With infinite caution, she inched her way along the wall to her right, one tiny step at a time. Each time she moved, she extended her fingers and her foot forward to feel the stone ahead. It was slow going, but at least she felt as if she was doing something.
After a while, Sara decided she must be in a corridor. The wall was very straight, and there was no feeling of space around her. The air continued to waft gently past her, moving sluggishly through the blackness. She gritted her teeth and pushed blindly on.
After what seemed a very long time, Sara's fingers found the edge of a door and the end of the corridor. She felt all around the opening and discovered it was an arched entrance into an open space. Keeping her fingers on the stone wall, she stepped into the chamber.
Her eyes, so accustomed to the Stygian darkness, nearly passed over the faint luminescence. She blinked and looked again, and there it was, a ghostly blob of pale greenish light. Then she saw another and another scattered across the floor and walls of the large cavern. A largish patch gleamed like a will-o'-the-wisp on the wall several steps beyond her hand, so she edged over to take a look.
To her surprise, the phosphorescent gleam came from a round growth of lichen that clung to the wall like thick gray moss. The patch came off easily in her hands and lay on her fingers, softly glowing. Excitedly she looked around for more and found two other patches growing within her reach. She peeled them off, too, and fastened them into a ball with the leather thong from her hair. Their combined light barely lit the floor by her feet, but any light was a joy after the impenetrable blackness of the corridor.
She made her way across the floor of the chamber and added two more glowing clumps to her ball. At last she had enough illumination to take a look around.
The slaves had obviously done some extensive work in this room. The floor was cleared of almost all the fallen rock and debris, and only a few large pieces remained. The ceiling had been shored up by timbers in several places, and any artifacts and bones had been removed. Best of all, to Sara's mind, there was an obvious trail of booted prints leading through a layer of dust on the floor to a second entrance on the far side of the chamber. Her head-bashing friends, no doubt.
The skittering sound of falling gravel came across the room from the corridor she had left. Sara froze. Her blood throbbed in her head, and the hairs rose on the back of her neck. She felt it once again, that insistent warning that something was watching her.
All at once the hazy words came back to her: "The horax will dispose of the body." The horax. An image formed in her memory of something she had heard about years ago, of a large insectlike creature that lived in subterranean tunnels and fed off the living and the dead. Her breath rushed through her chest, and she hurried forward into the second hallway.
In the pale light of her lichen clump, she could see two pairs of tracks. One set led into the chamber the way she had come, while the other set led out along this other corridor. Sara stumbled forward gratefully.
With something to guide her, she could move faster through the ruined halls, though not fast enough to suit her. She had to move carefully for fear of losing the tracks in the darkness or falling into occasional fissures that split the floor. Other arched doorways led off the corridor, but Sara continued to follow the footprints in the thin layer of dust.
The strange scuffling sound came again, a little louder and a little closer this time. Something chittered in the dense darkness behind her.
Sara stifled the urge to look back and kept her eyes pinned to the tracks on the floor. She came to a flight of stairs and stumbled up the steps as fast as her shaking legs could carry her.
"Please let there be an opening. Please let me out of here!" she panted softly.
Another large chamber opened up before her. This one, too, had been cleared, and more clumps of glowing lichen grew on the walls and the high ceiling. A few rats poked their heads up when she entered, then slipped furtively away into the thick darkness.
The footprints led plainly across the wide room past a huge crack in the floor to an arched entrance. At the far side, where the tracks exited the room, they joined with a much larger trail of barefooted prints that came up from a staircase. That trail had to be the footprints of the labor gangs that were excavating the temple's levels.
The movement of air Sara had noticed earlier was noticeably stronger. A definite draft, similar to the smell of the city above, blew through this entrance, stirring her hair.
Sara clutched her ball of lichen and hurried forward.
Behind her, at the far end of the room, a long, slender shape, as black as the darkness around it, skittered in through the door. A second followed, then a third. Two more crawled out of the crevice in the floor. They met in the middle of the chamber, chittered among themselves, and all five scurried after the fleeing woman.
Sara heard them coming. The noise sounded dry and rattling, like the bones thrown by a soothsayer. Fear surged through her. She broke into a trot, then a run. She had to be close to the opening. The breeze was stronger, and the smells were different.
All at once, the ceiling opened up into a huge hole, and overhead she saw the gloomy night sky of Neraka and the faint reflection of distant torchlight. Dropping her bundle of lichen, she scrambled under the opening and looked frantically for the way out.
Her shout of joy died in her throat, for all she saw were the sheer walls of the hole. Paths came down the upper slope of the huge crater, but at the bottom, where the hole broke into the remains of the temple, there was a twelve-foot drop down to the old floor. Sara looked around frantically. There had to be something the slaves used to climb out of the ruin. She saw gouges in the dirt walls where ladders must have stood, but now there was nothing. No boxes, no ladders, not even a step-stool.
What a stupid arrangement! she cursed. They couldn't build a simple set of steps for the slaves to use?
Suddenly she whirled. Something moved in the darkness, its hard feet scratching against the stone. She could see nothing beyond the faint glimmer of the lichen on the floor where she dropped it. The thing moved again, then another thing clicked along the wall to her right. They sounded large and solid and quite at home in the darkness.
Sara's hand automatically flew to her sword, only to meet the empty scabbard. Her attackers had left her with no weapons. Or had they missed one? Her heart in her throat, she bent and reached for the slender blade in her boot. She cried with relief as her fingers found the stiletto still safely tucked away.
"Get out of here!" she shouted at the unseen things, and she brandished her knife in their general direction.
"There you be," shouted a voice above her. "Are you fine?"
Sara's head jerked up in surprise. "No, I'm not fine! Please, help "me!" She searched the hole overhead and finally saw a small black figure perched on the edge of the drop-off. It appeared to be peering down at her. "Who are you?" she cried.
"I Fewmet, the gully dwarf. You give me coin and kind words. I see men drag you off, so I follow," came the raspy, hesitant voice.
Sara did not think she had ever heard a sound so sweet "Fewmet, please, could you see if there is a ladder or a rope or anything I could use to climb out of here? There's something down here that wants to eat me."
"Oh, the horaxes. I no like them," commented the gully dwarf.
"I no like them either!" Sara shouted. "Would you please hurry?"
She heard a scrambling noise as the gully dwarf climbed out of the crater, then her attention flew back to the horax. They were scuttling closer from several directions. She stamped and shouted and waved her knife, and for a moment they seemed to hesitate. One edged warily into the glimmer of light from the lichen, and for the first time, Sara was able to see her pursuers.