‘Oh, don’t be such a goose, Ulath,’ she told him. ‘Lift me up.’
Ulath looked around menacingly. ‘We aren’t going to talk about this, are we?’ he said to his friends. Then he bent and lifted her easily.
She clambered upward, looking not unlike someone climbing a tree. When she was high enough, she reached up and put the palms of her hands on several of the stones, pausing briefly with each one. Her touch seemed almost caressing. ‘That should do it,’ she said. ‘You can put me down again, Sir Knight.’
Ulath lowered her to the floor, and they retreated back down the corridor. ‘Be ready to run,’ she cautioned them. ‘This is a little inexact.’ She began to move her hands in front of her, speaking rapidly in Styric as she did so. Then she held out both hands, palms up, to release the spell.
Fine sand began to sift down from the ceiling, slithering out of the cracks between the roughly squared-off building blocks. At first it was only a trickle, but it steadily increased.
‘Looks almost like water leaking out, doesn’t it?’ Kalten observed as the sand-flow increased.
The walls began to creak, and there were popping noises as the mortar between the stones started to crack.
‘We can go back a bit further,’ Sephrenia said, looking apprehensively at all the rock around them. ‘The spell’s working. We don’t have to stand here to supervise it.’ Sephrenia was a very complex little woman. She was sometimes timid about very ordinary things and at other times indifferent to horrendous ones. They walked further on back up the corridor as the building blocks near the place where the sand was now pouring down out of the ceiling creaked and groaned and grated together, settling in a fraction of an inch at a time to replace the sand.
When it came, it came all at once. A large section of the overhead vault collapsed with the grinding clatter of falling rock and a large cloud of eons-old dust that billowed down the corridor towards them, setting them all to coughing. As the dust gradually settled, they saw a large, jagged hole in the ceiling.
‘Let’s go and have a look,’ Talen said. ‘I’m curious to find out what’s up there.’
‘Could we wait just a bit longer?’ Sephrenia asked fearfully. ‘I’d really like to be sure that it’s safe.’
They struggled up the pile of rubble from the fallen ceiling and boosted each other up through the hole. The area above the ceiling was a vast, domed emptiness, dusty and stale-smelling. The light from the torches they had brought with them from the corridor below seemed sickly and did not reach out as far as the walls – if walls to this dim place indeed existed. The floor resembled to a remarkable degree a field laced with the upward-bulging burrows of a colony of extraordinarily industrious moles, and they saw a number of structural peculiarities they had not perceived when down in the maze.
‘Sliding walls,’ Kurik said, pointing. ‘They can change the maze any time they want to by closing off some passage and opening others. That’s why those Zemoch soldiers didn’t know where they were going.’
‘There’s a light,’ Ulath told them, ‘way over there to the left. It seems to be coming up from down below.’
‘The temple maybe?’ Kalten suggested.
‘Or the throne-room again. Let’s go and have a look.’
They threaded their way along the tops of the vaults for some distance and then came to a straight path that stretched in one direction towards the light Ulath had seen and off into the darkness in the other.
‘No dust,’ Ulath said, pointing at the stones of the path. ‘This is used fairly often.’
The going was much faster on the straight pathway, and they soon reached the source of the flickering light. It was a flight of stone stairs leading down into a torchlit room – a room with four walls and no doors.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Kalten snorted.
‘Not really,’ Kurik disagreed, raising his torch to peer over the side of the path. ‘That front wall slides on those tracks.’ He pointed at a pair of metal tracks below that emerged from the room on the outside. He leaned forward to look more closely. ‘There’s no machinery out here, so there has to be a latch of some kind in that room. Sparhawk, let’s go down and see if we can find it.’
The two of them went down the stairs into the room. ‘What are we looking for?’ Sparhawk asked his friend.
‘How should I know? Something that looks ordinary but isn’t.’
‘That’s not very specific, Kurik.’
‘Just start pushing on rocks, Sparhawk. If you find one that can be depressed, it’s probably the latch.’
They went along the walls pushing on rocks. After a few minutes, Kurik stopped, a slightly foolish look on his face. ‘You can stop, Sparhawk,’ he said. ‘I found the latches.’
‘Where?’
‘There are torches on the side walls and on the back, right?’
‘Yes. So what?’
‘But there aren’t any torches on the front wall – the one right in front of the foot of the stairs.’
‘So?’
‘There are a couple of torch rings, though.’ Kurik went to the front wall and pulled on one of the rusty iron rings. There was a solid-sounding clank. ‘Pull the other one, Sparhawk,’ he suggested. ‘Let’s open this door and see what’s behind it.’
‘Sometimes you’re so clever you make me sick, Kurik,’ Sparhawk said sourly. Then he grinned. ‘Let’s get the others down here first,’ he said. ‘I’d rather not open that door and find half the Zemoch army behind it with only the two of us here to hold them off.’ He went to the stairs and beckoned to his waiting friends, touching one finger to his lips as he did so to signal the need for silence.
They came down quietly to avoid clinking.
‘Kurik found the latches,’ Sparhawk whispered. ‘We don’t know what’s on the other side of the door, so we’d better be ready.’
Kurik motioned to them. ‘The wall isn’t too heavy,’ he said quietly, ‘and the track it slides on seems to be well greased. Berit and I should be able to move it. The rest of you should be ready for anything on the other side.’
Talen moved quickly to the corner on the left side and put his face close to the two intersecting walls. ‘I’ll be able to look through here just as soon as you get it open an inch or so,’ he told his father. ‘If I shout, slam it shut again.’