The door was locked. I opened it and had to let it close behind me, but I checked the keyhole on the far side first. Beyond the door was another corridor, no different. I lit a match and then felt my way along the stone walls in the dark. The floor was uneven, and I stubbed a toe once but placed my feet more carefully after. I didn’t hurry. As my hands brushed across the stone on one side of me, they touched something cold and hard and perfectly smooth. I stopped and felt more carefully and then lit a match to see what I had found. It was Hephestial glass, obsidian, formed when the rock I walked through had been heated to liquid and had flowed across this part of the world. In ancient times it had been mined and used for points on arrows and spears, and it was still treasured for jewelry and the blades of decorative knives. The piece in front of me was the size of my head and would have been very valuable if I’d had some way to pry it out of the wall.

I walked on, and my sliding fingers touched another piece and another. I lit a match and found myself at an intersection of corridors. I walked in corridors all night—a maze of corridors hollowed out of the stone bluff. I wandered through it perplexed.

At one point I was surprised to find myself back at the door where I had come in. I hadn’t expected it to appear at the end of a corridor, and I stopped to think. Trying to arrange a map in my head of someplace I’d traveled through in the dark was difficult, but I’d had practice. I should not have arrived back at the door where I had come in, I was sure. I lit another match and checked the keyhole; then I forced the lock with my tools. I opened the door and felt along its opposite side and found no opening. This was not the door I had come in, although it was identical. Even the irregular shape of the stone walls leading to it looked the same. This was the other end of the trap. I lit yet another match—I had only seven left—and there on the floor ahead of me was the pry bar and beyond it, tipped on its side, the little brass lamp.

Of course, I thought. I will just step through this door and fetch my pry bar and my lamp and the door will close behind me and I will be trapped forever. Not likely. But I did want the lamp, so I held the door open with my foot—it was heavy and pinched the skin—while I pulled my overshirt over my head and wedged it very firmly beneath the door. Then I pulled off my undershirt as well and left it in a pile to block the doorjamb, just in case. Then, half naked and shivering, I hurried into the trap, picked up my lost possessions (no sign of my shoe), and hurried out again. Safe.

Some of the oil had spilled out of the lamp, but there was plenty left. I lit it and wandered through the corridors I had seen only with my fingertips. It wasn’t a big maze, not really big enough to get lost in. I thought of the temple to the goddess of the spring where we had stopped on the mountainside. It had been a small temple for a minor deity, and this maze was not much bigger than that temple, maybe two times its size, maybe three. And there didn’t seem to be a temple, at least no temple like any that I had ever seen. There was no naos, so of course no pronaos, no altar, no statues of the gods or of their supplicants. Most important there was no opisthodomos, no treasure room to store valuable offerings. Instead there was this maze of corridors hollowed out of the stone bluff.

The magus had been swoggled, I would have thought, except for one thing. At the back of the maze, farthest from the entrance doors, was a wider corridor, more carefully finished than the others. Its floor was canted, and one side was the lowest point in the maze. The water that remained there was several inches deep, but not deep enough to cover the bones that had settled over the years and remained undisturbed as the Aracthus drained away.

There were skulls worn as thin as eggshells, longer bones like thighbones, and smaller curved ribs that poked one end out of the dark water. How long, I wondered, does it take bones to dissolve? Fifty years? A hundred years? How long had these bones been here and how many had disappeared before them? I trailed my fingers in the water and shuddered at the cold. How could so many people have come searching without leaving a record? How could Hamiathes’s Gift have remained lost if so many people had known to look for it here? The light of my lamp reflected off the water, hiding some of the bones and revealing others, small bones, still arranged in the shape of a hand. I stepped back and left the surface of the water dark. I went back to check each corridor again for an opening that I might have missed.

There was none, but passing with my lamp where I had been only in the dark, I realized the abundance of the Hephestial glass. There were veins of it that sloped diagonally past me, three inches wide and twelve feet long. There were lumps of it two feet across, even three feet. They were perfectly black and at the same time filled with the different colors of my lamplight. They were so much like windows into the stone walls that I laid my hand against the glass to block reflections and I tried to look through them, as if I could see into the walls beyond.

In the longest corridor in the maze, excepting the one with the water and the bones, there was an enormous piece of obsidian, veined with solid rock. It started a little above the floor and reached over my head in a bulging sort of trapezoid. I ran my hands over it and thought of the hundreds of pendants, earrings, brooches, and spearpoints it would make.

I was standing there before it when the panic came. The walls pressed in, and the water seeped through them. The flame in my lamp sputtered, and I remembered the passage of time. Pol had said there was six hours of oil…but I had wandered for a long time by matchlight…but some of the oil had spilled from the lamp when I dropped it. How much time did I have? How much oil? I sloshed the lamp from side to side as my feet began moving of their own volition toward the door of the maze. I was careful to turn in the direction of the true exit. A careless thief or a panicked one might mistake the one door for the other and not realize his error until he was trapped, but I would not be careless.

The panic grew stronger. At the first locked door I spilled my tools out of their leather wrapper. The false keys, the awl, the tumbler jams—everything scattered on the stone floor, and I had to kneel down to gather them up. My hands shook. I nearly dropped everything again before I worked the lock open and stepped through the door into a puddle that hadn’t been left by the receding river. It was the first sign of the Aracthus’s return.

Panting with haste, I rushed to the next door and forgot my lamp behind me. I went back for the lamp, then turned again to the exit. It had swung closed sometime during the night, pushing my shoe ahead of it. Water poured through the grille in its bottom, washing toward me. Frantically I worked the lock. As it released, the door leapt open—I narrowly avoided being hit in the face—and the water behind it surged in, pushing me backward. I swung my arms for balance, dropped the pry bar, and let it go. I waded upstream to the barred stone door between me and the antechamber to the maze where the water came in through the ceiling. Waves sloshed in the tiny room.

I lifted the locking bar on the door and opened it, then edged my way along the wall of the antechamber and down the stairs. The water was still only five or six inches deep, but it had backed up against the door at the bottom where its path was restricted to the narrow slits in the door. With the strength that comes from terror I pulled the door open, against the force of the water; then the water and I both rushed out over the threshold. The door slammed behind me with force enough to break bones.