The Thief (10 page)

I waited another half an hour until the water flowing through the slits in the doorway had lessened its force. Then I stepped into the pool. Standing up to my ankles in water, I turned back to ask the magus, “Do you know if anyone has tried this before?”

“I believe that several attempts have been made,” he said.

“And?”

“No one came back.”

“From inside?”

“No one who has been inside has returned; no member of any party where someone went inside has returned either. I don’t know how it might happen, but if you fail, we are all lost together.” He smiled and waved one hand in a vague benediction.

I nodded my head and turned back toward the doorway. I wondered when I reached it how old it was. I ran my hand up and down the smooth granite of a pillar. There were gentle undulations where the stone had once been fluted. The door hanging between the pillars was stone as well. Wood would have rotted, and metal would have worn away. I poked my finger into one of
the slits, widened by years of flowing water. It looked thin in relation to the size of the door, but it was wider than my hand, even at its narrow end.

The door was three or four feet above the level of the pool, and I scrambled onto its threshold, careful not to spill the oil in the lamp. Even the hinges of the door were made from stone, and it was difficult to shift, but there was no lock on it. I pushed against not only its weight but the weight of the water remaining behind it. As I pushed, I muttered a perfunctory prayer to the god of thieves. It was a superstition my grandfather had ingrained in me. Send up a prayer as you start your work, send up a prayer as you finish it, and leave a gift once a month on the altar of Eugenides. I liked to leave earrings myself. My grandfather had left fibula pins.

The door swung inward, and more water rushed out. Once I was through, the water swung the door closed behind me. I was wet to my waist, but the water on the stairs behind the door was only three or four inches deep. Still, it flowed quickly, and I had to place my feet carefully as I climbed up the steep steps to the room above, where I recognized the chamber I’d seen in my dreams.

The smooth marble walls were marked with river silt, and the floor was deep in water that flowed through the grille in a door opposite me. The moonlight I’d dreamt of fell through an irregular hole in the ceiling, but there was no woman in a white peplos waiting for me. No gilded table, no scroll.

I stood under the hole in the ceiling and looked up. When the river came back, it would pour first into the chamber, backing up to fill the temple. When the room and the temple were full, some water would still flow through the chamber, but most would carry over the top to the falls and hide the doorway in the rock face. It was a work of genius, and I wondered how long ago it had been built. Five hundred years, if it had been meant to hold Hamiathes’s Gift.

I crossed the room to the doorway on the far side. As I did so, I remembered the questions of the woman in white. If I had been a religious person, I might have stopped to pray in earnest, but it didn’t occur to me.

Like the outer door, the inner door was stone, but its lower half was a barred grate to admit water more easily. It had no lock, just a simple latch, a stone locking bar fitted into a bracket. The open bars of the grate allowed the latch to be lifted from either side. I stopped to light my lamp, then pulled open the door. It, too, swung closed behind me.

The corridor on the other side stretched in two directions and was so narrow that my shoulders brushed its walls. They were solid rock. Lumpy and wet, they sagged inward near the roof to form an arch, with an apex lost beyond the feeble light of my lamp. In each direction the corridor ran for about ten feet, then turned and ended in a locked door. Here, where the flow of water was less strong, the doors were metal with
metal locks. There was no sign of rust.

The locks were complicated, and it took me several minutes to get the door on the right open. Beyond it was another stretch of narrow corridor, which again ended with a door similar to the one I held open. I sighed, and hunted around for something besides my foot to jam under the door. I didn’t want to have to reopen it in order to let myself out.

There were no loose stones in the tunnel. There was the leather bag I used to hold my tools or the pry bar. I certainly didn’t want to let go of the pry bar. In the end I used one of my shoes. They were soaking wet anyway and uncomfortably heavy. I took them both off and tucked one into my belt, in case I needed it later. The other I wedged under the door so that it wouldn’t swing shut and relock behind me. Barefoot, I stepped carefully down the corridor through several inches of water, which were still draining from the temple. I was only halfway to the far door when the lamplight revealed something noteworthy about its surface. It was perfectly smooth. If there was a lock on the door, there was no keyhole on this side to open it.

“Gods,” I said aloud, “oh, gods,” and turned back to the door behind me as the water washed my shoe out from beneath it and it began to swing closed.

I leapt—four giant steps—and threw myself face forward toward the closing door and slipped my fingers ahead of it into the jamb. The metal door bit into my
fingers, but I left them pinned until I could slip my other hand into the precious opening they had preserved. This door, like the other, was perfectly smooth on the inside.

I scootched through the doorway on my bottom and sat in the outer hall sucking my injured fingers. I still had my tools, but I had dropped the pry bar and the lamp. The only light I had came from the moon by way of the grille in the stone door behind me. It was not much.

When my heart stopped pounding and the pain in my fingers lessened, I stood up and paced. There was no point in opening the doors without a better means of holding them open, but I didn’t want to waste the time it would take to go back out to the magus to get another lamp and a pry bar and door blocks. Really, I didn’t want to tell him that I’d nearly gotten myself irretrievably stuck before I even reached the interior of the temple. Not that I would have died immediately if I had been trapped. I wouldn’t have died until morning, when the river returned. Just thinking about it made my heart pound again. I was a thief, I had to remind myself, of some accomplishment, or I would have been caught. I decided to check the other door before I went out to find door blocks.

I didn’t need a light to work by, but there was a dent across the ends of the first two fingers on my right hand, and their tips were numb. That made it difficult
to open the lock on the second door. Once I had it open, I checked for a keyhole in its far side. I even checked to be sure that the keyhole I felt with my fingertips was a real one, not a blind hole drilled there to deceive me. Once I was sure that I would be admitted to the workings of the lock, I wedged the door open with my remaining shoe—the other was lost—and crossed the threshold. It was pitch-dark ahead of me. Without the oil lamp I couldn’t see if this tunnel was a twin to the first one.

I dug my hands into the pockets of the blue trousers the magus had given me. One pocket had filled with water and was soaking wet; the other had remained fairly dry. I had matches in both. I’d picked up a package of sulfur matches in a little silver case at the inn the first night on the road, and I’d picked up another five or six the second night. The ones I’d taken from Pol were wrapped in a scrap of oiled paper. The water wouldn’t have bothered them. In the dry pocket I also had a small knife with a folding blade that had belonged to the man sitting next to us at lunch one day, several pieces of leather thong, one longer piece of cotton twine, and the fibula pin that the magus used to hook his cloak. He thought he’d dropped it before his last bath, stupid man. In the wet pocket were miscellaneous coins, two moist pieces of jerked beef, and Ambiades’s comb. I wondered if he’d noticed yet that it was missing.

I put one of the pieces of beef in my mouth and chewed it while I thought. I could always turn back to fetch door blocks and another light, but I didn’t really need them. I had no doubts about my ability to open any locked door, so long as it had a keyhole, and I was used to working with no light. I dug out a match from the silver case and lit it. There before me was the corridor mined out of the solid rock, with another metal door at the end. Leaving my shoe to wedge the door as well as it could, I went forward. The match burned down to my fingers; I blew it out and continued in the dark.

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 valu
able 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.