Presently two figures appeared, down a stonewalled corridor—a helmetless guard, and someone in courtier’s garb…

  The courtier looked familiar—doubly familiar, in fact, because the torches’ flickering momentarily gave him the look of having a beard.

  Konarr! The good captain of the Bephan garrison!

  “Ho,” said Tassoran, conversationally, as the two figures neared his cell, “good master Konarr, I am beholden for the sight of you. Though you have cropped your beard away and disfigured yourself with courtly style so much that I could not recognize you yesterday, it is good to see even so sad a figure, here in my condition…”

  Konarr started at his opening words, almost dropping the torch and the drawn sword he carried. The guard with him stopped when he did and simply stood, arms at his side, as if waiting dumbly for more instructions—which Konarr immediately assured Tassoran was the case.

  “It’s a strange situation, and a strange story, lad,” said Konarr, urgency in his voice, “and if you’ll only let me tell you the all of it some other time, I will be much beholden to you and we can get along with the business of rescuing you. Then we can see to the stealing of the Sigil of Tron and escaping from this accursed city. And when I do explain it to you,” he ended with a grimace, “you may entertain yourself attempting to invent a sensible explanation for why I ever went along…”

  Tassoran found the strength to chuckle, and realized he was weak. “How long has it been since I entered the palace —as you are here, I presume you know that as well?”

  “You entered at the stroke of the fourth hour of darkness. It is now the eighth hour.”

  Tassoran laughed. “All in all, I daresay you haven’t said as much all together since the last time you called the muster of your Free Company, good captain! Almost you convince me…”

  “Mmm,” said the good captain. “Let me convince you by telling you you’ve no other choice. And I will admit to any man after tonight that this man Zantain sews a tight stitch for a man who’s never been to sea…”

  And Konarr drew the guardsman’s sword and handed it through the bars to Tassoran, who examined it a moment, then sheathed it in his own empty scabbard. Then Konarr ordered the stupefied guard to unlock Tassoran’s cell, then to lie down and go to sleep.

  Then the two men started trudging through the pit corridors, each holding a torch high.

  Tassoran harked back. “I did not know you were a man who’d gone beyond sight of land, Captain.”

  “What do you think I’d been doing the ten years before I…chose…to beach myself among a Free Company? Half around the New Lands I’d sailed, young thief, before I’d turned fifteen, and before I was sixteen I saw the rocky shoals that mark the olden coasts of Pazatar and Armassic ; themselves…”

  Then Konarr fell silent, and Tassoran did not press him.

  After some minutes of walking, Tassoran looked about to see that they were in a large chamber—and the only exit was the one they’d just come through. The floor was covered with rotting, indescribable muck.

  “Where are we, and where are we going?” he whispered, speaking low instinctively.

  “I have no idea what our path is,” Konarr replied truthfully. “But Zantain told me I would find the way, and I am finding the way. I believe that he is actually guiding me, though physically I know he is now nowhere near the Queen’s quarter. Such is magic, and I can’t say I like it.”

  And he walked straight for the stonewalled rear corner of the room.

  Tassoran’s eyes narrowed and he could feel his heart slam wildly in his chest a moment.

  For when Konarr reached the stone wall, the large slab that had been facing him was no longer there.

  Before them, through the solid walls of the chamber, led a narrow, twisting, man-wide corridor!

  Tassoran decided there was no sensible question to be asked about any of it all, followed the captain and said nothing.

  It was like walking through odorless thin smoke.

  “This palace,” Konarr said, unusually talkative, “Zantain -says, is a thousand and more years old, and he was one of the architects—he is a Longlived One, though he says he is not of their blood. The Lesser Palace was constructed with a maze of secret passages both above and below the ground, which the then Lady Tza, third of that name, delighted in using.

  “Then there was a second set of passages, more skeletal in their network than the first, and known only to the Lady and to Vesalye the Wise—as Zantain called himself then. The dozen picked workmen who had constructed the doubly secret passages were carefully poisoned after, by the Lady, leaving only her and Zantain knowing a secret hidden even from her deepest, most solemn-trusted counsellors.

  “She thought then to have Vesalye slain, to narrow the secret down to one. But he disappeared, and she never knew that Zantain had constructed a third set of secret passages. Now the Lady at first suspected this might have happened, and from time to time did test this wall and that wall and the other in secret; but she found nothing.

  “Zantain did not tell me all, but I know that the secret of these passages is a mystery of the mind rather than of locality, and hence we travel through the stone itself, though it seems we walk in a passageway ., .”

  Tassoran gulped. “Through…the stone…itself?”

  It was too much. Tassoran felt chilled to the inner fastnesses of his being with a sensation of stark terror that transfixed him at last where he stood.

  “I…I can go no further,” whispered Tassoran.

  “He said we might feel thus,” Konarr answered gruffly, and with the air of friendly persuasion, grasped Tassoran by the back of his neck and moved his hand inexorably forward.

  Tassoran had to walk forward or be pitched headfirst to the…floor, was it? his mind gibbered for a moment…

  He stepped forward stiffly, hardly able to realize he could move after that bolt of paralyzing fear.

  “Forces…” he whispered, “such forces…”

  Konarr muttered something indistinct, not meant to carry objective meaning and not taken so.

  Tassoran gathered his thoughts a moment, as they resumed walking through the narrow corridor.

  “What has he done for you?” he said then, in a rush. “You speak familiarly of things you cannot know, and travel a path—”

  “He loaned me some skills,” Konarr said, “just as the sweating Spellmaster loaned others to you. If we are fortunate, we may successfully combine our skills, oh valiant thief, and our wizards’ tricks.” He spat. “If you are a man with my nature,” he said after a pause, “you would sooner be choosing your own path and your own weapons, eh?”

  And he grinned.

  At that, Tassoran’s spirits returned, and his answer was a hearty laugh of assent. “But,” he continued, “we must make the best of whatever we have, for the little that may be worth. I have lost some faith, I may tell you, in my squat Spellmaster—since I was chained with magic fire and cast into a slaughter pit. And, by the staff, I had performed all the rites correctly—he had bound me with other spells to do no otherwise! Ha. Will I do no better with my remaining tricks?”

  They came to a narrow winding descent of stairs.

  “Untrodden by any not directed here by Zantain,” Konarr said. “And how I know it, I cannot say.”

  “I do not think I care for these magics from nowhere that do so much for no reason I can see…”

  “Zantain told me we would pay for what we do this night, in weeks to come. The magic uses our own strength. Which,” Konarr said with sudden satisfaction, “is the real reason why all true men, like ourselves, commonly abhor magic.”

  They made their way down the narrow stairs, Konarr shifting slightly sidewise because his shoulders were too broad; they scraped the sides of the descending tunnel.

  Tassoran cursed as he hit his head, when a sharp turn debouched onto a landing. The roof of the tunnel was now so much lower that even Konarr had to duck his head to continue.

  They reached another landing.

  There were no more stairs, either down or up.

  There was no more tunnel.

  There was only what amounted to a tiny room, big enough for two men to stand in, uncomfortably.

  Tassoran rubbed his smooth jaw and found himself oddly contemplating the question of whether he was ever going to get a beard started.

  Then he shook his head and looked about, seeing nothing. Already the smoke was collecting, and he stubbed out his torch, leaving only Konarr’s.

  “I…I do not understand,” Konarr whispered. “I cannot tell what to do next. It is as if some…some sort of contact I had with…with Zantain’s knowledge, had been dampened off by all this stone…but it’s strange that I should think that, too…”

  Tassoran covered his eyes with his hands for a moment, trying to collect thoughts that might help. Then he stared at the ceiling, hoping obscurely for helpful words there.

  “Look there,” he said urgently, after a brief time trying to sort out what he was seeing. “Isn’t that a rung, up in the corner there? What’s a rung doing at eye level in a closed room with no other exit but the way we came?”

  “Bake in hell fire,” said Konarr, “and I would tell you nothing, for I cannot. Perhaps…perhaps I took a wrong turning back there somewhere. Let us return some way along our path, retrace our footsteps…we may discover a better path.”

  “Ha!” said Tassoran. “You spoke before of a mystery of the mind. Perhaps we do not have your quiet little voice guiding you, for the moment, but we still have our minds. Suppose, then, that that rung were the first of a series of rungs, running upward so to the surface, and suppose we were directly below the Ebon Tower…”

  “But the roof is solid stone!”

  “You should ponder the mysteries you walk with more thoroughly, my friend,” said Tassoran, vastly pleased with himself. “We have walked through stone tonight before, have we not? We have only to do so now, and by the time we near the surface, why, either your magician will aid you once more, or mine will. I have, after all, two more surprises…”

  Konarr shrugged. “Perhaps—but you may lead!”

  At that Tassoran frowned, but immediately laughed. “Of course! So then, let us be off!”

  “Yes, indeed,” Konarr said, but waited for Tassoran to move. After the lad had cracked his head on the stone ceiling, they could retrace their steps and—

  Tassoran grasped the lone rung firmly, then straightened up so that his head touched the ceiling…

  .…and as his head touched the stone, his head continued to move upward as he began to climb.

  For the stone ceiling had vanished: above them was a narrow, perpendicular shaft, rungs laddering upward…

  After proceeding upward half a dozen rungs, Tassoran looked down at Konarr, still standing on the floor of what had seemed a tiny room—and which now seemed only the bottom of a smoky, immensely deep well—and Tassoran laughed.

  “Come on, old captain!” he called down, “we have a great deal of climbing indeed, and we should not disappoint our magicians!”

  “So! We are within the walls of the Ebon Tower itself,” whispered Tassoran.

  Reaching the top of the shaft at last, he had climbed out silently to look about for guards, while Konarr remained several rungs down, out of sight. Though they were not magicians, they could feel the auras of power that centered on the Ebon Tower, and were determined to take no chances.

  Tassoran found himself in a small room, with curving corridors leading from it in opposite directions. It took only a moment for him to establish that this was another of Zantain’s smoky tunnels in the stone, and that this time the stone was that of the Tower itself.

  There were even occasional peepholes—both inward, to the chambers of the Tower, and outward, overlooking the gardens that surrounded the massive stone edifice.

  He helped Konarr over the edge of the pit then, and Konarr complained that it had been like climbing a thousand stories. Tassoran himself was soaked with sweat, but was also determined not to complain.

  Besides, it was not time for him to get down to business—his business, his specialty—and secretly he was delighted to have the chance at last to try out the other tricks Shagon had loaned him.

  Silently, carefully, they made their way through the narrow corridor running through the walls themselves, checking through the peepholes to be sure of missing nothing of possible significance.

  “Ho!” whispered Konarr suddenly. “There it is again!”

  “What?”

  “My,…my knowledge. It’s back. Come on, we have to do some more climbing. Back to the room the pit opened onto!”

  Set in the inner wall of the small room were more rungs, running both upward and downward. Tassoran sighed, and allowed Konarr to lead the way upward.

  After two levels Konarr stopped climbing and got off the rungs, in another small room. He checked the nearest inner peephole.

  There was a long pause.

  Finally, Konarr stepped back into the wall. “Look,” he said, indicating the peephole. “How do you propose to solve that problem?”

  Tassoran looked through the peephole.

  There was a large stonewalled chamber, plain, unoccupied—save for strangely solid-looking wisps of orange vapor that hung about the room, being wafted gently about by some mysterious breeze.

  Or so it appeared.

  “I don’t know what that vapor in there is,” said Tassoran, “and why should it concern us, at any rate?”

  “That is where the sigil is,” Konarr said. “Please spare me questions as to how I know. It is simply there, and you, my thief, must find a way…”

  “How is it that we walk within half a dozen steps of her innermost secret treasures of magic, and she knows nothing? Surely your Zantain can—”

  Konarr shook his head slowly. “No, he cannot solve our problem,” he said inexorably. “You must find and steal the Sigil of Tron, and we must escape from this place. How? Now the problems are yours—even finding the sigil would be beyond me.”

  “Do not worry about me finding the sigil. I am a thief; I have studied the arts of concealment. I am worrying about that vapor, for I cannot be sure what it is and what it implies —and what it may do to me when I enter that chamber. So. Your friend tells you no more? I could use counsel…”

  “No,” Konarr said again, slowly, and looked through the peephole again. “I have nothing for you from him except about the passages through stone. And except that I think that vapor may be no ordinary vapor at all, friend Tassoran. Look you, it does not dissipate, nor do I spy any place in that room from whence the vapor has come.”

  Tassoran nodded.

  “I think,” Konarr continued, “that 1 would not like to enter that room, for I think that orange vapor may be from the crushed flowers of the gravedust plant, which is death.”

  “A message at last,” said Tassoran, grinning in spite of himself. “Now how do I stay alive?”

  “Use Shagon’s tricks.”

  “One was a spell of invisibility, of no use here—and I cannot use it again at any rate. Another is a phrase I may whisper to strike any man loose from his memories. But I prefer my sword, and there are no men in the room anyway. And the third grants me some handsful of minutes when, Shagon told me, no man in this land could catch me, so fast would I be able to run. He warned me to touch no one while working this incantation, for it would affect him the same way. At least when we leave, we will then be able to leave together.” “Unpromising,” Konarr admitted grudgingly. “And the gravedust fumes are attracted to life, so that if you come near them, they come nearer and nearer to you, though they cannot move with great speed…”

  Konarr stopped and looked at Tassoran, who thought a moment, then cocked his head and slowly nodded, seeing a plan unfold. “That leaves the question of how to get into that room, and how to get out of this tower.”

  “We are three floors above the paving outside,” Konarr said. “Then there is the moat, which legend—and loose-tongued Hawk Guards from the Queen’s Quarters—says hold gaphalon and kannaq and virionne, and only the Lady Tza can pass safely over the waters at one slender footbridge…” Tassoran sighed deeply. “I should have refused this commission. That much is clear. What if we were to descend once more into the pit, and thence from the bottom retrace our steps through the caverns underneath the Lesser Palace? We could then leave by the same method which gained you entrance, and safely we could be away from this place.” Konarr shook his head. “Five guards died near the spot where I entered the Queens’ Quarter, and three more at the spot where I found the first underground passage leading to your sector of the pits. I do not think that way will be clear again until we have been slain—or leave in some other fashion. For that, I think, you will need all your conjurer’s speed.”

  It was Tassoran’s turn to shake his head. “We are peering too far into the future. There is the matter of a problem here, and now—the fumes, probably deadly, and the Sigil of Tron, which does not seem to be within the room.”

  “As for the sigil,” Konarr answered, “you have spoken it—you are the professional thief, not I. As for the fumes… Zantain should have come himself. I can get you into this room, but I cannot do more.”

  “There are only two possibilities,” Tassoran mused, “one being that the sigil is hidden within the stone walls of the chamber, and the other…”

  While Tassoran fell silent and worked on his problem, Konarr paced restlessly along the narrow tunnel, galled to be turned so completely useless in a moment, simply because he was neither a magician nor a thief.

  He watched Tassoran study the interior of the chamber as well as he could through the limits of the peephole. A soldier was of no use in such complex affairs, even though it made his blood tingle and run faster through his veins, made him hate the thought of returning to garrison duty on the Oulan Road, sameness unending for fifty fiftydays…

  Konarr grunted with anger and peered through the next outside peephole. Deep within him an uneasyness was growing.