Excerpt He looked around. The setting sun caused shafts of light the color of pomegranates to penetrate the lower quarter of the skylights. They hung in the air like tapestries, burnishing the fluted ammonwood handrails, staining the swath of carpet that ran the length of the balcony, firing a thin sliver off the wall. Curious, Annon padded down to the very end of the balcony. Sunlight dazzled a small strip of metal he had never noticed before. Here, the wall was not flat; the reflective metal jutted out perhaps a millimeter or two. He grasped it and pulled, almost ripping a nail clean off as his fingers slid off the slick surface. He got a better hold of the metal strip, applied a steady pressure and felt it move. A wedge of the wall swivelled silently out. A hidden doorway opened up, like the one Giyan and he had used to get to the living wing of the palace. Except this one was unknown to him. Sucking on his torn nail, he poked his head into the aperture. Velvet darkness engulfed the interior, but the odor of bitterroot was almost nauseating in its intensity. He took a deep breath of the fresher air on the balcony and stepped through into the darkness. He stretched out his arms and encountered solid objects: walls. From this evidence, he deduced that he was in a narrow corridor. He moved forward cautiously, but still he tripped down the first three steps and only a desperate grasp at the thin, cold metal handrail saved him from plunging head-first into the abyss. The staircase spiraled down like the inside of a muodd shell. The pitch-black air was chill, acrid as silicon, laced as it was by the bitterroot smell. He continued his descent until he came to a minuscule triangular landing. From here, the staircase branched off in three directions. He squatted down, felt around. The treads were of equal width; there was nothing to distinguish one from the other. Lacking a definitive clue as to which way to head, he chose the right branch. He could scent the bitterroot here and was congratulating himself on his luck when something made him stop dead in his tracks. He felt something, though he could not say what. The skin of his tender parts prickled in warning. A strange pulse had been set off inside himself. Somewhere, not far below him, something waited, something dark, vast, rippling. Terrifying. He stood very still, his hearts hammering in his chest. He could not say why, but he knew he could not continue. The sense of danger was overwhelming. He began to back up, almost cried out as the back of his ankle struck the tread just above. He bit his lip. That strange pulse returned, stronger than ever. It was localized now beneath his ribs from the very spot where the gyreagle had embedded its talon in his flesh. It felt as if the talon were on fire, pulsing to a rhythm far faster than his own double-pulse. He moved back up the stairs, careful to lift his feet high enough to reach the succession of ascending treads. All the while, his eyes frantically tried to part the heavy curtain of darkness. Then he had regained the small landing. He was panting, sweat poured off him, but oddly his wound or, more accurately, the embedded gyreagle talon had ceased its frantic pulsing. Without thought, he plunged down the central staircase as fast as his legs would pump. A faint patch of dark grey seemed to wash the outer wall of the staircase, one moment real, the next seeming illusory. Perhaps it was his haste that caused him to miss the last tread. He went over the edge, his hands grasped for the handrail that was not there and he found himself hurtling down a spiral chute. He tried to scream, but the sound stuck in his throat like a milk-nettle. The grey patch of light grew in volume and intensity until it filled the chute with a blinding glare. Then, all at once, Annon was spat from the chute. He fell through the air for a space of perhaps three meters, only to land on a dank and musty stone floor. As he rubbed his aches and bruises, he sat up and took a look around. He was in what appeared to be one of several interlinked caverns hewn out of the bedrock below the palace. At regular intervals around the rough rock walls, he saw beautifully fluted metal holders for pitch torches. A few held the remnants of these torches, but none were lit. Nevertheless, light fell upon him from high above. He craned his neck and saw an enormous oculus a thick-paned window of an odd crystal in the shape of an eye which, Giyan had told him, had been made eons ago in a sorcerous fashion. He scrambled up. Dead ahead of him was a cyclopean door, but one unlike any he had ever seen before. For one thing, it appeared to be made of solid rock. For another, it was perfectly round. In its center was a circular medallion with a wave motif into which was carved the mysterious figure of a dragon, just like the one upstairs he used to play with. He remembered putting his hand into its carven mouth. This one was curled into a circle, its head facing outward, its jaws hinged open. He stared at this terrifying and beautiful creature, powerfully drawn to it in some way he could not understand. He put his hands out, feeling its surfaces, tracing the intricate patterns of Kundalan runes that covered it. He wished Giyan were here to translate for him. But perhaps she wouldn't. These looked like sorcerous symbols, similar to the ones in her corhide book, the one he had glanced through from time to time. Not that it had done him any good; he had no idea of the meaning of even a single rune. And yet he kept coming back to the book, sneaking peeks at it whenever he was certain that he would not get caught. His fingers kept following the engraved lines like a blind person learning to read. All at once, the round door rolled back into a previously hidden niche. It happened so swiftly, so silently he had no time to react. The light the oculus let in did not extend beyond the door. It was as if the darkness beyond was aqueous, the air swirling with thick eddies that smelled of the sea. A stirring from within, something huge, grotesque, monstrous. He felt a pulsing beneath his ribs at the point where the talon was lodged, but it was of a wholly different nature than when he had felt it on the stairs above. The moment the pulsing began, the angle of the light penetrating the oculus seemed to shift, sending a shaft of pearly light through the doorway. Annon felt it strike the back of his head with a kind of heat. Then it had shot beyond him, illuminating the thing that stood just inside the open door. Annon had a quick glimpse of a floor littered with bones, skulls, tatters of Kundalan clothing. Then his gaze was riveted on the creature. It was so alien, his brain could scarcely take it in: it appeared to be six -legged, with a long, tapering, reptilian skull, horns that whirled like waterspouts, huge, sinuous sea-green body, long coral talons, gleaming teeth of pearl that protruded out beyond the silhouette of its head. Its powerful uppermost appendages were attached along their upper surfaces to a thin veined membrane, triangular as a sail, moving like spindrift, gleaming prismatically. A long tail whipped back and forth like surf against a rocky shore. These were brief but vivid impressions, taken in during the instant before one of the uppermost appendages reached out, grabbed him around the waist and drew him quickly over the threshold into the inner cavern. In the wink of an eye, the door rolled shut, they were engulfed in the darkness, and Annon lost consciousness. top Excerpted from The Ring of Five Dragons. Copyright © 2001 by Eric Van Lustbader.