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

for them, but Thar had
     shown her each one, last year, and she refound them without much trouble. Her recall of
     place and shape was like that of a blind person: she seemed to feel her way to each
     hidden spot, rather than to lookfor it. At the second, the farthest
     of all from the Tombs, when she pulled up her hood to cut out light, and put her eye to
     the hole cut in a flat pan of rock, she saw below her the dim glimmer of the wizardly
     light.
    He was there, half out of sight. The spy hole looked down at the very end
     of the blind alley. She could see only his back, and bent neck, and right arm. He sat
     near the corner of the walls, and was picking at the stones with his knife, a short
     dagger of steel with a jeweled grip. The blade of it was broken short. The broken point
     lay directly under the spy hole. He had snapped it trying to pry apart the stones, to
     get at the water he could hear running, clear and murmurous in that dead stillness under
     earth, on the other side of the impenetrable wall.
    His movements were listless. He was very different, after these three
     nights and days, from the figure that had stood lithe and calm before the iron door and
     laughed at his own defeat. He was still obstinate, but the power was gone out of him. He
     had no spell to stir those stones aside, but must use his useless knife. Even his
     sorcerer’s light was wan and dim. As Arha watched, the light flickered; the
     man’s head jerked and he dropped the dagger. Then doggedly he picked it up and
     tried to force the broken blade between the stones.
    Lying among ice-bound reeds on the riverbank, unconscious of where she was
     or what she was doing, Arha put her mouth to the cold mouth of rock, and cupped her
     hands around to holdthe sound in. “Wizard!” she said,
     and her voice slipping down the stone throat whispered coldly in the tunnel
     underground.
    The man started and scrambled to his feet, so going out of the circle of
     her vision when she looked for him. She put her mouth to the spy hole again and said,
     “Go back along the river wall to the second turn. The first turn right, miss one,
     then right again. At the Six Ways, right again. Then left, and right, and left, and
     right. Stay there in the Painted Room.”
    As she moved to look again, she must have let a shaft of daylight shoot
     through the spy hole into the tunnel for a moment, for when she looked he was back in
     the circle of her vision and staring upward at the opening. His face, which she now saw
     to be scarred in some way, was strained and eager. The lips were parched and black, the
     eyes bright. He raised his staff, bringing the light closer and closer to her eyes.
     Frightened, she drew back, stopped the spy hole with its rock lid and litter of covering
     stones, rose, and went back swiftly to the Place. She found her hands were shaky, and
     sometimes a giddiness swept over her as she walked. She did not know what to do.
    If he followed the directions she had given him, he would come back in the
     direction of the iron door, to the room of pictures. There was nothing there, no reason
     for him to go there. There was a spy hole in the ceiling of the Painted Room, a good
     one, in the treasury of the Twin Gods’ temple; perhaps that was why she had
     thought of it. She did not know. Why had she spoken to him?
    She could let a little water for him down one of the
     spyholes, and then call him to that place. That would keep him alive longer. As long as
     she pleased, indeed. If she put down water and a little food now and then, he would go
     on and on, days, months, wandering in the Labyrinth; and she could watch him through the
     spy holes, and tell him where water was to be found, and sometimes tell him falsely so
     he would go in vain, but he would always have to go. That would teach him to mock the
     Nameless Ones, to swagger his foolish manhood in the burial places of the Immortal
     Dead!
    But so long as he was there, she would never be