The Tombs of Atuan Read Online Free PDF

them, and when they’re all gone it will still be there. It is the center of things.”
    “It is the center of things.”
    “There are riches there; Thar tells me about them sometimes. Enough to fill the Godking’s temple ten times over. Gold and trophies given ages ago, a hundred generations, who knows how long. They’re all locked away in the pits and vaults, underground. They won’t take me there yet, they keep me waiting and waiting.But I know what it’s like. There are rooms underneath the Hall, underneath the whole Place, under where we stand now. There’s a great maze of tunnels, a Labyrinth. It’s like a great dark city, under the hill. Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years, and silence.”
    She spoke as if in trance, in rapture. Manan watched her. His slabby face never expressed much but stolid, careful sadness; it was sadder than usual now. “Well, and you’re mistress of all that,” he said. “The silence, and the dark.”
    “I am. But they won’t show me anything, only the rooms above ground, behind the Throne. They haven’t even shown me the entrances to the places underground; they just mumble about them sometimes. They’re keeping my own domain from me! Why do they make me wait and wait?
    “You are young. And perhaps,” Manan said in his husky alto, “perhaps they’re afraid, little one. It’s not their domain, after all. It’s yours. They are in danger when they enter there. There’s no mortal that doesn’t fear the Nameless Ones.”
    Arha said nothing, but her eyes flashed. Again Manan had shown her a new way of seeing things. So formidable, so cold, so strong had Thar and Kossil always seemed to her, that she had never even imagined their being afraid. Yet Manan was right. They feared those places, those powers of which Arha was part, to which she belonged. They were afraid to go into the dark places, lest they be eaten.
    Now, as she went with Kossil down the steps of the Small House and up the steep winding path toward the Hall of the Throne, she recalled that conversation with Manan, and exulted again. No matter where they took her, what they showed her, she would not be afraid. She would know her way.
    A little behind her on the path, Kossil spoke. “One of my mistress’s duties, as she knows, is the sacrifice of certain prisoners, criminals of noble birth, who by sacrilege or treason have sinned against our lord the Godking.”
    “Or against the Nameless Ones,” said Arha.
    “Truly. Now it is not fitting that the Eaten One while yet a child should undertake this duty. But my mistress is no longer a child. There are prisoners in the Room of Chains, sent a month ago by the grace of our lord the Godking from his city Awabath.”
    “I did not know prisoners had come. Why did I not know?”
    “Prisoners are brought at night, and secretly, in the way prescribed of old in the rituals of the Tombs. It is the secret way my mistress will follow, if she takes the path that leads along the wall.”
    Arha turned off the path to follow the great wall of stone that bounded the Tombs behind the domed hall. The rocks it was built of were massive; the least of them would outweigh a man, and the largest were big as wagons. Though unshapen they were carefully fitted and interlocked. Yet in places the height of the wall had slipped down and the rocks lay in a shapeless heap. Only a vast span of time could do that, the desert centuries of fiery daysand frozen nights, the millennial, imperceptible movements of the hills themselves.
    “It is very easy to climb the Tomb Wall,” Arha said as they went along beneath it.
    “We have not men enough to rebuild it,” Kossil replied.
    “We have men enough to guard it.”
    “Only slaves. They cannot be trusted.”
    “They can be trusted if they’re frightened. Let the penalty be the same for them as for the stranger they allow to set foot on the holy ground within the wall.”
    “What is that penalty?”