The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin Page A

starlight, like pillars of bone. She knocked at the rear door, and
     Kossil let her in.
    “What brings my mistress?” said the stout woman, cold and
     watchful.
    “Priestess, there is a man within the Labyrinth.”
    Kossil was taken off guard; for once something had occurred that she did
     not expect. She stood and stared. Her eyes seemed to swell a little. It flitted across
     Arha’s mind that Kossil looked very like Penthe imitating Kossil, and a wild laugh
     rose up in her, was repressed, and died away.
    “A man? In the Labyrinth?”
    “A man, a stranger.” Then as Kossil continued to look at her
     with disbelief, she added, “I know a man by sight, though I have seen
     few.”
    Kossil disdained her irony. “How came a man there?”
    “By witchcraft, I think. His skin is dark, perhaps he is from the
     Inner Lands. He came to rob the Tombs. I found him first in the Undertomb, beneath the
     very Stones. He ran to the entrance of the Labyrinth when he became aware of me, as if
     he knew where he went. I locked the iron door behind him. He made spells, but that did
     not open the door. In the morning he went on into the maze. I cannot find him
     now.”
    “Has he a light?”
    “Yes.”
    “Water?”
    “A little flask, not full.”
    “His candle will be burned down already.” Kossil pondered.
     “Four or five days. Maybe six. Then you can send my wardens down to drag the body
     out. The blood should be fed to the Throne and the—”
    “No,” Arha said with sudden, shrill fierceness. “I wish
     to find him alive.”
    The priestess looked down at the girl from her heavy height.
     “Why?”
    “To make—to make his dying longer. He has committed sacrilege
     against the Nameless Ones. He has defiled the Undertomb with light. He came to rob the
     Tombs of their treasures. He must be punished with worse than lying down in a tunnel
     alone and dying.”
    “Yes,” Kossil said, as if deliberating. “But how will
     you catch him, mistress? That is chancy. There is no chance about the other. Is there
     not a room full of bones, somewhere in the Labyrinth, bones of men who entered it and
     did not leave it? . . . Let the Dark Ones punish him in their own
     way, in their own ways, the black ways of the Labyrinth. It is a cruel death,
     thirst.”
    “I know,” the girl said. She turned and went out into the
     night, pulling her hood up over her head against the hissing, icy wind. Did she not
     know?
    It had been childish of her, and stupid, to come to Kossil. She would get
     no help there. Kossil herself knew nothing, all she knewwas cold
     waiting and death at the end of it. She did not understand. She did not see that the man
     must be found. It must not be the same as with those others. She could not bear that
     again. Since there must be death let it be swift, in daylight. Surely it would be more
     fitting that this thief, the first man in centuries brave enough to try to rob the
     Tombs, should die by sword’s edge. He did not even have an immortal soul to be
     reborn. His ghost would go whining through the corridors. He could not be let die of
     thirst there alone in the dark.
    Arha slept very little that night. The next day was filled with rites and
     duties. She spent the night going, silent and without lantern, from one spy hole to
     another in all the dark buildings of the Place, and on the windswept hill. She went to
     the Small House to bed at last, two or three hours before dawn, but still she could not
     rest. On the third day, late in the afternoon, she walked out alone onto the desert,
     toward the river that now lay low in the winter drought, with ice among the reeds. A
     memory had come to her that once, in the autumn, she had gone very far in the Labyrinth,
     past the Six-Cross, and all along one long curving corridor she had heard behind the
     stones the sound of running water. Might not a man athirst, if he came that way, stay
     there? There were spy holes even out here; she had to search