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

vastness; a mystery, never to be seen. She had seen it, and the mystery had given place, not to horror, but to beauty, a mystery deeper even than that of the dark.
    She went slowly forward now, unsure. She felt her way to the left, to the second passageway, the one that led into the Labyrinth. There she paused and listened.
    Her ears told her no more than her eyes. But, as she stood with one hand on either side of the rock archway, she felt a faint, obscure vibration in the rock, and on the chill, stale air was the trace of a scent that did not belong there: the smell of the wild sage that grew on the desert hills, overhead, under the open sky.
    Slow and quiet she moved down the corridor, following her nose.
    After perhaps a hundred paces she heard him. He was almost as silent as she, but he was not so surefooted in the dark. She heard a slight scuffle, as if he had stumbled on the uneven floorand recovered himself at once. Nothing else. She waited awhile and then went slowly on, touching her right-hand fingertips very lightly to the wall. At last a rounded bar of metal came under them. There she stopped, and felt up the strip of iron until, almost as high as she could reach, she touched a projecting handle of rough iron. This, suddenly, with all her strength, she dragged downward.
    There was a fearful grinding and a clash. Blue sparks leapt out in a falling shower. Echoes died away, quarreling, down the corridor behind her. She put out her hands and felt, only a few inches before her face, the pocked surface of an iron door.
    She drew a long breath.
    Returning slowly up the tunnel to the Undertomb, and keeping its wall to her right, she went on to the trapdoor in the Hall of the Throne. She did not hasten, and went silently, though there was no need for silence anymore. She had caught her thief. The door that he had gone through was the only way into or out of the Labyrinth; and it could be opened only from the outer side.
    He was down there now, in the darkness underground, and he would never come out again.
    Walking slowly and erect, she went past the Throne into the long columned hall. There, where one bronze bowl on the high tripod brimmed with the red glow of charcoal, she turned and approached the seven steps that led up to the Throne.
    On the lowest step she knelt, and bowed her forehead down tothe cold, dusty stone, littered with mouse bones dropped by the hunting owls.
    “Forgive me that I have seen Your darkness broken,” she said, not speaking the words aloud. “Forgive me that I have seen Your tombs violated. You will be avenged. O my Masters, death will deliver him to you, and he will never be reborn!”
    Yet even as she prayed, in her mind’s eye she saw the quivering radiance of the lighted cavern, life in the place of death; and instead of terror at the sacrilege and rage against the thief, she thought only how strange it was, how strange. . . .
    “What must I tell Kossil?” she asked herself as she came out into the blast of the winter wind and drew her cloak about her. “Nothing. Not yet. I am mistress of the Labyrinth. This is no business of the Godking’s. I’ll tell her after the thief is dead, perhaps. How must I kill him? I should make Kossil come and watch him die. She’s fond of death. What is it he was seeking? He must be mad. How did he get in? Kossil and I have the only keys to the red rock door and the trapdoor. He must have come by the red rock door. Only a sorcerer could open it. A sorcerer—”
    She halted, though the wind almost buffeted her off her feet.
    “He is a sorcerer, a wizard of the Inner Lands, seeking the amulet of Erreth-Akbe.”
    And there was such an outrageous glamor in this, that she grew warm all over, even in that icy wind, and laughed out loud. All around her the Place, and the desert around it, was black and silent;the wind keened; there were no lights down in the Big House. Thin, invisible snow flicked past on the wind.
    “If he opened the red rock door