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the Temple.
    â€œAre there any hymns of Temple building?” said the King suddenly.
    â€œNo, Majesty. That knowledge was lost with the Wise.”
    â€œI just wanted to know whether these passages were built on purpose for spying, or whether they would have built the walls hollow anyway, and just took advantage of the fact to make this network. I think that must be it. There’re places so narrow even you can’t get along, and other passages that don’t lead anywhere. Now, I want to try something else. Stand still. Listen.”
    Tron shut his eyes and waited, straining for sounds. Nothing stirred. Then, against all his training, he cried out with shock as a hand touched his face, and the cry was muffled into silence by a hard palm over his mouth. The King laughed and let go.
    â€œI’m sorry,” he said. “I wanted to practice. It looks as though there’ll be passages like this in the Great Temple—yes, even in the walls of my own palace. So I’ll have to explore them and that’ll take some delicate stalking. You didn’t hear me coming?”
    â€œNo, Majesty … but the boys chosen for Aa learn a dance called Flying Shadows. The steps are done blindfold, swiftly and in silence, with a knife of sacrifice in the hand.”
    â€œHm.… Are you afraid of this place, Tron?”
    â€œYes, Majesty.”
    â€œSo am I. It’s going to be heart-stopping work. Let’s leave now. I don’t think there are any more secrets to be found here—it’s just the same secret, repeated and repeated.”
    The King was wrong. In the narrowness of a dark crevasse he disturbed a roost of bats. Tron, following some paces behind, felt them whirl past like a sudden soft wind, musty and rustling. He stood rigid, locked in fright and revulsion, and when they had gone reached out to pat the solid wall, to reassure himself with the reality of stone. His hand, however, touched nothing.
    He moved it about, and found a rectangular opening containing a bronze latch.
    â€œMajesty,” he called. “Here is another door!”
    A tug, and the latch clicked up. The door swung easily.
    â€œLord Sinu! What is this?” said the King blinking in the blaze of light.
    â€œIt’s a Room of Days and Years,” whispered Tron. “But … but …”
    â€œYou said there wasn’t one. Look, that door’s been bricked up.”
    He stepped inquisitively down into the drifted sand on the floor, but Tron stood where he was, staring in dismay. The room was a desolation. Its windows looked west across the river, but as the wall ran sheer to the water they could only have been seen from a boat or the far bank. Beneath them ran the proper sloping rack, but heaped with dust and bird-mess and tumbled bits of nests. Even from the door Tron could see that beneath the mess the rack was all disordered. In the Great Temple he had been awed by the ranked mystery of the rods, the sense of their counting away the generations, themselves unchanging. Here they seemed to lie all hugger-mugger. When he overcame his shock and stepped down into the room his foot scuffed up a rod from the floor, and brushing the mess off the rack he found places where twenty or thirty rods lay side by side, quite neatly, but then there would come a gap, a rod lying sideways, and then a stack of rods trying to fill a single place. The medallion of O lay in an empty space; the medallion of Aa he found leaning against one of the stacks, as though the Goddess Herself had begun to hold back the orderly march of days.
    For all his pleasure in his own new freedom Tron still felt a rooted reverence for the order and discipline of the Temple, for the pattern of life that brought two thousand priests each exact to his place, each to chant the same line of the same hymn as their predecessors had chanted in that place a thousand flood-times ago. Though the Lord Gdu had chosen to set Tron free from this