Dannelle nodded. "I suppose the lot of you have been busy in my absence. Where are the others?"

Without waiting for her answer-indeed, dropping the young woman perfunctorily at the steps of the infirmary- the engineer turned and raced toward the cellars of Castle di Caela, where the brimming moat had told him that the underground was filling with water.

Birgis trotted up to the indignant young woman and

again most reverently licked her nose. He murmured in her ear, something that sounded like words again to the jostled Dannelle.

"You are muddy," he seemed to say, "and you smell like salt."

Birgis charged off jubilantly around the corner of a guardhouse, and something squawked and fluttered from the direction he had taken.

Down in the tunnels below the castle, something stirred in the rubble. Gileandos, tutor to the Pathwardens, scrambled out from a rockpile, trailing gravel and dust.

He did not know he had been unconscious for a day.

"Oh, dear!" he exclaimed. "Oh, dear! I fear that my companions have been… submerged past all recovery."

His hands fluttered like bats in the darkness. He could not see them.

After scrambling and worrying and exclaiming and fluttering, the tutor groped in the darkness, found a large rock-one, in fact, which missed his head by inches in -the cave-in-and seated himself upon it.

"Now, think clearly, Gileandos," he told himself. "There is… there is a lantern in these whereabouts, and if the gods are kind, it is still in working order."

Like a mole, he turned and dug in his subterranean blindness, his soft, thin fingers scrabbling through rock and dust.

Above Gileandos, the engineers stopped at a fork in the passage and caught their breath. The dozen or so castle servants they had brought along-grooms, sappers, a cook or two-ran into one another in the gloomy, lamplit corridor. Following behind the stumbling wall of men, Dannelle stepped through the crowd and laid a muddy hand on the shoulder of the younger and more promising engineer.

"You've been this way before, Bradley," she said. "Where from here?"

The young man blushed. Dannelle's touch, it seemed, was volatile in many quarters.

"He has no idea, m'lady," the head engineer replied testily. "'Twas long before this that Bayard Brightblade made the lot of us turn back."

Dannelle nodded in the shadows, being accustomed to unwelcome protection.

"And yet," the young man said, his eyes on the two passages, "after a brief inspection of incline and breadth and the mathematics thereof, I would venture that the leftward passage leads toward Sir Bayard and his party."

"Nonsense, Bradley!" the head engineer sputtered. "Surely you are aware that the workings of the well lie south of here. If Sir Bayard knew aught of engineering and matters hydraulical, he would surely have pursued the passage to the right."

'Then I would venture that Bradley is right," Dannelle interrupted, and the old man gazed at her with something approaching contempt.

"I shall be food for bats!" Gileandos murmured, fumbling hysterically at loose things. "Or giant rats, or lizards, or huge flightless birds that have evolved into something menacing, or… or… that worm I touched!"

Hysteria turned to blind panic as the tutor flung rocks in all directions. As he raised dust in the blackness, he coughed and sneezed and continued to burrow deeper into the rock-pile until he reached the floor of the corridor, until his right hand struck solid rock…

And his left hand metal.

Panting, squealing, fumbling with the lantern, he juggled it from one hand to another, heard the splash of lamp oil on the dark rocks around him. Fumbling in his robes, he came up with a tinderbox, wrenched it open, and drew out flint and tinder…

There were times years ago, in Coastlund, when Gileandos was said to be careless with fire. It was a reputation he did not deserve. Frequently ignited by the youngest and oldest Pathwarden boys-who worked sometimes separately, sometimes in tandem-the tutor spent much of his time in the infirmary, nursing burns and the ill regard of Sir Andrew Pathwarden. In those long, reflective hours on his back (or on his belly, depending on where the fire had struck him) Gileandos had come to believe that he had set the fires himself, or walked into them as part of some huge and fatal design established in the cloudy past of the Age of Dreams.

That was why he was not surprised when his sleeves burst into flame in the corridor and, shouting and spinning like an enormous fireworks display, he pinwheeled up the corridor, straight into a geyser rising from the artesian well, which whirled him about and extinguished him.

And yet, in that blaze of glory, an obscure tutor had saved a shimmering array of Solamnic knighthood and nobility, for the sharp eye of Bradley the engineer caught a glimpse of light wavering down the corridor-the left one, it was, to the young man's great delight-and, pointing out the glimmer to the head engineer and the Lady Dannelle, he proceeded to guide the expedition to its source in the smoldering, smarting tutor.

From there, it was a matter of pickax and shovel against rock, a task taking less than an hour.

Far below the clamor of metal and stone, below the rescue party and below those they had set out to rescue, below the great dale worm Tellus, who stirred uneasily in his hundred thousand years of sleep, the caverns dropped away into nothing, and nothing dropped away into the Abyss. Where Sargonnas waited, watching events unfold.

The dark god frowned. There was a whining at his ear, thin and incessant, like the choiring of mosquitoes.

Something was wrong.

He had plotted so carefully all that had come to pass: hundreds of years ago, setting a dark passage in front of the Scorpion and even darker thoughts in his heart, and at almost the same time finding the Namer through the depths of the opals…

It was all so elaborate and beautiful.

And yet, Sargonnas thought now, turning uncomfortably in the black vacuum of the Abyss, and yet there are too many of them. Wherever 1 look are unforeseen people: the sharp-eyed, mournful Knight and the merry blind juggler, the girl and the priest and the dog…

And since he put on the crown, I have not heard from the Namer anymore. Too variable these mortals were, and something was about to happen that was beyond contingencies.

He stirred, anxiously scanning the Vingaards and the plains and the subterranean cavern beneath both.

He could not figure it. Too many and variable they were.

"Something the Scorpion said in the parchment…" Bayard began thoughtfully, scrambling urgently for answers as the fissure brimmed over and the chamber around his party began to fill with water. "Some clue to that damnable distant machinery…"

His companions paused expectantly, their gazes moving from the dark mechanism faintly seen by some, only imagined by others, until every eye was on Bayard, who frowned, shifted himself on Enid's shoulder, and turned to Brandon Rus.

"Though you may uncover my devices, the note said, you will never strike the mark nor hit the target. It's easy and direct, and wouldn't that be the Scorpion's greatest joke, that for all his machineries, the key is not subtle at all but is in fact the simple head of an arrow? That spot in the center of the device, Brandon," he urged as the fissure before them spilled water over their feet and the ceilings rained. "The dark spot, like the pupil of the eye. Can you shoot it with a bow?"