They had travelled a few more miles when they heard a noise behind them, and they looked around to see a horde of over a hundred blue skinned, white haired humanoids creeping through the trees towards them, their bare feet making almost no noise on the soft, peaty ground. Seeing that they’d been seen, they abandoned their stealthy approach and broke into a full charge, screaming battlecries and waving crude spears and clubs, apparently the only weapons they possessed. The only weapons they needed, considering the odds. Those with spears threw them as they approached, one glancing off Matthew’s breastplate, making him glad he had it despite the heat, and then they were on them and the questers formed a desperate defensive circle in an attempt to hold them off.

     Their defence turned out to be unexpectedly successful, though. Shaun’s sword proved to be devastating against the humanoids, and one after another fell before it in quick succession, their scarlet blood clashing horribly with their blue skins. Thomas’s flaming sphere and Jerry and Lirenna’s sleep spells scared them even more, though. The Underworld dwellers had never experienced magic before, and when twenty of them had fallen, either unconscious or reduced to smoking, charred corpses, the remainder broke off their attack and ran in blind panic, disappearing back among the trees.

     “Phew, that was a bit of luck!” exclaimed Thomas. “Who’d have thought they’d scare off so easily?”

     “They won't scare off quite so easily next time,” said Douglas. “It won't take ‘em long to figure out that there’s a limit to your magical powers.”

     “Yeah, right,” agreed the wizard. “And we’re still a week away from the human settlements. If we get cut off way out here, we’ve had it. We’d better get a move on.”

     They hurried on through the forest, thanking the Gods and Shale Granore for the compasses in the handles of their knives, without which they would have been completely lost with nothing to give them a sense of direction. No sun, no stars, nothing. They allowed themselves a brief halt as ‘night’ fell again, but carried on after a couple of hours, now uncomfortably aware that this seemingly ordinary forest they were traversing was, in fact, part of the Underworld; the terrible, nightmarish World Below of which so many terrible tales were told. Those stories came back to them now. No longer thrilling them with excitement and a sense of adventure, but now filling their imagination with nightmarish images of hideous subterranean races and other forgotten horrors. Things that they were now ready to believe were not just stories but all too real and ready to manifest themselves at any moment. Their only hope, their only sanctuary in the World Below, were the small and fragile human settlements, which were only able to survive because of some superstition held by the monsters that led them to fear those particular areas, and even the nearest of those areas was still several days away.

     For some reason, though, they saw no more of the blue humanoids, or any other horrors or evil monsters, and after they’d been marching for another day and night they began to dare to hope that their one experience of surface magic had been enough for them and that they wouldn’t be back. They went back to resting through the daytime, although with more people awake and on guard.

     “I don’t understand,” mused Jerry as they sat around their campfire, watching a rabbit roasting on a spit while Thomas held the bottle of magic in his hand, allowing some of its power to soak into his body. “I’ve heard so many horror stories told about this place that I can’t believe we’re going to get through a week in the wilderness with only one minor encounter with a bunch of humanoids. Where are they all? The Llanoks, the deep delvers, the rock horrors, the fell men, the darkreavers? What’s happened to them all?”

     “Sounds like you’re looking forward to meeting them,” said Lirenna.

     “No, I just want to know what’s happened to them. If there’s something down here so terrible that all the other monsters have fled the area, I want to know about it.”

     “Maybe it’s the Sword,” suggested Matthew. “The Sword of Retribution. I mean, we know that the priest with the Sword is down here somewhere, so maybe it's him who's chased all the monsters away. After all, that was why he came down here in the first place, wasn’t it? To use Samnos’s power to make the Underworld safer for the humans living here.”

     “Why yes! I bet that’s it!” exclaimed Shaun, clapping his brother on the back. “We’re in the area he’s cleared with the Sword! That’s great, it means we won’t have any more trouble all the way to the settlements.”

     And so it proved. After five more entirely uneventful nights marching through the forest, they finally came to the end of the trees and gave a mighty cheer when they saw cultivated fields ahead of them, stretching all the way to the horizon.

     “We made it,” cried Jerry in disbelief. “We actually made it, and I thought you were crazy to ask a slaver to be our guide.” He hugged Thomas around the legs. “I take it back, I take it all back! You were right all along.”

     “Don’t mention it,” muttered back the other wizard in embarrassment.

     They had to walk across the ploughed fields for the first few hundred yards, Diana almost twisting an ankle in the process, but eventually they came to a dirt track ten feet wide that ran between the fields and were able to walk in more comfort. When ‘day’ came, they carried on walking, being anxious to reach a town or village as soon as possible, and soon they saw farm workers emerging from their huts to go about their business. Harnessing horses to ploughs, carrying sacks of grain, and so on. The Underworlders stared at their visitors, and the questers hesitated uncertainly, thinking at first that they were receiving an unfriendly reception. Then they relaxed when they saw that the farmers were simply astonished at their appearance. Human visitors were evidently an uncommon occurrence down here.

     The Underworlders wore open toed sandals on their feet, and on their heads were wide brimmed hats to shade their eyes from the Underworld’s bright ceiling. In between they wore loose white smocks, some with belts around their waists to carry tools and equipment. Many of them had bare arms and legs and they saw that none of the Underworlders had the slightest trace of a sun tan, the Underworld’s illumination containing, apparently, no ultraviolet light. As a result their sweat sheened skins were not only as pale as milk but also completely devoid of lines and wrinkles so that even the oldest men had skins as smooth and unblemished as that of a twenty year old. Only their varicose veins and grey hair betrayed their true age. The same was true for women as well, as they discovered when they entered the village, although the men quickly hustled their women out of sight, which made Thomas smile uncomfortably.

     The village was very small, consisting of only twenty or so small huts gathered around a central open space from which three roads radiated, including the one they’d come in by. The huts were rectangular and made from thin panels of woven grass fixed to a framework of wooden poles. They looked as though a strong sneeze would blow them away, but since there was virtually no wind in the Underworld, and no need to protect their occupants from the environment, which was always comfortable (for those who didn’t have to wear lots of hot clothes), they didn’t need to be strong and their only function was to protect the privacy of those inside. Since their occupants only needed privacy for a few hours each day, though, many of them had a whole wall folded down to allow whatever slight breeze there might be to circulate around inside, giving the questers a completely unobstructed view of what lay within.

     Their furniture and possessions, they saw, were of a high order of workmanship, equaling anything that might be found in any Ilandian home in quality and craftsmanship. They differed only in cultural style, reflecting the fact that these people had been almost completely cut off from the surface for five hundred years, their only contact with the World Above coming from the occasional traveler or adventurer like themselves. Their language will have changed quite a bit as well, Thomas realised. I hope we can still communicate with them.

     They soon had a chance to test their ability to communicate. A small crowd of naked children had gathered around them, gazing up at them in fearless curiosity, and some of the adults, less trusting and wiser in some of the world’s less pleasant aspects, came forward to grab their offspring and carry them off to safety. Soon there were only adult men left, most of them holding wooden clubs and farming implements as makeshift weapons. The exceptions, five of them, wore effective looking whole body steel and leather armour, similar in design to that worn by Shaun and Matthew, not surprising since both the Beltharans and the Underworlders were cultural descendants of the Agglemonians.