“That shouldn’t be too hard,” Tagwen declared with a snort. “It is smarter than we are.”

“An open space leading to a gap in the rocks would be ideal,” Pen went on, ignoring him. “We can coat the ground and rock sides with the tar. Even if it just brushes up against it, that would help.” He looked over at Tagwen. “Does this stuff stay sticky when it gets cold?”

The Dwarf shook his head. “It stiffens up. We have to keep it warm. Frost is a problem, too. If it frosts, the tar will harden and lose its stickiness.”

There were so many variables in the plan that it was tough to keep them all straight, and Pen was growing increasingly worried that he was going to miss at least one of them. But there was nothing he could do about it except to continue talking the scheme over with Khyber and Tagwen, hoping that, together, they could keep everything straight.

The afternoon slipped away, and the shadows were beginning to lengthen when Khyber suddenly gripped Pen’s arm and said, “There! That’s what we’re looking for.”

She was pointing across a sparsely wooded valley to a meadow that fronted a heavy cluster of rocks leading up into the mountains. The rocks were threaded by a tangle of passages that gave the cluster the look of a complicated maze. The maze lifted toward the base of a cliff face that dropped sharply for several hundred feet from a high plateau.

“You’re right,” Pen agreed. “Let’s have a closer look before it gets dark.”

They went down through the valley, into the trees, and along a series of ravines and gullies that rains and snowmelt had carved into the slope, watching the sun slide steadily lower on the horizon. East, the sky was already dark behind the mountains, and a three-quarter moon was on the rise. Night birds were winging through the growing gloom, and night sounds were beginning to surface. A wind had picked up, bitter and chill as it blew down out of the higher elevations.

They were almost through the trees when Pen drew up short and pointed back the way they had come. “Did you see something move just then?” he asked.

The Dwarf and the girl peered through the dark wall of trunks and the pooling shadows. “I didn’t see anything,” Khyber said.

Tagwen shook his head as well. “Shadows, maybe. The wind.”

Pen nodded. “Maybe.”

They went on quickly and were out of the trees and across the meadow in moments, heading for the rocks. Pen saw at once that it was exactly what they had hoped to find. The meadow sloped gently upward into a jumble of boulders too high and too deep to see over. There were passages leading into the rocks, but most of them ended within a dozen yards. Only one led all the way through, traversing small clearings in which sparse stands of evergreens and scrub blocked clear passage. It was possible to get through, but not without maneuvering over and around various obstacles and making the correct choices from among the narrow defiles. Best of all, one of the choices led to an outcropping at the edge of the woods they had just come through—and it was elevated enough to allow them to see over the rim of the maze to the meadow below.