“It is the center of things.”

“There are riches there; Thar tells me about them sometimes. Enough to fill the Godking's temple ten times over. Gold and trophies given ages ago, a hundred generations, who knows how long. They're all locked away in the pits and vaults, underground. They won't take me there yet, they keep me waiting and waiting. But I know what it's like. There are rooms underneath the Hall, underneath the whole Place, under where we stand now. There's a great maze of tunnels, a Labyrinth. It's like a great dark city, under the hill. Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years, and silence.”

She spoke as if in trance, in rapture. Manan watched her. His slabby face never expressed much but stolid, careful sadness; it was sadder than usual now. “Well, and you're mistress of all that,” he said. “The silence, and the dark.”

“I am. But they won't show me anything, only the rooms above ground, behind the Throne. They haven't even shown me the entrances to the places underground; they just mumble about them sometimes. They're keeping my own domain from me! Why do they make me wait and wait?”

“You are young. And perhaps,” Manan said in his husky alto, “perhaps they're afraid, little one. It's not their domain, after all. It's yours. They are in danger when they enter there. There's no mortal that doesn't fear the Nameless Ones.”

Arha said nothing, but her eyes flashed. Again Manan had shown her a new way of seeing things. So formidable, so cold, so strong had Thar and Kossil always seemed to her, that she had never even imagined their being afraid. Yet Manan was right. They feared those places, those powers of which Arha was part, to which she belonged. They were afraid to go into the dark places, lest they be eaten.

Now, as she went with Kossil down the steps of the Small House and up the steep winding path towards the Hall of the Throne, she recalled that conversation with Manan, and exulted again. No matter where they took her, what they showed her, she would not be afraid. She would know her way.

A little behind her on the path, Kossil spoke. “One of my mistress' duties, as she knows, is the sacrifice of certain prisoners, criminals of noble birth, who by sacrilege or treason have sinned against our lord the Godking.”

“Or against the Nameless Ones,” said Arha.

“Truly. Now it is not fitting that the Eaten One while yet a child should undertake this duty. But my mistress is no longer a child. There are prisoners in the Room of Chains, sent a month ago by the grace of our lord the Godking from his city Awabath.”

“I did not know prisoners had come. Why did I not know?”

“Prisoners are brought at night, and secretly, in the way prescribed of old in the rituals of the Tombs. It is the secret way my mistress will follow, if she takes the path that leads along the wall.”

Arha turned off the path to follow the great wall of stone that bounded the Tombs behind the domed hall. The rocks it was built of were massive; the least of them would outweigh a man, and the largest were big as wagons. Though unshapen they were carefully fitted and interlocked. Yet in places the height of the wall had slipped down and the rocks lay in a shapeless heap. Only a vast span of time could do that, the desert centuries of fiery days and frozen nights, the millennial, imperceptible movements of the hills themselves.

“It is very easy to climb the Tomb Wall,” Arha said as they went along beneath it.

“We have not men enough to rebuild it,” Kossil replied.

“We have men enough to guard it.”

“Only slaves. They cannot be trusted.”

“They can be trusted if they're frightened. Let the penalty be the same for them as for the stranger they allow to set foot on the holy ground within the wall.”

“What is that penalty?” Kossil did not ask to learn the answer. She had taught the answer to Arha, long ago.

“To be decapitated before the Throne.”

“Is it my mistress' will that a guard be set upon the Tomb Wall?”

“It is,” the girl answered. Inside her long black sleeves her fingers clenched with elation. She knew Kossil did not want to spare a slave to this duty of watching the wall, and indeed it was a useless duty, for what strangers ever came here? It was not likely that any man would wander, by mischance or intent, anywhere within a mile of the Place without being seen; he certainly would get nowhere near the Tombs. But a guard was an honor due them, and Kossil could not well argue against it. She must obey Arha.

“Here,” said her cold voice.

Arha stopped. She had often walked this path around the Tomb Wall, and knew it as she knew every foot of the Place, every rock and thorn and thistle. The great rock wall reared up thrice her height to the left; to the right the hill shelved away into a shallow, arid valley, which soon rose again towards the foothills of the western range. She looked over all the ground nearby, and saw nothing that she had not seen before.

“Under the red rocks, mistress.”

A few yards down the slope an outcropping of red lava made a stair or little cliff in the hill. When she went down to it and stood on the level before it, facing the rocks, Arha realized that they looked like a rough doorway, four feet high.

“What must be done?”

She had learned long ago that in the holy places it is no use trying to open a door until you know how the door is opened.

“My mistress has all the keys to the dark places.”

Since the rites of her coming of age, Arha had worn on her belt an iron ring on which hung a little dagger and thirteen keys, some long and heavy, some small as fishhooks. She lifted the ring and spread the keys. “That one,” Kossil said, pointing; and then placed her thick forefinger on a crevice between two red, pitted rock-surfaces.

"The key, a long shaft of iron with two ornate wards, entered the crevice. Arha turned it to the left, using both hands, for it was stiff to move; yet it turned smoothly.

“Now?”

“Together-”

Together they pushed at the rough rock face to the left of the keyhole. Heavily, but without catch and with very little noise, an uneven section of the red rock moved inward until a narrow slit was opened. Inside it was blackness.

Arha stooped and entered.

Kossil, a heavy woman heavily clothed, had to squeeze through the narrow opening. As soon as she was inside she backed against the door and, straining, pushed it shut.

It was absolutely black. There was no light. The dark seemed to press like wet felt upon the open eyes.

They crouched, almost doubled over, for the place they stood in was not four feet high, and so narrow that Arha's groping hands touched damp rock at once to right and left.

“Did you bring a light?”

She whispered, as one does in the dark.

“I brought no light,” Kossil replied, behind her. Kossil's voice too was lowered, but it had an odd sound to it, as if she were smiling. Kossil never smiled. Arha's heart jumped; the blood pounded in her throat. She said to herself, fiercely: This is my place, I belong here, I will not be afraid!

Aloud she said nothing. She started forward; there was only one way to go. It went into the hill, and downward.

Kossil followed, breathing heavily, her garments brushing and scraping against rock and earth.

All at once the roof lifted: Arha could stand straight, and stretching out her hands she felt no walls. The air, which had been close and earthy, touched her face with a cooler dampness, and faint movements in it gave the sense of a great expanse. Arha took a few cautious steps forward into the utter blackness. A pebble, slipping under her sandaled foot, struck another pebble, and the tiny sound wakened echoes, many echoes, minute, remote, yet more remote. The cavern must be immense, high and broad, yet not empty: something in its darkness, surfaces of invisible objects or partitions, broke the echo into a thousand fragments.