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Ware would soon lose many of those; greed would make the guards want them all.
Ware fastened up the uniform tunic and tied the pouch to his belt. With a wink, he strode boldly up the
valley to the entrance. Now it was time to wait again.
Finally, at mid-morning, excited shouts and cheers echoed up the valley toward their hiding-place. Ware
had succeeded in his distraction, and it was time to go.
They slipped up the valley, then climbed the cliff above the main entrance to find the secondary way in.
The ascent was not difficult-in fact, there was even a path there. The problem was not access, but the
three guards that waited at the tiny slit in the cliff-face that led down to the main cave.
She needed a second distraction, but this one was easier to come by. Faro took one handful of gold
nuggets-this time, though, they were dirty, loaded with quartz, and in general, looked very much as if
they had just broken off of a larger mass. Xylina took a handful, and Thesius took the third handful.
They climbed above the trail to the second entrance, and located the three little goat-tracks Faro and
Ware had found. They scattered their nuggets all along these paths, until they reached the point where
all three trails met. There, Xylina worked a little more conjuration, creating a false front to the cliff-face
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of quartz ribboned with veins of gold. It would take men with proper tools several days to chip the gold
free- and those men below had no such thing. But she had no doubt they would try.
Then they returned down the goat-trails and concealed themselves in three separate places near and
above where the guards would pass.
Xylina waited, as the others were waiting, and as the guard passed below her position, dropped the last
of her nuggets so that it bounced down the side of the mountain and onto the trail just in front of the
man, as if it had been naturally dislodged at just that moment.
The gold caught the light perfectly, and the guard leaned over to see what it was.
She could not see his face from here, but his whole form stiffened. He snatched up the nugget, and
looked around furtively, then looked up.
She could easily see him, but he could not see her through the screening of the gorse bushes. She waited,
and shortly she heard him ascending the goat-trail, on a furtive, silent hunt for more nuggets. With luck,
the other two would be doing the same. If Faro and Thesius got the opportunity, they would knock the
guards out, but only Faro had the skill and strength to carry such a move off without one of them calling
a warning. Her plan called for Faro to dispose of his own guard; the other two would then presumably
meet at the cliff face, and either quarrel over the gold, or reach some kind of conclusion, and each would
greedily try and remove more than his fellow. In either case, there would be no further interference from
the guards.
She dropped down to the trail and sought out the entrance to the upper cave.
It was less of an entrance than an exaggerated slit in the rock. Only the fact that Ware had been here
before and that it was guarded left her inclined to trust that it led to the lower caves. She squeezed
herself inside-literally-with no more space between her face and the rock-face than the thickness of a
piece of paper, and rock pressing into her back.
Of all the things she had needed to do, this was the worst. It was dark, darker than the blackest, overcast
night. She barely had room to take a breath-in fact, in order to make any progress at all, she had to
exhale, inch forward, then stop to take another breath. She was very glad that her tunic was of leather, or
she would have been leaving skin behind on the rock-face by now.
Several times she had to stop and fight back panic, telling herself that Ware had already been here, and
that the passage did get wider eventually. All she had to do was to go a little further-just a little further-
Suddenly, she broke free of the rocky embrace, and tumbled into a larger chamber. She landed on her
hands and knees, and quickly sat down to take several lung-filling, free breaths.
Now she took a chance and conjured a glowstone to light her way. The chamber in which she sat was a
small one, but quite spacious compared with the passage.
At the end of the chamber opposite the passageway was a large hole in the floor of the cave. This, Ware
had told her, led down to the guard-chamber just outside the one holding the crystal shard itself. It
resembled a steep rabbit-hole, but it was large enough to take several people her size, slanting downward
when she crawled over to it to look. Ware said that it looked to him as if had been made by the passage
of a great deal of water down that hole over the course of many centuries, water that had since found
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another outlet. But there were marks in this upper chamber that indicated more recent flooding, and he
had learned that from time to time a sudden storm might send water into that passage even these days.
That would flood the lower cavern, and the guards would retreat to the valley, waiting for the full day it
took the caverns to drain. She saw nothing down below, not even a light; the slanting passage and the
distance it had to cross in order to reach the guard-chamber made certain of that. But if she listened,
carefully, she could hear the guards talking.
She would have to risk one more conjuration, and hope that no one detected it. So far, no one had; Ware
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