"On the contrary, princess." Burke smiled thinly. "This is one advantage of coming here from another time. It tells me in advance so many of the things that are scheduled to happen."
Ignoring her obvious blank bafflement, he again spoke to the smith: "Daedalus, do you have cord here--light, strong line such as you use in laying out the walls of each new building?"
The brawny craftsman crossed to a chest against the wall; brought out a thick skein of twine. "Will this do?"
"Is it long enough to guide me to the Labyrinth?"
"Then that's all I need from you." Burke turned to go.
"Wait!" This from Ariadne. Her dark eyes pinned their host's deep-set orbs. "Daedalus, I've a promise to make you."
"A vow, if you will." Never had Ariadne looked more beautiful--or more deadly. Her smile held the shadow of impending doom. "For if there's any trick to this, smith, or if word should reach my father of what's happened here tonight, I swear an hour will come when you'll pray for death to end your agonies!"
Then she and Burke were out in the night again, silent as shadows, feeling their way back through the murky maze of alleyways and corridors and buildings to the central court.
Burke pulled the girl to a halt there, in the narrow slot between two pillars. "Where are we going?" He held his voice low; spoke with his mouth close to her ear to compensate for the buffeting of the wind. "We can't chance your rooms, you know. That guard's snapped out of it by now."
"Of course. I've a place in mind across the court, closer to the shrine."
But again, as before, tension rose within Burke. A guard's shouted challenge somewhere far off started him sweating. When the low, mingled laughter of a man and a woman drifted from a nearby window, he froze in his tracks.
The role of hero, he decided, ill became him. He thought too much of consequence and peril; found it too difficult to lose himself in an emotional haze of recklessness.
Yet here, now, he had no choice--not feeling the way he did about Ariadne; not knowing the things he knew from that brief session before the inverter's scanning screen.
And the time remaining was so short ... less than an hour, as of this moment.
Wordless, once more Burke fell in behind the girl.