Linsha and Leonidas did not need another warning. The buckskin centaur cantered for the tunnel, the others close on his heels. With their torches held high, they hurried back the way they had come, hoping to reach the faraway pool entrance before anyone else in the labyrinth knew they were there.

But they had not gone far when Varia returned, winging up the passage they had just entered. The centaurs stopped, and in the sudden silence that fell among them, they all heard what the owl had heard in the cavern-voices and the sounds of a large troop moving at a quick march through the tunnels. In the twists and turns of the labyrinth, it was difficult to tell exactly where and how far away a sound originated, but no one doubted the creators of the noises that echoed up the tunnel were not far away. Surely they were even now on their trail of hoofprints in the layer of dirt on the tunnel floors.

Linsha thought fast. Although she had spent more time down there than anyone else in the group, she had always had a guide to help her find her way in the lightless maze. She did not know it well, nor was she familiar with more than four or five doors. Two of those doors were out of their reach in the old foundations of the city, one was the way they had come through the pool house, and one was guarded by the mercenaries on the palace grounds.

She raised an arm for Varia. When the owl landed on her wrist, she whispered, “Who is there?”

The owl clacked her beak in anger. “Tarmaks. Many of them. They are in the tunnel that you must take to reach the pool door.”

“How convenient,” Linsha snapped.

Several well-chosen curses ran through her mind, all aimed at herself. She had been so sure. She wanted to be so sure! She wanted those eggs back so much that instead of doing something sensible like coming down alone to scout out the situation, she had brought along seventeen others to share in her heedless stupidity. Now they were trapped in this maze without a safe door out.

“Where do we go?” Leonidas asked. His hooves shifted nervously beneath him.

There was only one place she could think of, only one door that they might be able to break through. “The palace. We’ll have to go to the door in the palace gardens.”

“Isn’t that one guarded by the mercenaries?” Lanther reminded her. She wished he hadn’t, but the others may as well be prepared.

“Yes. Who would you rather fight, the Tarmaks or the mercenaries?”

No one bothered to answer. In one motion, they wheeled around and hurried back toward the egg chamber. They passed the chamber and plunged into a different tunnel, one leading away from the abandoned nest. From that point Varia helped direct Linsha on the route to the western side of the labyrinth and the chambers that lay under the vast palace of Iyesta’s old lair. The centaurs jogged as fast as they dared, and for a little while Linsha hoped the Tarmaks would turn into the egg chamber, that they didn’t know the militia group was down there. But that faint hope soon died. Their small troop could not seem to escape. Every time they paused and allowed the sound of their hooves to die into silence, they heard the noises of pursuit echoing behind them. Their pursuers moved surprisingly fast and had no trouble tracking them through the settled dust and dirt on the floor.

“Is there another way to reach this door?” Tanefer asked Linsha. “Or could we work our way around and lose them in the maze? Then we could go back to the pool door.”

Linsha had wondered the same thing. Although she did not know the tunnels well enough to find an exact route, it just might be possible to hide their tracks, wander around long enough to lose their hunters, and find another way out of the maze. But Lanther didn’t give her time to speculate.

“No,” he shot back. “We can’t afford to run aimlessly around down here. We have no water or food, and the Tarmaks will put guards on every entrance they’ve found-if they haven’t already. It would be better to make a fast break out and try to get past the mercenaries before they know we’re there.”

Not a word of dissent was spoken. Everyone wanted to escape the heavy, brooding darkness and the threat that closed in on their heels. They hurried on.

Before long they reached a section of the labyrinth Linsha remembered well. She had been here several times with Mariana and Crucible. The chamber where Iyesta had died was only a turn or two away. As much as she would have liked to stop to pay her respects to the dead dragonlord and be sure the body had not be disturbed, she knew there was no time.

“We’re almost to the palace,” she warned Leonidas.

The young horse-man nodded once. He pulled his short hunting bow off his shoulder, strung it, and settled the quiver of arrows at his side where he could easily reach it. The other centaurs followed suit.

They reached the high, wide passages that crisscrossed beneath the grounds of the old elven palace, and to their relief, found them empty. The treasure-hunting mercenaries seemed to be busy elsewhere. Hurrying faster, they passed the arched entrances to the tunnels and the vast stairs leading to the palace and took the corridor that sloped up to the surface. At the foot of another flight of stairs, Leonidas and Tanefer stopped the others. They gathered close, grim and silent, their weapons ready.

“The entrance is up those stairs and through a short hall,” Linsha told them. “The last time I saw it, the doorway was hidden behind vines and overgrown bushes, but it was open and wide enough for us to pass through one at a time.”

The centaurs and the Legionnaires did not look happy at that news. A small doorway made it too easy for an enemy to pick off departing opponents one by one. Warily they walked up the steps. At the end of the hall they saw a glimmer of daylight and realized night had passed and the sun was beginning to rise. So much for the cover of darkness.

Tanefer set three centaurs and their riders to watch the top of the stairs, then he and Leonidas led the rest down the hallway toward the light. A clatter and a loud outcry from outside suddenly broke the quiet of the dawn. A horn’s blast echoed into the corridor. The centaurs and the humans looked one another in alarm.

They recognized those sounds all too well. It was the noise of armed conflict.

“Oh, gods, now what?” Tanefer growled, voicing the frustration of all. Their group wasn’t outside yet. Who would the mercenaries be fighting?

Linsha slid off Leonidas’s back and hurried to the entrance. The door was smaller than the arches and corridors below and opened into a spacious courtyard that was part of the large, overgrown gardens connected to the palace where Iyesta had once made her lair. The doorway was as she remembered, its wooden door long rotted away, its opening cloaked in vines and disguised by the roots and branches of shrubs and young trees. Keeping to the shadows, she pushed aside some vines and peered carefully out, squinting in the early morning light.

The signal horn sounded again, loud and fierce, and this time it was accompanied by shouts and screams from several directions. Weapons clashed somewhere out of sight.

There was nothing Linsha could see in her immediate vicinity, so she held out her arm for the owl and waited as Varia stepped to her wrist and launched herself out into the rising morning wind.

Lanther crowded in beside her and together they watched the owl wing silently into a copse of nearby trees. “Where are they?” he muttered in Linsha’s ear. “Do you see anything?”

She stared into the trees and gave her head a brief shake. “No. But judging by the horns, the mercenaries are under attack. Did Falaius have something planned I didn’t know about?”

“Not that he told me. Maybe this was meant to be a distraction?”

Any thought of that abruptly ended when a dozen or so mercenaries burst through the grove of trees where Varia hid. They ran as if all the denizens of the Abyss were after them. The mercenaries scrambled over a collapsed wall and ran through the overgrowth toward the distant palace. A flight of arrows ripped through leaves behind them and fell in their midst. Several men fell and lay still. Another fell screaming but fought his way to his feet and staggered after his companions, none of whom stopped to help him.