They stood in a loose collection on either side of an open aisle. They were perfectly silent and none looked toward me, but it was impossible that they could be unaware of my arrival. The obsidian crashing to the floor had made enough sound to wake the dead, but no one moved. I was in plain sight, but no one looked at me. Finally I realized that the only movement in the entire room was the movement of the shadows thrown by my light as my hand shook, and I began to breathe again. They were statues.

As I walked among them, I could see that their perfection made them unreal. Their skin was lighter or darker, but always unblemished, their faces symmetrical, their eyes clear. There were no scars, no bent limbs, no squints in those eyes. I wanted to touch the perfect skin, but I didn’t dare. I settled for brushing my fingers across the cloth of one robe. It was deep blue and had a pattern like running water woven into it. The man wearing it was tall. Taller than I was, of course, but taller than the magus as well.

Away from the aisle, toward the back of the room, I found the woman in the white peplos. I knew her now, even without her feather pen and scroll, and I smiled in recognition. She was Moira, who recorded men’s fates. How she had come to my dreams I didn’t wonder. I had found her image in the world, and somehow I thought all mysteries were explained.

I left her and turned toward the altar but found that I was mistaken. There was no altar. There was a throne, and sitting on it was the statue of the Great Goddess Hephestia. She wore a robe cut from deep velvet, its reds darkest in the heart of its folds and brighter across the ridges. Her hair was held back from her face by a woven ribbon of gold set with red rubies. Resting on her knees was a small tray that held a single stone on its mirror surface. I stepped forward until I could reach to take the stone. Then, with my hand extended, I stopped, and was perfectly still as I watched the pattern of light on the velvet robe shift with the movement of a breath. My heart was like stone inside my chest.

This was not an image carefully made in imitation of Hephestia, amid a statuary garden of the gods. This was the Great Goddess, and she was surrounded by her court. My extended hand began to shake. I closed my eyes as I heard the rustle of cloth behind me, wondering if it was the midnight blue gown with the water pattern as Oceanus checked to see if I had left any dirt. I opened one eye and looked up at the Great Goddess. She looked beyond me, impassive, distant, not unaware of my presence but unmoved by it.

There was a murmur of voices behind me, but I made out no words. In the corner of my vision a figure moved forward. I hadn’t seen him before, though I should have looked. His skin was not black like the Nimbians’. It was a deep brownish red, like fired clay, like that of the ancient people who’d left their portraits on the walls of the ruins on islands in the middle sea. His hair was dark like his half sister’s, but her hair reflected the light in flashes of gold and auburn; his was black like charcoal. His face was much narrower, his nose sharper. On one cheek was a lighter scar of a burn mark, shaped like a rounded feather. He was smaller than the other gods, dressed in a tunic of plain gray.

“You have not yet offended the gods.” Eugenides, the god who had once been mortal, spoke at last. “Except perhaps Aracthus, who was charged to let no thief enter here. Take the stone.”

I did not move.

The patron of thieves came closer. He moved to his sister’s right hand and laid his own across it.

“Take it,” he said. His words were strangely accented, but not so very different from my way of speaking. The magus was not there to tell me how it compared with the language of the civilized world. I had no difficulty understanding the god’s instruction. I just couldn’t move.

My nerve had failed, I suppose. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of the retribution of lightning bolts that might follow. It was religion that had seeped into my childhood without my knowing it. The thought of stealing something from the Great Goddess was too awful to contemplate, and I could not do it.

Neither could I turn and flee. I was a little surprised at how stubborn I was turning out to be, but I wouldn’t leave without the Gift. It mattered too much. Distantly I heard the swish and rattle of small stones as the water began to flow down the riverbed overhead, but I remained as immobile as the gods that I had mistaken for statues. Only my eyes moved as I looked from the small gray stone of the tray to the hand of Eugenides, to his face. And then, because I thought that if I were dying, I would do something that very few had done since the world was made, I looked again into the eyes of the Great Goddess, and for a moment she looked back at me. That was enough.

Released from my paralysis, I leaned forward a little further and plucked the stone off the mirrored tray. Then I turned and I ran. With the sound of water roaring in my ears, I ran for the staircase, past the gods, who watched impassively. I lifted my head only once to look for Moira, but she was hidden in the crowd.

When I reached the staircase, I jumped the first two steps and stumbled down the rest. I thumped against the wall across from the bottom step and dropped my lamp. I didn’t stop to pick it up. After three nights in the maze I didn’t need it. Brushing my hands against the walls, one with Hamiathes’s Gift clutched in its fist, I ran on. When the wall on my left ended, I turned left, then right, and right again, then left, and left again, and splashed toward the doors which I had wedged open and which had again closed. I imagined Aracthus somewhere making a gesture, forcing a little more water through the bluff to move my blocks. He might yet succeed in trapping me. The water coming through the grille in the door washed against my legs, six inches deep. How many thieves, I wondered, had reached this point and still drowned? Would my bones end in the pool at the back of the maze? Would the obsidian door be restored and the Gift returned to its mirrored tray?

If I had dropped my tools, they would have disappeared into the water, but I did not fumble. The water beyond the door was twelve inches deep, and it was almost two feet deep before I reached the next door. I worked the lock and stepped back as the water forced the door open. In the antechamber the water was waist deep, and the waves made by the water thundering down in a solid pillar from the hole in the ceiling were as high as my chest. The pillar carried a glint of moonlight from above, but the chamber was as dark as the maze. I slid cautiously around, close to the walls, but I slipped at the top of the stair leading to the outer door and slid down underwater until I was pinned, unable to breathe, against the stone door.

I fought to turn over, to get some purchase in order to lift my head, but the river held me on my back, head down. I scrabbled with my hands but could find no leverage to move my body against the force of the water. The river foamed around me. I ran out of air. Darkness that was deeper than the river swallowed me up.

CHAPTER TEN

WHEN I WOKE, THE SUN was up and the day was already warm. I was on the sandy bank of the Aracthus, my feet still in the water. The river lifted them and tugged gently, but not as if it still hoped to suck me in. It was moving quietly between its banks and seemed willing to make peace over the loss of Hamiathes’s Gift. At least that was my thinking as my eyes opened. A moment later came more sensible questions. Had I tried to escape the last maze at the last minute the night before and been trapped by the river, hallucinating everything else, the obsidian door, the gods, Hephestia, and Hamiathes’s Gift?