were so unchanging that it was hard to measure time or
distance. Dalgard chewed at his emergency rations, a block of dried
meat and fruit pounded together to an almost rocklike consistency, and
tried to make the crumbs he sucked loose satisfy his growing hunger.

The passageway was growing damper; water trickled down the walls and
gathered in fetid pools on the floor. Dalgard's dislike of the place
grew. His shoulders hunched involuntarily as he strode along, for his
imagination pictured the rock above them giving away to dump tons of
the oily river water down to engulf them. But though Sssuri avoided
splashing through the pools wherever he might, he did not appear to
find anything upsetting about the moisture.

At last the human could stand it no longer. "How much farther to the
sea?" he asked without any hope of a real answer.

As he had expected him to do, Sssuri shrugged. "We should be close.
But having never trod this way before, how can I tell you?"

Once more they rested, choosing a stretch which was reasonably dry,
munching their dried food and drinking sparingly from the stoppered
duocorn horns which swung from their belts. A man would have to be
dying of thirst, Dalgard thought, before he would palm up any of the
stagnant water from the passage pools.

He drifted off into a troubled sleep in which he fled beneath a sky
which was a giant lid in the hand of an unseen enemy, a lid which was
slowly lowered to crush him flat. He awoke with a start to find
Sssuri's cool, scaled fingers stroking his shoulder.

"Dream demons walk these roads." The words drifted into his half-awake
mind.

"They do indeed," he roused to answer.

"It is always so where Those Others have been. They leave behind them
the thoughts which breed such dreams to trouble the sleep of those who
are not of their kind. Let us go. I would like to be out of this place
under the clean sky, where no ancient wickedness hangs to poison the
air and thought."

Either the merman had miscalculated the direction of their route or
the river mouth was much farther from the inland city than they had
believed, for, though they pushed on for what seemed like weary hours,
they came to no upward slope, no exit to the world they knew.

Instead Dalgard began to realize that just the opposite was true. At
last he could stand it no longer and broke out with what he feared,
hoping that Sssuri would deny that fear.

"We are going downhill!"

To his disappoin