Gileandos rose slowly, timidly. He was obviously not consoled by science.

Without another word, Andrew, Robert, and Bayard drew their swords. Gileandos raised the lantern, and the procession into the black roots of Castle di Caela began.

The world beneath Castle di Caela was wet and hollow.

At least, so it seemed to the Lady Enid as she walked behind her husband, who was propped on the stout right shoulder of Sir Brandon Rus, who plodded dutifully ahead, clutching a lantern in his left hand.

Hollow, and also confusing. It was a world in which one could become quickly and forever lost. The network of tunnels branched and doubled back on themselves, as elaborate as an anthill or a hive. For that was what came to mind – some kind of lair or warren. It was not the kind of tunnelry born of the seepage of water, the shifting of earth. There was something more intentional in all of this, more designed, as if it had been burrowed by something menacing.

Except that there was no dreadful smell, no hot stink of terror or panic or lust or simple sleep or stirring or hunger. The smell of the tunnels was the smell of something remote and unearthly.

If nothing had a smell, Enid thought, it would smell like this.

Bayard wished he had not given in, Enid knew. He wished he had put down some masculine boot and sent his wife back up the cellar stairs to light and safety. His father-in-law would have supported him. Indeed, none of the Knights would have stood against his decision.

But he chose to be fair, chose faith in Lady Enid's resources, in the simple rules of justice and reason, in the Measure and Oath the way he had always read them.

Now she was in for the duration, for any danger. Because of this, the poor man was worried to distraction.

The lantern dipped in Brandon's hand, and quickly the Knights recovered their fragile, shared balance. Enid and Raphael and Marigold followed, their cloaks wrapped tightly against the cool still air and intrusive damp.

Behind them, the other three straggled and splashed through roots and rubble and tilting shadow. Already the shallow breathing and the grunting and the occasional brilliant oath leapt like sparks out of the shadows.

All at once, the party came to a juncture where the tunnel branched. Without hesitation, they took the left branch, which sloped downward past two small eddies of water circling beneath where they had stood but a moment before. Behind them, the old men followed laboriously. Now the tunnel circled back on itself and back yet again, descending in a tight spiral, its earthen walls giving way, surprisingly, to walls of hewn stone as Bayard and Brandon led the party deeper below the castle.

Sir Robert swore he knew nothing of this lower masonry.

"It's before my time," he declared. "Before the castle itself, unless I am mistaken."

Bayard reached across Brandon, took up the lantern, and raised it high, until its light tumbled onto the crumbled bricks.

Strange letters were scrawled across their surface.

"The spidery hand of magic," Gileandos whispered reverently, and Sir Andrew rolled his eyes.

"Gileandos, you say that every time you find something you can't read."

Bayard looked more closely at the writing. "Plainsman, I'd wager by the shape of the letters. Other than that, I'm lost."

For a moment, the party collected itself before the wall in question. Each of the Knights squinted, mumbled, and conceded he could not read it either. Gileandos crouched behind his companions, his mind far from magic, listening no doubt for animals and geysers and rockslides. The other lantern, his responsibility, flickered and dimmed because his constant, nervous tumblings with its mechanism had retracted the wick.

"Look!" Gileandos exclaimed, holding the sputtering lantern aloft. "We are faced with a shortage of air down here!" The Knights looked at one another curiously.

"The time has come for hard decisions," Gileandos babbled on, pointing frantically to the faint glow in the lantern globe as some kind of mad evidence. "One of us will have to… give his life so the others can breathe." He glanced into each puzzled face around him, looking, no doubt, for a volunteer.

"Gileandos, are you having trouble breathing?" Sir Andrew asked coldly.

"Quick, sir. There's little time remaining, if my calculations-"

"Damn your calculations! I asked you a simple question, man. Are you having trouble breathing?"

Gileandos coughed, stammered, then shook his head.

"Then I would suggest we hold off on slaughtering our ranks. Meanwhile, you might see to extending the wick in that contraption we've been foolish enough to put you in charge of."

Shamefaced, Gileandos slinked into a corner, leaving his companions in an orange half-light, framed by gloom and shadows.

"Well, now, Bayard," Sir Andrew said, "before Gileandos sacrifices us all to the great god of panic, we should have an idea of where you are taking us."

"To be honest, Sir Andrew," Bayard said, leaning against the weeping wall of the tunnel and smiling winningly, "I have never really considered it."

All of his companions-even Brandon Rus-looked at one another in astonishment.

It was Enid's turn to smile. One would think she approved of such a shot in the dark.

"You mean," Sir Andrew finally ventured, "that we've been shanghaied into the bowels of the planet on some sort of whim?"

"On some sort of adventure, Andrew. It's not by accident when the world beneath you opens."

"It's a curse," Sir Robert pronounced.

"It is clearly tectonics," said Gileandos.

"How strange," Sir Andrew observed. "It seems like accident to me. Or the will of the gods, which sometimes looks like accident. Sir Brandon, what is your philosophy?"

"My philosophy is that the dark is for philosophers," Brandon said curtly, his eyes on the descending spiral in front of him. "I agree with Bayard because we are already down here."

It seemed that Brandon Rus had hit the mark once more. His companions nodded, puffed, grunted, and shouldered their weapons and burdens for the descent. Here where the runnel corkscrewed down into the blackness, there was time for reflection and for long thought. The stone of the corridor curved leftward, beetling over the Knights as they descended, blocking their view of each other.

We are below the Southeast Tower by now, Sir Robert thought. He never called it the Cat Tower.

He thought of Mariel, his mad aunt. Thought of the smothered laughter her story brought to his visitors-the laughter that even the family shared now, the years having spiraled old Mariel into a faint, small form at the edges of memory, someone remembered because of this story only.

But Robert remembered the door opening onto the room in the top of the tower. Mariel's red door, the silver fleur-de-lis fast in its center. He remembered how they waited outside the door for a moment, how his brother Roderick set booted foot to the door.

It had been like flies swarming.

The cats boiled across his aunt's body, covered with dust, cobwebbing, and wet, hot-smelling things that he could not name if he dared. They were feeding hysterically, their tails whipping through the air as if a hostile wind was moving them.

Years later, when he saw the scorpions settle on Benedict di Caela, there in the Pass at Chaktamir, Robert had remembered his aunt, had felt nausea rise and had told no one.

Again the image arose, banishing the dark and the torchlight ahead of him, banishing the curve of the rock, the downward incline of the muddy tunnel floor. For a moment, Robert di Caela thought he was climbing steps. He shook his head, saw rock, darkness, and torchlight. Saw the descending tunnel ahead of him, Bayard and Brandon huddled together, moving from shadow to light to shadow. His daughter following them, at her side the young page, Raphael.