The top of the ten-foot wall around Pem-Y-Rum was lit by lanterns and Snoat’s sentries paced it night and day. Wilm and Dajaes had spent days watching from the forest, trying to find a way in, but the sentries did twelve-hour shifts and never slackened off… save the one time.

Wilm and Dajaes were forty feet up, squashed together in the fork of a big tree; from it they had a line of sight through the forest to the main gates and part of the wall. A warm breeze rustled the leaves all around. It was exciting; they were on a great and important adventure together. And he found it very pleasant to be pressed up against a charming and attractive girl who admired him.

A exhausted guard, a hollow-eyed youth with huge ears and sandy hair that stuck out in all directions like a badly made broom, stopped by the guardhouse, leaned back against the wall for a moment and fell asleep standing up.

The next guard to pass by discovered him and shouted for the sergeant, who came running. Half a dozen sentries assembled. A captain appeared and conferred with the sergeant.

“What are they going to do?” whispered Dajaes.

She smelled like roses. Wilm found it distracting. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Though sleeping on duty isn’t good. In wartime —”

“It’s not wartime, and this is just a country estate.”

“Sometimes my imagination runs away with me.”

The captain and the sergeant broke apart. The broom-headed youth pulled free of the man who was holding him and reached out with both arms towards the captain as if begging. Wilm could not make out what he said, though it was clear the captain wasn’t receptive. He spun on one foot and snapped an order to the sergeant, who gestured to the sentries.

The broom-headed guard ran as if intending to leap off the wall. Another sentry tripped him. He was lifted to his feet, his wrists were bound behind his back and then, as he was held from behind, one of the guards thrust a sword into him.

Dajaes gasped and caught Wilm’s right hand in her two hands, squeezing it tightly.

The youth doubled over. The sergeant hauled him upright. Blood began to puddle on the walkway. The other five sentries put their swords into him, one after another. The sentry holding the guard let him go. He folded up and fell, and did not move. The blood spread until it was the size of a kitchen table. The sergeant snapped an order and the guards went back to patrolling, stepping carefully around the dead man as they paced.

Dajaes was shivering violently. Wilm put his arms around her and she pressed her face against his chest. When she pulled away, her face was wet with tears and her nose was running.

He found a rag in his pocket and wiped her tears away and then, self-consciously, dabbed at her nose.

Dajaes looked up at him. “What have we got ourselves into?”

“I thought it would be an exciting game,” said Wilm, “but if we’re caught breaking into Pem-Y-Rum, we’ll be killed too.”

He imagined someone taking the news to his mother. If she could see him now, she would be out of her mind with worry. Work hard, do the right thing and never attract attention to yourself.

Dajaes was holding his hand again.

“This changes everything,” said Wilm.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t change anything. Llian is in even more danger than we thought, and if we don’t rescue him, he’ll be killed as well.”

“But we’re just kids!”

“You’re seventeen and I’m eighteen. If I’d gone home, father would be marrying me off any day now. That makes me an adult.”

“What if we told the sergeant in Chanthed what Snoat’s up to?”

“We don’t have any proof. Besides, how can a town sergeant take Snoat on? Llian’s only got us, Wilm.”

Her logic was unarguable. “But what are we going to do?”

“Find him inside Pem-Y-Rum. Get him out. Help him to clear his name.”

Wilm felt utterly overwhelmed. He lowered his head onto his bony knees. “I don’t even know where to start.”

“I do,” said Dajaes. “We’re going back to Chanthed. Come on.”

“Pem-Y-Rum was originally built by Odio Lossily,” said Dajaes.

“Who’s he?” said Wilm.

They were in the sub-basement of the college library, in a section that, judging by the dust, had not seen much use in decades. Shelves full of boxes, books, scrolls and paper folders stretched for thirty yards in every direction.

Dajaes shook her head in disbelief. “You must have read about him when you were studying for the scholarship test.”

“I can’t remember anything. I crammed so many facts in that they all got mixed up.”

“Odio Lossily was a legendary teller of eleven centuries ago.” She was reading a page attached to the plans. “He crafted the eighteenth Great Tale, the Tale of Rula.”

“Rula was a Magister during the Clysm, wasn’t she?” said Wilm.

“In the Annals of the Magisters, she’s regarded as the greatest of all.”

“Greater than Mendark, who lived more than a thousand years and renewed his life thirteen times?”

Dajaes smiled. “It’s good to see one of those facts has stuck.”

“What did Rula do that was so great?”

“If you read the Great Tale you’ll find out. Getting back to the point, Odio Lossily became fabulously wealthy and built himself a magnificent country manor, Pem-Y-Rum.”

“Yes?” said Wilm.

“He was one of the first of the great collectors. Maybe that’s another reason why Snoat bought the place.”

“Um… ?” Wilm did not have the faintest idea where she was going with this.

“Lossily was also a master at this college, and all his papers are here. I read that when I was studying for the test too.”

“Go on.”

“Before the builder started work he would have needed drawings and detailed plans of everything. And if we can find them —”

“We might be able to get Llian out. Let’s get to work.”

It took long and weary hours of searching before they found the plans, but they turned out to be less use than they had hoped.

“Pem-Y-Rum looks nothing like that,” said Wilm, riffling through the drawings again. They showed a large but simple one-storey villa with a courtyard in the centre, completely different to the current house.

Dajaes lowered her head onto the papers. “So tired. Even my eyes ache.”

She closed them for a minute or two, then sat up. A smudge of dust on her left cheek was shaped like the letter P. “Eleven centuries is an awfully long time. It might have burned down.”

“Or been torn down and rebuilt several times. Few houses would have survived unchanged all that time.”

She gave a weary sigh. “Would you mind awfully if I had a little nap?”

“Odio Lossily was also a master of wine,” said Wilm. “He wrote books about the wines of Iagador and established the first vineyard in the area.”

“I’ve never tasted wine,” she said drowsily.

“Llian drinks it; I tasted some a couple of times.” He made a face. “It wasn’t very nice.”

“Perhaps he couldn’t afford anything good.”

“A vineyard would need a big wine cellar,” said Wilm. “And even if the place was torn down and rebuilt, why would they rebuild a perfectly good cellar?”

He went through the plans again. “Here we go.”

Dajaes did not answer. She was asleep. He studied the plan of the cellars, which ran under the manor and back into the hill in two wings for fifty yards, then tossed the plan on the pile and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes.

“It’s no damn use!” he muttered.

“What were you looking for?” said Dajaes, sitting up with a jerk.

“I was hoping the old cellars came out past the boundary wall.”

“If they did, the entrance would be guarded.” She checked that there was no one within earshot and picked up the plan. “Wilm, this tunnel goes close to the wall.”

“How does that help?”

“What if we tunnelled under the wall from the forest?”

“It’d take years to tunnel that far through rock,” said Wilm.

“It isn’t rock. The soil is ten feet deep there. We saw it in the road cutting near Pem-Y-Rum, remember?”

Why would he remember that? “It would still take ages to tunnel that far – if the tunnel didn’t collapse on us.”

Wilm shuddered at the thought of being trapped underground, nose and mouth and ears filled with dirt, unable to breathe, choking, gasping, dying.

“I used to go underground with Father all the time,” said Dajaes. “Before he took to the grog and they sacked him.” Her small fists clenched. “He taught me everything he knew about tunnelling in hard rock – and soft earth.”

“We’d have to start a long way back from the wall, otherwise the guards would see us.”

Dajaes measured distances with her fingers. “Eight yards from the end of the cellar to the wall. Plus three yards for the wall. And another forty to here,” she tapped a point in the forest, “where we could start a tunnel out of sight. Fifty-one yards. Fifty-five, to be safe.”

“Fifty-five yards!” He did a quick calculation. “But if the tunnel was a yard square, say, the soil would fill about… dozens of four-wheeled wagons.”

“Twenty-eight, actually, if a wagon holds two cubic yards.”

“It’d take weeks. And where would we put it?”

“If the tunnel was half a yard square it would only be seven wagon loads,” said Dajaes. “We can dump it in that old quarry we saw in the forest. No one goes there.”

“Half a yard! That’s not much wider than my shoulders.”

“A smaller tunnel is safer than a large one.”

“But still not very safe. It gives me the horrors just thinking about going down one.”

“Can you think of any other way to save Llian?”

“No.”

“Then we’d better get on with it.” She stood up, studying him with her head tilted to the side. “It’ll be the hardest work you’ve ever done.”

“Everything I’ve done in my life has been hard work.”

It took every grint they had left to equip themselves with a rusty iron pick, a wooden shovel, food for a week, a lantern and fuel, some rope and a couple of buckets so Wilm could carry the soil to the quarry.

Using discarded boards, they made a little wooden cart with rounded corners and skids instead of wheels. Dajaes tied a length of rope to either end so Wilm could heave the full cart out and she could haul the empty one back to the tunnel face, where she would work alone. There would not be room for two, and Wilm did not have the experience to know which soil was safe and which was not.

The following morning she began the tunnel in the side of a mound-like hill, out of sight of the wall and surrounded by shrubs. It was easy work at first, and Wilm, returning from dumping his buckets of earth over the side of the quarry a hundred yards away, watched anxiously as she crawled out. The tunnel was four feet long already.

Dajaes was filthy and her eyes were streaming, the tears carving runnels through the dirt on her cheeks.

“What’s the matter?” said Wilm.

“Lantern fumes. And they’ll get worse as the tunnel gets longer. Can you check on the guards?”

He crept through the forest to the nearest vantage point, a rounded hillock. The wall guards were pacing, following their normal routine, though this did not ease his anxiety. He had never seen anyone go into the forest, but if a guard should choose to, for any reason, they would be discovered. And killed.

He went back, hauled the cart out, filled his buckets, lifted the wooden carrying bar onto his shoulders and trudged off to the quarry. So the morning went. He called a halt for lunch and Dajaes backed out, then flopped on her face on the dirt.

Wilm helped her up. “The fumes?”

“Got a shocking headache.”

He handed her a water skin. She gulped at it, washed her face and hands and gave him a feeble smile.

“I… I’ll take a turn after lunch,” said Wilm, cringing at the thought of working underground.

“The hell you will! I’ll do it in the dark, by feel.”

“That doesn’t sound very safe.”

“Safer than breathing lantern fumes all day.”

They ate bread and cheese and an apple each; it wasn’t enough for either of them but they had to ration the food, since there was no money to buy more.

“How far have you got?” said Wilm.

“Four yards.”

“Great progress!”

“But the further I go, the slower it’ll get.”

She continued, working in the dark, every so often coming out for air, and occasionally lighting the lantern and crawling in to check the face of the tunnel. By sunset they had done nine yards and were feeling very pleased with themselves.

“That’s enough,” said Dajaes. “We can’t use the lantern after it gets dark; it’d be spotted from the wall.”

They put their gear inside, covered the entrance with dead bushes, scattered leaves over the bare earth outside and headed through the forest for half a mile to a secluded place Wilm had found earlier, a copse not far from a rivulet.

“Can we have a fire?” said Wilm. It was already getting cold. “I’d love a cup of hot chard.”

“Too risky,” said Dajaes. “After we’ve been here a day or two, and we know if there’s anyone around, it might be all right.”

They sat shoulder to shoulder, eating their meagre dinner and talking quietly about the day’s work and their plans for tomorrow. They were going to start at first light.

Soon it was too cold to sit out in the open. They had no tent, though fortunately it did not rain often at this time of year. As the light faded, Wilm got out his sleeping pouch, then realised that Dajaes did not have one. Travelling by ferry, she hadn’t needed one.

“You should get to sleep,” he said, offering the sleeping pouch to her. “You must be exhausted.”

She looked up at him. Even in this light he could see that her cheeks were flushed.

“You worked just as hard, carrying all that dirt.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I like sleeping out.”

“At this time of year? You’ll freeze.”

She picked up the sleeping pouch, put it down again and took a deep breath.

“I can’t possibly sleep in these filthy clothes,” she said, undressing. “And I don’t think you should either.”