I bowed. "I assure you my lord, Barnar and I are agreed on one thing: You are very tall and impressive the way you tower and glower and glare like that. I promise you it does make a man shake to look at you. But if you think Barnar and I will tramp through the Primary Subworld, and wade in the infernal lake itself, for no more pay than a kiss-my-arse-and-fare-thee-well, then you can go hump your hat. We'll go all right-for the terms I state and not a jot less. If you don't like our bid you can put us back on the rack. We'd rather die than demean our reputations by accepting the swindle you're offering."

Kamin was one of those men who are strong mainly through the habit of success. He had no real toughness or resilence of spirit. A dab of insolence had him red and sputtering: "You impudent, skulking dog!" he said. "You arrogant gutter-sneak. I'm going to have them . . . I'll have you . .

"Oh yes, your eminence," I said, "have it done. What would you not have done to us? You're wiser than to risk the doing yourself. But mark me. You took us for fools once with your false arrest. Once is all. We'll go down there all right, and you have your luck to thank that you trapped us rather than others. We have high reputations to maintain. We dislike to turn aside even from such a thing as this once the challenge is down. But we'll be paid what we dictate, and heroes are expensive. And that, you jowly sack of slops, you sagbellied sodomite, you puffed and strutting human pimple, is that."

In these last remarks I was mixing business with my pleasure. He had to be roughly handled to feel our seriousness. Otherwise he would be trying to wear us down or torture us into compliance.

He took it hard. The council was dead still, eating up every word for thei r f r iends af terwards. Kamin blazed like a signal fire, and glared at the guards. They came uncertainly forward, but Kamin could bring out neither a word or gesture of command.

He must now either kill us or ask our terms. We all knew which he would do. Still, he took a long time to swallow what I'd put on his plate. At last he did it with a certain grace. He sat down. He looked at the floor a moment, then turned to me a blank face.

"What are your terms?" he asked.

"Let your scribe set them down as I speak them, and then article yourself to them in full legal form."

"It will be done. I will article myself if the terms are . . . acceptable."

So I gave our terms. If we emerged from Darkvent with his son, we were to receive mounts, a full set of new arms each, an oath of non-pursuit, the freedom of Charnall, who was to be liberated on the spot to accompany us, and four packbeasts.

I rather liked Charnall, but our main motive here was to ensure our freeing from the Life-Hook and any other ensorcellments that might be slipped into us along with the protective spells we were going to have to submit to before descending. As for the packbeasts, I didn't explain them until I'd given specifications for all the other things. This took some time, and the scribe's quill squawked and chuckled on the parchment, keeping up with me. At last I said: "And, divided equally on the four packbeasts, four hundredweight of pure gold, securely lashed in saddlebags of stout leather."

Kamin had been waiting, eyes on his hands, for the real price to be named. Now he shook slightly, but kept silence and didn't look up. From what one heard of the man, the price probably represented about a third of his personal worth-and he could be sure he'd get none of it from the municipal pocket. I'd have liked to take two thirds, but it's a fool who takes so much that he guarantees pursuit while making fast flight impossible. The quill scratched. Wax and taper were brought. Kamin didn't move, and I thought the wax would harden before he did.

Then, with a grunt, he jammed his signet against it, seized the quill and slashed his signature across the vellum.

Then he sat glaring at me, as if I were some species of pestilence his fate forced him to endure. It made my gorge rise, and I shook my fist at him.

"By the Black Crack, Rod-Master,"

I s n a r l e d . " I ' d l o v e to take you with us. You'd think the wage a small one then."

VI.

The subworld portal called Darkvent is an abandoned mine shaft in the Smelt Hills. The Smelts are a bouldery, bony-looking range bordering a desert, and we reached them in the afternoon of a windy, sun-drenched day. As our mounts climbed the switch-backs toward the hilltops, Barnar and I let our eyes linger on the limitless blue sky with a feeling that none of our escort could have shared. Around us the wind muttered as it does among rocks in a dry country-a sad, confiding sound I've always liked.

We had neared the summits when Charnall, riding behind, nudged me and pointed down to the desert floor. I could now see the ruins of a town there on the range's footslopes. It had been a big town, but built mostly of wood, and such bleached shards of its walls as remained standing-shaggy with dead brambles-recalled those cracked husks of insects that hang in dusty winter spiderwebs. For the rest, the townsite was marked mostly by weed-lines, where crumbled planks and posts had fattened the stingy soil.

"Westforge," he said. He got all the life the place must have had into the way he said it-the shanty-taverns, the sharpers, the whores, the nights of fierce music and lightly drawn blades. In twenty years a town doesn't take deep root, but it can get big and lively. And then had come the day when, up here in the hills, the miners had pushed their shaft that last yard too far. The very mountain core which it pierced had trembled, fractured, and plunged into the unsuspected abyss underlying it. The luckier of the miners, who were working higher up the shaft, made it back into the light of day, and saw the sun once more before they were taken. And then the outwelling horror had plunged like an avalanche out of the hills and down upon Westforge, where no warning had reached. And then human voices raised up a new and dreadful music from the streets of that city, and many danced there for long days and nights, clasped irresistibly in alien arms. Much of darkness and catastrophe was vomited up from Darkvent in those days, before one of the Elder League perceived the leakage, bestrode his winged slave, and came to seal the breach.

And now we approached the shaft. The sight of it was indefinably loathsome-it carried a crude shock, as if its raw stone had literally touched my naked eyeballs. Darkvent. A bottomless hole filled to the brim with shadow. A diseased mouth forever spewing its one black syllable of obscenity at the sunlight. Barnar and I dismounted and walked to its threshold.

It was like looking through a loophole in Time itself, for inside the shaft, all the handiwork of the Westforge miners lay untarnished, bright and whole despite its three generations of sleep. We looked disbelieving back down at the splintered bones of the city, and again at what lay within the shaft's ensorcellment, annexed therewith to the agelessness of the subworlds. There Westforge's craft and ingenuity survived, and testified to the vigor and hope it had once enjoyed.

I have heard of nothing resembling their methods of mining elsewhere. They had been great smiths, and had made their ore-carts of iron, with iron wheels. The wheels ran in a pair of steel troughs laid perfectly parallel and affixed to thousands of short wooden beams set into the earth, all lying crosswise to the parallel troughs. Heavy cables hauled the carts by means of big windlasses, one of which stood in clear view within. The tremendous weight this system could haul-swiftly and with scarcely any drag-was instantly obvious.

All that gleaming wrought steel, paralyzed and silent, all swallowed and sepulchred by forces against which the rarest works of human enterprise are like sand-forts on a stormy beach. How keenly we felt, at that portal, the lunatic futility of our own enterprise! Compared to all this impotent iron, what were our own poor tools? Two - short-swords, two broadswords, two slings, two lances, two javelins, two shields. Granted, this was not all we had-heavens no! Charnall had also laid three spells on our bodies. One, the Wayfarer's Blessing, we felt only as a kind of blankness in gut and throat-we would need neither food nor drink while subject to it. The second was the Charm of Brisk Blood. This felt like a large dose of tonic weed. My muscles were as taut and jumpy as a pack of hungry rats, and my veins were so fat my arms felt like they were wrapped with snakes. In situations where mere fleetness and stamina mattered, this would be an undeniable asset. The third spell was the Life- Hook. This I experienced as a little sore spot in my heart, the kind of pang a large, old scar sometimes gives you-a flesh-memory of pain. The asset here was entirely our captors'.

A sensation of absolute aloneness touched both of us, in the same instant, it seemed, for we both turned to look behind us. And I almost laughed to see how alone we actual ly were, how far of f f rom the shaf t -mouth Kamin, Charnal l , and the fifty soldiers of our guard had stationed themselves. Many of the soldiers, who were going to have to bivouac here to await our return, held even their eyes averted from Darkvent. Kamin sat tall in his saddle, his unease masked with disdain. Charnall sat slumped, avoiding our eyes.

Barnar grinned bitterly. "Are you all so modest?" he cried. "You stand so removed, gentlemen! Perhaps it's delicacy? You fear we'll snub you if you come forward to wish us luck?"

At this, Charnall dismounted and came forward with guilty haste, stumbling slightly. He was able to imagine our destination in far greater detail than the others and felt, I think, a generous dread for us, beyond his sense of his own danger. As he neared us it was his right hand he held extended, but then he faltered, and it was his left he ended by giving us, for on his right he wore the graven ring to which he had anchored the control of the Life- Hooks and the other two spells he had put on us. I could not forbear letting my gaze rest ironically an instant on the ring. He shrugged, smiling sadly, and I found I had to smile back.

"What clowns we are, Charnall," I told him, "with all our supposed wits. Do you believe we are actually - doing this? I mean, if I'm not dreaming the whole thing, maybe you are."

"And if you are," Barnar put in, "feel free to take a break any time. Why overdo? You could just summarize the rest of the plot for us over a cozy breakfast."

"Nifft. Barnar. You do know that this whole idea . . . I mean that this whole approach to the problem was the farthest thing from my remotest . . . I mean let alone my even knowing who you were or that you were in town, or ever planning your-"

I clapped him on the shoulder, saying, "Peace, good wizardlet." The epithet made him smile ruefully. "You're too well aware, good Charnall, of what it means to enter the subworlds, ever to have hatched this scheme. Only an arrogant ignoramus like Kamin could seriously entertain it."

Charnall nodded, moodily twisting the control ring on his finger. "It's ridiculous," he said, "even callous -perhaps, but I keep thinking that if only I could find more to like in the boy, all this wouldn't seem quite such an insane waste of . . ." He checked himself, mortified.

"Our lives," Barnar finished gently. Charnall nodded, but then angrily shook his head.

"No. There's Gildmirth. He is there. There's something about this legend-from the first I heard of it it struck me as truth, and even more than that, I could feel the man himself in it, feel a rare and vital personality behind the deeds reported of Gildmirth. I mean, for some reason, when I think about it, I actually feel hope, and if only you can find him, reach him . . ."

His own words had brought back to him the utter vagueness and improbability of the entire project. His shoul- ders sagged. I squeezed his arm consolingly and looked at Barnar, who nodded. Raising my arm in salute, I hailed Kamin: "So down we go after your brat, cattle-king! Go home and reflect that if you have any hope at all, it lies with two men whose freedom you have stolen, and whose fealty you have coerced. If you find any comfort in such an arrangement, you're welcome to it."

A soldier came forward with two lit torches and a bundle of several dozen more. As he neared the shaft, he made a sign against evil over his eyes, which he tried to hold downcast, sparing them the least glimpse of our destination.

Thrusting our two ridiculous little flames ahead of us, we stepped inside Darkvent. We felt a light shock of immersion, as in a very tenuous, oily medium. Being men, we felt no more of a transition than that, and received no hint of the hell of pain which the barrier-spell opposed to any of demon-kind who strove to pass through it in the other direction.

VII.

The main shaft, with its steady downward pitch and its triple course of cart-tracks, remained unmistakable through a multitude of intersections with branch-shafts. It was a warm, gingery darkness that we walked through, with an elusive, sickish spice to it that you not only smelled and tasted, but also felt with your skin, like a breath of fever. And I could have sworn that in that darkness, the torchlight didn't fan out and attenuate-it stopped short, enveloping us in two eerily distinct bubbles of light outside of which the perfect blackness teemed with all the shadows the torches had not yet summoned into form. Meanwhile, within the light, the shadow-play made it seem that our passage called back the long-dead will of the Westforge miners to fugitive, fretful life. Crazily leaning carts appeared to lurch, struggle against the puddled gloom their wheels were mired in, craving to roll again and bear ore. And, in the little maintenance-smithies inset at intervals in the shaft walls, the dropped sledges and toppled anvils twitched restively in the elastic nets of darkness constraining them, as if we'd set them dreaming of the meddlesome, relentless hands of the men who had made them. All this lay in a huge silence that our footfalls hacked at feebly, but could not break. It was an infested silence, wormy with almost-sounds-a great, black throat with the noise of an anguished multitude locked inside it.

An endless time passed, which nevertheless could not have been more than two hours. Just as our second pair of torches was burning out, we reached a broad gallery. It had served primarily as a switching-yard for ore-carts, dozens of which stood in the central maze of track, sidelined long ago for re-coupling to new cart-trains that had never rolled. These carts were unusual in being of two sizes. Among those of the by now familiar dimensions, there stood an equal number of more than twice this capacity. These giants were concentrated toward the gallery's farther side,

where the shaft we had been following resumed its descent-resumed it at a markedly steeper angle, and with a bigger gauge of track, from which it was clear that the larger design of cart had been devoted strictly to working this more swiftly plunging segment of the shaf t . In the gal lery the giants had - transferred their greedily heaped plunder to more manageable vessels for the long climb to the sunlight.

This place had been described to us. Here the mother vein h a d t a k e n a sudden, steep downturn, while simultaneously thickening and complexifying to a fabulous richness. The Westforge engineers had hesitated only fractionally, then rushed down to pursue the vein at full gallop.

Boom times ensued. Several years of smooth progress and serene profits unrolled before the city, just as (if we'd been told rightly) four unflawed miles of this more cyclopean tunnelwork would now flow easily under our footsoles before we reached the next turning of the mine's fortunes, which was also a turning-a wrenching, really-of the shaft's course. We were told that it continued past this rupture for one more tortured mile, to end in a ragged edge above the subworld gulf. We crossed the gallery's switchyard and continued downward.

The riskier slope, the new giantism of c a r t s a n d o t h e r equipment-this combination was subtly frightening, for in it you could read the city's state o f s p i r i t a t that period. They were luck-drunk. The headlong grade revealed the dangerous exhilaration to which initial incredulity had yielded, while the unwieldy presumption of the machinery's new scale betrayed the tipsy acceleration of Westforge's appetite to possess its inordinate good fortune. Poor, luckless wretches! What haste they made to feast on the mountain's bowels, thereby, with precisely equal haste, delivering to demon-kind a very different feast-themselves.

The crossbeams of the tracks started to get slippery before we had pushed even a half mile beyond the gallery.

Barnar took a nasty fall that snuffed his torch. As he got to his feet I interrupted his muttered blasphemies: "Look down ahead. Is it getting light?"

It was. At first it was scarcely light we saw-an oily pallor veining the dark, no more. But soon the features of the shaft before us began, unmistakably, to emerge, varnished with a glossy, jaundiced fulgor. Barnar took - another fall, and then I took one worse than either of his, and suffered truly amazing pain when forced to use my elbow for an emergency anchor against the track's slimy beams.

"Barnar," I said between gasps, "beyond the collapse . . . It's bound to get steeper. . . . So we should just simply string out . . . a simple, stinking, putrid, slime-kissing, thrice-buggered cable . . . to go down along . . ."

I was proposing more toil than I knew. Even though we could all but count on finding supplemental lengths of cable on our way down, which our line could incorporate as we descended, still we gathered, cut, coiled and packed over two miles of it before proceeding, if only because we did not yet imagine how we could reach the subworld floor from the shaft, and for all we knew a simple line might serve the need. From our supply, and what we foraged, we pieced out our safety line behind us as we stepped-steady and methodical-deeper into the sulphuric haze in which tracks, crossties, timbers and walls were manifested with gradually increasing detail, all of them like objects emerging from smoke. Four torches later-for we kept them past our need of them, for the sake of their earthly familiarity-we reached the shaft's mortal wound, the catastrophic rupture Charnall had called "the buckling." Here commenced the shaft's terminal phase, for past this point its stony matrix had partially subsided into the subworld chasm, though it had stopped just short of following the rest of the mountain's core down to the demon-infected plains. The megalith still clung to its place in the architecture of the upper world, though it hung askew of its former placement. The discontinuity this produced in the shaft was dramatic. The tunnel was brutally torqued, its rocky walls having splintered while its shoring, though wrenched, had held. The tracks had also held together, though their bending had divorced them at some points from their crossbeams. They arched gracefully through a half-spiral, then plummeted down the nearly vertical drop that fol- lowed. Hereafter we fervently rejoiced in my foresight regarding the cable, for the shaft's terminal segment often opposed slopes of sixty and seventy degrees to our progress, while the febrile subworld light, which now filled the tunnel, seemed more than ever to have the property of lubricating whatever it lit.

And yet we all but forgot the hardship of the tricky path once we had seen a certain thing awaiting us below- or more exactly, once we had suddenly understood, and rightly interpreted, something we had been seeing for some time. It was at the center of our vision's limit, a ragged patch of yellow, criss-crossed with grey lines. And when, all at once, it became obvious that this was a patch of subworld sky framed by our tunnel's end, our rapt scrutiny had a new puzzle to pick at-the meaning of that disorderly grey network. Down we came, planting our feet with absentminded care while our eyes strained ahead to untangle this perplexing image.

But we had drawn quite near it before we comprehended its spatiality. At last it was clear that all the strands of the meshwork hung outside of the shaft, that somehow the whole crazy rigging was strung up in the open air just beyond our tunnel's ragged issue.

And then a warning was murmured to me. I was ahead of Barnar on the cable, and I heard from behind me that one fleet syllable of premonition, a throaty hum like that of a loosed bowstring. This touched my ears, and in scarcely the time it takes a hand to clench-which my rope-hand did-it was followed by a crushing blow laid across the backs of my knees. My legs shot out from under me as neat as ninepins. My grip on the cable held-it was my shoulder that nearly came apart while, for an instant, my body was stretched out on the air like a banner in a brisk wind. Well before I hit the ground, I understood that it would be far better for me if I did not hit the ground, and that if I must perforce do so, the less I tarried thereon the better, since it was clearly upon the ground that this trap was designed to throw me.

Actually, the line had robbed the trap of its full effectiveness. The blow I'd taken would have flung an unan- chored victim right out to the shaft's ragged lip and left him sprawled on its dizziest salience above the webbed abyss. Instinctively I riveted my eyes on that menacing spot even while-finding I had no real alternative-I gave gravity her due and yielded to my body's stubborn determination to hit the ground, will-I nill-I.

Starbursts blotted my vision, yet still I held my eyes to their target. And while my stunned frame wallowed to get its legs beneath it; while returning vision dispelled the white obscurity that filled my eyeballs; while my right hand groped for its dropped lance-throughout all the harrowing micro-pulses of precious time which these accomplishments consumed, still I fought to see, exclusive of all else, that shaft-lip and any least thing that happened there. Unmonitored by me, my palm found the haft of my spear. Precisely then, as if the touch had summoned it, a scorpion as big as a battle-chariot swarmed into the shaft-mouth, and came avalanching towards us on a great splashing racket of rattly legs. My own legs weren't quite under me yet, but Barnar's lance came plunging past my shoulder and planted its razor-edged steel a half-yard deep in the junction of her soft throat with the first of her glossy black thoracic plates.

For of course this thing was not pure scorpion. Most demons, having something of man in them, are just such hybrids as this which leered at us with an old woman's face obscenely socketed in the huge ribbed and jointed body. The shot had stopped her, by which I mean made her pause, no more. For she crouched perfectly poised, the dreadful,

limber power of her legs undiminished. Cautiously, delicately, her bulky pincers nibbled at the shaft sprouting from her gorge. And though this brought tears of pain in thick streams from her eyes, it was a look of the purest lunatic glee that her face beamed on us. It was a jowled, flabby-mouthed face, the brow fantastically gnarled-nightmare-knotted-above her crazed red eyes. Her mouth gaped-displaying not teeth but black barbs-and she paid out an endless red tongue that dangled to her wounded throat and licked it caressingly.

Then, in a gurgling whisper, she said: "I'm going to lick your face clean off your skull. Slowly, thoroughly, lick it entirely off. I'm going to sting you and bind you and scoop your loins hollow and lap out your brains. And then I'm going to make you again and start over."

It was just as she finished speaking that I made my cast. Almost casually her pincers rose, their movement perfectly timed to shield her face. Unluckily for her, I wasn't aiming at her face. Crouched for attack as she was, with her tail advanced in a strike-ready arc over her back, my target was positioned several feet above her head, and I didn't miss it. Skewered, her stinger's poison bulb dropped a black bucketful of her venom onto her face.

Her agony was volcanic. She surged and crashed against the shaft walls like a stormy sea, her pincers tearing at the sizzling mess whence her howls erupted and her simmering eyes leaked out in red rivulets. We stood with broadswords drawn waiting for a safe moment to move in, but in the end we were spared that task, for after a few moments the poison seemed to reach some central nerve in her. She rose in the air, folding and unfolding spasmodically, crashed down on her back and writhed so mightily that the movement propelled her like a snake straight backward and launched her from the shaft-lip. We rushed to the lip and looked out. We learned then the obstacles that opposed our entry of this vast prison where the key to our freedom lay.

The tunnel issued from a stupendous wall of ragged bluffs, scarred by great landslides and stretching past - vision to either side. The cliffs dropped sheer below us for nearly half a mile down to a zone of swampland, and all across the face of them the grey webbing spread, like a shroud crawling with grave-lice. For everywhere big multilegged shapes crouched in that dingy rigging, or ran along it with the incredible speed ants have on their own tiny scale. And other forms decorated the nasty weave-dangling bundles of webbing which stirred and twisted impotently against their anchorages. Vague though they were in their wrappings, we could see that many of these were winged things of a stature about twice that of a man, but the commonest food of the scorpion demons was themselves. Their cannibal struggles raged everywhere, including at a point not far beneath our feet, where our recent adversary, snagged in the web by her tail, offered little effective resistance to the greedy pincers of two of her confreres.

As for the swamp below us, it was apparently a kind of backwater off a river which, far to our right, flowed out from the foot of the cliffs, and divided the plain with a shallow valley. Across the valley, perhaps two leagues distant from us, a city of giant towers stood, stilt-supported platforms crowned with buildings. And, looking small as flies above a far off corpse, things numerous and fleet flew among the titanic structures.

But we gave most of our attention to the cliff that we had to descend. We could see that any rope we dropped would hang in striking range of a score of places in the webbing. We'd be picked off within ten minutes of our starting down. And when we'd brooded on this for a while, we discovered an added unpleasantness; the swamps we must cross once down were astir everywhere with the movement of submerged shapes. None broke the surface. All we could be sure of was that they were big-very big.

We sat down and rested. We were so discouraged, we couldn't speak a word. I discovered that my spear had fallen free from the demon's stinger, and that her venom had only slightly corroded its ironwood haft. I was about to exult in this luck, but then only smiled bitterly. We had so little to work with! Barnar spat vigorously out into the yellow air.

"I'd like to sweep that foulness off the rock, like cobwebs with a broom," he snarled.

"Too bad we didn't bring a broom," I sighed. "Do you think we could drop rocks big enough to break a path through the web?"

"How many do you think we could manage that were even as heavy as that demon, let alone heavier?"

This had already occurred to me. I sighed again. Then I had an idea.

When Barnar had heard me out, he sat meditating for a moment. "You know," he said, "its wildness may be the thing about it that will make it work. I mean, I don't think you can ease and creep your way into a realm like this. If you try, the first little entity will smell your uncertainty and hesitation. Horror and bad luck will converge on you. But if you barge in with all possible force, storm the gate . . . then maybe luck might just give way a few inches for you, and let you pass."

And so we started back up the shaft.

VIII.

A long time after ascending-how can I know how long?-I counted off the first hundred paces of our second descent, measuring from the switching-yard gallery and down the main shaft's penultimate steepening. I found my mark and looked back toward the gallery. It was suddenly eerie that the sections of its walls and ceiling I could see should be stained with the lurid wash of the forge's light, braziers and many torches.

"All right!" I shouted. "Send it down!"

My voice woke the noise of the mighty windlass above, and it all felt even more like some ghostly resurrection of the mine's great, toilsome soul, so long in its grave. Dusty and smoke-stained as I was, it was not hard to feel like some reanimated Westforger-certainly, I was as far from the world of men as any ghost is.

But when the thing I had summoned rumbled into view and came easing down the tracks, my little whimsicality was badly jarred. No such conveyance as this had ever ridden these rails in the doomed city's heyday. Though one soon saw the two giant ore-carts that were its substructure, its embellishments made it look far more like some monstrous weapon than any kind of mining equipment, and of course it was a weapon.

We'd welded on a prow-an upswept scimitar forged from the smithy's stocks of sheet-iron and sharp as a well-honed axe-bit. We'd also welded two long horizontal vanes to the sides of both carts-these were shaped rather like an arrow's fletches and were also sharpened. Lastly, both carts had a pair of broad vanes that pivoted on pins set in the frontal segments of their boxes' rims. At present they resembled a beetle's wings half-folded over its back, but they could be pushed out to a much broader lateral spread, and locked in this position, from inside the carts.

When this huge, haftless spearhead had nosed down to my mark, I shouted: "Hold!" Barnar locked the windlass and appeared in the mouth of the shaft. When he reached me, he found me staring down the shaft ahead-rather glumly, I suppose.

"The buckling?" he asked after a moment.

"Yes," I said. It didn't bear much dwelling on. We had spent hours there fine-measuring by every trick we could think of, and the tracks at that point certainly seemed-throughout their contorted stretch-to have been bent perfectly in phase. At the speed we would be going when we got there, they had better be. Barnar nodded sadly, gazing where I did. He sighed.

"Oh well," he said.

I nodded. "Well put."

We went to our vehicle. I climbed into the fore-cart, and Barnar into the rear. We spent a moment adjusting ourselves in the shredded cable with which we had packed both carts for cushioning, and checking the operation of our folding vanes. Then we poked our heads up and looked at each other. Barnar had his shortsword in one hand.

"Well, old Ox," I smiled, "all I can say is, I just wish it was you riding up front. I still think it's nose-weight we should have."

"Tail-weight. But be comforted, Nifft. Either we'll enter that place safely, or we'll ram ourselves so far up its arse you won't even notice the difference."

"Well that's true enough. Yes indeedy. You realize of course, Barnar, that it is simply not possible that we're actually doing this?"

"I've come to the same comforting conclusion, old friend. Therefore let's away-an impossibility can only do us an unreal sort of harm, after all."

I nodded. He reached his sword over the cable holding us by the stern, and the blade whickered through it.

The slope plucked us down. The great i ron mass seemed to r ide a ramp of ice, so dreadful ly smooth was i ts - acceleration. The fetid gloom of the tunnel surged up against us like a foul throat swallowing us ravenously.

The racketing of the tracks rose to a howl, and in moments it had grown light enough to see the shoring's main beams, at their thirty-foot intervals, merging into one blurred, continuous wall.

All that lay in our power to do, in the way of navigational control, we had already done when we cut the cable, and nothing remained for us to do but-when it came time-to spread our vanes as we exited the shaft. The assumption that we would ever be called upon to perform this second task now appeared quite clearly to me as the most extravagant folly, based on a wild delusion conceived by a raving idiot. We would never reach the shaft-mouth! How could we have dreamed that we would attain this velocity? When we hit the buckling, we would quite simply be thrown up against the roof of the shaft with enough force to wed carts with stone-and ourselves between-in an eternally indissoluble bond. Already we were leaving the tracks and resettling on them in long, giddy surges. The feeble subworld light seemed to be igniting, coming on like a flare, so swiftly did we drive toward its source. I saw the buckling just below. I pulled my head back in and lay down. I could not forbear shouting farewell to Barnar, though he could not have heard me over the shriek of the wheels. Then my body, in its cushiony coffin, was seized, lifted up, pulled down, and torqued into a tight spiral-all in the same fraction of an instant. For another half-instant I was floating, and then the wheels were roaring again, our speed unabated.

I sat back up. Before I had succeeded in believing what I saw-that we still swept down the track-I saw ahead the webbed tunnelmouth. It seemed to howl as it yawned at us, though its voice was actually the din of our own white-hot, fire-spitting wheels combined with the thunderstorm of echoes we trailed behind us. I lay back.

As the carts erupted from the roaring corridor, and into the stunning silence of that sunken sky, I slammed open my top-vanes.