“Why not use the rings?’ Berit suggested. “Couldn’t Sparhawk just blow a hole straight through the maze?’
‘The passages are mostly barrel-vaults, Berit,’ Kurik said. ‘If we start blowing holes in the walls, we’ll have the ceiling down on our heads.’
“what a shame,’ Kalten sighed. ‘So many good ideas have to be discarded simply because they won’t work.’
“Are we absolutely bent on solving the riddle of the maze?’ Talen asked them. “I mean, does finding the solution have some sort of religious significance?’
“None that I know of,’ Tynian replied.
.Why stay inside the maze then?’ the’ boy asked innocently.
‘Because we’re trapped here,’ Sparhawk told him, trying to control his irritation.
‘That’s not exactly true, Sparhawk. We’ve never been really trapped. Kurik might be right about the danger involved in knocking down the walls, but he didn’t say a thing about the ceiling.’
They stared at him. Then they all began to laugh a bit foolishly.
‘We don’t know what’s up there, of course,’ Ulath noted.
.We don’t know what’s around the next corner either, Sir Knight. And we’ll never know what’s above the ceiling until we have a look, will we?’
‘It could just be open sky,’ Kurik said.
‘Is that any worse than what we have down here , father?
Once we get outside, Sparhawk might be able to use the rings to break through the outer wall of the temple. Otha may find mazes entertaining, but I think I’ve more or less had enough amusement out of this one. One of the first rules Platime ever taught me was that if you don’t like the game, don’t play.’
Sparhawk looked questioningly at Sephrenia.
She was also smiling ruefully. “I didn’t even think of it myself,’ she admitted.
“Can we do it?’
“I don’t see any reason why not – as long as we stand back a way so that we don’t get crushed by falling rubble.
Let’s have a look at this ceiling.’
They raised their torches to look up at the barrel-vaulted ceiling. ‘Is that construction going to cause any kind of problem?’ Sparhawk asked Kurik.
“Not really. The stones are laid in interlocking courses, so they’ll hold – eventually. There’s going to be a lot of rubble, though.’ ‘That’s all right, Kurik,’ Talen said gaily. “The rubble will give us something to climb up on.’
“It’s going to take a great deal of force to knock loose any of those stone blocks, though,’ Kurik said. ‘The weight of the whole corridor is holding the vault together.’
‘What would happen if a few of those blocks just weren’t there any more?’ Sephrenia asked him.
Kurik went to one of the upward-curving walls and probed at a crack between two stone blocks with his knife.
‘They used mortar,’ he said. ‘It’s fairly rotten, though. If you can dissolve a half-dozen of those blocks up there, a fairly sizeable piece of the ceiling will fall in.
“But the whole corridor won’t collapse?’
He shook his head. ‘No. After a few yards of it tumbles in, the structure will be sound again.’
.Can you really dissolve rocks?’ Tynian asked Sephrenia curiously. She smiled.
“No, dear one. But I can change them into sand – which amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?’ She intently studied the ceiling for several moments. ‘Ulath,’
she said then, ‘you’re the tallest. Lift me up. I have to touch the stones.’ Ulath blushed a bright red, and they all knew why.
Sephrenia was not the sort of person one put one’s hands on.
‘Oh, don’t be such a goose, Ulath,’ she told him. ‘Lift me up.’
Ulath looked around menacingly. ‘We aren’t going to talk about this, are we?’ he said to his friends. Then he bent and lifted her easily.
She clambered upward, looking not unlike someone climbing a tree. When she was high enough, she reached up and put the palms of her hands on several of the stones , pausing briefly with each one. Her touch seemed almost caressing. “That should ‘do it,’ she said. ‘You can put me down again, Sir Knight.’
Ulath lowered her to the floor, and they retreated back down the corridor. ‘Be ready to run,’ she cautioned them.
“This is a little inexact.’ She began to move her hands in front of her, speaking rapidly in Styric as she did so. Then she held out both hands, palms up, to release the spell.
Fine sand began to sift down from the ceiling, slithering out of the cracks between the roughly squared-off building blocks. At first it was only a trickle, but it steadily increased.
‘Looks almost like water leaking out,‘doesn’t it?’ calten observed as the sand-flow increased.
The walls began to creak, and there were popping noises as the mortar between the stones started to crack.
‘We can go back a bit further,’ Sephrenia said, looking apprehensively at all the rock around them. ‘The spell’s working. We don’t have to stand here to supervise it.’
, Sephrenia was a very complex little woman. She was sometimes timid about very ordinary things and at other times indifferent to horrendous ones. They walked further on back up the corridor as the building blocks near the place where the sand was now pouring down out of the ceiling creaked and groaned and grated together, settling in a fraction of an inch at a time to replace the sand.
When it came, it came all at once. A large section of the overhead vault collapsed with the grinding clatter of falling rock and a large cloud of eons-old dust that billowed down the corridor towards them, setting them all to coughing. As the dust gradually settled, they saw a large, jagged hole in the ceiling.
‘Let’s go and have a look,’ Talen said. ‘I’m curious to find out what’s up there.’
‘Could we wait just a bit longer?’ Sephrenia asked fearfully. ‘I’d really like to be sure that it’s safe.’
They struggled up the pile of rubble from the fallen ceiling and boosted each other up through the hole. The area above the ceiling was a vast, domed emptiness, dusty and stale-smelling. The light from the torches they had brought with them from the corridor below seemed sickly and did not reach out as far as the walls – if walls to this dim place indeed existed. The floor resembled to a remarkable degree a field laced with the upward-bulging burrows of a colony of extraordinarily industrious moles, and they saw a number of structural peculiarities they had not perceived when down in the maze.
“sliding walls,’ Kurik said, pointing. “They can change the maze any time they want to by closing off some passages and opening others. That’s why those Zemoch soldiers didn’t know where they were going.’
‘There’s a light,’ Ulath told them, ‘way over there to the left. It seems to be coming up from down below.
‘The temple maybe?’ Kalten suggested.
.Or the throneroom again. Let’s go and have a look.’
They threaded their way along the tops of the vaults for some distance and then came to a straight path that stretched in one direction towards the light Ulath had seen and off into the darkness in the other.
‘No dust,’ Ulath said, pointing at the stones of the path.
‘This is used fairly often.’
The going was much faster on the straight pathway, and they soon reached the source of the flickering light. It was a flight of stone stairs leading down into a torchlit room a room with four walls and no doors.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Kalten snorted.
‘Not really,’ Kurik disagreed, raising his torch to peer over the side of the path. “That front wall slides on those tracks.’ He pointed at a pair of metal tracks below that emerged from the room on the outside. He leaned forward to look more closely. “There’s no machinery out here, so there has to be a latch of some kind in that room.
Sparhawk, let’s go down and see if we can find it.’
The two of them went down the stairs into the room.
“What are we looking for?’ Sparhawk asked his friend.
‘How should I know? Something that looks ordinary but isn’t. ‘
“That’s not very specific, Kurik.’
.Just start pushing on rocks, Sparhawk. If you find one that can be depressed, it’s probably the latch.’
They went along the walls pushing on rocks. After a few minutes, Kurik stopped, a slightly foolish look on his face.
‘You can stop, Sparhawk,’ he said. “I found the latches.’
‘Where?’
‘There are torches on the side walls and on the back, right?’
‘Yes. So what?’
“But there aren’t any torches on the front wall – the one right in front of the foot of the stairs.’
“so?~
‘There are a couple of torch rings, though.’ Kurik went to the front wall and pulled on one of the rusty iron rings.
There was a solid-sounding clank. ‘Pull the other one, Sparhawk,’ he suggested. ‘Let’s open this door and see what’s behind it.’