Duffy carefully set both booted feet onto the stone step before trying for the next. When he'd taken a dozen of them he was below the level of the floor, and he found himself in a claustrophobically tight and lowroofed spiral stairwell, hunching and groping his way by the reflected light from Aurelianus' lamp. The old sorcerer was about half a spiral below him, and though the Irishman could
clearly hear his scuffling steps and his breathing, he couldn't see him.
'Damn it, wizard!' exclaimed Duffy, lowering his voice in mid-word as he noticed how the tight-curled stone tube amplified sounds. 'Slow up, will you? This stairway was obviously built for gnomes.'
Aurelianus' head poked into view around the bricks of the curved inward wall. 'I must insist on complete silence from here onward,' he hissed, and withdrew below.
The Irishman rolled his eyes and continued his awkward descent, bent-kneed and crouching to keep from bumping his head on the stone roof. The steps were rounded as if by millennia of use, but every time his boots slipped on one it was easy to catch himself by bracing his hands against the close walls. No sir, he thought, this isn't a stairway in which you'd have to worry about taking a tumble. Though, he reflected uneasily, if you did fall, and got jammed head-downward in here, somebody would have to come with hammers and break your bones to get you unwedged. He took a few deep breaths and forced the thought out of his mind.
The corkscrew shaft didn't go straight down; it seemed to Duffythat it slanted slightly north. By now we must be about thirty feet under the cobblestones of the Malkenstrasse, he thought. Maybe if we go deep enough we'll be outside the city altogether.
By the dim light he had noticed words scratched roughly in the bricks, and he paused to puzzle out a couple of the inscriptions. PROPTER NOS DILATAVIT INFERNUS OS SUUM, he read, and, a few steps later, DETESTOR OMNES, HORREO, FUGIO, EXECROR. Hm, he thought; the first graffiti was a comment on how eagerly the mouth of Hell awaits us, and the second is just somebody expressing a lot of hatred for 'all of them.' Evidently the foreman of this tunnel-digging job failed to keep the workmen happy. Well-educated workmen they were, too, to be scrawling in Latin instead of German.
'Hey,' Duffy whispered. 'Why are these inscriptions in Latin?'
The sorcerer didn't even peer back. 'This was a Roman fort once, remember?' came his whisper from below.
'Romans spoke Latin. Now be quiet.'
Yes, the Irishman thought, but Romans didn't have chapels, at least not Christian ones. What sort of chamber did this damned stair once lead down from?
His continually hunched posture was beginning to give him knee-twitches and a throbbing headache, but when after a half-hour's steady descent they came to a wide landing and Aurelianus proposed a brief rest, the headache went away but the throbbing did not; a deep reverberation, like a slow drum-beat, was coming from below, vibrating through the stone, to be felt in the bones rather than heard. For one panicky moment Duffy thought something ponderous was walking slowly up the stairs, but after a few more seconds he decided the source was stationary.
As he sat panting and massaging his right leg he noticed more scratches on the walls, and lifted the sorceror's lamp to see what the sentiments were at this level. Instead of Latin words, though, he saw a number of horizontal lines hatched by short vertical and diagonal strokes. Well I'm damned, he thought - these inscriptions are in Ogham! I didn't think you could find this primordial script except in a few Celtic ruins in Ireland. I wish I could read them.
Then he had hastily clanked the lamp back down beside Aurelianus and said, 'Let's push on, shall we?' -for it had seemed to him that he could have read them, if he'd really tried. And no one since the druids had ever been able to.
Aurelianus stared at him curiously, but shrugged and got to his feet. 'Right.' He padded to the end of the level stretch, where the stair resumed, and continued the downward course.
This deeper set of stairs was a long, steep ramp rather than a spiral, but Duffy had by now lost all sense of direction, and he had no idea of their position in relation to the city that lay somewhere above. The walls were still close, but the stone ceiling was a good deal higher in this section, and the Irishman was able to stand up straight.
Here too the stairs were worn down to low ridges, but the incline wasn't quite steep enough to make it dangerous. The arched mouths of side-tunnels yawned in the walls at intervals, and the deep drum-beat throbbed a little more noticeably each time the two wayfarers shuffled past one. It seemed to Duffy that the going was warmer on this stretch, as if the draft sighing out of the black tunnels was a long exhalation from the lungs of the earth, and the slow drum the beating of its molten heart.
Passing one of the openings he head a soft, slithering rustle, and he started convulsively, his hand leaping to his dagger hilt.
Aurelianus jumped too, then after glancing roundabout turned to Duffy with his white eyebrows raised in annoyed inquiry.
'What sort of things live down here?' the Irishman asked, remembering to whisper. 'Snakes? Trolls?'
'I suppose there may be snakes,' the sorcerer answered impatiently. 'No trolls. And no man has entered these tunnels since the Church took over the brewery, in the twelfth century. All right?'
'All right!' snapped Duffy, irritable now himself. After all, he thought, it wasn't my idea to go for a romp in a rat warren. They plodded on in silence.
After perhaps a hundred more yards the Irishman noticed something ahead - a hammocklike bundle slung from the ceiling, dimly visible in the flickering yellow light. Aurelianus nodded to show he saw it too, but didn't slacken his pace.
My God, Duffy thought as they drew closer, it's a mummy, wearing a sword, hung sitting in a sling. A poor idea of a joke, especially in a setting like this.
Then the thing opened its eyes, which brightly reflected the lamplight. Its pupils were vertical slits, like a cat's. Duffy yelped and jumped a full yard backward, fell, and regained the ground in a sitting slide. The sorcerer just eyed the sitter speculatively.
Its mouth spread open in a glittering yellow grin, making its face seem to be nothing but eyes and teeth. 'Halt,' it said in an echoing whisper, 'for the toll.'
Aurelianus stepped forward, holding the lantern low, as Duffy got back to his feet. 'What price for passage?' the old man asked.
The thing spread long-fingered hands. 'Nothing exorbitant.' It hopped down from its sling, agile as a monkey, and caressed the hilt of its short sword. 'There are two of you.. .I'll take the life of one.'
Duffy had wearily dragged his dagger out now - dreading the exertion of hacking this unwholesome creature to death - but Aurelianus just raised the lamp so that his seamed, craggy face was clearly visible. 'Do you think you could digest my life, if you took it?' His voice was flat with contempt.
The thing shuddered with recognition and bowed, casting its ropy colorless hair over its face. 'No, Ambrosius. Your pardon - I didn't know you at first.' A glowing eye looked up from under the hair. 'But I will have your companion.'