Forest Kingdom Trilogy 3 - Down Among the Dead Men

candle stub he always carried with him for emergencies. Lighting the wax stub with flint and steel from his boot whilst being very careful not to overbalance himself turned out to be a nightmare in itself, but finally he got the wick to light and held the candle up before him.
    He was lying on a narrow shelf of discolored bone, surrounded by dark walls of rotting flesh. If he looked up, he could see above him the beginnings of a broad tunnel reaching up through the decaying meat. Another equally broad tunnel fell away beneath him. MacNeil sat up cautiously on the ledge of bone, cradling the candle stub carefully in his shaking hands. He finally knew where he was. He was in the body of the Beast. He’d plunged into the eye and through it, and fallen into the head of the Beast, destroying its mind. The liquid in the massive eyeball must have cushioned his fall enough so that when he finally hit the more solid flesh beyond it, the shock of the impact hadn’t been enough to kill him. At some point he must have dropped the Infernal Device. It had carried on without him, rotting its way deeper into the Beast’s mind, and leaving behind it the tunnel beneath his ledge. There was no knowing how deep Wolfsbane had gone, but it must have gone deep enough. The Beast was dead. MacNeil only had to look around to know that; everywhere he looked was rotten with decay. And the Infernal Device was gone, lost deep in the decomposing body of the Beast.
    And there it can stay, for all of me
, thought MacNeil firmly.
    He clambered unsteadily to his feet and looked up at the tunnel above him. The opening was just above his head, easily within reach. It was the only way out, much as he disliked the thought. There was no telling how far he’d penetrated into the Beast’s body before the bone shelf broke his fall, and in his current battered state he wasn’t up to much climbing. The ledge of bone suddenly creaked loudly and shifted under his feet. He looked down, and saw a fine tracery of cracks spreading across the bone. The decay was continuing. He no longer had a choice; he had to climb out while he still could. If he fell any farther into the body of the Beast he might never get out, even if he survived a second fall.
    MacNeil allowed a trickle of melted wax to fall onto the absorbant cloth of the shirt over his shoulder, and used it to stick the wax stub firmly in place. He was drenched from head to foot with foul-smelling slime from his passage through the eye, but the candle stub seemed more or less secure, and he had to have both hands free for climbing. He drew his knife from its sheath and cut himself a series of foot and handholds in the decaying flesh of the tunnel opening above him. He then gripped the knife firmly between his teeth, gagging at the awful taste, and pulled himself up into the wide shaft. His arms groaned with the effort, but eventually he pulled himself high enough for his feet to find the first footholds, and then the long climb began. In later years, he was only to remember most of it in his worst nightmares.
    The climb seemed to last forever. The flickering candlelight showed him a wall of red and purple flesh, already dark with spreading pockets of decay. Dim pulses of light ran through the Beasts flesh occasionally, and once MacNeil thought he saw a strange distorted face peering up out of the meat at him. When he looked again it was gone, and he didn’t wait to look more closely. A slow dull ache burned in his legs as he climbed, spreading to his hips and chest and arms. His back grew steadily worse. He couldn’t even stop for a rest; his weight would have been too much for the precarious foot-and handholds he hacked out of the yielding wall before him. Occasionally slivers and promontories of splintered bones erupted out of the walls, and he quickly learned to work his way around them. They looked solid enough, but they were eaten away inside. Wolfsbane did its job thoroughly. MacNeil climbed on, slowly making his way up the decaying column of flesh.
    He came at last to the enormous socket that had once held the Beasts eye. It was an open crater now, carpeted in places with a rotting, translucent jelly. MacNeil clambered out of the tunnel and into the crater, and just stood for a moment, while his various aches and pains subsided enough to be bearable. His candlelight didn’t travel more than a few feet, but the glowing crystals in the cavern walls still shone with a dim, stubborn light. The