attack when threatened."

"I think I'm going to sneeze," Kurda said as a spider crawled over his nose.

"I would not advise it," Seba warned him. "They might interpret that as an act of aggression."

Kurda held his breath and shook from the effort of controlling the sneeze. His face had turned a bright shade of red by the time the spider moved on. "Let's beat it," he wheezed, letting out a long, shaky breath.

"Best suggestion I've heard all night," Gavner agreed.

"Not so fast, my friends," Seba said with a smile. "I did not bring you here for fun. We are on a mission. Darren — take off your shirt."

"Here?" I asked.

"You want to put a stop to the itching, don't you?"

"Well, yes, but…" Sighing, I did as Seba ordered.

When my back was bare, Seba found some old cobwebs that had been abandoned. "Bend over," he commanded, then held the cobwebs over my back and rubbed them between his fingers, so that they crumbled and sprinkled over my flesh.

"What are you doing?" Gavner asked.

"Curing an itch," Seba replied.

"With cobwebs?" Kurda said skeptically. "Really, Seba, I didn't think you believed in old wives' tales."

"It is no tale," Seba insisted, rubbing the webby ash into my broken skin. "There are chemicals in these cobwebs which aid the healing process and work against irritation. Within an hour, the itching will stop."

When I was covered in ash, Seba tied some thick, whole webs around the worst-infected areas, including my hands. "We will take the webs off before we leave the tunnels," he said, "although I advise against washing for a night or two — the itching may return if you do."

"This is crazy," Gavner muttered. "It'll never work."

"Actually, I think it's working already," I contradicted him. "The backs of my legs were killing me when we came in, but now the itching is barely noticeable."

"If it's so effective," Kurda said, "why haven't we heard about it before?"

"I do not broadcast," Seba said. "If the curative powers of the webs were widely known, vampires would come down here to the caves all the time. They would disturb the natural routines of the spiders, forcing them farther down into the mountain, and within years the supplies would dry up. I only bring people here when they truly need help and always ask them to keep the secret to themselves. I trust none of you will betray my confidence?"