Elric_ The Sleeping Sorceress - Michael Moorcock [126]
Then Rackhir took up his bow-stave and pushed that out.
“Grab the bow, Elric. Can you?”
Leaning forward and stretching every bone and muscle in his body, Elric just managed to get a grip on the bow-stave.
“Now, I must—Ah!” Rackhir, pulling at the bow, found his own feet slipping and the slab beginning to rock quite wildly. He flung out one arm to grab the far lip of the slab and with his other hand kept a grip on the bow. “Hurry, Elric! Hurry!”
Elric began painfully to pull himself from the ooze. The slab still rocked crazily and Rackhir’s hawklike face was almost as pale as Elric’s own as he desperately strove to keep his hold on both slab and bow. And then Elric, all soaked in mire, managed to reach the slab and crawl onto it, the brand still sputtering in his hand, and lie there gasping.
Rackhir, too, was short of breath, but he laughed. “What a fish I’ve caught!” he said. “The biggest yet, I’d wager!”
“I am grateful to you, Rackhir the Red Archer. I am grateful, Warrior Priest of Phum. I owe you my life,” said Elric after a while. “And I swear that whether I’m successful in my quest or not I’ll use all my powers to see you through the Shade Gate and back into the world from which we have both come.”
Rackhir shrugged and grinned. “Now I suggest we continue towards yonder monument on our knees. Undignified it might be, but safer it is also. And it is but a short way to crawl.”
Elric agreed.
Not much more time had passed in that timeless darkness before they had reached a little moss-grown island on which stood the Monument of the Eagle, huge and heavy and towering above them into the greater gloom which was either the sky or the roof of the cavern. And at the base of the plinth they saw a low doorway. And the doorway was open.
“A trap?” mused Rackhir.
“Or does Yyrkoon assume us perished in Ameeron?” said Elric, wiping himself free of slime as best he could. He sighed. “Let’s enter and be done with it.”
And so they entered.
They found themselves in a small room. Elric cast the faint light of the brand about the place and saw another doorway. The rest of the room was featureless—each wall made of the same faintly glistening black marble. The room was filled with silence.
Neither man spoke. Both walked unfalteringly towards the next doorway and, when they found steps, began to descend the steps, which wound down and down into total darkness.
For a long time they descended, still without speaking, until eventually they reached the bottom and saw before them the entrance to a narrow tunnel which was irregularly shaped so that it seemed more the work of nature than of some intelligence. Moisture dripped from the roof of the tunnel and fell with the regularity of heartbeats to the floor, seeming to echo a deeper sound, far away, emanating from somewhere in the tunnel itself.
“This is without doubt a tunnel,” said the Red Archer, “and it, unquestionably, leads under the marsh.”
Elric felt that Rackhir shared his reluctance to enter the tunnel. He stood with the guttering brand held high, listening to the sound of the drops falling to the floor of the tunnel, trying to recognize that other sound which came so faintly from the depths.
And then he forced himself forward, almost running into the tunnel, his ears filled with a sudden roaring which might have come from within his head or from some other source in the tunnel. He heard Rackhir’s footfalls behind him. He drew his sword, the sword of the dead hero Aubec, and he heard the hissing of his own breath echo from the walls of the tunnel which was now alive with sounds of every sort.
Elric shuddered, but he did not pause.
The tunnel was warm. The floor felt spongy beneath his feet, the smell of brine persisted. And now he could see that the walls of the tunnel were smoother, that they seemed to shiver with quick, regular movement.