The crown he wore was silver and glowed with the deep violet light of the opals.

The grub-pale tenebrals flashed across the path of the Que-Tana, squeaking desolately as they burrowed into the darkness.

"Of all times to meet them," Ramiro muttered. "Our backs to a freak of nature and our faces to superior numbers. Our best hope lies in the blades of our swords when they close with us."

He smiled fiercely at me, drawing forth that long, double-edged monstrosity he handled like a carving knife.

"There's never been a time," he claimed, "when a Plainsman could hold his own against a Solamnic Knight in close quarters."

It was then that the rain of arrows began.

Clattering onto the stones around us, they came like a menacing avalanche. Under the direction of their leader, the Plainsmen aimed some five yards short of us, and volley after volley drew nearer and nearer, until Ramiro and I were forced to raise our shields above the party, forming a canopy of leather and metal over them.

It was all designed for terror's sake, this relentless barrage of arrows. Pinned down we clearly were, and in open terrain, and as far as I could figure it, at any moment they could have lowered their sights and riddled us with straighter and more deadly shots.

We extinguished our lantern at once, then huddled together, the five of us, shivering as though we were caught in a mountain blizzard.

"That does it!" I finally exclaimed, as yet another wave of arrows swept over us, jarring my hand on the shield. "Whatever befalls the rest of us, I'm finding a way out of this for Dannelle!"

"Indeed not!" the girl exclaimed bravely, but her voice quivered, and I could feel her tremble next to me. "By the gods, I can stand here with the best male among you!"

"Standing here is no real feat of courage, my dear," Shardos explained, his voice a trifle too high-pitched to be taken for calm. "I could guide you readily back the way we came, then send you for help. The only thing is that our visitors may still prove great fanged flies in the ointment."

I thought of the waiting, hungry vespertiles and shuddered.

"Well, then," Oliver announced with a sigh, reluctantly but fearlessly, as though it was his part only to rise from bed in the wee hours of a winter's morning. "Well, then, there should be a sword hand to secure the lass the length of the chamber below."

Ramiro and I looked foolishly at one another. As fortune would have it, at that moment, there came a lull in the shooting, and Oliver slipped from beneath the shields and raced toward the ledge and the lower cavern.

"No, Oliver!" shouted Dannelle. Shardos, turning, groped for the squire but came away clutching nothing as Oliver slid down a stalactite and into the chamber below us. It was too dark to see what was unfolding down there. I heard Oliver shout once from directly below the ledge, then again at a distance and once more at a still greater distance as he drew the giant bats away from the stalactites. Dannelle grasped my arm, and I took her hand. "You have no choice now," I said to her bluntly. "The boy is moving the monsters away to save you. You have no choice but to use the time he is buying to get to the surface, then hasten toward whatever help you can find us."

It was a fiction, and we both knew it. The help Dannelle went for would almost certainly arrive too late. And yet it was good to think about, that help, and with all of our thoughts upon it, at least we could act, could be busy at something when the enemy overwhelmed us in the dim caverns and the dim times. Meanwhile, my directions would surely take her back to Castle di Caela, to the safest place I knew in these troubled parts.

I placed her hand into Shardos's.

The rain of arrows began again as the juggler burst toward the ledge, shielding Dannelle's body with his own. In the half-light from the Plainsmen's torches, I saw the blind man lift an arm above the both of them and, when one or another arrow came too close, swat it from the air in an old juggler's movement that was remarkable and totally unexplainable. It was as though they passed through a downpour without getting wet.

Birgis trotted along merrily after his master, hugging to the safety of ledges and Shardos's cloak.

Dumbstruck, Ramiro and I watched all three of them slide over the ledge. Then we lifted our shields and followed to the lip of the tunnel.

Below me, I saw them blend into the darkness at the far end of the cavern, safely out of the reach of bowshot or vespertiles. Loudly to my right, Oliver shouted again and rushed back in our direction, one of the monsters not far behind him. The boy's intention, no doubt, was to climb the wall and join us. But there was something deceptive about the beast that pursued him, something as subtle as quicksilver and as shifting in form, for its speed propelled it faster by far than the movement of legs or hand, and we learned that at its most fleet, it surpassed the eye itself. The boy was halfway back to us when the vespertile turned and rushed him in a white blur.

Oliver screamed and raised his sword in desperation, but the big, sail-like wings were already covering him.

"No!" Ramiro and I cried out in unison, our eyes fixed to the terrible scene below us, to the vespertile lowering its face like some horrible lover to the boy's unprotected neck. The Que-Tana, shrewdly commanded, chose that moment to rush us, and as I watched the unspeakable fate of Oliver, a solid blow from a Plainsman quarterstaff struck me from behind, sending me skidding toward the ledge after the lantern, which dropped ahead of me, struck the stone ground, and shattered as I hurtled after it, clutching desperately for the ledge, for stalagmites, for anything, somehow righting myself so I managed to hit ground feetfirst but losing my sword and my sense of direction in the process.

Half-dazed, I sat against smooth stone, looking up toward the dodging torches at the high mouth of the tunnel. Above me, I heard the sounds of struggles-thrashing and wrestling and Ramiro bellowing-and here around me in the gibbering darkness, the high-pitched cries of the vesper-tiles.

Oliver moaned somewhere off to my left, and I heard the scraping sound of something monstrous moving across stone and rubble.

There was nothing I could do.

Whatever had happened to Oliver would happen next to me. There was no telling about Ramiro, whose curses grew more elaborate and powerful as he wrestled a dozen Que-Tana above me, nor about Shardos and Dannelle, whom I could only hope had escaped.

For a moment, I felt worse for my friends than for myself, even though I had brought them here.

Above me suddenly a shout burst out of the darkness. It was Ramiro, I was sure, and something in the shout spurred me to action, for there was no pain or panic in that cry. Instead, there was something like triumph.

There in the caves, where we all lay blinded, something above me was passing for hope.

My fingers moved into my pockets, past the nuisance of those old leather gloves, and closed thankfully over metal and reed.

I drew out the whistle-the old dog whistle that was a gift from Brithelm all those many years ago. What impelled me to blow it, I cannot say for sure: something in my childhood schooling, perhaps, or the way it had disturbed the tenebrals when I had used it to call Birgis before.

Whatever my reasons, Huma's dog whistle, as Brithelm and I had called it laughingly, shrilled its silent note through the caverns, and I heard strange, humanlike shrieks above and about me, and the sounds of scurrying, of rustling, of something running away, leaving us alone.

Soon Ramiro called my name down the cascade of wet stone, and I answered, and above was the glimmer of torchlight.

But here about me, the silence was deep, complete. It was like some blackness before the world began, like there was simply nothing here but nothing.