The swinging light of the lanterns jabbed and shifted along the tunnel walls. The shadows of humans and cats tangled together hurrying down into earth. Voices interlaced in whispers, as if to speak too loudly might call forth from the earth things one would not want to summon. As the tunnel dropped, the glancing light picked out falling chasms, picked out stone slabs tilting over them. Spaces yawned, then suddenly the tunnel closed in, the walls soon pressed against Braden’s shoulders. Fear traveled with them, fear of being trapped beneath the earth. But his companions seemed unafraid. A powerful longing drew the Catswold on, a need Braden could only guess at as the Catswold hurried deeper down into the core of the earth. He felt above him the weight of tons of stone, and he began to sweat. He had never suffered from claustrophobia, but now a nearly uncontrollable fear gripped him; he fought the panic, fought a screaming need for space and air. If not for Melissa somewhere down there in that cavernous world he would have gone racing back to pound uselessly on the stone wall that separated him from the world of light and air, would have dug with his hands at the tunnel walls, trying to break through.
He still held Wylles’ shoulder, alternately pushing the boy along and then, when Wylles tried to bolt, jerking him back. Wylles was their only source of information, the only source of the spells which the Catswold folk must learn if they were to survive in the world they approached. And when after several hours they stopped to rest, Braden forced Wylles to say for the gathered Catswold the spell for changing, then the spell for light, then spells for turning away weapons. The Catswold tested each. In the hoary half-dark among lantern shadows the Catswold folk changed from human to cat, and from cat to human, a metamorphosis that made Braden’s skin crawl. Sharply now, he realized that without magic he would be severely crippled in the Netherworld.
Melissa had told him that.
Well, hell, he had fought in other wars. If this war was different he would compensate for his weakness. War couldn’t all be fought by magic, not all swords and spears would be deflected. To calm his fears he concentrated on the exotic glimpses of the inner earth given him by the lanterns, images like sudden scenes from a slide projector: waterfalls snaking down fissures, slabs of stone swinging out over black emptiness, echoing spaces dropping as if into hell itself. He imagined he could hear the whispers of dark gods, of Hecate, of Cerberus; he imagined the voices of the Hell Beasts Melissa had described too graphically. And now, no human figure shared the tunnel with him, except Prince Wylles. They all had turned to cats. He picked up the abandoned lanterns one by one, strewn down the tunnels. Alternately dragging Wylles then restraining him, burdened with lanterns he was unwilling to leave behind, Braden felt like some modern day, clumsy Diogenes.
He had no idea how long they had been in the tunnel moving ever downward. All ability to measure time had left him—the journey seemed outside of time. Several days might have passed; endless nights might have gone by stacked one on another as if someone had shuffled all the dark cards together.
The end of the world would be like this. Unrelieved blackness hiding whatever waited, so that neither size nor scale nor space could be clearly understood; mankind would be flung into dimensions of which they had no comprehension.
Suddenly ahead a figure appeared in his light: one of the cats had changed back to human. Then another. Another. Voices rose. Soon a crowd again filled the tunnel. But he did not see Terrel change, he saw the black cat with a white foot running on ahead, swift as wind. And far ahead a faint green light stained the blackness.
Around a bend they entered a green glow, then around another bend they saw the ragged hole, green lit, that marked the cave’s mouth. He pushed Wylles ahead faster.
The boy was too docile now, almost sleepy. Braden tightened his grip before the prince could jerk away and run. Together, captive and captor, they hurried toward the hole filled with green mist.
The stream they had followed flowed out into the light, and the few remaining cats leaped through the water and away into the Netherworld. On the far shore they shook their paws then sat licking them dry, looking around them at the green world, at the home they had never seen.
Melissa’s world. He imagined her in the ambient greenness reaching out for him, her green eyes loving him, and he was riven with longing for her. And with fear for her—and, perhaps, with fear
The gathered Catswold were silent; the only sound was the bleating cry of a dove from the forest, a homey, familiar sound as he might hear on the brown grass hills of Marin. And in the silence the few remaining cats began to regain human form as if this world might be too unsafe to remain small.
