He didn’t bother to answer. He turned a corner and a sudden blast of air got me clutching my cloak to myself. At the same time I found myself up to my calves in water, fresh moving brine-water, a virile salt wind scudding it in long ripples hard against me—Kaselm’s hand plucked me back. I stood behind him and sneezed as I looked up a slope and through a tunnel-arch of black green-slimed stone. AJ1 I could see was a pale sky, all movement, clouds scudding in it pursued by the wind as it pursued water. Because it was late evening the paleness of the sky had a violet tone richening its wild dreariness, but there must have been squally weather while we were traveling in the labyrinth—there was no gleam of setting sun nor rising star.

The tunnel slope before us was sliding with brine, collecting in the anciently-worn hollow at the bottom, but there was no other sign of life except that a gull could be seen wheeling mewing for an instant in the patch of sky. But I didn’t miss the rails on the slope for crates.

“Has no visitor to the wharfs ever noticed this hole?” “Maybe. But none can come down here to find out what goes on. Even a punitive force wouldn’t dare it. It wouldn’t matter if they did. The people here don’t bother with passwords which can be betrayed even from day to day—they kill or capture and use anyone they don’t know they can trust.” “Can I get away from this point—? A boat?”

“Where is your goal?”

“I’ve no idea,” I said after a pause of amazement that I’d not considered this. “For one year after leaving my own country I had no goal but the Southern Capital. My months at the Court here I never thought of my future if I could help it—It was deliberately a state of being, an existence to relax, to slough off all the stresses of that former life which rose to screaming-point—I would never have gone except that now existence is again a threatened thing.”

“You’ve no wish to stay here?”

“In the Labyrinth? My personal God tells me No.”

“Have you any ambition?”

“No.”

“Consider. You are a displaced person, wanted by the Temple as a spy”—and by the law as a murderess, I added silently—“and you have no friends, no family, no chosen home, no purpose—To go out, alone and small and as far as I can tell impetuously incompetent, and with a bad cold, into a dangerous alien land thirsty for your pain and blood—Just in order to find a roof and food, it isn’t worth it.”