She saw it, a glow through some bushes ahead, and ran, forgetting the depressions in the ground. This time, when she fell, the lantern went out. No matter. She began to crawl.

It was a strange light, neither a fire nor the diffusion of candles-more like a beam directed upward. Scrabbling toward it, her hands touched nothing and she was jerked forward so that she was humped over a slope. Safeguard was looking straight ahead, and there it was, three yards away from her in the center of the bowl-like depression. It wasn’t a fire or lanterns. There was nobody there. The light came from a hole in the ground. It was the gaping mouth of hell lit by the flames below.

All Adelia’s training had to come to her aid then, every nut of natural philosophy, every hypothesis proved, every yardstick of common sense had to be set against unreason in order to fight the howling panic that sent her scrabbling away from the hole, wailing. She prayed for deliverance: From terror by night, Almighty God defend me.

“It’s not the Pit,” a voice said, primly, in her head, “It’s a pit.”

Of course it was. A pit. Just a pit. And Ulf was in it.

She started to crawl forward and struck her knee against something that lay in the grass and had seemed merely part of the ground but which, after a minute, her exploring hands discovered to be manufactured-a huge and solid wheel. She crawled over it, finding it covered with turf.

She put out her hand to stop Safeguard from coming too close, then, with the slowness of a turtle, extended her neck to look over the pit’s edge.

Not a pit. A shaft, some six feet across and the Lord only knew how deep-the light rising from its bottom confused distance-but deep. A ladder led down into whiteness-white, all white, as far as she could see.

Chalk. Of course it was chalk, the chalk on the dead children.

Rakshasa hadn’t dug it; excavation such as this had involved the labor of hundreds. He’d found it and used it; how he’d used it.

Is that what all the depressions on the hill were? The filled-in entrances to mines? But who had needed chalk on such a scale?

It doesn’t matter; their purpose doesn’t matter now. Ulf is down there.

So is the killer. He’s lit the place-those are flambeaux down there; this is the light the shepherd saw. Dear Lord, we should have found it; we walked this stinking hill, skirting every depression to look into it; how did we miss this open invitation to the underworld?

Because it wasn’t open, she thought. The turfed wheel she’d crawled across wasn’t a wheel at all, it was a cover, a lid, a wellhead. When it was in place, it made this dip in the ground look like any other.

Such a clever fellow, Rakshasa.

But some of Adelia’s skin-crawling horror of the killer left her because she knew that when Simon’s cart had carried Prior Geoffrey up the track to Wandlebury Hill, Rakshasa had panicked. Like the guilty thing he was, he had taken the bodies from the shaft by night and carried them down the hill, so that his lair would be kept secret.

This shaft is your place, she thought, so precious it makes you vulnerable. It glares for you as it does for me now, even when the lid is on; it is the tunnel into your body, the entrance to your rotting soul, your doom to be discovered. For you, its existence cries to God, whom it outrages.

And I’ve found it.

She listened. The hill around her rustled with life, but the shaft delivered no sound. She should not have come alone, oh, mercy, she should not. What service was she providing that little boy by bringing no reinforcement and in telling nobody where she had gone?

Yet the moment had demanded it; she could not think of what else she might have done. Anyway, it was done, the milk was spilt and, somehow, she had to mop it up.

If Ulf were dead, she could pull out the ladder and push the wheel into place, entombing the living killer, and walk away while Rakshasa thrashed around in his own sepulchre.

But she had followed the belief that Ulf wasn’t dead, that the other children had been kept alive in Rakshasa’s larder until he was ready for them-a hypothesis based on what the body of a dead boy had once told her. Such frail evidence, such a gossamer of belief, yet it had pulled her into the nuns’ punt and marched her across country to this hellhole so that…

So that what?

Lying prone, with her head over the pit, Adelia considered her choices with the chill logic of despair. She could run for help, which, considering how long it would take, was no option at all-the last habitation she’d seen had been Sister Walburga’s auntie’s farm-and now that she was close to Ulf, she could not leave him. She could descend the shaft and be killed, which in the end she must be prepared to do if, thereby, Ulf could escape.

Or, and this had considerably more merit, she thought, she could descend and kill the killer. Which entailed finding a weapon. Yes, she must look for a stick, or a stone, anything sharp…

Beside her, the Safeguard shifted suddenly. A pair of hands seized Adelia’s ankles and raised them so that she slid forward. Then, with a grunt of effort, somebody threw her down the pit.

What saved her was the ladder. It met her fall halfway down, breaking some of her ribs on impact but allowing her body to slither the rest of the way on its lower rungs. She had time-it seemed quite a long time-to think I must stay conscious before her head struck the ground and she wasn’t.

AWARENESS WAS A LONG TIME coming to her, traveling slowly through a misty crowd of people who insisted on moving about and shifting her and talking, which irritated her to the point where, if she hadn’t been in such pain, she’d have told them to stop. Gradually, they went away and the sound of voices dwindled down to one that persisted in being just as irritating.

“Do be quiet,” she said and opened her eyes, but the effort hurt so much that she decided to stay unconscious for a while, which was just as impossible because there was horror waiting for her and someone else, so that her mind, determined on her own and the someone else’s survival, insisted on working.

Stay still and think. God, the pain; her head was being trepanned. That would be concussion-how severe it was impossible to estimate without knowing for how long she’d been unconscious; the length of time would indicate the severity. Damnation, it hurt. And so did her ribs, possibly two fractures there but-she experimented with a deep breath, wincing-probably no puncture of the lung. It wasn’t helped by the fact that she seemed to be standing with her arms over her head, causing compression on her chest.

It doesn’t matter. You’re in such danger, your medical condition doesn’t matter. Think and survive.

So. She was in the shaft. She remembered being at its top; now she was at its bottom; her brief glimpse had shown enclosing whiteness all around. What she couldn’t remember was getting from one to the other-the natural result of concussion. Pushed or fallen, obviously.

And somebody else had fallen, or had been brought down before or after Adelia herself, because the attempt at opening her eyes had shown a figure against the opposite wall. It was this someone who was ceaselessly and so irritatingly making a noise.

“Save-and-preserve-me, dear-Lord-and-Master-and-I-shall-follow-Thee-all-my-days-I-will-abase-myself-unto-Thee. Punish-me-with-Thy-whips-and-scorpions-yet-keep-me-safe…”

The babbling was Sister Veronica’s. The nun stood ten or so feet away on the other side of the ceilingless chamber that was the pit of the shaft. Her wimple and coif had been torn down to her neck and her hair hung over her face like wisps of dark mist. Her hands were stretched above her head where, like those of Adelia, they were manacled to a bolt.