The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin

down, unslung his pack, got out a piece of dry bread, and munched on it. He unstopped his leather bottle of water and shook it; it looked light in his hand, as if nearly empty. He replaced the stopper without drinking. He put the packbehind him for a pillow, pulled his cloak around him, and lay down. His staff was in his right hand. As he lay back, the little wisp or ball of light floated upward from the staff and hung dimly behind his head, a few feet off the ground. His left hand was on his breast, holding something that hung from a heavy chain around his neck. He lay there quite comfortable, legs crossed at the ankle; his gaze wandered across the spy hole and away; he sighed and closed his eyes. The light grew slowly dimmer. He slept.
    The clenched hand on his breast relaxed and slipped aside, and the watcher above saw then what talisman he wore on the chain: a bit of rough metal, crescent-shaped, it seemed.
    The faint glimmer of his sorcery died away. He lay in silence and the dark.
    Arha replaced the cloth and reset the tile in its place, rose cautiously and slipped away to her room. There she lay long awake in the wind-loud darkness, seeing always before her the crystal radiance that had shimmered in the house of death, the soft unburning fire, the stones of the tunnel wall, the quiet face of the man asleep.

CHAPTER 6
THE MAN TRAP
    N EXT DAY, WHEN SHE HAD finished with her
     duties at the various temples, and with her teaching of the sacred dances to the
     novices, she slipped away to the Small House and, darkening the room, opened the spy
     hole and peered down it. There was no light. He was gone. She had not thought he would
     stay so long at the unavailing door, but it was the only place she knew to look. How was
     she to find him now that he had lost himself?
    The tunnels of the Labyrinth, by Thar’s account and her own
     experience, extended in all their windings, branchings, spirals, and dead ends, for more
     than twenty miles. The blind alley that lay farthest from the Tombs was not much more
     than a mile away in a straight line, probably. But down underground, nothing ran
     straight. All the tunnels curved, split, rejoined, branched, interlaced, looped, traced
     elaborate routes that ended where they began, for there was no beginning, and no end.
     One could go, and go, and go, and still get nowhere, for there was nowhere to get to.
     There was no center, no heart of the maze.And once the door was
     locked, there was no end to it. No direction was right.
    Though the ways and turnings to the various rooms and regions were firm in
     Arha’s memory, even she had taken with her on her longer explorations a ball of
     fine yarn, and let it unravel behind her, and rewound it as she followed it returning.
     For if one of the turns and passages that must be counted were missed, even she might be
     lost. A light was no help, for there were no landmarks. All the corridors, all the
     doorways and openings, were alike.
    He might have gone miles by now, and yet not be forty feet from the door
     where he had entered.
    She went to the Hall of the Throne, and to the Twin Gods’ temple,
     and to the cellar under the kitchens, and, choosing a moment when she was alone, looked
     through each of those spy holes down into the cold, thick dark. When night came,
     freezing and blazing with stars, she went to certain places on the Hill and raised up
     certain stones, cleared away the earth, peered down again, and saw the starless darkness
     underground.
    He was there. He must be there. Yet he had escaped her. He would die of
     thirst before she found him. She would have to send Manan into the maze to find him,
     once she was sure he was dead. That was unbearable to think of. As she knelt in the
     starlight on the bitter ground of the Hill, tears of rage rose in her eyes.
    She went to the path that led back down the slope to the temple of the
     Godking. The columns with their carved capitals shonewhite with
     hoarfrost in the