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.