So saying. Cadellin laid his hand upon the wall, and a dark gap appeared in the blue rock, through which the night air flowed, cold and dew-laden.

It looked very black outside, and the memory of their recent fear made Colin and Susan unwilling to leave the light and safety of Fundindelve; but, keeping close to the wizard, they stepped through the gap, and stood once more beneath the trees on the hillside.

The gates and the opening closed behind them with a sound that made the earth shake, and as they grew used to the moonlight the children saw that they were standing before the tooth of rock that they had striven to reach as they floundered in the depths of the beech wood, with svart-claws grasping at their heels.

Away to the left they could make out the shape of the ridge above the dell.

“That’s where the svarts attacked us,” said Colin, pointing.

“You do not surprise me!” laughed the wizard. “Saddle-bole was ever a svart-warren; a good place to watch the sun set, indeed!”

They walked up the path to Stormy Point. All was quiet just the grey rocks, and the moonlight. When they passed the dark slit of the Devil’s Crave Colin and Susan instinctively huddled closer to the wizard, but nothing stirred within the blackness of the cave.

“Do svarts live in all the mines?” asked Susan.

“They do. They have their own warrens, but when men dug here they followed, hoping that Fundindelve would be revealed; and when the men departed they swarmed freely. Therefore you must keep away from the mines now, at all cost.”

Cadellin took the children from Stormy Point along a broad track that cut straight through the wood as far as the open fields, where it turned sharply to twist along the meadow border skirting the woodland. This, the wizard said, was once an elf-road, and some of the old magic still lingered. Svarts would not set foot on it, and the morthbrood would do so only if hard pressed, and then they could not bear to walk there for long.