In the whelming silence of a tomb, the air stirred about the great snout. Slowly, above the moribund shell of the reptile, a haze formed. It spread, lengthened, billowed only slightly, and rose. Tenuous, wavering creepers of mist shuddered on the stale air of the cavern. Luminous walls were clearly visible through the gossamer floating haze. It was blue-grey, that ever-shifting amorphous cloudlet; the colour of human death.

Yet about it there was nothing human.

For just a moment among the fleeting motes of time, the necrotic haze seemed to coalesce, as if attempting to form a shape: rounded at the top, pierced below by two holes, narrow and latticed below-a death’s head.

But that was gone in an instant, nor were there living eyes present to have seen.

The mist floated up, free of the serpentine corpse that had spawned it. It moved, and surely there was purpose in the flowing movement of that faint cloud of haze along the subterranean corridor.

The passage bent and twisted again and again, as though formed by a restless reptile-or by long-dead men who had sought to confuse and slow possible pursuit. For though the mist-thing moved away from it, the tunnel gave off a concealed passage in the centuries-old castle above.

The mist-thing drifted along above a dusty, ever-descending floor of packed earth. Around convoluted turnings and twistings writhed the wraithy haze, and it touched nothing but air, this form of life from death that trailed in eerie silence through the soundless channel beneath the earth.

Then it paused, writhing in air. It hovered above… another corpse.

The body was that of a man. Old he had been, aged enough to have died of natural causes. But there was visible evidence to the contrary. He who had been tall and unusually thin wore a cowled robe, dark as night. Cloth covered his reed-thin body from head to instep. He lay belly down, and in the center of the robe’s back a darker stain spread. Dried trails of it led over the fabric to the corridor’s floor of packed, dust-piled earth. The splotch and its coagulated runnels were a reddish brown, like old rust. The robed man had been stabbed from behind and had got his death thereby.