In the next few moments, we all must have looked at one another a dozen times, each of us sizing the situation, wrestling fear and misgiving and pure common sense, exchanging glances, a few muffled words, and no doubt a superstitious prayer or two-Get me out of this alive, and I'll rush to the door of the nearest monastery.

I waited a long, troubled moment above the fissure, saying good-bye to the wind and the twilight. Then, catching my breath, I followed, listening hard for pale Plainsmen or for trolls or for something inexpressibly worse.

What I heard was the uneven breathing of Dannelle following me. Behind her walked Oliver, and towering over the both of them, I could see Ramiro. And then, as complete darkness closed around us, I said a brief prayer to whatever god favored the luck of fools and the nerve of shaken Knights, and I followed the sound of Shardos's careful steps, the snorts and whuffles of Birgis.

"Let me tell you a story…" Shardos whispered back to me, and the mountainous night engulfed us.

Had there been light to see us by, I am sure we would have looked awkward and strange.

Shardos ranged below me on the downward climb, scrambling nimbly from rock to rock, clutching Birgis under his left arm. The dog, it seemed, hated enclosed spaces, and on occasion a loud rumble or whimper or yelp rose up to me through the windless, damp air.

I was ready to rumble or yelp myself. Twice Ramiro had slipped, shaking dust and rock down upon the rest of us from above. We all would stop, shiver, send prayers or oaths flying though the darkness around us, and then continue. I figured that at any moment he would fall, and hoped that when he did, he would make the supreme sacrifice and not grab out for purchase and drag someone down with him, but plummet to his death quietly and solitarily.

Dannelle and Oliver, on the other hand, descended gracefully, soundlessly, sandwiched between me and the puffing Ramiro, who, amid stumbles, was cursing his own lack of foresight for following me anywhere, especially to the center of the world.

The silence around us grew even more still at our passing.

Occasionally something would burst into flight by my face, erupting with squeals and light and burring and the sound of frantic wingbeat as it rushed by on its way to the surface.

Tenebrals," Shardos whispered, and I thought of the strange, collapsing creatures that had rushed on wing from the mouth of the fissure. I hoped, for their dim-witted sake, that it was dark on the surface above us.

Almost an hour later, the guidance I had hoped for from Shardos came remarkably to pass. For in the candlelit, lan-ternlit recesses of earth, we stumbled about like blind things while the truly blind found resource in his other senses.

For a thousand feet down (or so it seemed), Shardos guided us by touch. His skilled hands and feet scrambled over jutting rocks, and he would pause, pointing dramatically at unstable shelves, at notches in the fissure wall too shallow for purchase.

Twice I shifted my lantern from one hand to the other, moving the light for a better grip on the rock walls around me. Everything that lay more than twenty feet from me was lost in the darkness beyond the pathetic glow of the lamp I carried. Twice we reached tunnels, branching away from the fissure into even a deeper dark. At the lip of those tunnels, Shardos would stop and tilt his head, as though listening or smelling or feeling the moisture in the air. Twice he shook his head, again dramatically.

That way lay danger, evidently. Or at least a dead end, a passage leading nowhere-especially not to Brithelm.

On occasion, a noise from below us made Shardos pause. Nimbly he hugged the wall of the fissure, motioning for silence or stillness or just plain attentiveness. His signal was relayed back up the line of followers, and whatever it meant in particular, I am sure we gave it to him.

After those pauses, he would move again, downward and downward, sometimes far more quickly than the full-sighted oafs behind him could manage. When his hearing told him he was losing us, he would stop and allow us to catch up.

At the third passageway, he whispered, "This is the one, Sir Galen." I joined him on the wide shelf of rock that jutted out into the chasm. Dannelle climbed down to stand beside me, followed by a nimble Oliver. Ramiro hung on the rocks a step or two above us, conscious of his weight as always, how it might be the last thing an overhang would need.

I stepped into the passage, lifted my lantern, and the tunnel in which we stood emerged out of darkness into a low, orange light. Three or four tenebrals who had been dangling from the roof of the tunnel shot out into the chasm, chittering wildly, their pale wings glowing more dimly as they flew away from us.

For a moment, I thought of phosfire, the dim light of decay that ranges over swamplands in warmer country north of here. But my attention soon returned to the situation at hand.

Ramiro grumbled. I looked up to see his enormous backside, hanging out into the chasm like some kind of clownish awning.

"Would you rather keep scrambling down the walls like a bunch of salamanders until we reach the core of the planet and our flesh is burned away?" I chastised.

Slowly, doubtfully, Ramiro took the step or two to the lip of the cavern, then let his weight down carefully.

Of course, the floor of the tunnel held.

What the lantern displayed was no less unsettling when we had joined each other on the landing. We found ourselves at the entrance to a large, low room of rock, stretching for hundreds of feet in all directions, but never any higher, it seemed, than ten feet or so above our heads. Stalactites drooped from the low ceiling, here like fangs or a row of teeth, there like a smooth stone curtain, making the room difficult to negotiate-well nigh impossible without the light my lantern provided.

"Birgis?" Dannelle whispered. "Galen, where's the dog?"

Thinking only that I'd be damned before I lost yet another member of the party, never considering the danger it could bring, I reached in my pocket, pushed aside the gloves, and wrapped my fingers around the dog whistle. Placing it to my lips, I blew three short, brief bursts into the stagnant air of the cavern. At the opposite end of the enormous room, the sound of rustling wings and of wild, pained chittering arose as the tenebrals stirred uneasily, alarmed at the noise we could not hear.

Something belched at my feet. Birgis appeared out of nowhere, snuffling at my shoes. I stroked him behind the ears and seated myself on a low, rounded stalagmite.

"Well, where do we go from here, juggler?" Ramiro asked aggressively, leaning back against a huge stone drapery. A silence followed, in which we heard the flapping wings of a bat or tenebral-or something-dodging through the stalactites at the far edge of the light. "Here we are, half lost down a crack in the earth, not even close enough to our destination to draw enemies."

Dannelle stirred angrily.

"It is grand of you to be so concerned about enemies at this juncture, Ramiro," she observed ironically. "Nonetheless, I think what we do is up to the leader. Who, if my understanding is correct, is not you."

As if to second her words, Shardos gestured in my direction.

"I believe the choice is Sir Galen's," he murmured.

All eyes-even the blank ones of Shardos-turned toward me. I looked around me, then behind me, where Birgis sat on a flat rock, scratching his ear and staring simply and expectantly.

I looked up, pretending to be mulling a great decision, though in fact I was searching frantically, desperately, for anything that would make sense of this underground labyrinth.