The dreams and retrospections sloughed from me.

The journey had shrunk to more natural if no less ominous proportions, and I should, in any case, have no margin for sleep the next “night”—this much was obvious.

For the hunt was up.

2

My horse was sound as a bell. He bore me through the tenth night spear-swift; the tenth day, after resting him and myself two hours, he took up our flight again as if it were a personal thing with him that I should get away. Indeed, on the eleventh night, my last in the tunnel, when I was scorch-eyed and light-headed from missing sleep, I began to think my city wife, child of magician stock, had placed a magic on him to keep him fleet.

My last torch had burned out somewhere in the previous “day,” and I had appropriated a gold lamp from one of the rest-chambers, and lighted that. I had not wanted to use Their equipment, but had no choice.

About what I assumed to be midnight, I dismounted, knelt, and laid my ear to the paving. There was no vibration of hooves; no doubt the hunters took their ease at nights. I slept three hours, having observed the usual precaution of setting the iron water flask against my side; you need to be near dead not to turn in your sleep after an hour or so, and the hard object woke me each time, and each time got a round cursing, but without it I should not have woken till the hounds had me by the throat.

Waking, and hearing no noise still, I walked the horse for a couple of hours before remounting, to save him. I should not be done with him, even at the tunnel’s end.

If the tunnel ended. Maybe it was witch-work and had no end.

Then the lamp fluttered and went sick green and was suddenly extinguished.

The air was bad: it had a sour smell. The horse jerked his head, snorting, and my throat closed. I thought, Now I stifle in the dark, fine end to my escape. But I was not in the dark after all. As my eyes adjusted after the lamp, I could make out a jumble of rock ahead, and through that a shaft of gray that marked, however faintly, the outer world.

We went cautiously over the debris—it looked to me as if there had been some tremor of the earth that had cracked the rock and brought down the roof in one huge slab. It was the only blow that had befallen the architecture of the tunnel. There had been a broad stairway there before the quake, and probably another imposing arch-mouth to make men shrink. Nothing now but rubble, and an exit between broken blocks.

But no matter—soon I was breathing the world’s air, and the smell of that air was sweet as flowers. The horse shook his mane, and kicked the earth with his feet.

The tunnel emerged on the floor of a stony valley with, away at its sides, shallow sloping hills, black-green in the moment before dawn. The opening faced to the south—leftward the sun was rising from a blue veil of mist, one of those suns of earliest spring that seem to have no substance and no depth, yet flay the land with light.