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By Root 793 0

that the Darke Halls were a whole lot bigger than he or Marcellus had thought. One of the ancient writers had called them “The Infinite Palaces of Wailing.” Septimus had noted the Wailing but had paid little attention to the Infinite Palaces bit. But the cavern he had been walking through was surely as big as a dozen Castle Palaces—and it showed no sign of ending. The enormity of his task suddenly hit him. There were no maps to the Darke Halls; everything they knew was based on legends or on the writings of a handful of Wizards who had ventured there and returned to tell the tale. Most of these had drifted quickly into madness—not the most reliable of sources, thought Septimus, as his weary feet plowed onward.

And so it was with huge relief that Septimus at last saw a landmark appearing out of the gloom—a great square-cut gap in the rock, flanked on either side by two lapis lazuli pillars. It was exactly as Marcellus had described the entrance to Dungeon Number One. With his spirits soaring Septimus hurried toward it. Now all he had to do was to walk through and find Alther on the other side.

As he got closer to the portico Septimus noticed something white at its foot, and as he drew nearer still, he saw what it was. Bones. Clean and completely white—except for a thin brass ring with a red stone on the left little finger—the skeleton was sitting propped against the wall, the skull tipped at a jaunty angle toward the pillars as if pointing the way through.

Feeling it was wrong to pass casually by, Septimus stopped beside the bones. They had belonged to someone small, probably no taller than he had been a year ago. They looked fragile, sad and lonely, and Septimus felt a wave of sympathy for them. Whoever they had been had somehow survived the Bottomless Whirlpool only to find a haunted, freezing desert awaited them.

A sudden wail of wind blew through the portico and chilled him, even through the Darke Disguise. A bout of shivering overtook Septimus and he decided it was time to go through to the antechamber to Dungeon Number One; time to find Alther and do what he had come to do. He nodded respectfully to the bones and stepped through the portico.

The antechamber to Dungeon Number One was not what Septimus had expected—it seemed much the same as the empty space he had been walking through before. And there was no sign of Alther—there was, in fact, no sign of any ghosts at all. According to the texts, the antechamber was the most haunted place on earth, mostly by the ghosts of those thrown into the dungeon over the centuries. One of the great fears that Dungeon Number One held was the knowledge that those who died there were never seen as ghosts. All fell victim to the thrall of the Darke Halls and spent their entire ghosthood below the ground, with no possibility of ever seeing the people or places they had once loved ever again. Many quite reasonably preferred to stay with the company of other ghosts rather than roam the “Infinite Palaces of Wailing.”

The antechamber to Dungeon Number One was described as a circular walled chamber lined with black bricks, the same as those used to build the little round brick pot that marked the top entrance to the dungeon. And if those descriptions were right—and Septimus believed they were—then he was most definitely not in the antechamber to Dungeon Number One.

Septimus felt near to despair. If he was not in the antechamber, where was he? Unbidden the answer came to him—he was lost. Totally and utterly lost. Far more lost than he had been during the night he had spent in the Forest with Nicko a few years back. To stop himself sliding into panic Septimus thought about what Nicko would say right then. Nicko would say that they must keep going. Nicko would say that sooner or later they would come to Dungeon Number One, that it was only a matter of time. And so, taking an imaginary Nicko with him, Septimus set off once more into the Darke.

Almost immediately he was rewarded with the sight of three plain, square entrances set into the smooth rock wall. Septimus stopped and considered