“What are you doing?” The dragon's voice was soft in his mind.

He laughed aloud. “You know what I'm doing,” he muttered to her. “You know every thought in my head. Don't give me doubts now.”

“I don't know everything about you, Reyn Khuprus. I never foresaw that you might do this. Why?”

He roared with laughter this time. He pitied Selden. The poor boy stared at him in wonder, but feared to ask what was wrong or even to whom he spoke. “I love you. I love the city, and for me you have always been the heart of the city. I love you and so I strive to save what I can of it. What might survive.”

“You believe you will die if you turn the crank. You and the boy both.”

He nodded to himself. “Yes. But it will be more quickly than if we wait and let the water eat out the walls and bring them down on us.”

“Can't you go back the way you came?”

“Do you seek to dissuade me from what you have begged me to do for years?” he asked her in amusement. Then he answered her question. “The way back is already gone. The Satrap's chamber was oozing water. That door is only wood. It could not hold. I suspect it is the source of the water that flows in even now. I am done, dragon, and the boy with me. However, if we collapse the ceiling, some light may break through. If it does, then you may survive us. If not, then we will all be buried together.”

He waited in vain for her reply. When it came, it surprised him. She left him. There was no lingering aura of gratitude, not even a farewell. She was simply gone.

He rapped the shaft sharply with his claw tool. He set his hands to the crank. He suspected that once the counterweights in the wall started moving, the momentum might take over. Or perhaps the wheel would turn no more than a notch or two. He would not think of that. Slow death alone he might be able to face. Slow death with a young boy at his side would be torture eternal. He shoved the claw tool through the spokes of the wheel and braced it. He looked at Selden. The whites of the boy's fearful eyes gleamed in the candlelight. “Now!” he told him.

They leaned on the bars. The wheels turned grudgingly, but they turned. The door groaned warningly. Move the bar up a spoke, lean. Move the bar up a spoke, lean on it again. Reyn heard the counterweights shifting inside the wall. Surely by now something should suddenly take over the work of the task. He wondered how many barrows full of earth were pressed up against the door. It had settled solidly for years; how many, no one knew. How could he even imagine that he could open it, let alone that the earth would break in and light shine through? It was ridiculous. Move the bar up another spoke. Lean on it.

Cruelly, the light bar suddenly sprang to life, illuminating the final destruction of the city. It lit up the spreading cracks across the murals and the gleaming water on the floor. For the first and last time in his life, Reyn got a fleeting glimpse of the true beauty of the room. He stared up in awe. As he looked, something cracked sharply, not in the door, but up overhead. Crystal shards of one of the great windows of the dome fell like great icicles. They shattered to dust on the floor of the chamber. A trickling of soil followed them. Nothing more.

“Keep going, lad,” Reyn encouraged Selden. In unison they moved their bars, and leaned on them. Another groaning notch.

Suddenly, on Reyn's side of the door, there was a tremendous series of pops. Instinct sent him diving toward Selden as the door suddenly burst unevenly from its track. The edge of the door bowed in, a great vertical crack that reached from the floor to the top of the door. Suddenly the sagging and splitting spread from there. Like the shell of a dropped egg, the cracks spread out across the dome above. Crystal panes and plaster frescoes fell like rotten fruit from windswept trees. There was no place to escape the bombardment as the ceiling randomly surrendered to the weight of earth atop it.

Reyn clutched the boy to him and hunched over him as if his paltry body could save him from the forces of the earth. The boy clung to him, too frightened to scream. One great intact panel of the ceiling fell with a crash. It landed against the wizardwood log and leaned there. Selden wriggled loose from his grip. “Under there. We should get under there!” Before he could clutch at him, the boy was racing across the chamber, dodging falling pieces of ceiling and heaps of debris on the floor. He scooted under the fallen ceiling piece.

“The rising water will drown us there!” Reyn roared after him. Then he was following the boy's zigzag course, to scuttle into the dubious shelter of the leaning ceiling panel. The light bar failed. They plunged into darkness as the ceiling came down with a roar.