Finally they came to a room which, like the Guardian’s study, was screened by curtains and sealed by a closed wooden door. Soft light glowed behind the door’s small window of patterned, colored glass.
Gently Lief turned the knob and looked in. Despite the candle that flickered on a stand beside the door, the room was dim. It took a moment for him to make out the huge pile of soft cushions in one corner.
The Guardian was lying there, asleep. But he was not alone. His four pets shared his bed, their fleshy leads tangling around them like pale snakes. And the creatures were awake. They turned their terrible heads to the door. Their teeth gleamed as they growled, long and low.
Hastily, Lief jerked backwards and closed the door again.
“We cannot go in there,” he whispered. “It is his bedroom. And the creatures are with him.”
“We will surely have to face them in the end,” Barda whispered back. “How else will we have any hope of finding out what Pride’s fault is?”
They stood, undecided, staring at the closed door. Then Jasmine’s face grew puzzled. She pointed to the colored glass window. “There is something strange about this,” she murmured. “I have just noticed it. Look!”
“It is certainly odd. There is a diamond or a star in every square except the last,” said Barda, peering at the glass.
“Yes!” Jasmine snatched the paper from Lief’s hands and read out two of the lines from the rhyme:
My third begins a sparkle bright —
The treasure pure? The point of light?
She looked up eagerly, to see if they understood. “Diamonds and stars are both bright sparkles,” she said. “The rhyme is asking us which one of them should go in the last square. A diamond, which is a treasure. Or a star, which is a point of light.”
“So the third letter of the Guardian’s name is the beginning letter of one of those two. It is D, or S.” Lief took the paper from Jasmine and made a note on his diagram, gnawing at his lip, fighting down his excitement.
They stared at the panes of colored glass till the pattern blurred in front of their eyes, but with no result.
“There is not any sense to it!” growled Barda at last. “There are sixteen squares in all. But they seem to be arranged simply according to someone’s fancy.”
Lief agreed. And Jasmine, now that her excitement had died, was growing more and more uneasy.
“Perhaps the mystery is connected with sixteen,” Barda muttered, refusing to be beaten. “Sixteen is a useful number, for it divides easily into smaller, equal parts. The platoons at the palace numbered sixteen. Often, when we were marching in formation on the parade ground, we would begin together, then split into eights, then fours, then …”
His voice trailed off. His jaw had dropped. He was staring fixedly at the window. “Look!” he said huskily.
His blunt finger drew a cross through the center of the window, dividing it into four equal parts.
“The whole makes no sense,” he said. “But if instead of seeing it as one large square made of sixteen smaller squares, we see four squares, each containing four smaller squares, what happens then?”
Lief looked, and it was as if he was seeing the window with new eyes. Now it was made up of four blocks. Two on the top, two on the bottom.
In the first block, there were three stars and one diamond. In the block next to that, there were two stars and two diamonds. In the third block, the one directly below the first, there was one star and three diamonds. And in the fourth block, the one that contained the blank square …
“One diamond is added each time,” hissed Barda, his eyes alive with relief, “and one star taken away. So the last square must contain no stars, and — four diamonds!”
“Yes!” Lief could hardly believe how simple it was. But it had not seemed simple until Barda worked it out. And all because he remembered his days as a palace guard, thought Lief, writing a D above the third dash on his paper.
Barda watched with satisfaction. “Two letters filled in!” he said. “Now — shall we face the creatures?”
Gently, they opened the bedroom door once more. The Guardian had not moved, but now the monsters were sprawled all over him. Hearing intruders, all of them raised their heads and snarled threateningly.
“This is impossible!” breathed Barda. “They will not let us near him. How can we find out about them from here?”
“Perhaps we can call them by name,” Jasmine suggested. “Each in turn.”
“Well, do not call Greed first, that is all I ask,” murmured Lief.
“Why?” Jasmine asked.
Lief grew very still. He had spoken without thinking. He had blurted out the half-joking request because of something he had not realized he knew.
“Because,” he said, his heart starting to pound, “because, when we first came to the palace the Guardian told us that the envious monster and the proud one are both afraid of Greed. So Greed cannot be the envious one, or the proud one, itself. And we also know that Greed is not greedy, for none of the monsters has the fault after which it has been named. So — that means Greed must be the most dangerous one of all, the one full of hatred.”
He could tell that his friends were thinking of other things the Guardian had said. Things that at the time they had not guessed were important. But which, now, suddenly seemed very important indeed.
Without a word, they backed out of the door for a second time, and closed it behind them.
“He gave us the clues, and we did not realize!” hissed Jasmine. “What else did he say?”
“He said that Envy once nearly killed the greedy one, fighting over scraps from the table,” said Barda firmly.
“If Envy tried to kill the greedy one, then it is not greedy itself,” said Lief. “And it is not envious, we know that …”
“And it is not full of hatred!” exclaimed Jasmine. “For we have already decided that Greed is that. So Envy … must be the one who is proud!”
They were walking away from the door, through to another room. By now they were sure that they had no need to face the monsters. They already knew enough to work the puzzle out for themselves.
“What else did the Guardian tell us?” hissed Lief, racking his brains. “He said …”
“He said that Hate is not envious!” said Jasmine triumphantly. “He said it when we first saw the beasts.”
“Yes!” Lief remembered. “And Hate is not full of hatred. And it is not proud, for Envy is the proud one. So — Hate must be greedy!”
“And that leaves only one fault for Pride,” said Barda slowly. “Pride is envious.”
Without a word, Lief wrote E on the first dash on his paper.
And now there was only one letter left to find, for the rhyme had said that the second and last letters of the name were the same. Barda repeated the clue:
My second and my last begin
The sum of errors in the twin …
“I have not the smallest idea what this could mean,” Jasmine confessed. “I feel I am stupid, but —”
“If you are stupid, then so am I,” growled Barda. “It has been a mystery to me from the start.”
And Lief could not think what the strange lines could possibly mean, either. All he knew was that somewhere in this glass-walled maze was the last clue, and they had to find it.
Filled with desperate energy, they hurried from room to gleaming room, searching everywhere for some sign that would help them solve the riddle. But they found nothing. Nothing but magnificent emptiness.