“WE’LL HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL nearly midnight,” said the magus. “We might as well get something to eat.”
So Pol unpacked the backpacks and made dinner over a fire. It took Sophos some time to find enough fuel to burn, but he managed. I didn’t help. I scuffed a hollow in the sand and lay down in it to rest while I flexed my fingers in limbering exercises and kneaded the wrists as much as I could stand to prevent them from going stiff. I wondered what the magus thought we were up to, out in the middle of nowhere, but I didn’t ask. We weren’t on speaking terms. While Pol cooked, I napped.
The dream I’d had the night before returned. I was walking up steps into a small room with marble walls. There were no windows, but moonlight came from somewhere to fall on the white hair and dress of a woman waiting there for me. She was wearing the ancient peplos that fell in pleated folds to her feet, like one of the women carved in stone beside old altars. As I entered the room, she nodded as if she’d been expecting me for some time, as if I were late. I had a feeling I should recognize her, but I didn’t.
“Who brings you here?” she asked.
“I bring myself.”
“Do you come to offer or to take?”
“To take,” I whispered, my mouth dry.
“Take what you seek if you find it then, but be cautious. Do not offend the gods.” She turned to the tall three-legged table beside her. It held an open scroll and she lifted a stylus and wrote, adding my name at the bottom of a long list and placing a small mark beside it. When I woke a moment later, Pol had dinner ready.
We ate by moonlight, without conversation, and then we sat. Nobody said much, and no one but the magus knew what we were waiting for. To break the silence, he at last condescended to ask me to tell him the story of Eugenides and the thunderbolts. He wanted to compare it with the version he knew.
I rubbed my arm across my forehead and yawned. I wasn’t really in a storytelling mood, but neither did I want to sit in gloomy silence until midnight. I abbreviated the story a bit and told it to him.
EUGENIDES AND THE GREAT FIRE
After Eugenides was born, the woodcutter and his wife had other children. The oldest of these children was Lyopidus. He was jealous of Eugenides because Eugenides had the gifts of the gods and because he was older. If the Earth had not given the woodcutter her own baby, Lyopidus would have been the first of his father’s children, and he never forgot it. At dinner Eugenides sat on the right hand of their father, and when guests came to the house, it was Eugenides that offered them the wine cup.
When the family’s house was destroyed by the Sky God, Lyopidus was sure that Eugenides would be blamed. It was Eugenides who was the cause of the Sky’s anger. Lyopidus wanted his father and mother to abandon Eugenides in the forest, but they would not. And when Eugenides stole the Sky God’s thunderbolts and became immortal, Lyopidus’s jealousy turned to hatred.
Eugenides knew his brother’s feelings, and to avoid them, he traveled across the world. So Lyopidus sat at his father’s right hand and offered his father’s guests the wine cup, but he was still not happy. When the Sky God came to him in the guise of a charioteer with a plan to humiliate Eugenides, Lyopidus was ready to listen.
The Sky God took Lyopidus into his chariot and ferried him across the middle sea to the house where Eugenides lived, and Lyopidus went and knocked at Eugenides’s door and said, “Here is a stranger who asks to share your wine cup.”
And Eugenides came to his doorway, and he saw Lyopidus and said, “Brother, you are no stranger to me. Why do you ask to share my wine cup as a stranger when you are welcome to all I possess as my kin?”
“Eugenides,” said Lyopidus, “in the past I had bad feelings for you, and now all those bad feelings are gone. That is why I say I am a stranger to you, and as an unfamiliar person I ask to share your wine cup and be your guest, so that you can discover if you like me and if you will call me friend as well as brother.”
Eugenides believed him, so he fetched his wine cup and shared it with Lyopidus and called him his guest. But Lyopidus was no friend and no good guest. He asked his brother many questions, like how he hunted and how well he lived and what luxuries he had. Did he have a Samian mirror? An amber necklace? Gold armlets? An iron cooking pot? And each time Eugenides said no, he did not have that thing, Lyopidus said, “Why, I am surprised. You being a son of Earth.”
And Eugenides said, “The Earth gives me no gifts that she does not give all men. I can hardly ask her to give every man an iron cooking pot in order to have one of my own.”
“Ah,” said Lyopidus, “then could you not steal one? As you stole the Sky’s thunderbolts? But no,” he said, setting out his hooks, “I suppose you could not do something so marvelous again.”
“Oh, I could,” said Eugenides, stepping like a mouse into a trap, “if I chose.”
“Ah,” said Lyopidus.
And every day Lyopidus tugged on the hooks he had set in Eugenides’s flesh, begging him to perform some marvelous feat. “I could carry the word of it home to our parents,” he explained. “They have not had news of you for so long.”
For a time Eugenides evaded his request, but Lyopidus built up his arrogance, telling him over and over how clever he had been to defeat the Sky God, how much more clever he could be if he put his mind to it. For instance, he could steal the thunderbolts again, just for a lark, and then return them to Hephestia. He knew that Hephestia was fond of her half brother, part human and part god, and would not be angry at the trick.
After a time Eugenides agreed. He knew Hephestia would not mind, and he was eager to impress Lyopidus because he believed that Lyopidus wanted to be his friend as well as his brother. So he climbed one evening into a fir tree that grew in the great valley of the Hephestial Mountains and he waited for Hephestia to pass beneath him as she went to her temple at the summit. As she passed, Eugenides reached down and lifted the thunderbolts from her back, so lightly that she was unaware that they were gone.
He carried them to his house and showed them to Lyopidus, who pretended to be greatly impressed.
“You could throw one,” he said. “If I tried to throw one, it would kill me, but you are part god.”
“I suppose,” said Eugenides.
“Try,” said Lyopidus. “Just a small one.”
And he nagged and cajoled, and to please him, Eugenides agreed to try. He chose one of the smaller thunderbolts, and he threw it against a tree, where it exploded and set the world on fire.
When the world began to burn, the Sky went to his daughter and said, “Where are the thunderbolts that I have loaned to you?”
“Here at my shoulder, Father,” said Hephestia, but the thunderbolts were gone. Hephestia thought perhaps she had dropped them in the valley, so the Sky told her to go there and look and said that he would look with her.
“If you are so careless with them,” he said, “I am not sure that I will return them to you if I find them.”
From the valley Hephestia could not see the fire, and so the world went on burning. The olive trees burned and Eugenides’s house burned. The fire grew, and Lyopidus was afraid. “You are immortal,” he said to his brother, “but I will die.” Eugenides took his hand, and they ran from the flames. The fire surrounded them. Lyopidus cried out in his fear that it had been the Sky that drove him to entrap his brother, and he called on the Sky to protect him, but there was no answer. Eugenides loved his brother, as little as he deserved it, and he tried to carry him safely through the flames, but Lyopidus burned in his arms, while Hephestia and her father walked silently among the fir trees.
Now Hamiathes was king of one of the small mountain valleys. He looked down from his megaron and he saw the world burning and he saw Eugenides and his brother and he could guess the rest. He left his megaron and crossed the river to seek the great goddess in her temple, but her temple was empty. He turned back to the river and met at its bank the river god who was a child of the Sky.
“The world has caught fire,” he told the river.
“I will not burn,” said the river. “I am water.”
“Even water is injured by a great fire,” said Hamiathes, thinking of the burning when the Sky and the Earth were angry with each other.
“Where is the fire?”
“Below us on the plains.”
“Above my course or below it?”
“Below.”
“Then I do not need to worry,” said the river.
“But Eugenides will suffer.”
“Eugenides is the enemy of my father,” said the river, and Hamiathes saw that he would get no offer of help from the river, so he stood for a moment in silence and watched the world burn, and Lyopidus die, and Eugenides burned and did not die.
“Look,” he said to the river, “Eugenides carries the thunderbolts of your father.”
“They are no longer my father’s,” said the sullen river. “Let Hephestia fetch them herself.”
“If you fetched them, you could give them to your father and not to Hephestia,” Hamiathes pointed out.
“Ah,” said the river, and after a moment asked, “Tell me where to change my course that I may fetch the thunderbolts.”
And Hamiathes told him. “If at this point you leave your course and go with all your strength, you will flow across the plain to Eugenides.”
The river did as Hamiathes instructed, and as he flowed across the plain, he cut through the heart of the fire and quenched it, and as he reached Eugenides, his power was almost spent. He swept up the half god along with the thunderbolts because Eugenides would not release them, and the river’s new course carried them both down to the great river, the Seperchia, who was the daughter of the Earth.
She said to the lesser river, “You are tired. Give me the thunderbolts that I may return them to my sister.”
While the smaller river and Seperchia fought for possession of the thunderbolts, Hamiathes went to the temple of the great goddess Hephestia to await her return. And Eugenides, ignored by the two rivers, swam to the bank and pulled himself out of the water, burnt as black as toast. And that is why Eugenides, alone among the gods, is dark-skinned like the Nimbians on the far side of the middle sea.
It was not my favorite story, and I wished I hadn’t brought it to mind just then, when I had work to do.
“Did you know,” I asked the magus, “that when you think someone is very intelligent, you say he is clever enough to steal Hamiathes’s Gift?”
The magus cocked his head. “No, I didn’t. Is it just among your mother’s people?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. But I know what happened if you tried and got caught.”
“I don’t know that either,” the magus said, surprised by a gap in his scholarship. He wasn’t surprised that I knew. I suppose crime and punishment are things that most thieves keep track of.
“They threw you off the mountain.”
“Maybe that’s what happened to your mother. Maybe that’s why she left Eddis.” He was teasing, doing his best to lift my spirits. He’d either gotten over his anger or was pretending that he had.
“Not threw as in exile,” I said, and described with one hand the arc of someone falling a long distance. “Threw as in over the edge of the mountain.”
“Oh,” he said.
We were all quiet again. It was another quarter of an hour before we heard the sound the magus had been waiting for. It was a variation in the wash of the river beside us. The magus stood and turned to look at it. I did the same, and in the space of a few heartbeats the river disappeared. The flow of its water stopped, came again in slushy bursts over the falls, and then stopped again. It was as if a giant tap somewhere had been turned by the gods, and our ears, which had ceased to register the sound of water, were now pounded by the silence of no water at all.
I stood with my mouth open for a long time as I realized that upstream there was a reservoir and the water that made the Aracthus flowed through a sluice in its dam. At the end of the summer, if the water in the reservoir was too low, then the sluice gate was closed and the river disappeared. I shook my head in wonder.
In the bulging rock where the waterfall had been, there was a recessed doorway. The lintel of the doorway was the rock itself, but set into it were two granite pillars. Between the pillars was a door pierced by narrow slits that were wider in their middles and narrower at the ends. The river water still sprayed through these slits and dropped into the round pool that remained in the basin below.
“I wanted to get here at least a day early, to give you a chance to rest,” said the magus. “The water will begin to flow again just before dawn. You have to be out again before that, as I believe the temple will fill quickly. I assume that you will need these.” He handed me the tools of my trade, wrapped in a soft piece of leather.
I recognized them. “These are mine.”
“Yes, they were the ones taken from you when you were arrested. Not being a thief, I couldn’t otherwise be sure of equipping you properly.”
My stomach was jumping as it hadn’t since the audience with the king. “You already knew then?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, the man you bragged to in the wineshop was an agent of mine. Not just a casual informer.”
I whistled soundlessly as I thought of the twists in this tale. “I need a light,” I said.
“Pol has one for you.”
I looked behind me and saw Pol standing with a lamp in his hand. He gave it to me. “There’s six hours of oil.”
“Do you have a pry bar?” I asked. It was the only necessity that I didn’t habitually carry with the rest of my tools because it was too big. Pol did have one and went back to his pack to fetch it. I walked to the edge of the riverbank. The water left in the pool still rippled against it.
“If my calculations are correct, the water will stop for four nights in a row this year, and this is the second of them. Don’t get yourself drowned on the first try,” said the magus.
Pol handed me the pry bar, and it was a comfort to have it in my hand, even though I could be sure that there was nothing living in the temple. You can’t keep watchdogs someplace that’s underwater all but a few nights of the year. Snakes, though, I thought. Maybe you could keep snakes.
I waited another half an hour until the water flowing through the slits in the doorway had lessened its force. Then I stepped into the pool. Standing up to my ankles in water, I turned back to ask the magus, “Do you know if anyone has tried this before?”
“I believe that several attempts have been made,” he said.
“And?”
“No one came back.”
“From inside?”
“No one who has been inside has returned; no member of any party where someone went inside has returned either. I don’t know how it might happen, but if you fail, we are all lost together.” He smiled and waved one hand in a vague benediction.
I nodded my head and turned back toward the doorway. I wondered when I reached it how old it was. I ran my hand up and down the smooth granite of a pillar. There were gentle undulations where the stone had once been fluted. The door hanging between the pillars was stone as well. Wood would have rotted, and metal would have worn away. I poked my finger into one of the slits, widened by years of flowing water. It looked thin in relation to the size of the door, but it was wider than my hand, even at its narrow end.
The door was three or four feet above the level of the pool, and I scrambled onto its threshold, careful not to spill the oil in the lamp. Even the hinges of the door were made from stone, and it was difficult to shift, but there was no lock on it. I pushed against not only its weight but the weight of the water remaining behind it. As I pushed, I muttered a perfunctory prayer to the god of thieves. It was a superstition my grandfather had ingrained in me. Send up a prayer as you start your work, send up a prayer as you finish it, and leave a gift once a month on the altar of Eugenides. I liked to leave earrings myself. My grandfather had left fibula pins.
The door swung inward, and more water rushed out. Once I was through, the water swung the door closed behind me. I was wet to my waist, but the water on the stairs behind the door was only three or four inches deep. Still, it flowed quickly, and I had to place my feet carefully as I climbed up the steep steps to the room above, where I recognized the chamber I’d seen in my dreams.
The smooth marble walls were marked with river silt, and the floor was deep in water that flowed through the grille in a door opposite me. The moonlight I’d dreamt of fell through an irregular hole in the ceiling, but there was no woman in a white peplos waiting for me. No gilded table, no scroll.
I stood under the hole in the ceiling and looked up. When the river came back, it would pour first into the chamber, backing up to fill the temple. When the room and the temple were full, some water would still flow through the chamber, but most would carry over the top to the falls and hide the doorway in the rock face. It was a work of genius, and I wondered how long ago it had been built. Five hundred years, if it had been meant to hold Hamiathes’s Gift.
I crossed the room to the doorway on the far side. As I did so, I remembered the questions of the woman in white. If I had been a religious person, I might have stopped to pray in earnest, but it didn’t occur to me.
Like the outer door, the inner door was stone, but its lower half was a barred grate to admit water more easily. It had no lock, just a simple latch, a stone locking bar fitted into a bracket. The open bars of the grate allowed the latch to be lifted from either side. I stopped to light my lamp, then pulled open the door. It, too, swung closed behind me.
The corridor on the other side stretched in two directions and was so narrow that my shoulders brushed its walls. They were solid rock. Lumpy and wet, they sagged inward near the roof to form an arch, with an apex lost beyond the feeble light of my lamp. In each direction the corridor ran for about ten feet, then turned and ended in a locked door. Here, where the flow of water was less strong, the doors were metal with metal locks. There was no sign of rust.
The locks were complicated, and it took me several minutes to get the door on the right open. Beyond it was another stretch of narrow corridor, which again ended with a door similar to the one I held open. I sighed, and hunted around for something besides my foot to jam under the door. I didn’t want to have to reopen it in order to let myself out.
There were no loose stones in the tunnel. There was the leather bag I used to hold my tools or the pry bar. I certainly didn’t want to let go of the pry bar. In the end I used one of my shoes. They were soaking wet anyway and uncomfortably heavy. I took them both off and tucked one into my belt, in case I needed it later. The other I wedged under the door so that it wouldn’t swing shut and relock behind me. Barefoot, I stepped carefully down the corridor through several inches of water, which were still draining from the temple. I was only halfway to the far door when the lamplight revealed something noteworthy about its surface. It was perfectly smooth. If there was a lock on the door, there was no keyhole on this side to open it.
“Gods,” I said aloud, “oh, gods,” and turned back to the door behind me as the water washed my shoe out from beneath it and it began to swing closed.
I leapt—four giant steps—and threw myself face forward toward the closing door and slipped my fingers ahead of it into the jamb. The metal door bit into my fingers, but I left them pinned until I could slip my other hand into the precious opening they had preserved. This door, like the other, was perfectly smooth on the inside.
I scootched through the doorway on my bottom and sat in the outer hall sucking my injured fingers. I still had my tools, but I had dropped the pry bar and the lamp. The only light I had came from the moon by way of the grille in the stone door behind me. It was not much.
When my heart stopped pounding and the pain in my fingers lessened, I stood up and paced. There was no point in opening the doors without a better means of holding them open, but I didn’t want to waste the time it would take to go back out to the magus to get another lamp and a pry bar and door blocks. Really, I didn’t want to tell him that I’d nearly gotten myself irretrievably stuck before I even reached the interior of the temple. Not that I would have died immediately if I had been trapped. I wouldn’t have died until morning, when the river returned. Just thinking about it made my heart pound again. I was a thief, I had to remind myself, of some accomplishment, or I would have been caught. I decided to check the other door before I went out to find door blocks.
I didn’t need a light to work by, but there was a dent across the ends of the first two fingers on my right hand, and their tips were numb. That made it difficult to open the lock on the second door. Once I had it open, I checked for a keyhole in its far side. I even checked to be sure that the keyhole I felt with my fingertips was a real one, not a blind hole drilled there to deceive me. Once I was sure that I would be admitted to the workings of the lock, I wedged the door open with my remaining shoe—the other was lost—and crossed the threshold. It was pitch-dark ahead of me. Without the oil lamp I couldn’t see if this tunnel was a twin to the first one.
I dug my hands into the pockets of the blue trousers the magus had given me. One pocket had filled with water and was soaking wet; the other had remained fairly dry. I had matches in both. I’d picked up a package of sulfur matches in a little silver case at the inn the first night on the road, and I’d picked up another five or six the second night. The ones I’d taken from Pol were wrapped in a scrap of oiled paper. The water wouldn’t have bothered them. In the dry pocket I also had a small knife with a folding blade that had belonged to the man sitting next to us at lunch one day, several pieces of leather thong, one longer piece of cotton twine, and the fibula pin that the magus used to hook his cloak. He thought he’d dropped it before his last bath, stupid man. In the wet pocket were miscellaneous coins, two moist pieces of jerked beef, and Ambiades’s comb. I wondered if he’d noticed yet that it was missing.
I put one of the pieces of beef in my mouth and chewed it while I thought. I could always turn back to fetch door blocks and another light, but I didn’t really need them. I had no doubts about my ability to open any locked door, so long as it had a keyhole, and I was used to working with no light. I dug out a match from the silver case and lit it. There before me was the corridor mined out of the solid rock, with another metal door at the end. Leaving my shoe to wedge the door as well as it could, I went forward. The match burned down to my fingers; I blew it out and continued in the dark.
The door was locked. I opened it and had to let it close behind me, but I checked the keyhole on the far side first. Beyond the door was another corridor, no different. I lit a match and then felt my way along the stone walls in the dark. The floor was uneven, and I stubbed a toe once but placed my feet more carefully after. I didn’t hurry. As my hands brushed across the stone on one side of me, they touched something cold and hard and perfectly smooth. I stopped and felt more carefully and then lit a match to see what I had found. It was Hephestial glass, obsidian, formed when the rock I walked through had been heated to liquid and had flowed across this part of the world. In ancient times it had been mined and used for points on arrows and spears, and it was still treasured for jewelry and the blades of decorative knives. The piece in front of me was the size of my head and would have been very valuable if I’d had some way to pry it out of the wall.
I walked on, and my sliding fingers touched another piece and another. I lit a match and found myself at an intersection of corridors. I walked in corridors all night—a maze of corridors hollowed out of the stone bluff. I wandered through it perplexed.
At one point I was surprised to find myself back at the door where I had come in. I hadn’t expected it to appear at the end of a corridor, and I stopped to think. Trying to arrange a map in my head of someplace I’d traveled through in the dark was difficult, but I’d had practice. I should not have arrived back at the door where I had come in, I was sure. I lit another match and checked the keyhole; then I forced the lock with my tools. I opened the door and felt along its opposite side and found no opening. This was not the door I had come in, although it was identical. Even the irregular shape of the stone walls leading to it looked the same. This was the other end of the trap. I lit yet another match—I had only seven left—and there on the floor ahead of me was the pry bar and beyond it, tipped on its side, the little brass lamp.
Of course, I thought. I will just step through this door and fetch my pry bar and my lamp and the door will close behind me and I will be trapped forever. Not likely. But I did want the lamp, so I held the door open with my foot—it was heavy and pinched the skin—while I pulled my overshirt over my head and wedged it very firmly beneath the door. Then I pulled off my undershirt as well and left it in a pile to block the doorjamb, just in case. Then, half naked and shivering, I hurried into the trap, picked up my lost possessions (no sign of my shoe), and hurried out again. Safe.
Some of the oil had spilled out of the lamp, but there was plenty left. I lit it and wandered through the corridors I had seen only with my fingertips. It wasn’t a big maze, not really big enough to get lost in. I thought of the temple to the goddess of the spring where we had stopped on the mountainside. It had been a small temple for a minor deity, and this maze was not much bigger than that temple, maybe two times its size, maybe three. And there didn’t seem to be a temple, at least no temple like any that I had ever seen. There was no naos, so of course no pronaos, no altar, no statues of the gods or of their supplicants. Most important there was no opisthodomos, no treasure room to store valuable offerings. Instead there was this maze of corridors hollowed out of the stone bluff.
The magus had been swoggled, I would have thought, except for one thing. At the back of the maze, farthest from the entrance doors, was a wider corridor, more carefully finished than the others. Its floor was canted, and one side was the lowest point in the maze. The water that remained there was several inches deep, but not deep enough to cover the bones that had settled over the years and remained undisturbed as the Aracthus drained away.
There were skulls worn as thin as eggshells, longer bones like thighbones, and smaller curved ribs that poked one end out of the dark water. How long, I wondered, does it take bones to dissolve? Fifty years? A hundred years? How long had these bones been here and how many had disappeared before them? I trailed my fingers in the water and shuddered at the cold. How could so many people have come searching without leaving a record? How could Hamiathes’s Gift have remained lost if so many people had known to look for it here? The light of my lamp reflected off the water, hiding some of the bones and revealing others, small bones, still arranged in the shape of a hand. I stepped back and left the surface of the water dark. I went back to check each corridor again for an opening that I might have missed.
There was none, but passing with my lamp where I had been only in the dark, I realized the abundance of the Hephestial glass. There were veins of it that sloped diagonally past me, three inches wide and twelve feet long. There were lumps of it two feet across, even three feet. They were perfectly black and at the same time filled with the different colors of my lamplight. They were so much like windows into the stone walls that I laid my hand against the glass to block reflections and I tried to look through them, as if I could see into the walls beyond.
In the longest corridor in the maze, excepting the one with the water and the bones, there was an enormous piece of obsidian, veined with solid rock. It started a little above the floor and reached over my head in a bulging sort of trapezoid. I ran my hands over it and thought of the hundreds of pendants, earrings, brooches, and spearpoints it would make.
I was standing there before it when the panic came. The walls pressed in, and the water seeped through them. The flame in my lamp sputtered, and I remembered the passage of time. Pol had said there was six hours of oil…but I had wandered for a long time by matchlight…but some of the oil had spilled from the lamp when I dropped it. How much time did I have? How much oil? I sloshed the lamp from side to side as my feet began moving of their own volition toward the door of the maze. I was careful to turn in the direction of the true exit. A careless thief or a panicked one might mistake the one door for the other and not realize his error until he was trapped, but I would not be careless.
The panic grew stronger. At the first locked door I spilled my tools out of their leather wrapper. The false keys, the awl, the tumbler jams—everything scattered on the stone floor, and I had to kneel down to gather them up. My hands shook. I nearly dropped everything again before I worked the lock open and stepped through the door into a puddle that hadn’t been left by the receding river. It was the first sign of the Aracthus’s return.
Panting with haste, I rushed to the next door and forgot my lamp behind me. I went back for the lamp, then turned again to the exit. It had swung closed sometime during the night, pushing my shoe ahead of it. Water poured through the grille in its bottom, washing toward me. Frantically I worked the lock. As it released, the door leapt open—I narrowly avoided being hit in the face—and the water behind it surged in, pushing me backward. I swung my arms for balance, dropped the pry bar, and let it go. I waded upstream to the barred stone door between me and the antechamber to the maze where the water came in through the ceiling. Waves sloshed in the tiny room.
I lifted the locking bar on the door and opened it, then edged my way along the wall of the antechamber and down the stairs. The water was still only five or six inches deep, but it had backed up against the door at the bottom where its path was restricted to the narrow slits in the door. With the strength that comes from terror I pulled the door open, against the force of the water; then the water and I both rushed out over the threshold. The door slammed behind me with force enough to break bones.
I landed on my hands and knees in the pool below and got up soaked and spluttering. I’d been wet all night, and I felt like a fool. The panic was gone. The maze behind me wouldn’t be full for hours yet. I could hardly have drowned in six inches of water.
As I waded toward shore, it was easy to imagine how undignified my arrival in the pool must have looked from the riverbank. There was no sun in the sky, but the world was twilight gray. In an hour it would be dawn.
“Did you get it?” the magus asked from the bank.
“No.” I sloshed toward him sullen and embarrassed. “I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t find anything.” Nothing except huge chunks of obsidian. “There’s no naos, no altar, no treasure room.” I told him about the maze as I climbed up the sandbank out of the water. “It’s not very big.” He reached out a hand to help, grabbing me first above the wrist and then behind the elbow.
“There’re still two nights left,” he said optimistically. “Come get some breakfast.”
We woke Pol, who made us breakfast. He’d been hiding six eggs in his bags as well as more coffee. The magus dug out a dry set of clothes for me, and after breakfast I lay down and went to sleep. The sun was just rising.