“Any luck?” he asked.

“None,” I said.

“Dammit. What are you doing all night?”

“Tripping over pry bars,” I told him. “Where’s my breakfast?”

After I ate, I asked the magus if he had any paper. I knew he had a journal that he kept a record of our days in.

“Did you want to write a letter to your sweetheart?” he asked.

“What makes you think my sweetheart can read? Shut up and get me a piece of paper.”

The magus laughed and pulled himself up to walk to his backpack, lying beside his bedroll. He tore a sheet from the back of his journal and flourished it in front of me. “I hear and obey,” he said, “which is more than you have ever done.”

I snatched the paper out of his hands and noticed Sophos staring in astonishment. “What are you looking at?” I asked him.

“Nothing,” he answered.

“He is merely astounded by my good humor, Gen,” explained the magus, “and my ready compliance to your grumpy requests.” To Sophos he said, “I have the highest respect for a craftsman, and Gen is nothing if not that. Although if he doesn’t bring back Hamiathes’s Gift tonight, the three of us may as well drown here as go back and tell the king that we have failed.”

“The three of you?” I asked pointedly. “What happens to me?”

“Oh,” said the magus, waving one hand, “you would drown in the maze.”

A chill shivered down my spine. I turned to the paper in my hand without speaking. I used a charcoal stick from the fireside to mark out the measurements I’d stored in my head. The maze took shape under my hands while the magus looked silently over my shoulder.

“What’s that?” He pointed with a finger at a dark smudge.

“A mistake,” I answered. “I keep getting my measurements turned around. That big piece of obsidian that I told you about, though, is right there.” I marked it with another smudge.

“If I were here to get rich, I’d be a happy man. How long is the rope?” he asked after a pause.

“About thirty feet,” I told him.

“Thirty exactly,” Pol volunteered.

“So this space here”—the magus put his fingertip down on the page—“might be as much as eight feet by six?”

“I think so,” I told him.

“You think there is a room hidden?”

“I don’t know. Every wall is two feet or three feet thick. There could be a hidden storage space anywhere. And then there are the outside walls of the maze. A secret way could lead to a tunnel a mile long. I just don’t know.”

“You’ve checked those walls?”

“Every inch,” I said, frustrated.

The magus squeezed one shoulder. “If there were a door, you would find it, Gen,” he said, and I shrugged. I was pessimistic of finding anything hidden in any of the seamed walls of the maze. There was no door. I was positive of it.

“Did you look among the bones?” he asked quietly. He hadn’t suggested it the night before, although the necessity was obvious to both of us.

“Yes.”

“Find anything?”

I looked down at the ring still hung around my left thumb. He looked as well and whistled. In the sunlight I could see that the emerald was flawed, milky white on one side. The seal engraved in it was a curving fish, maybe a dolphin. The white flaw was a breaking wave.

The magus leaned over me to lift it off my thumb. “The writing on the ring itself is in the old style, pre-invader. Whoever wore it here must have had it in his family for many generations.”

“Or he lost it here a long, long time ago.”

The magus agreed. “Or that. I’ll put it in my bag, so that it doesn’t get lost.”

“You will not,” I said. The ring didn’t belong in a bag; it belonged on a finger. My finger.

The magus looked down at me, and I started to get up. Pol rose as well.

“If you want a seal ring,” I said, louder than I’d intended, “go get one yourself.”

“Oh, very well.” The magus capitulated with a smile, handing it back to me. “Grave robber.”

I laughed at that. “I’m trying to rob a god’s temple, and you think I should worry about the ghosts of a few dead men?” I slipped the ring back over my thumb and went to lie down. With the image of the maze in my head, I slept.

And dreamed again. In the antechamber the woman in white called me by name. Of course she had written my name on her scroll, I knew that, yet hearing her say it aloud tore away a comforting pretense of anonymity. I hesitated, and she called me again.

“I am here,” I answered.

“Many have sought twice in the maze and yet gone away,” she said quietly. “If you go a third time into the maze, you will not leave without what you seek.”

I nodded my head.

“You will go a third time?”

“Yes.”

“There is no shame if you did not.” She paused as if she had wandered as far as she could from a script that was written out for her. “Who brings you here?” she asked.

“I bring myself,” I whispered.

“Then will you go?”

“Yes.”

“Be cautious,” she said as she turned and picked up her white pen. “Do not offend the gods.”

I woke before she looked up from the third mark beside my name.

It was still more than an hour before sunset. The sand under me was warm with a day’s heat, and I was comfortable. I stayed where I was with my eyes closed and thought about the stones I’d used as door blocks the night before. They shouldn’t have moved. I had been very careful. Had someone removed them? A woman in white? A little voice inside me laughed. Of course she knew my name. She was a dream, something made of my own imagination. If I knew my name, then so did she, but those blocks hadn’t been moved by a dream.

I opened my eyes in slits and looked over at the magus. He and Pol were sitting by the cold fire ring talking quietly, so as not to wake me, about some army campaign they had fought together. Pol wouldn’t have moved the blocks. He didn’t particularly care if I found the stone, but he was no enemy to the magus. The magus could have moved the blocks, but I couldn’t see why he would. I had an ugly image of him sealing the outer door of the maze and refusing to let me out until I produced Hamiathes’s Gift, but it was a nightmare, nothing real. The magus, in spite of his dogged pursuit of world sovereignty for Sounis, was a reasonably honest man. When I’d accused him of intending to knife me in the back after I’d delivered Hamiathes’s Gift, he’d been insulted and angry. He’d steal an entire country, but he wouldn’t murder one dirty little thief. Nor would Pol, unless the magus ordered it, nor did I need to worry about Sophos as an assassin. Ambiades I would worry about, but we’d left him on the far side of the dystopia.

So who had moved the blocks? No one, I finally decided. The doors were heavier than I’d allowed for, the wet stone slicker. I’d have to be more careful, that was all. My stomach rumbled for the lunch it had missed, and I sat up.

“Welcome,” said the magus. “Would you like some dried beef, some dried beef, or some dried beef for lunch?”