The Realms Thereunder

4

They set out from the weaver women’s camp feeling more rested than at any time since leaving Ni?ergeard. They had been given some short strips of dried meat that were as tough as leather but also rather flavorful.

The travelers left the dry island by the same beach that they had arrived. The ground from there onwards continued sloping downwards and they found it getting damper. Then they started coming across large puddles-still, black pools of water. Swi?gar cautioned them to watch their step as there was no telling how deep these pools might be; the surfaces they could see could be just thin films of water on rock, or they could be the skin of a fathomless sinkhole, the currents of which could take them away faster than it was possible to fight.

Even stepping very near the edges of the puddles was a risk, Swi?gar said, as a rocky bank could crumble away. For this reason the travelers spread out and tied the rope to their belts to connect themselves to each other for safety. Swi?gar took the first position with Ecgbryt following directly behind him. Freya and Daniel were led along an unpredictable and erratic path. As the puddles grew wider, more frequent and irregularly shaped, they found themselves at a dead end and were forced to turn back and find a different path.

The air was growing colder, chilled by the dampness that Freya now associated with darkness so deep that it felt massive. Because of the meandering path they were forced to take, their journey over the lake bed plain, although tedious and uneventful, was far from boring. They found the tension and uncertainty exhausting. They took more breaks than they felt were probably necessary. Daniel and Freya would fall to the ground, their heads nearly spinning from all the turns and U-turns they had to make out of dead ends and cul-de-sacs.

In the light of their lamps, they saw a structure ahead of them and they made their way to it. It was another pier, a longer and bigger one, but just as dry and ruined as the last. They scaled the bank and found that the pier was an extension of a large ramp that went steeply upwards. They had no choice but to go up.

They walked many hours and took many breaks, never knowing how high this underground mountain-which is what they came to think of it as-rose ahead of them. The last time Freya could remember climbing so high was while hiking in the Lake District. But climbing so high and still being underground was a very different sensation. She was glad that she couldn’t see how far up they were. It felt as if they were leaving the Wild Caves far behind-which she was glad of-but how much farther did they have to climb?

There was an indefinable change in the air, and the noise that their footsteps made allowed them to sense a narrowing of the walls around them. The ground became steeper and then curled around them, shunting them to the left, creating a wall to their right.

Cresting the mound of scree, they found themselves on a rock shelf that ran to their left, and no option but to follow it. They moved cautiously, each of them inwardly terrified that the ground would give way beneath them. But to their relief it broadened and continued on.

Then they discovered the carvings.

All of a sudden the wall was covered with them. Most of them looked like writing, but with odd letters that were made of straight lines only, no curves. Some of them were long horizontal lines with perpendicular and slanting lines stemming from and intersecting the baseline. Daniel ran his hands along them; they were set very deeply into the rock. Sometimes there was just a single running line a couple of inches high and a foot long, scrawled here and there like graffiti. At other points, there were large blocks of tightly packed letters with no spaces, several feet in length and height, well blocked out and bordered.

One set of carvings quite startled Daniel. He had to stop and pull back his torch to see the full extent of them. Lines of words snaked through each other like ribbons, randomly twisting and splitting and converging. Caught in the middle of this was a man with a bearded face, kneeling, with his arms raised, the words twisting around him and his limbs. His face, almost cartoon-like in its simplicity, nonetheless wore the look of someone in deep anxiety.

The others, seeing Daniel had stopped, returned to stand beside him. They spent a few silent moments contemplating the picture.

Freya shuddered.

“Swi?gar,” Ecgbryt said in a low voice, “you are more familiar with the old script than I. Can you read it?”

“Hmm, not easily,” Swi?gar answered. “I wish Ceolfer? were here; he was more the scholar than I. The letters I know, but not their arrangement. It is not our tongue.” He stepped forward and reached a hand out to some crudely etched words only a sentence long.

“Apart from these,” he said, “which forbid the passing of any person. It is a curse, written backwards. Perhaps all these words are written backwards,” he said, casting his eyes across the wall.

Daniel felt a chill ripple across his shoulders. The words and banks of letters were no longer an interesting puzzle but a wall of angry and oppressive words, aware of them, warning them away, cursing them.

“I fear no curse from man or devil,” declared Swi?gar. “My heart has been sealed against both by one stronger than any enchanted.”

A short distance farther, they came across a cave mouth-an archway in the rock. It was obviously man-made and bordered with row upon row of angry-looking writing that none of them even wanted to read. There were columns or standing stones that had been placed in front of the tunnel entrance like two rows of guards, three on each side, each stone covered top to bottom in angry-looking letters.

Thankfully the writing did not continue inside the tunnel-the walls were unmarked in any way. As the travelers stood, wondering what might be in that tunnel and where it led, they heard a slow, rhythmic scraping sound start up that grated on their spines. They stood silently, listening to it and holding their lanterns up in front of them. After a minute it stopped, and with deep breaths they entered the tunnel. Its walls were not rounded but octagonal; whoever had constructed the passage must have been meticulous in its carving, for though it twisted and turned maddeningly, the walls and diagonals kept their shape, never moving farther away or closer together.

The meandering passage bends became corners, then hairpins, tightly packed together, turning first this way and then that, and then the other. The travelers picked their way along and were starting to feel quite dizzy and disoriented, with all the zigzagging- right and then right again, full left, right, left, right, right, left-when suddenly the floor fell from underneath them.