“There is no way out,” she said, but she took one step forward. Then she took another, hesitant as if beneath each step the black hollow void gaped open, the emptiness under the earth. The warm, hard grip of his hand was on her hand. They went forward.
After what seemed a long time they came to the flight of steps. It had not seemed so steep before, the steps hardly more than slimy notches in the rock. But they climbed it, and then went on a little more rapidly, for she knew that the curving passage went a long way without side turnings after the steps. Her fingers, trailing the left-hand wall for guidance, crossed a gap, an opening to the left. “Here,” she murmured; but he seemed to hold back, as if something in her movements made him doubtful.
“No,” she muttered in confusion, “not this, it’s the next turn to the left. I don’t know. I can’t do it. There’s no way out.”
“We are going to the Painted Room,” the quiet voice said in the darkness. “How should we go there?”
“The left turn after this.”
She led on. They made the long circuit, past two false leads, to the passage that branched rightwards towards the Painted Room.
“Straight on,” she whispered, and now the long unraveling of the darkness went better, for she knew these passages towards the iron door and had counted their turns a hundred times; the strange weight that lay upon her mind could not confuse her about them, if she did not try to think. But all the time they were getting nearer and nearer to that which weighed upon her and pressed against her; and her legs were so tired and heavy that she whimpered once or twice with the labor of making them move. And beside her the man would breathe deep, and hold the breath, again and again, like one making a mighty effort with all the strength of his body. Sometimes his voice broke out, hushed and sharp, in a word or fragment of a word. So they came at last to the iron door; and in sudden terror she put out her hand.
The door was open.
“Quick!” she said, and pulled her companion through. Then, on the further side, she halted.
“Why was it open?” she said.
“Because your Masters need your hands to shut it for them.”
“We are coming to…” Her voice failed her.
“To the center of the darkness. I know. Yet we’re out of the Labyrinth. What ways out of the Undertomb are there?”
“Only one. The door you entered doesn’t open from within. The way goes through the cavern and up passages to a trapdoor in a room behind the Throne. In the Hall of the Throne.”
“Then we must go that way.”
“But she is there,” the girl whispered. “There in the Undertomb. In the cavern. Digging in the empty grave. I cannot pass her, oh, I cannot pass her again!”
“She will have gone by now.”
“I cannot go there.”
“Tenar, I hold the roof up over our heads, this moment. I keep the walls from closing in upon us. I keep the ground from opening beneath our feet. I have done this since we passed the pit where their servant waited. If I can hold off the earthquake, do you fear to meet one human soul with me? Trust me, as I have trusted you! Come with me now.”
They went forward.
The endless tunnel opened out. The sense of a greater air met them, an enlarging of the dark. They had entered the great cave beneath the Tombstones.
They started to circle it, keeping to the right-hand wall. Tenar had gone only a few steps when she paused. “What is it?” she murmured, her voice barely passing her lips. There was a noise in the dead, vast, black bubble of air: a tremor or shaking, a sound heard by the blood and felt in the bones. The time-carven walls beneath her fingers thrummed, thrummed.
“Go forward,” the man’s voice said, dry and strained. “Hurry, Tenar.”
As she stumbled forward she cried out in her mind, which was as dark, as shaken as the subterranean vault, “Forgive me. O my Masters, O unnamed ones, most ancient ones, forgive me, forgive me!”