They struggled up the pile of rubble from the fallen ceiling and boosted each other up through the hole. The area above the ceiling was a vast, domed emptiness, dusty and stale-smelling. The light from the torches they had brought with them from the corridor below seemed sickly and did not reach out as far as the walls – if walls to this dim place indeed existed. The floor resembled to a remarkable degree a field laced with the upward-bulging burrows of a colony of extraordinarily industrious moles, and they saw a number of structural peculiarities they had not perceived when down in the maze.

‘Sliding walls,’ Kurik said, pointing. ‘They can change the maze any time they want to by closing off some passage and opening others. That’s why those Zemoch soldiers didn’t know where they were going.’

‘There’s a light,’ Ulath told them, ‘way over there to the left. It seems to be coming up from down below.’

‘The temple maybe?’ Kalten suggested.

‘Or the throne-room again. Let’s go and have a look.’

They threaded their way along the tops of the vaults for some distance and then came to a straight path that stretched in one direction towards the light Ulath had seen and off into the darkness in the other.

‘No dust,’ Ulath said, pointing at the stones of the path. ‘This is used fairly often.’

The going was much faster on the straight pathway, and they soon reached the source of the flickering light. It was a flight of stone stairs leading down into a torchlit room – a room with four walls and no doors.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Kalten snorted.

‘Not really,’ Kurik disagreed, raising his torch to peer over the side of the path. ‘That front wall slides on those tracks.’ He pointed at a pair of metal tracks below that emerged from the room on the outside. He leaned forward to look more closely. ‘There’s no machinery out here, so there has to be a latch of some kind in that room. Sparhawk, let’s go down and see if we can find it.’

The two of them went down the stairs into the room. ‘What are we looking for?’ Sparhawk asked his friend.

‘How should I know? Something that looks ordinary but isn’t.’

‘That’s not very specific, Kurik.’

‘Just start pushing on rocks, Sparhawk. If you find one that can be depressed, it’s probably the latch.’

They went along the walls pushing on rocks. After a few minutes, Kurik stopped, a slightly foolish look on his face. ‘You can stop, Sparhawk,’ he said. ‘I found the latches.’

‘Where?’

‘There are torches on the side walls and on the back, right?’

‘Yes. So what?’

‘But there aren’t any torches on the front wall – the one right in front of the foot of the stairs.’

‘So?’