“I wouldn’t do that again, if I were you, Your Majesty.” The Patryn spoke through gritted teeth. “I don’t know what’s out there, but I have the feeling someone heard you.”
Bane, eyes wide, had shrunk back against the wall.
“I think you’re right,” he whispered through quivering lips. “I-I’m sorry. What do we do?”
Haplo heaved an exasperated sigh, endeavored to loosen Jarre’s pinching fingers, which were cutting off his circulation. “Let’s go. But let’s be quick about it!”
No one needed any urging to hurry. By now, all of them, including Bane, were anxious to complete their task, then get out of this place.
The glowing sigla led them through the myriad hallways.
“What are you doing?” Bane demanded, pausing to watch Haplo, who had stopped for about the fourth time since they’d started down the tunnel. “I thought you said to hurry.”
“This will ensure us finding our way out, Your Highness,” Haplo replied coolly. “If you’ll notice, the sigla fade after we pass them. They might not light up again or they might take us another way, a way that could bring us out into the arms of the elves.”
He stood facing the arched entryway of the tunnel branch they had just entered and, with the point of his dagger, was scratching a sigil of his own on the wall. The rune was not only useful, but he felt a certain amount of satisfaction in leaving a Patryn mark on hallowed Sartan walls.
“The Sartan runes will show us the way out,” argued Bane petulantly.
“They haven’t shown us much of anything yet,” remarked Haplo.
But eventually, after a few more twists and turns, the runes led them to a closed door at the end of a hall.
The glowing sigla that ran across the floor and skipped over other doorways, leaving them in darkness, now arched up and over, outlining this door in light. Recalling the warding runes on Abarrach, Haplo was glad to see the sigla glow blue and not red. The door was formed in the shape of a hexagon. In its center was inscribed a circlet of runes surrounding a blank spot. Unlike most Sartan runes, these were not complete, but appeared to have been only half finished.
Haplo registered the odd shape of the door and the sigla formation as something he had seen or encountered before, but his memory offered no help, and he thought little more of it.* It looked to be a simple opening device, the key being sigla drawn in the center.
*Undoubtedly the gates to the Sartan city of Pryan, which Haplo describes in his journal Pryan, Worid of Fire.
“I know this one,” said Bane, studying it for a moment. “Grandfather taught me. It was in those old books of his.” He looked back at Haplo. “But I need to be taller. And I need your dagger.”
“Be careful,” said Haplo, handing the weapon over. “It’s sharp.”
Bane took a moment to study the dagger with wistful longing. Haplo lifted the boy, held him up level with the rune-structure on the door.
Brow furrowed, tongue thrust out in concentration, Bane stuck the dagger’s tip into the wooden door and began slowly and laboriously to draw a sigil.* When the last stroke was completed, the sigil caught fire. Its flame spread to the runes around it. The entire rune-structure flared briefly, then went out. The door opened a tiny crack. Light—bright, white—flared out, the brilliance making them blink after the darkness of the tunnel.
*Haplo should have recognized this from Pryan as well. The dwarf Drugar wore the very same sigil on an amulet around his neck. A common Sartan key and locking device, the sigla were more ornamental than they were functional, for—as Bane demonstrates—even a mensch could learn to operate the elemental magic. Places the Sartan wanted to truly guard and prohibit entry to were surrounded by runes of warding.
From inside the room came a metallic clanking sound.
Haplo dropped His Highness unceremoniously on the ground, shoved the boy behind him, and made a grab for the excited Limbeck,’ who was preparing to march right inside. The dog growled, low in its throat.