“You have four minutes and thirty seconds to complete the testing.”
Ryan stopped and doubled over, being violently sick, his mouth flooding with the bitter taste of golden bile. He dropped to his hands and knees, pressing his forehead to the seeping walls of the corridor.
It felt like someone had a fist knotted down in the soul of his guts, tugging and twining, trying to rip out the greasy loops of intestines. He moaned out loud, feeling warm tears streaming down his stubbled cheeks, leaking under the eye patch, the salt stinging his skin.
For a moment he stopped, battling the sickness. He paused in the dark stillness, waiting for his prey to give him some clue where it was lurking.
But there was nothing.
The blackness was filled with complex, shifting shapes. It was like being locked into the heart of a huge puzzle that had a simple solution. Once he had found the missing shapes—or were they symbols?— and slipped them into the correct places in the puzzle, then everything would be all right. Just like that.
He heard the soft sound of someone sniggering with laughter, a vile, triumphant noise, a cruel merriment that began to swamp the tunnels all about him, flooding and welling up, louder.
“Fireblast!” he whispered. There was a bitter anger in his heart that threatened to become a scarlet mist that would shroud his brain and imperil all sense of balance and harmony.
Things were getting worse.
The sickness and dizziness pressed down on the unprotected surface of his brain.
Blood trickled down his thighs, into his combat boots, an icy feeling that seemed to be spreading from the gaping wound in his stomach.
The floor dipped, suddenly, and Ryan dropped, a jolting fall that felt like fifty feet, but that common sense told him was probably no more than eight or ten feet. It was hard enough for him to lose his balance and to bang his elbow, a painful, bone-scraping blow that triggered the reflexes in his fingers. They opened, and the unusual blaster spun away out of his grip.
He stayed where he was, crouched on hands and knees, slowly recovering from the shock of the fall. He reached out around him on the wet granite for the blaster, but it had totally disappeared in the blackness.
Shakily Ryan stood. He felt for the walls, finding one, then, four or five paces off, the other one. Both were hacked from stone, both streaming with melt-water, as cold as whispered sin. Cautiously he reached up into the singing space above his head, but there was no roof to be felt.
He knew that he could never climb back up to the previous level, which meant that there was only one way to go. And that was onward.
But now he was weaponless, and the tumble had stretched the torn lips of his gashed belly. The blood was flowing more quickly, and he had no way of checking it. You couldn’t put a tourniquet on your own stomach.
“Lonesome, low-down,” he muttered to himself. He wished that Krysty were with him in the catacomb. The Trader always used to say that in a tight spot, two were ten times as good as one.
Ryan blinked again, reaching to rub at his good eye. He pressed hard with his palm, expecting to see a dazzling array of silver-and-gold sparks flashing across the retina. But there was nothing. No reaction.
Just all-over sable.
It felt like he was losing it; his senses were betraying him. Now the pain in his stomach was burning hot, making him cry out in shock. The steady dribble of blood from the wound was bitterly cold, making it difficult for him to lift and lower his feet. But when he did, it was like walking across an infinite pavement of human eyeballs that squished and rolled under the soles of the boots, making him lose his balance.
When Ryan brushed against the invisible wall, it wasn’t hard stone like it had been before. Now it was just like plunging his fingers into the rotting body of a flayed corpse. He had the horrible sensation of hundreds of blind maggots, writhing in both hands.