Finally I tethered and fed the horse; Demizdor had thought of all such necessities. I lay down to sleep. Not on one of their love couches, unconcealed and brazen as nothing else of theirs needed to be, but on the webby floor, wrapped in my cloak.

It was a sudden sleep that took me, and deep, though not agreeable. For with slumber, the wall paintings came alive. . . .

A woman stood over me. She was winged with light and garbed in it; her face was like a star. She stirred me with her foot. I could not rise or move my limbs.

“Vazkor, man, magician, warrior, Black Wolf,” she said. “War-lord, king, fool, dead, maker of a son. Vazkor son of Vazkor. Who is your mother?”

In my dream I assumed she was a ghost, and my hair shifted on my neck, as if ants walked there.

Later I was crawling in an intricate maze of white marble, trying to reach a plate of fruit laid out for me at its center.

The god-race had shut me in the maze for their amusement, to see how intelligent the inferior human might be. I could hear them laugh and lay bets on me. When I took a wrong turning, a woman’s voice would cry sharply, “No, Vazkor, not that way.” (In Eshkorek I had seen the gold- and silver-masks indulge in a similar pastime, setting a mouse in a miniature labyrinth, and watching it scurry hither and thither after the food. If it found the dish, they would pet it and reward it. Some of the creatures perished of hunger before they solved the puzzle.)

Once in the dream I was flying. The upper air was blue with dusk and I threw a black shadow over the plain below. Before me a woman darted like a white pigeon. I caught her by the hair, and it was Demizdor, and there was a dagger in her hand. I said to her, “We are the sum of our achievements, nothing more and nothing less.” And she said to me, “Vazkor, you are a human man.” And she struck the dagger to its hilt into my brain.

There was no pain, only a blazing and a blindness; then a sense of icy water, and in the water a million knives.

I started up, soaked in my own cold sweat.

I thought, Is it to be thus, then, I must be a battling ground for them, my father and my mother? He got her with me, and she worked some curse on him and he died, and they will reenact it forever?

I lay sleepless then awhile, too worn out to rise and make on. When I slept again, there were other dreams. I was to grow accustomed to them on that journey.

The beauty of the tunnel became monotonous; it never altered. Generally after many hours’ riding, I would seek the elaborate rest-chambers for my slumber. Each time I must steel myself against the dreams. It was as if the ghosts gathered to mock me then. At last, even that niggling horror lost its edge. I woke unharmed, and awake; no phantom challenged me. My own mind was my enemy and my obscure heritage, nothing else.