upward until they disappeared, the ceiling an impenetrable can-
opy of black.
The chamber appeared empty of life.
At its far end, a second pair of doors stood closed. It was
beyond that the serpent Valg had lived. The Pyre of the Dead
was there, an altar on which the deceased rulers of the Pour
Lands lay in state for a requisite number of days before their
interment. A set of stone stairs led down from the altar to a pool
of water in which Valg hid. Supposedly, the serpent kept watch
over the dead. Walker wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that
he just fed on them.
He listened for long moments for the sound of anything mov-
ing, anything breathing. He heard nothing. He studied the Tomb.
The Black Elf stone was hidden here-not in the cavern beyond.
If he were quick and if he were careful, he might avoid having
to discover whether or not the serpent Valg was still alive.
He began moving slowly, noiselessly past the crypts of the
dead, their statues and their wealth. He ignored the treasures;
he knew from Cogline that they were coated with a poison in-
stantly fatal to anyone who touched them. He picked his way
forward, skirting each bastion of death, studying the rock walls
and the rune markings that decorated them. He circled the
chamber and found himself back where he had started.
Nothing.
His brow furrowed in thought. Where was the pocket that
contained the Black Elfstone?
He studied the cavern a second time, letting his eyes drift
through the haze of greenish light, skipping from one pocket of
shadows to the next. He must have missed something. What was
it?
He closed his eyes momentarily and let his thoughts reach
out, searching the blackness. He could feel something, a very
small presence that seemed to whisper his name. His eyes
snapped open again. His lean, ghostlike face went taut. The
presence was not in the wall; it was in the floor!
He began moving again, this time directly across the cham-
ber, letting himself be guided by what he sensed was waiting
there. It was the Black Elfstone, he concluded. An Elfstone
would have life of its own, a presence that it could summon if
called upon. He strode away from the statues and their treasures,
away from the vaults, no longer even seeing them, his eyes fas-
tening on a point almost at the center of the cavern.
When he reached that point, he found a rectangular slab of
rock resting evenly on the floor. Runes were carved in its sur-
face, markings so faded that he could not make them out. He
hesitated, uneasy that the writing was so obscured. But if the
runes were Elven script, they might be thousands of years old;
he could not expect to be able to read them now.
He knelt down, a solitary figure in the center of the cavern,
isolated even from the dead. He brushed at the stone markings
and tried a moment longer to decipher them. Then, his patience
exhausted, he gave up. Using both hands, he pushed at the stone.
It gave easily, moving aside without a sound.
He felt a momentary rush of excitement.
The hole beneath was dark, so cloaked in shadow that he
could make nothing out. Yet there was something . . .
Casting aside momentarily the caution that had served him
so well. Walker Boh reached down into the opening.
Instantly, something wrapped about his hand, seizing him.
There was a moment of excruciating pain and then numbness.
He tried to jerk free, but he could not move. Panic flooded
through him. He still could not see what was down there.
Desperate now, he used the magic, his free hand summoning
light and sending it swiftly down into the hole.
What he saw caused him to go cold. There was no Elfstone.
Instead, a snake was fastened to his hand, coiled tightly about
it. But this was no ordinary snake. This was something far more
deadly, and he recognized it instantly. It was an Asphinx, a
creature out of the old legends, conceived at the same time as