Ulath blushed a bright red, and they all knew why. Sephrenia was not the sort of person one put one’s hands on.

‘Oh, don’t be such a goose, Ulath,’ she told him. ‘Lift me up.’

Ulath looked around menacingly. ‘We aren’t going to talk about this, are we?’ he said to his friends. Then he bent and lifted her easily.

She clambered upward, looking not unlike someone climbing a tree. When she was high enough, she reached up and put the palms of her hands on several of the stones, pausing briefly with each one. Her touch seemed almost caressing. ‘That should do it,’ she said. ‘You can put me down again, Sir Knight.’

Ulath lowered her to the floor, and they retreated back down the corridor. ‘Be ready to run,’ she cautioned them. ‘This is a little inexact.’ She began to move her hands in front of her, speaking rapidly in Styric as she did so. Then she held out both hands, palms up, to release the spell.

Fine sand began to sift down from the ceiling, slithering out of the cracks between the roughly squared-off building blocks. At first it was only a trickle, but it steadily increased.

‘Looks almost like water leaking out, doesn’t it?’ Kalten observed as the sand-flow increased.

The walls began to creak, and there were popping noises as the mortar between the stones started to crack.

‘We can go back a bit further,’ Sephrenia said, looking apprehensively at all the rock around them. ‘The spell’s working. We don’t have to stand here to supervise it.’ Sephrenia was a very complex little woman. She was sometimes timid about very ordinary things and at other times indifferent to horrendous ones. They walked further on back up the corridor as the building blocks near the place where the sand was now pouring down out of the ceiling creaked and groaned and grated together, settling in a fraction of an inch at a time to replace the sand.

When it came, it came all at once. A large section of the overhead vault collapsed with the grinding clatter of falling rock and a large cloud of eons-old dust that billowed down the corridor towards them, setting them all to coughing. As the dust gradually settled, they saw a large, jagged hole in the ceiling.

‘Let’s go and have a look,’ Talen said. ‘I’m curious to find out what’s up there.’

‘Could we wait just a bit longer?’ Sephrenia asked fearfully. ‘I’d really like to be sure that it’s safe.’