“To be decapitated before the Throne.”
“Is it my mistress’ will that a guard be set upon the Tomb Wall?”
“It is,” the girl answered. Inside her long black sleeves her fingers clenched with elation. She knew Kossil did not want to spare a slave to this duty of watching the wall, and indeed it was a useless duty, for what strangers ever came here? It was not likely that any man would wander, by mischance or intent, anywhere within a mile of the Place without being seen; he certainly would get nowhere near the Tombs. But a guard was an honor due them, and Kossil could not well argue against it. She must obey Arha.
“Here,” said her cold voice.
Arha stopped. She had often walked this path around the Tomb Wall, and knew it as she knew every foot of the Place, every rock and thorn and thistle. The great rock wall reared up thrice her height to the left; to the right the hill shelved away into a shallow, arid valley, which soon rose again towards the foothills of the western range. She looked over all the ground nearby, and saw nothing that she had not seen before.
“Under the red rocks, mistress.”
A few yards down the slope an outcropping of red lava made a stair or little cliff in the hill. When she went down to it and stood on the level before it, facing the rocks, Arha realized that they looked like a rough doorway, four feet high.
“What must be done?”
She had learned long ago that in the holy places it is no use trying to open a door until you know how the door is opened.
“My mistress has all the keys to the dark places.”
Since the rites of her coming of age, Arha had worn on her belt an iron ring on which hung a little dagger and thirteen keys, some long and heavy, some small as fishhooks. She lifted the ring and spread the keys. “That one,” Kossil said, pointing; and then placed her thick forefinger on a crevice between two red, pitted rock-surfaces.
“The key, a long shaft of iron with two ornate wards, entered the crevice. Arha turned it to the left, using both hands, for it was stiff to move; yet it turned smoothly.
“Now?”
“Together-“
Together they pushed at the rough rock face to the left of the keyhole. Heavily, but without catch and with very little noise, an uneven section of the red rock moved inward until a narrow slit was opened. Inside it was blackness.
Arha stooped and entered.
Kossil, a heavy woman heavily clothed, had to squeeze through the narrow opening. As soon as she was inside she backed against the door and, straining, pushed it shut.
It was absolutely black. There was no light. The dark seemed to press like wet felt upon the open eyes.
They crouched, almost doubled over, for the place they stood in was not four feet high, and so narrow that Arha’s groping hands touched damp rock at once to right and left.
“Did you bring a light?”
She whispered, as one does in the dark.
“I brought no light,” Kossil replied, behind her. Kossil’s voice too was lowered, but it had an odd sound to it, as if she were smiling. Kossil never smiled. Arha’s heart jumped; the blood pounded in her throat. She said to herself, fiercely: This is my place, I belong here, I will not be afraid!
Aloud she said nothing. She started forward; there was only one way to go. It went into the hill, and downward.
Kossil followed, breathing heavily, her garments brushing and scraping against rock and earth.
All at once the roof lifted: Arha could stand straight, and stretching out her hands she felt no walls. The air, which had been close and earthy, touched her face with a cooler dampness, and faint movements in it gave the sense of a great expanse. Arha took a few cautious steps forward into the utter blackness. A pebble, slipping under her sandaled foot, struck another pebble, and the tiny sound wakened echoes, many echoes, minute, remote, yet more remote. The cavern must be immense, high and broad, yet not empty: something in its darkness, surfaces of invisible objects or partitions, broke the echo into a thousand fragments.