‘Aye, the cap’n’s the best,’ said Kieran, with all the devotion of an ardent admirer. ‘Nails it at the dramatics shows, ’e does. Every time!’

Colby glanced at Albert, the familiar serious look now back in his eyes, looking once again like the determined young soldier Albert recognized. ‘Well, you got what you wanted. We’re in. Which leaves us with the little matter of getting back out, but we’ll see about that when the time comes.’

‘This is the Pit?’

‘Yes. Now, let’s move fast. We’re running out of time in every way. The three of us need to be back out soon, too. If he is alive, Albert, let’s make it snappy.’

‘If?’

‘You heard what the guard said—nobody’s heard anything from him all day.’

‘Why’d ’e kill that other bugger, you reckon, Cap’n?’ asked Kieran.

Colby shrugged. ‘I don’t know and don’t want to. All right, this is it. You ready?’

‘Yes,’ said Albert.

Together they marched forward, into the cavern.

Almost immediately they had to stop, though, because there was no real inside to the cavern. The walls ran round—smooth, almost glassy black rock, well over twenty feet high—if one could call them walls. They didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling—there was a gap of almost four odd feet between the two. It was as if these rock formations had grown up later, enclosing part of the cavern, cutting it off from what lay beyond. Near the walls were large groups of towering stalagmites, some twice or thrice as tall as a man. Within the walls, or rather around their circumference, ran a thin strip of land like a circular ledge. The rest of the inside of the tent was taken up by a huge hole in the ground, directly in front of them. A faint ripple of water moving came out of the hole. The smell was terrible—the unmistakable odour of things dead, dying and somewhere in between, mixed with the stink of rotting vegetation.

‘Welcome to the Pit,’ said Colby softly.

Albert looked down at the hole with interest. So this was the dreaded Pit. He could see nothing—blackness hung like a live shadow inside the hole. Then he looked up, and that was when things began to go wrong, very wrong.

He heard a voice, shouting something. He couldn’t make out what, the words lost in the realization that it had come from in front of him, not behind, even as he heard Colby groan. ‘Inside! They put guards inside!’

Albert completed the process of looking up and saw two men standing against the wall on the far side of the Pit, just in front of a long rope running vertically up to the ceiling, blasters in their hands. Blasters that were pointing right at them.