Page 576 of Flirting with Darkness

That time, he lost track of any sense of levels or floors. Nothing broke the monotony of the steep, winding stairs. Feeling a faint bite of unease from the enclosed space, Ghost continued down without letting himself think too closely about where it might end.

He didn’t suffer from anyrealfear of enclosed spaces, unlike some he knew. But he didn’t particularly like them, either. He also couldn’t help but be conscious of how little maneuvering room he had to fight within the stone tunnel. The curved walls scarcely gave him two feet on either side of his shoulders.

He’d just about decided to stop, to begin the long ascent upwards, when his foot dropped through empty air.

He jerked at the last instant.

He fought to catch himself on the walls with his hands.

It was already too late.

A vision flashed through his mind, of falling through an endless abyss of darkness…

…when his boot landed solidly on a flat stone tile.

He managed to catch his balance enough to pull his upper body back, to rest his second foot not far from the first.

For a few seconds he stood there, panting.

He turned in a full circle next, holding out the torch as he attempted to see more about where he found himself. He walked forward in the wide tunnel, and the space opened up again.

That time, he could feel the difference in air and sound.

He discovered quickly that the ceilings stretched exceedingly high in this new place, perhaps four or five stories overhead. The walls down here appeared to be of the same blackened rock he’d seen on the outer walls of the castle. The same black rock he’d seen used to make the frame for his bed, the banister and steps of the grand staircase, many of the carved wall details, as well as the protective barriers around the castle grounds.

Down here, however, that rock appeared more raw, more in its natural state.

It had not been shaped into furniture or stone lions.

Most of what he saw was not even hewn into bricks, apart from the cobblestones and tiles that made up the floor. The walls appeared to be madeentirelyof the black stone, the space itself hewn out with pickaxes and chisels.

Someone had found the underground stone deposit and hollowed it out in the shape of an enormous, egg-shaped cave.

Ghost wondered if the residence and towers were built deliberately over the same quarry used to mine the stone they’d used for everything on the Count’s estate.

If so, that struck him as… odd.

If ever the ground violently shifted, the whole of Count Aslanov’s castle and a good chunk of his grounds would fall roughly four hundred feet to be smashed at the bottom of these caves.

But what else explained this?

The Count obviously knew the cavernous space existed down here.

Someone had built stairs to reach it.

Seeing more torches in brackets along the walls, Ghost walked along, lighting more of them off the first. He didn’t light all of them; he would need at least one to climb back out of here. Once he had lit six at various points in the high-ceilinged room, he gazed around a second time, trying to gain some perspective on the cavernous space.

Something in the heights of the cave’s ceiling sparkled like diamonds… or really, like stars. Strange carvings wound down from that height to the cave’s floor.

More carvings appeared to be chiseled out of the floor itself.

Most of that floor was covered in those black tile slabs, ground and made to fit into one another so the entire surface appeared smooth like glass.

In the center, however, a round piece of stone had no such connecting points at all.

A lion’s head had been carved into the top of a single unbroken piece of stone.

Just looking at all of it made Ghost frown.

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