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!”
There was no answer. There had never been an answer.
They came to the passage beneath the Hall, climbed the stairs, came to the last steps up and the trapdoor at their head. It was shut, as she always left it. She pressed the spring that opened it. It did not open.
“It is broken,” she said. “It is locked.”
He came up past her and put his back against the trap. It did not move.
“It's not locked, but held down by something heavy.”
“Can you open it?”
“Perhaps. I think she'll be waiting there. Has she men with her?”
“Duby and Uahto, maybe other wardens -men cannot come there-”
“I can't make a spell of opening, and hold off the people waiting up there, and withstand the will of the darkness, all at one time,” said his steady voice, considering. “We must try the other door then, the door in the rocks, by which I came in. She knows that it can't be opened from within?”
“She knows. She let me try it once.”
“Then she may discount it. Come. Come, Tenar!”
She had sunk down on the stone steps, which hummed and shivered as if a great bowstring were being plucked in the depths beneath them.
“What is it– the shaking?”
“Come,” he said, so steady and certain that she obeyed, and crept back down the passages and stairs, back to the dreadful cavern.
At the entrance so great a weight of blind and dire hatred came pressing down upon her, like the weight of the earth itself, that she cowered and without knowing it cried out aloud, “They are here! They are here!”
“Then let them know that we are here,” the man said, and from his staff and hands leapt forth a white radiance that broke as a seawave breaks in sunlight, against the thousand diamonds of the roof and walls: a glory of light, through which the two fled, straight across the great cavern, their shadows racing from them into the white traceries and the glittering crevices and the empty, open grave. To the low doorway they ran, down the tunnel, stooping over, she first, he following. There in the tunnel the rocks boomed, and moved under their feet. Yet the light was with them still, dazzling. As she saw the dead rock-face before her, she heard over the thundering of the earth his voice speaking one word, and as she fell to her knees his staff struck down, over her head, against the red rock of the shut door. The rocks burned white as if afire, and burst asunder.
Outside them was the sky, paling to dawn. A few white stars lay high and cool within it.
Tenar saw the stars and felt the sweet wind on her face; but she did not get up. She crouched on hands and knees there between the earth and sky.
The man, a strange dark figure in that half-light before the dawn, turned and pulled at her arm to make her get up. His face was black and twisted like a demon's. She cowered away from him, shrieking in a thick voice not her own, as if a dead tongue moved in her mouth, “No! No! Don't touch me -leave me– Go!” And she writhed back away from him, into the crumbling, lipless mouth of the Tombs.
His hard grip loosened. He said in a quiet voice, “By the bond you wear I bid you come, Tenar.”
She saw the starlight on the silver of the ring on her arm. Her eyes on that, she rose, staggering. She put her hand in his, and came with him. She could not run. They walked down the hill. From the black mouth among the rocks behind them issued forth a long, long, groaning howl of hatred and lament. Stones fell about them. The ground quivered. They went on, she with her eyes still fixed on the glimmer of starlight on her wrist.
They were in the dim valley westward of the Place. Now they began to climb; and all at once he bade her turn. “See-”
She turned, and saw. They were across the valley, on a level now with the Tombstones, the nine great monoliths that stood or lay above the cavern of diamonds and graves. The stones that stood were moving. They jerked, and leaned slowly like the masts of ships. One of them seemed to twitch and rise taller; then a shudder went through it, and it fell. Another fell, smashing crossways on the first. Behind them the low dome of the Hall of the Throne, black against the yellow light in the east, quivered. The walls bulged. The whole great ruinous mass of stone and masonry changed shape like clay in running water, sank in upon itself, and with a roar and sudden storm of splinters and dust slid sideways and collapsed. The earth of the valley rippled and bucked; a kind of wave ran up the hillside, and a huge crack opened among the Tombstones, gaping on the blackness underneath, oozing dust like gray smoke. The stones that still stood upright toppled into it and were swallowed. Then with a crash that seemed to echo off the sky itself, the raw black lips of the crack closed together; and the hills shook once, and grew still.