“Oh, I’ll take stuffed pigeons in sauce, thank you, and some decent wine to drink. None of that cheap stuff, please.”

The magus handed me an almost empty paper package of dried beef and half of a loaf of bread. “Enjoy your meal,” he said.

The bread was four days old and as difficult to chew as the beef. I worked my way through my portion listening to Pol and the magus go on discussing their campaign. I looked around for Sophos, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“I sent him after more wood,” the magus broke off to tell me.

Knowing Sophos, I thought he had probably fallen in the river. “Can he swim?” I wondered out loud.

The magus glanced over at Pol, who shrugged his shoulders. Without another word they both stood up, brushed the sand off the seats of their trousers, and went to look for Sophos. Once they were gone, I flipped open Pol’s bag and helped myself to another slab of dried beef, which I stuffed into one pocket. The magus would have given it to me if I had asked, I think, but I’d given up asking for extra food since the scene with the riding crop.

Sophos came over the ridge behind me, bringing a bundle of brush. “Where is everybody?”

“Looking for you.” I explained that they thought he’d drowned.

He sat in huffy silence for the next half hour until the magus came up the riverbank from downstream. When he saw Sophos, he stepped back around the curve in the bank and must have waved to Pol because both of them reappeared.

They sat down beside us, and Sophos, staring straight ahead, said pointedly, “I swim very well.”

“Is there any dinner?” I asked.

So we ate and waited for the river to disappear. I had moved away from the fire to sit in the dark. Sophos moved with me.

“Gen,” he asked, “can you hear the river coming inside the temple?”

I thought about my panic on the previous two nights. Maybe my ears heard what my head didn’t understand. “I don’t know,” I had to answer, and told him about the panic. I told him about the sliding stone door blocks as well.

“Do you think,” he stammered, “there’s some . . . body in the maze with you?”

I wished he hadn’t so obviously substituted “somebody” for “something.” Not that I thought ghouls and ghosts were real, but they were easier to believe in when standing in a cold, dark, wet hole in the ground.

My third night in the maze I remembered to pick up the pry bar, lying abandoned in the entranceway to the maze. Then I went directly to the corridor through the middle of it. I searched fingertip by fingertip every stretch of its inner wall from one end of it to the other, and then as nearly as I could tell, I circled through the maze to the far side of the same wall and searched it, too. It took most of my night, and I found nothing. I went to the pool in the back of the maze and waded through it, bones occasionally crunching under my feet despite my care. I searched the rear wall of the maze and again found nothing.

As I searched, Sophos’s unspoken words came to haunt me, “. . . something in the maze with you?” I broke off every few minutes to look over my shoulder and cursed Sophos for bringing up something I didn’t want to think about.

The flame in my lamp sputtered once, and the panic swept down on me. I went back to the middle corridor and stood there while the panic rolled over me, sweeping and pushing me toward the exit of the maze. I knew that there was still time before the maze filled, and I refused to admit defeat. I planted my feet and actually held on to the rock for support. I intended to find Hamiathes’s Gift, and if I couldn’t, or if as I suspected, it was not there to be found, I told myself that I might as well drown. What, after all, was there to go back to?

The panic receded, and I looked at the wall in front of me. There were bulges of rock and ripples where it had flowed and hardened, but there was no crack or fissure that would reveal a doorway or conceal a hidden spring. I searched through the middle section of the wall until frustration made me swear out loud and swing my pry bar against the solid rock.

I hurt my hand. The pry bar landed, ringing like a bell, on the stone at my feet. I was lucky it hadn’t bounced off the rock and hit me in the face. I turned around and sat down against the wall, nursing my sore hand and wiping the tears off my face. The panic was gone, but I was still tempted to try to make my way out of the maze. I don’t know if I could have left then or not. I didn’t stay because I was trapped; I stayed because I was too stupid to go. Maybe all the owners of the bones in the back of the maze had been drowned by their own stubbornness as well.

I was facing the giant piece of obsidian, and I wondered how many had sat there before me. The Hephestial glass was beautiful, reflecting the light of the lamp that was sitting beside me. My own reflection was there as well, distorted by the bumps and ridges in the obsidian. I watched the image of the burning flame for a moment, thinking again how much like a window at night the glass was, reflecting the houselights when the world was dark, keeping the world on the far side of the glass invisible. How much like a window—or like a door.

I stood up, forgetting my sore hand. The piece of obsidian was easily the size of a double doorway, although veins of solid rock ran through it. I brushed my hands over the slick black surface and pressed my nose against it, trying to see through. There was nothing but blackness. I picked up my pry bar and, holding my breath, slammed it into the glass.

The pry bar rebounded, chipping free a small chunk of the obsidian. I turned my face away and swung again harder. Larger pieces of glass broke off, and when I turned back, there were long cracks radiating in a star shape from where the point of my pry bar had struck, and there, where the cracks intersected, was a little hole no bigger than a button. I pushed my fingertip through it, careful of the sharp edges, and wiggled it in the open space on the other side.

Turning my face again, I swung the pry bar over and over against the glass door until I felt something break loose and shatter on the stone floor. I looked and saw that a piece larger than an armored breastplate had dropped out and broken to fragments at my feet. There was dust in the air that stung my eyes. I lifted up my lamp to let light fall through the hole before me. There was no room beyond, but there was the space that my calculations had said must be behind the opposite wall of the corridor. I looked back for a moment, puzzled by my mistake. Then I looked again through the hole in the obsidian. There was a staircase, twelve steep steps, leading up. The room above was outside the range of my small light.

With more judicious taps of my pry bar I enlarged the opening between the veins of solid rock. Pieces of obsidian larger than platters broke off, and I lowered them carefully to the ground. Suddenly one tap of my hammer overcame the door all at once. The veins of stone crumbled to fist-sized rocks, and a huge piece of glass slipped free and crashed down. Shards flew like missiles. I jumped back and covered my face with both arms. When the dust settled, I dropped my arms and looked through an irregular opening nearly as wide as a double doorway, to stairs that filled the space beyond. They were about eight feet wide, as the magus and my map had predicted. I had no idea, though, how they came to be on that side of the corridor, where the wall was only two feet thick.

I had dropped my lamp again, but it was still burning. I scooped it up and picked my way through the rubble of obsidian and stone and climbed up the stairs. The lamp was a round, fat one, a little longer than it was high, flat on the bottom, with two more flat spots on one side where I’d dropped it. It had a hint of a spout with a hole for the wick, but no handle. It sat in the palm of my hand, the brass growing warmer and less heavy as the oil inside burned away. There was very little oil left by then, and the lamp sat lightly. I held it above the level of my eyes so that it might cast its frugal glow ahead of me. There were no obstacles. I climbed with my eyes on the stairs, and so I did not realize until I reached the top and looked up that the room was filled with people.