"Agir IX, the Liberator. Creator of the Curtain," Aniallu read in a loud voice.

"He didn't have to sign it. It's understood," Anar noted.

While the other kings and queens made do with identical doors of carved stone, the entrance to the Liberator's tomb was sealed with a magical, coppery-golden wall, just like the Great Curtain he'd created.

"Let's hope this thing only mimics the Curtain. Otherwise, we'll be stuck here a long time," Aniallu put her cheek to the wall, as if listening to see whether Agir were talking in his eternal sleep.

It was less than two minutes before the protective field blinked and went out.

"That's it?" asked Anar in an almost disappointed tone.

"Yep. Even I'm surprised. It was set to allow only your mother in. I passed for Amialis, and there was nothing to it. Simple," Aniallu smiled, twitching her ears pensively, and added, "Only I have a strange feeling that something's amiss."

"Me too," Anar nodded, tuning in to his senses. "Are you sure Alasais doesn't have a problem with us visiting the old man?"

"I'm sure. It's something else."

"A trap, maybe?"

Alu shrugged.

Looking all around them suspiciously, the Alae stepped onto the holy slabs of the burial crypt of the great Agir the Liberator, defender of faith and bane of all non-cats. A foreboding feeling stayed with them, although they didn't run into any unpleasant surprises, and soon the dark passageway led the tailed pilgrims to the spacious quarters of the sepulchral chamber.

Its walls, floor and high ceiling were hidden under whole tiles of black Darlaron marble. In the center, on a platform framed by a sloping stone staircase, the Liberator's sarcophagus shone with a pale golden glow. It was an unusual rectangle shape. Evidently, in his profound humility, Agir had wished to be buried in his bipedal form. Behind the coffin, two glossy triangles of translucent green stone sat evenly – placed a few paces apart and facing one another at right angles. This was a stylized representation of cat's eyes, symbolizing the goddess' all-knowing nature and her eternal watch over the Rual people. The passage between them served as an invisible door through which the soul of the legendary ruler was said to ascend to Briaellar...

"Exactly as the cannons say," Aniallu was impressed.

"Not exactly," Anar let out a flabbergasted sigh. "Look at the wall!"

Alu looked around slowly. The black-mirrored walls revealed only her own reflection. There were no drawings, no writing...

"Not a single one of them is a Wall of Life?!" Alu shivered for some reason.

"Exactly. That's a gross violation of all the rules. And they said I was disrespecting tradition!" Anar scoffed.

"Maybe someone destroyed his writing? Amialis?"

"It's possible... Only, why would she do that?"

"I don't know. Let's look in the tomb, maybe we'll find something..."

"I don't think that's a good idea," Anar cut her off. "Something's not right here. You feel it yourself!"

"I do feel it. That's why I want to get to the bottom of it. Are we really putting our tails between our legs?"

"I don't know, Alu. Running with my tail between my legs isn't something I do often, but right now I'd be happy to get my paws out of here. And if your paws followed my paws, that would be amazing."

"No way! I wouldn't be able to sleep afterward, agonozing over what had me so scared."

"Me too..." Anar admitted with a loud sigh.

"All right then!" Aniallu said, raising her finger pointedly.

Throwing her shoulders back with slight annoyance, she ran up the steps and pushed the lid off the sarcophagus.

No thunder sounded in the heavens, no lightning reduced her to ashes. The massive slab slid off to the side without a sound, revealing the body of Agir the Liberator, not subject to the power of decay. Like the shroud of a very fine gas, the gentle glow of embalming magic enveloped him. The ancient ruler's eyes were open. A chill ran down Aniallu's spine from this frozen gaze. It felt as if she were looking into her own grave – a grave someone was planning to bury her alive in.

"What is it?" Anar asked with concern.

Alu didn't know what to answer.

Instead, she leaned over, pressed her palms to Agir's temples and froze, with only her tail swinging pensively from side to side. Left, right, left, right... Suddenly Alu snapped straight. The sianae's hands fluttered over Agir's face. Their movements were erratic, irregular, fitful... like those of a mad pianist. Before Anar could say anything, Aniallu bent down to the ground, snatched a thin dagger from her boot, and with a short flick slashed the skin on the corpse's forehead.

"Aridolen!" she hissed and recoiled from the sarcophagus.

Stumbling into Anar, Aniallu pressed her back into his chest and heaved a sigh.

"Alu, what is it? Come on, tell me."

The sianae said nothing, her ears clinging to her head.

"I wish I knew how. It' was... horrible. Seeing such things, I feel like the whole Infinite's about to come crashing down on me. Who would dare...?" She looked up at him, her face suddenly pale and haggard. Even her eyes weren't shining, having lost all their luster as if she were some elf!

Carefully, the Alae approached the sarcophagus as if it were a sleeping predator. Agir's outward appearance hadn't changed. Only in the deep cut across the forehead something silvery gleamed, as if the Liberator's skull were molded from a dull metal.

It's aridolen, 'the captor of souls,'" Aniallu explained, licking her lips. "It's a metal that can only be found in Tir-Veinlon – the Silver cliffs, aka the abode of Death – and only silver dragons, the children and servants of Veindor, can use it. Its properties are abominable. The soul of your grandfather can never depart from this world and find a new incarnation. It is forever enclosed in the bone prison of his skull. Someone... Someone fettered Agir with magic, weld a thin layer of aridolen around his skull using magic, and then made his heart stop."

"A soul can be held prisoner?!" Anar was shocked, and immediately thought of how much longer the hallway with doors that led to the tombs of Rualite sovereigns would be if his greedy-for-power tribesfolk found out there was a way to force the souls of kings and queens slain by them into silence!

"Yes. Many mages have the power to do it. Even I can. But not like that. Not... forever." She shivered. "Only phantom dragons are capable of this... I can't even... Could it be that Veindor had been judging the Alae all along? No... Alasais would have known... We would have known..."

Her voice grew quieter and quieter.

"Hold on. You let slip once that if you needed to, you could get around 'the soul's justice.'" Aniallu suddenly recalled. "Weren't you talking about something similar?"

"No, I've never thought of such a thing. I thought of a way to hide from the so-called 'all-seeing gaze' of the soul of a murdered king... or queen. So that it wouldn't recognize and expose its true killer," Anar shook his head.

Aniallu didn't even appear to be listening, her face wearing a mask of boundless compassion. For a moment, it almost offended Anar. How could she feel sympathy for Agir, this monster in cat's skin, who had erected the very prison where Anar had languished for three hundred agonizing years? He listened with jealousy to Aniallu's emotions. No, she had not forgotten about Agir's "merits;" the suffering did not raise him at all in her eyes. But she was the Shadow of Alasais, whom Agir called his Divine Mother – she who for many centuries defended the innermost, essential rights of the Infinite's denizens, and Aniallu could not stand by and watch those rights be violated, no matter who Agir had proven himself to be, no matter the pain he had inflicted upon those she loved. Hers was a compassion sans forgiveness – a rather peculiar feeling and... grownup. Mature, dignified. Correct. Pleasing to the Infinite and to Anar's own soul. His anger and confusion subsided. He carefully took Aniallu by the hand. She squeezed his fingers gratefully.

"I had no idea there was a way to hold a soul prisoner," Anar repeated. "However, I do know a woman who's probably well aware of all this. A coldhearted, cruel woman with no moral principles. She, more than anyone, fits the bill for Agir's murderer. Who better than she? I'm talking about my mother. A priestess of Alasais, the truth is that she serves only herself and her unquenchable thirst for power! And she is most certainly capable of sacrificing her own father's life on the altar of this idol. Killing the king in that way, she wouldn't need to worry about her crime being discovered, as his soul wouldn't be able to leave its body and expose the killer. And the body would never be found, for the tombs had been restricted from then on. Oh, Alasais! How I hate all this! I'm so tired of their endless foul dealings! I'm tired of imagining how they..."

He tousled his hair in annoyance and scratched behind his ear. Aniallu gently wrapped her tail around his leg.

"It was her. Have no doubt," Anar repeated bitterly, collecting himself.

"Amialis hadn't shown you any mercy; it stands to reason she wouldn't show him any either," Alu nodded. "It's awful. Unthinkable. No Alae would dare do such a thing... especially to one's own kind. Freedom-loving, active, hungry for life. I never thought an Alae would ever be capable of doing something like this. How... how dare she, how... could she? Stealing aridolen is incomprehensible! No, no matter how you spin it, Amialis couldn't have acted alone. Someone had to have helped her. Someone from Veindor's inner circle..."

Aniallu slid down to the floor, cradling her head on bent knees in despair. The green glow of the lacquer gleamed on her smoothly combed hair. Anar stood with his arms folded across his chest, looking behind the sianae at the sarcophagus in which the eternally living... or eternally dead Liberator reclined. The thought of such a fate made his hair stand on end.

"Can he see us now?"

"Yes. No. He can't see us, but... he senses us," she mumbled. "He has no sight, no hearing, no sense of smell. But some traces of his telepathic abilities have been preserved. That's his only connection to the world. Thanks to that he can feel our presence. And we, we can take a look in his mind."

"And..."

"He's long since lost his mind. Fear is his only thought now. Agir's conscience has died, but the horror lives on. And it's not the typical fear that anyone would feel before death."

"What is it then?"

"I don't know. He... he roamed the catacombs for a long time. Not where we were, but in different ones that lie much, much deeper..." Aniallu's gaze strayed about the room, as if she were inspecting something invisible to Anar. "There's a labyrinth down there, an enormous one... The king didn't know that there were underground tunnels, but when he discovered them, he decided to investigate. I see only some sort of gates. He entered them, and... I don't know what happened next. The horror of the experience erased his memory of what lurked behind them."

Alu shook her head. Bit by bit, her eyes regained her intelligent expression.

"Strange," said Anar, scratching the floor with the claws of his feet thoughtfully. "I thought we were on the deepest tier of the catacombs. Only rocks and dirt beneath us."

"Apparently not. There is a huge labyrinth underneath."

"And how did it get there?"

"If you don't know, then I certainly don't."

"Well then, we need to get down there and find out!" Anar exclaimed, fully reanimated. "Or do we have other plans?"

Aniallu shook her head. She did not share his enthusiasm, but she couldn't just leave things the way they were.

"Agir was a son of a dog, no doubt about that, but even he didn't deserve such torture. We have to make this right. It'll be dangerous, but cats have nine lives, right?"

"That's right," Anar nodded with feeling. "And what about... my grandfather? You can't free him?"

"No, only Veindor can do that. All I can do is temper his fear and help him to have... pleasant dreams, in so much as that's possible."

A drawling roar broke the silence of the dungeon, morphing into a resounding echo that swept through the vaulted corridor and crashed into the thick stone walls at its end, then abated. The doors to the Tombs bid farewell to the visitors in their deafening fashion.

"Alu, we forgot why we came here in the first place! We didn't ask him about the Curtain and the menagerie!" Anar slapped his forehead once the slabs had already sealed shut.

"I asked him," Alu forced a smile. "I wondered if Agir's death... or rather his eternal torture, his punishment for the Curtain, for the premeditated destruction of thousands of beings? What if Veindor had been reneging on his word not to meddle in worldly affairs, in things that have nothing to do with the circulation of souls? But no. There was no reason to punish Agir so harshly. Your granddad didn't know what would happen as a result of his actions. He never intended to harm the non-Alae. He just wanted to protect his people."