Forest Kingdom Trilogy 3 - Down Among the Dead Men

somewhere far away, deep down under the cavern.
    The liches suddenly stopped pouring out onto the ledge from the tunnel mouth. Hammer cut down the last few corpses as they pressed forward, and their rotting bodies fell away from the ledge and out into the darkness. Hammer slowly lowered his sword and then leaned on it tiredly. MacNeil began to breathe a little more easily. The dead from the border fort had pushed their intended prey all the way back to the mouth of the original tunnel before the last of them had been destroyed. MacNeil looked at Hammer and winced. The Infernal Device was glowing brightly, almost too brightly to bear. Hammer was leaning on the sword with his eyes closed. His sides were heaving and his face was slick with sweat. For Hammer the nightmare wasn’t over; it was just beginning. He groaned aloud and screwed his eyes shut rather than look at the sword he held.
    MacNeil and Scarecrow Jack looked at each other. The liches might be gone, but the cavern was still breaking up. This was no place to be hanging around. There was no sign of the Beast, and MacNeil couldn’t see one good reason to stay in the cavern a single moment longer than necessary. He moved forward to stand facing Hammer. The outlaw gave no sign he even knew MacNeil was there.
    “Hammer?” said MacNeil. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the constant groaning of the shifting stone all around him. “What is it, Hammer? What’s wrong?”
    “It’s the sword,” said Hammer hoarsely. His face twisted, and his knuckles were white where they gripped the long sword hilt. “It’s the Damned sword. I used it for too long, tempted it too much … It’s awake.”
    MacNeil glanced back at Jack, who nodded jerkily. “He’s right, Sergeant. The sword is alive, and aware. I can feel it.”
    MacNeil turned back to Hammer. “Sheathe the sword. We don’t need it anymore, Hammer. It’s all right to sheathe it now.”
    “You damned fool!” said Hammer despairingly, “I can’t sheathe it! The bloody thing’s awake, and it’s hungry… . You don’t understand the power in this sword, MacNeil. There’s power here beyond your worst nightmares, power to destroy all the world and leave it nothing but a rotting ball of filth. And the sword wants me to use that power.”
    MacNeil swallowed dryly. He didn’t want to believe Hammer, but he had no choice. There was a power in the hellsword, beating in rhythm to the pulsing of the sword’s brilliant light, beating so strongly that even he could sense its presence. He started to grab the sword away from Hammer while he was still distracted, but the outlaw immediately moved back out of reach and leveled the sword at MacNeil’s breast.
    “Stay away from me. Try that again and I’ll kill you. I’ll have to.”
    “Hammer …”
    “I can control the Device. I can! I just need a little more time—”
    A thick, vile grunt issued up from somewhere deep in the cavern. It sounded like some monstrous hog at its trough. The echoes seemed to take forever to die away. The cavern shook constantly now, and earth fell from the ceiling like a fine mist. The grunt came again, a huge, sonorous sound that shook the air like thunder. Hammer, MacNeil, and Scarecrow Jack looked down into the darkness, and a line of silver fire suddenly appeared far below on the cavern floor. Hundreds of yards wide, it stretched from one side of the cavern to the other, splitting the darkness in two. And then, slowly, the split grew wider. The shining light became brighter still as the split widened into a broad band of light. The silver glare filled the cavern, painfully bright and piercing. It wasn’t until a vast golden circle moved into the light from behind the darkness that MacNeil realized he was looking at the opening of a single gigantic eye.
    The huge, dark eyelids crawled open, revealing the whole floor of the cavern to be one great eye. The enormous golden pupil stared up at MacNeil with monumental disdain. He wanted to look away but couldn’t. He was held by the sheer immensity of the eye below him, fixing him with the awful stare of an ancient and unforgiving god.
    It’s too big
, thought MacNeil dazedly.
It’s just too big. Nothing could be that size… . That eye must be hundreds of yards across
… . He tried to visualize the size of the Beast and couldn’t. It was just too big, too large for his human mind to cope with.
    There were giants in the earth in those days
.
    Something beat on the