50

In the end, you only manage to wait about an hour, which is not long enough, but you're all eager to get in there. You tie a rag over your mouth and advise your friends to do the same. Then you light your sturdy miner's lamp and lead the way into the tunnel.

The walls of the tunnel are clearly man-made rather than natural—you can still see the pick marks left there two thousand years ago as your lantern-light dances across them—but there is nothing smooth or finished about them. Their long-dead excavators did not care for neat appearances. The tunnel twists and writhes as you follow its course, looping left and right and back in on itself inexplicably as it carries you deeper beneath the Bull's Horns.

In the dense darkness outside the little pools of light cast by your and Abdul's lanterns, unseen creatures chirp and skitter. The air is thick, humid, and oppressive, undisturbed for millennia before your rude intrusion.

Eventually the tunnel comes out into a wide central space—a large square chamber with several entrances and exits in its walls. In the northern wall, you see a single door; to the west, two different arched doorways lead into other rooms. Another tunnel, the twin of the one you entered in the east wall, leads south.

Esme takes stock. "Alright," she says. "Let's split up. Abdul and I will take the tunnel to the south, see where it leads. Sam, Namen Oberhelm, you search this little cluster of rooms here."

And with that, Abdul and Esme are off, disappearing rapidly into the blackness of the southern tunnel.